Alexander The Great, Ashoka, And Wudi: A Comparative Analysis

In ancient time, in order to expand their empires and accumulate properties, many successful emperors or leaders usually conquered other places through strong military forces. Someone then concludes that “the most successful ancient empires were able to maintain hegemony over conquered peoples with little or no thought to anything besides military power.” However, a successful emperor, such as Alexander the Great, Ashoka, and Han Wudi, did not gain the political control of the conquered regions through military force, but adopted more complicated and efficient methods such as controlling or eliciting peoples’s thoughts through education, making strict laws and assimilation—adapting cultures of conquered areas as well as diffusing its own culture
In fact, Alexander the Great adapted a very unique strategy to control and convince conquered people-assimilation. A the same time the Hellenization went, Alexander also respected certain regional custom of conquered areas. Such intolerance of different cultures created a sense of belonging for conquered people, so they would satisfy with their current lives and maintained the hegemony. For instance, different from Ashoka, who interrelated to other religions, Alexander the Great actually was very open to different cultures since he hoped to mix Macedonians, Greeks and conquered people into one larger group. He wore Persian clothing, encouraged intermarriage(even his wife was a Persian princess), respecting religions of conquered people, and even punished Macedonians who mistreated native populations (Lecture 8). His intolerance to other cultures worked and conquered people had less ambitious to take against him. His achievement was proved and appreciated by Plutarch, a Greek writer. Plutarch recorded that Alexander “strove to acquire the goodwill of the conquered by showing respect for their apparel, so that they might continue constant in loving the Macedonians as rulers, and might not feel hate toward them as enemies” (Plutarch on Alexander and Hellenization, p111). Therefore, Alexander the Great successfully controlled conquered people and maintained the peace through assimilation until his death. It was true that powerful empires would expand their regions through military force. However, it did not mean that military force could solve every problem after conquering. In fact, Han dynasty, the Maurya dynasty and the kingdom of Macedon utilized education, laws and assimilation as other kinds of bloodless weapons, to protect their expand regions