Ever the patriotic Roman, Livy notes that the generals of Rome’s Early Republic, men such as Titus Manlius Torquatus and Lucius Papirius Cursor, would have been equal to the task of resisting a Macedonian invasion. The country would also have been aided by the wise governance of the Senate, which excelled at statecraft; Alexander could not have outthought such a body. Rome would thus have had an edge.
Livy also cast aspersions on Alexander’s opponents, both Darius III of Persia and the Indians, whom Livy inappropriately and incorrectly dismissed as having been fought by Alexander’s inebriated soldiers. Livy writes that Alexander, if and when he had brought war to Italy, would have been a much different man from the one who had set out to conquer Asia. Alexander’s enormous successes had caused a sea change in his personality, and not for the better. Having mastered Asia, he had become haughty and tyrannical, more akin to a Persian monarch such as Darius than the straightforward, and relatively egalitarian, Macedonian king that he had been as a young man. Livy reminds us that Alexander, by the later years of his life, was given to meting out horrific punishments. He had also taken the life of Cleitus the Black, a man he’d once called friend, in a drunken rage. Alexander was a notoriously heavy drinker and possessed an explosive temper. Livy was sure that this degradation of Alexander’s character would have negatively impacted his generalship in a hypothetical invasion of Italy.
