Graeco-Macedonian cultural and linguistic hegemony

[samiaseo75]

Seldom outlive their founder. But in most cases the founding conqueror but leads a conquering nation, as Alexander did the Macedonians, Napoleon the French, Hitler the Germans. However, even where all enemies are vanquished, instead of, as in the latter two cases, the reverse, such empires still seldom outlive their founder. Alexander's Empire fell apart into the rival realms of his warring generals. Nonetheless, although one Macedonian-ruled state did not survive, several such did, and over the Middle East was almost as pervasive as is Arab today for several centuries thereafter.

More stable are empires, such as the Roman, the phone number list Han and the British, created by slow but sure expansion by one core nation over centuries. The problem that then arises is of maintaining cohesion in the face of erosion of the identity and strength of the imperial nation by a number of factors which seem common to empires. Often the conquerors become the victims of their own success.

The martial nobility and sturdy, free yeomanry who normally comprise such nations in the days of their rise and form the backbone of its military strength degenerate into idle parasitic sybarites on one hand and into impoverished serfs and urban proletarians on the other, as happened to both Classical Rome and Byzantium. The free farmers who proudly rallied to the standard of their elected temporary war leader Cincinnatus and of the Republic evolved into the urban prole.