Enormous effort has been devoted to the elucidation of possible effects of bond-length alternation on the benzene pi-system. Benzene tends to stay highly aromatic and highly diatropic even if strong bond-length alternation is introduced artificially into the pi-system. Such peculiar aromatic and magnetic characters of benzene Were justified consistently and unambiguously within a single theoretical framework. From all physically sound points of view, bond-alternate benzene is highly aromatic with a large aromatic stabilization energy. We confirmed that in the annulene family benzene is least sensitive in aromaticity to bond-length alternation.