Inheritance

In tutoring his gifted young pupil no doubt
Aristotle imbued in that preternaturally
mature Macedonian an obligation to his
fellow man, to use his endowment of
creative intelligence and ruling inheritance
to become a wise and forgiving tyrant for
the advance of Greek civilization among the
primitive Eastern hordes he set out to pacify
and bring under his vast ruling orbit to
complete what his father Philip set out to
accomplish. Installing satrapies loyal to
the Hellenistic ideal as his vast armies set
out to support Alexander's ambition to
enlarge his dominion he found in ancient
Bactria resistance to his occupation first 
in Persia unseating its king of kings in a
sweep of geography encompassing that
empire's holdings to absorb into his own in
a measure of absolute domination none
others might challenge. But challenge they
did in unconventional warfare by war lords
resentful of foreign interlopers and what
then ensued was the drenching of the land
deep in the blood of Bactrians, Macedonians
and Greeks alike as Alexander's armies 
swept through the mountainous terrain and
deserts taking villages, towns and cities and
sparing no lives in a paroxysm of vengeance 
that his destiny to rule the world met resistance.
How world events repeat themselves time and
again, with that same bloodied land invaded
from time immemorial to the present, where
war lords and the Taliban now rule, outwitting
and outmanoeuvring the armies of modernity
in that archaeological treasure of a land that
has seldom known peace where the bones of
humanity settle and sink deep in its blood
drenched geology, never to be pacified.