influential Librans in history.  He's generally known for conquering most of the known world.  But Alexander wasn't your usual run-of-the-mill dictator carving territory out for himself for love of power.  He was a Libran, after all.  He was an intense idealist, and held a belief for the whole of his life that the disparate peoples of the ancient world - Greek, Persian, Indian - could mix and intermarry and create a united world under one king, with different customs and religions co-existing happily side by side.  He himself married the defeated King of Persia's daughter to set an example, and arranged marriages between his Macedonian troops and Persian women.  A true Libran dream, this one.  Alexander's tragedy, like that of any other idealist, was that after all his painstaking work Greeks still hated Persians and Persians still hated Indians and fire-worshippers hated earth-worshippers and people still wanted to rape, loot and pillage. 

Alexander's military tactics are also pure Libra.  He never just blundered into battle, attempting to win by brute force.  His genius was his strategy.  Time after time he worked out what his enemy was going to do by psychologizing him, and then playing with his knowledge.  He also led his men with true Libran finesse; he ate with them, drank with them, starved with them, knew all their names, never set himself above them.  No ordinary conqueror, this one, but a wonderful example of many Libran qualities at work. 

Frequently, with all these gifts, the one to suffer is the Libran himself.  This is because, if you're going to spend your life with the kind of acute awareness of everybody else that Libra's got, you don't have a chance very often to express your own emotions honestly.  And this is Libra's biggest problem.  He often finds his own emotions very painful to deal with, because they so frequently contradict the ideal of the Good, the True and the Beautiful.  Libra likes to think that emotion should always be pleasant, agreeable, loving, harmonious.  When he feels things like anger, hatred, jealousy, intense desire, it frightens him.  One shouldn't feel such things.  He often carries a pretty sizeable guilt complex around him, over all those nasty things that churn around in the secret soul.  Like the fact that he doesn't really like everybody after all.  In a nutshell, Libra often represses his own emotions mercilessly, both because they conflict with his image of how people should be, and because they get him into trouble (meaning that sometimes other people get angry at him) when he shows his real feelings.  His unreal world of perfect harmony and companionship often becomes so unreal that it's impossible for him to deal with ordinary human conflict.  And repressed emotion like that, sooner or later, surfaces in a variety of unpleasant and indirect ways - like depression and physical illness.  Or like secret and unintentional snipes at the people he's trying hardest to be pleasant to.  Then he says the worst possible thing at the worst possible moment, and doesn't even realize what he's done.  His pent-up anger and hostility have come out in an indirect way, and he's usually the last one to know he's doing it, until he's lost all his friends in the process. 

Libra, the great lover of Truth, is often emotionally dishonest, both with himself and with others.  It isn't intentional.  It's just that this sensitive idealist, with the perfect image of the world rattling around his very capable brain, takes a long time adjusting to the rougher currents in the sea of life.  And all too often he'll just avoid the challenge of adjusting his idealistic nature with a bumpier world by trying to hide behind a relationship which can protect him and offer a warm, secure cocoon so that he doesn't have to deal with such difficult issues.  Put briefly, Libra is often terribly dependent on his friends and loved ones, because he wants protection from life.  The thing is, he has so much charm that you can't resist protecting him, and perpetuating the vicious cycle. 

Libra also often has a great problem with what he calls his selfishness.  It's hard for him to assert his own wishes without consulting everybody first.  Now, Libra is pretty notorious for the famous indecisiveness he's said to possess.  But isn't real