Member-only story
Black Swans and the Great Man Theory of History
Why History is not Inevitable
In the ancient world, Achaemenid Persia was the center of the universe. For 200 years, the known world; from India to Ionia; from Scythia to Egypt, was under the rule of a single state. Gold and silver flowed towards Persepolis, and in exchange, there was peace.
And then suddenly, in a historical blink of an eye, Persia was gone, replaced by the short-lived empire of Alexander the Great. This in turn led to a longer lived culture of Hellenism that would dominate the Near and Middle East until the rise of Islam nearly a millennia later.
All of this depended upon the actions of a single man: Alexander himself. If not for the three brilliant victories of his vastly inferior Greek and Macedonian army in Asia Minor, the destruction of the Persian Empire would have not been possible. Without the influence of Hellenism, in turn, the Roman world upon which our own society was built would have looked extremely different. Our own society: unrecognizable.
Other forces would have inevitably caused the Persian Empire to crumble. Perhaps the revolt in Egypt that distracted Darius initially from Alexander could have been more serious, the Scythians could have mounted a successful invasion, or the Magi could have actually succeeded at usurping the throne. But none of those…
