Alexander the Great

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexander the Great was undefeated in battle, and by the age of 30 he had built one of the largest empires in history, stretching from Greece to northwestern India. He was born in Pella, the capital of Macedon, and succeeded his father Philip II to the throne in 336 BC at the age of 20. His reign lasted only about thirteen years, yet most of it was spent on a single lengthy military campaign across Asia and Egypt. He died in 323 BC in Babylon at age 32. So how did a half-Macedonian prince, tutored in philosophy until 16, end up worshipped as the son of a god and chased by armies he never lost to? Why did his troops finally refuse to follow him east? And why, after his death, did the empire he assembled tear itself apart within 40 years? The answers run through a horse named Bucephalas, a fire at Persepolis, a knot at Gordium, and a body packed in honey.

• 2. A Boy And A Tutor

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  When Alexander was ten years old, a trader from Thessaly brought Philip a horse offered for thirteen talents. The horse refused to be mounted, and Philip ordered it away. Alexander noticed the animal feared its own shadow and asked to tame it, which he managed. Plutarch records Philip kissing his son and declaring, "My boy, you must find a kingdom big enough for your ambitions. Macedon is too small for you." Alexander named the horse Bucephalas, meaning "ox-head," and it carried him as far as modern-day India.

  At 13, Philip searched for a tutor and considered Isocrates and Speusippus before choosing Aristotle, the philosopher and polymath. Philip provided the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza as a classroom. In return, he agreed to rebuild Aristotle's razed hometown of Stageira and to free or pardon its scattered citizens. Mieza became a kind of boarding school where Alexander studied alongside Ptolemy, Hephaestion, and Cassander, boys later known as the "Companions."

  Aristotle taught medicine, philosophy, morals, religion, logic, and art. Under his tutelage Alexander developed a passion for Homer, especially the Iliad, carrying an annotated copy on his campaigns. He could quote Euripides from memory. At the Macedonian court he also met Persian exiles, including Artabazos II and his daughter Barsine, who lived there from 352 to 342 BC. That early exposure gave the court a working knowledge of Persian affairs, knowledge Alexander would later put to use against the empire those exiles had fled.

• 3. Securing The Throne

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  In 338 BC, at the Battle of Chaeronea, Philip commanded the right wing and Alexander the left, beside Philip's trusted generals. Alexander was the first to break the Theban lines. With the Athenians lost and the Thebans surrounded, the allied Greek resistance collapsed, and at Corinth Philip established a Hellenic Alliance that included most Greek city-states except Sparta.

  The family was less stable than the battlefield. When Philip married Cleopatra Eurydice in 338 BC, her uncle Attalus prayed drunkenly for a "lawful successor." Alexander, only half-Macedonian through his mother Olympias, hurled a cup and shouted, "You villain, what, am I then a bastard?" Philip rose to run his son through, but slipped and fell. "See there," Alexander mocked, "the man who makes preparations to pass out of Europe into Asia, overturned in passing from one seat to another." Alexander then fled Macedon with his mother, returning after six months through the mediation of a family friend, Demaratus.

  In October 336 BC, at Aigai, Philip was assassinated by Pausanias, the captain of his bodyguards, during the wedding of Alexander's sister Cleopatra. Alexander was proclaimed king on the spot at age 20. He moved fast to eliminate rivals, executing his cousin Amyntas IV and ordering the death of Attalus. When revolts erupted across Greece, he mustered 3,000 Macedonian cavalry, rode his men over Mount Ossa to surprise the Thessalians, and pardoned a chastened Athens. It was during this stay near Corinth that he met Diogenes the Cynic, who asked only that the king stop blocking his sunlight.

• 4. The Knot And The Empire

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  In 334 BC Alexander crossed the Hellespont with roughly 48,100 soldiers, 6,100 cavalry, and a fleet of 120 ships. He threw a spear into Asian soil and declared he accepted Asia as a gift from the gods. After victory at the Battle of the Granicus, he took the Persian capital and treasury of Sardis and moved down the Ionian coast, granting cities autonomy and democracy.

  At Gordium, the ancient Phrygian capital, Alexander confronted the Gordian Knot, said to await the future "king of Asia." He proclaimed it did not matter how the knot was undone and hacked it apart with his sword. In spring 333 BC he crossed into Cilicia and then defeated Darius III at Issus, where the Persian king fled and left behind his wife, his two daughters, his mother Sisygambis, and a fabulous treasure. Darius offered a ransom of 10,000 talents for his family; Alexander replied that as king of Asia, he alone decided territorial divisions.

  In 332 BC he captured Tyre after a long and difficult siege, massacring the men and selling the women and children into slavery. The same fate met Gaza, where engineers told him the height of the mound made an assault impossible, which only encouraged him further. He took a serious shoulder wound there. The road to Egypt now lay open, and Egypt would treat him not as a conqueror but as a liberator.

