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Greek ultranationalists here with an even hotter take
(hexbear.net)
To be fair, this somehow seems slightly less fascist than the "launch another crusade to retake the holy land for Christians" take
What the fuck? Lol why are greeks claiming ownership of the levant?
Love the scare quotes lol
Macedonian national anthem intensifies
If he was so "great", why did he die? Checkmate.
They're looking at the shores with that thousand island stare.
Alexander the Great was born in modern day Greece (Central Macedonia, which is a province of Greece, not to be confused with North Macedonia, a sovereign nation to the north of Central Macedonia).
He conquered the Levant from... I wanna say the Assyrians? Whichever powers that be that expelled the Jews. Despite the fact that Alexander conquered everything from Greece to India by the age of 30, he died at the age of 32, the empire collapsed, fell to in fighting, etc. He only ruled for 7 years.
Look I'm not going to try and go into the logic of ultranationalists since it's inherently illogical, Greeks having a claim to the Levant by way of conquest over 2,000 years ago is extremely tenuous. No-one, including Greece, wants a Greek Levant.
Alexander the Great conquered the Levant from the Achaemenid Empire and his successors in Egypt (The Ptolemaic Kingdom) and Persia (The Seleucid Empire) held the area for 300 years
I think it's more the Byzantine Empire which held it a fair bit longer.
The Seleucid Empire is back baby.
Bashar al-Assad is known in some circles as Antiochus CCXL Leones
i would contend they're on about the Roman Empire more than hellenistic times. last time Romans were in the Levant they were speaking greek, and greeks called themselves roman a long time after the Ottomans ate them.
Yeah tbh it's a mostly weird idea to call the Roman Empire and Romans anything but Roman. Only half the country broke apart, a millennium and a half before the rest of it all did - so what if the first half to collapse contained the one-time capital that they got the name from. The Greeks spent like a thousand years as the imperial core of the Roman Empire, called Romans by everyone, and it doesn't take that long to update terminology. "Byzantine" was only used to describe Eastern Rome after it collapsed. They were still often called Roman until the 20th century, when the more popular Hellenes finally pushed it out completely, after becoming more and more popular for several centuries, as Roman had acquired a connotation of being politically subservient to the Ottoman Empire. For a while "romans" mostly referred to people from Istanbul.