Efstathios wrote:And i wonder what would have happened if Alexander decided to march to the west.Would they pose resistance?
They will, I believe, have resisted as long as they felt they had alliances in place to do so. They certainly summed up both Alexander of Epirus and Pyrrhus (dispatching the former and turning away from the later) and some allied themselves with the Sicilian Greeks and Carthage against Rome.
By the time of his death, the Greeks of Asia Minor - indeed Greeks per se - were viewed by Alexander in no different light to the rest of his subjects. Greeks they may well be but subjects - no different to other subjects of the empire - was their status. The League of Corinth fiction, in the casualty ward after Persepolis, was put into palliative care by his claim of divinity and sent to the morgue by the “Exiles Decree”. The burial - albeit after his death, although Alexander will have reacted no differently - was carried out by Peithon, when Greek mercenaries marched homeward from their Alexandrias of freedom and fusion in the east and were summarily massacred.
The Greeks of the west will have received little different treatment. Their levies will most likely have seen themselves posted to Alexandrias-in-Africa or Gaul.
As well, there is the assumption that Alexander will have taken Arabia and the west with his Macedonian levies. Not true. At the time he was due to depart for Arabia; Macedonians were very much the Spartiates in a Peloponnesian host: a small and declining minority. There were very few more to come from the homeland as well (as Lamia would show). It is estimated that Alexander’s anabasis had drawn some 30-33,000 Macedonian infantry into Asia. Many were dead and 10,000 more were to be superannuated home. It is likely that only some 8-10,000 or so will have remained in Babylon had Alexander’s plans seen completion.
Had he led his army out of Babylon in 323, you can rest assured that it would be, in great part, Iranian/Asian. These, “trained in the Macedonian fashion”, will have faced the Greeks of the west at some Magna Graecia Gaugamela in place of the 15,000 or so Macedonian regulars that held that position against Darius’ army.
