Did Romans know about Alexander the Great?

[Araujo]

I have to disagree. Pyrrhus won his battles, until he tried to liberate Sicily from Carthaginian control, and instead lost his army. Had he concentrated on Rome, he might have won the war; it was an act of hybris to go to Sicily. I also think that the genocidal tactics Alexander had developed in Sogdia and the Punjab might have served him well in Italy.

That being said, I agree that Alexander would have been unable to subdue Rome, but for the same reasons as why Sogdia and the Punjab remained essentially unconquered: as long as Alexander was there, the people feared him and obeyed, but once he was gone, they revolted. When Alexander died, Sogdia had been in open revolt for more than two years; Nearchus was forced to leave Patala before he had planned to do so; and after the dead of one of the satraps of India, no substitute was sent. I think a similar scenario applies to Italy.

The truth is that the romans were not still the invencible machine they would become after the Second Punic War, but the truth is that Pyrrhus was almost the same military genius as Alexander was but he praticly only defeated the romans because of the shock that his disciplined troops caused on Rome's troops on that time. The romans had never seen a phalanx, or at least they hadn't fought against any. Now, the greatest military commander of his age comes to Italy with an army to be known as invencible... and remember that Pyrrhus got elephants from India. Elephants that soon as they were near the romans, these barbarians who had never those great animals would imediatly flee from the battlefield. There is a story, which Livy passed to us, that in some meeting between a delegation from the Senate of Rome, directed by Scipio Africanus, and Hannibal, at Ephesus,

Africanus asked who, in Hannibal's thought, was the greatest commander of all times. Hannibal answered: «Alexander... for with a little force of men he destroyed armies of uncountable numbers of men, and because he passed unknown lands...» Then he asked who would Hannibal put into second place, and Hannibal said: «Pyrrhus. He was the first to teach the art of establishing a camp. Besides that, never other man showed such capacity in the choosing of the terrain or in the disposal of his troops. He had the art of gaining men to his side...» [...]b

This can either truth either fictional, but the point is that even Hannibal (one of the greatest military commanders of all times) choosed Pyrrhus as the second greatest commander and Pyrrhus lost. I don't think that it was Pyrrhus' expedition to Sicily which made him lose the war. Somehow, the epirotes only won the first battles because of the appearence of shock they showed in front of the romans. While the greeks/epirotes fought with long sarissa, 5 to 7m tall, the romans only fought with fragile pila who made their enemies laugh. The animosity of the epirotes below the roman eyes would seem to encourage the romans to flee, and in the first battles the appearence of the epirote armies - the sarissa, the long phalanxes and the elephants - would seem to put to run the entire roman legions. The tactic didn't work for long and the epirotes were soon defeated.
I also disagree that Pyrrhus didn't lose his battles in Italy because of his losses in Sicily. He had good reasons to go to Sicily: the romans didn't stop training more legions to send against him, he had no reinforcements from Greece or Tarentum and the carthaginians were far worse than romans on land. Besides, the mercenaries who fought in the carthaginians' lines were not as loyal as the strict, disciplined and "proud to be romans" roman legionaries. Pyrrhus could once see a chance to gain the support of Syracuse and the other Sicilian Greek colonies and to defeat a powerful roman ally who seemed to only get sea power. I don't really see how Pyrrhus was defeated against those barbarians of Carthage, but the truth is that his loss in Sicily was only a little more to encourage his defeat and flee to Epirus again.
Now, Alexander fought in a more heroic, tradicional way. He commanded his troops even more bravely than Pyrrhus (who said to be his heir and descendent, even in those ways) and was a great stratego, sure about it. But the point is that fear caused more on enemies' eyes than a possible, true defeat. The persians were led by fool men: first an idiotic Memnon of Rhodes, at Granicus, then one of Darius' proud satraps, and then the own Darius. The greek phalanx was far better than the persian armies, I do not doubt it - see the battles os Marathon, Salamina or Plataea -, but could an army of 40 000 men destroy the uncountable armies of more than 1 million men in Asia? Probably Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela were true fields to demonstrate Alexander's capability of making war, of leading his men up to battle and of gaining victory, but could he gain also those victories at Bactria or Sogdiana? Truly that would seem to much impossible, even for a lucky man as Alexander ("fortune favours the bold"). Alexander was blinded by the ancient tales of Homer about Achilles or Hector, and he was true proud of himself and of Greece to let the persians beat him at any battlefield. India and the eastern satrapies were a completely different thing. The rest of the Persian Empire had lost its' king, Darius III Codomanus, and they were beginning to fight each other by order of each satrap. Alexander immediatly conquered those lands. India? I don't think so. The Battle of Hydaspes was almost a disaster for Alexander, himself was going to die if it wasn't his men. It was the fear that Alexander had caused in Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela and the destruction of Thebes, Gaza and Persepolis which caused his enemies to be defeated. I truly think it was because of this that the great Megas Alexandros continued to expand his kingdom further east, to the "end" of the known world.