But simply because Alexander chose to pursue glory within the dramatic unities of time, place and action that warfare imposes upon those who practise it, the perfection of his performance should not blind us to the harshly limited nature of his achievement. He destroyed much and created little or nothing. The Persian empire, a force for order in the ancient world, to summarize its function at its lowest, did not survive the Alexandrian conquest. Within a generation of his death, it had been torn to pieces by the quarrels of his successors, the Diadochi. The conquest itself was made at the cost of great suffering to many, not only to the Persians who opposed the Macedonian invasion but to the disparate peoples of the empires whose lives were disrupted by it and who reacted to disruption in what Alexander called insurrection and rebellion.

One of his most perceptive biographers, N.E.L. Hammond, juxtaposes with a list of his good qualities a list of his bad: ‘his overweening ambition, his remorseless will, his passionate indulgence in unrestrained emotion, his readiness to kill in combat, in passion and in cold blood and to have rebellious communities destroyed. He had many of the qualities of the noble savage.’ And that, perhaps, is the ‘real’ Alexander that the mask of his command of himself conceals. There is the nobility of self-forgetting in his life–danger forgotten, fatigue forgotten, hunger and thirst forgotten, wounds forgotten. But they were forgotten with the amnesia of savagery, to which all who opposed his will were subject. His dreadful legacy was to ennoble savagery in the name of glory and to leave a model of command that far too many men of ambition sought to act out in the centuries to come.
–John Keegan, The Mask of Command