• 5. Son Of Amun

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  In Egypt in late 332 BC, Alexander journeyed to the oracle of Amun-Ra at the Siwa Oasis in the Libyan desert, where he was pronounced the son of the deity Amun. He afterward often called Zeus-Ammon his true father, and later coinage depicted him crowned with the Horns of Ammon as a symbol of divinity. He was crowned in the temple of Ptah at Memphis, restored temples the Persians had neglected, and built a chapel for the sacred barge in the temple of Luxor near Karnak.

  During these months he founded Alexandria, which would become the prosperous capital of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. He founded more than twenty cities in all, several across central Asia also named Alexandria, including modern Kandahar in Afghanistan and Alexandria Eschate, "The Furthest," in modern Tajikistan.

  The claim of divine sonship was not only Egyptian flattery. Several legends had already surrounded his birth. Plutarch records that Olympias dreamed her womb was struck by a thunderbolt before her wedding, and that Philip dreamed of sealing her womb with a lion's image. On the day Alexander was born, it was said the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, burned down. Hegesias of Magnesia joked that it burned because Artemis was away attending the birth. Such stories may have spread when Alexander was king, perhaps at his own instigation, to show he was destined for greatness from conception.

• 6. Fire At Persepolis

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  After defeating Darius again at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC, Alexander captured Babylon, where the astronomical diaries record "the king of the world, Alexander" sending word ahead: "I shall not enter your houses." From Babylon he took Susa and its treasury, then stormed the Persian Gates, blocked by a force under Ariobarzanes, to reach Persepolis before its garrison could loot the treasury.

  Alexander stayed in Persepolis for five months. During his stay a fire broke out in the eastern palace of Xerxes I and spread through the city. Plutarch and Diodorus allege that his companion, the hetaera Thaïs, instigated it, possibly in revenge for Xerxes burning the Acropolis of Athens. Plutarch claims Alexander immediately regretted the decision and ordered the fires put out, while Curtius claims the regret came only the next morning. Plutarch even describes Alexander pausing before a fallen statue of Xerxes, debating aloud whether to leave it lying or set it upright again.

  The pursuit of Darius ended without a battle. His own Bactrian satrap Bessus took him prisoner, had him fatally stabbed, and declared himself Artaxerxes V before fleeing into Central Asia. Alexander buried Darius beside his Achaemenid predecessors in a regal funeral and claimed the dying king had named him successor. In 329 BC, Spitamenes betrayed Bessus to Ptolemy, and Bessus was executed. The campaign against Spitamenes carried Alexander through Bactria, Sogdiana, and a victory over the Scythians at the Battle of Jaxartes.

• 7. The Strain Of Empire

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  At his court Alexander adopted Persian dress and the custom of proskynesis, a kissing of the hand or prostration that Persians offered their superiors. The Greeks regarded such a gesture as owed only to deities and suspected he meant to deify himself. It cost him the sympathy of many countrymen, and he eventually abandoned it.

  The strain showed in blood among his own circle. His officer Philotas was executed for failing to report a plot, and the death of the son required the death of the father, so Parmenion, guarding the treasury at Ecbatana, was assassinated on Alexander's command. At Maracanda, modern Samarkand, Alexander personally killed Cleitus the Black, the man who had saved his life at Granicus, during a violent drunken quarrel in which Cleitus accused him of forgetting Macedonian ways for an oriental lifestyle. A later plot by his royal pages implicated his official historian, Callisthenes of Olynthus, who was tortured and likely died soon after.

  Far to the west, Macedon strained too. Alexander had left Antipater as regent, and in 331 BC Antipater defeated and killed the Spartan king Agis III at the battle of Megalopolis. Alexander's constant demands for troops and the migration of Macedonians across his empire drained Macedon's strength. That weakening helped lead to its subjugation by Rome after the Third Macedonian War of 171 to 168 BC.

• 8. The Beas And After

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  At the Battle of the Hydaspes in 326 BC, Alexander won an epic victory over Porus, an Indian king ruling between the Hydaspes and the Acesines in the Punjab. Impressed by Porus's bravery, he made him an ally and a satrap, even adding to his territory. He founded two cities on opposite banks of the river, one named Bucephala for his horse, who died around this time, and the other Nicaea, meaning "Victory."

  East of Porus's kingdom lay the Nanda Empire of Magadha and, further on, the Gangaridai of Bengal. Exhausted and fearing reports of vast armies with thousands of war elephants, Alexander's army mutinied at the Hyphasis River, the Beas, refusing to march farther east. His general Coenus pleaded that the men longed "to again see their parents, their wives and children, their homeland." Alexander turned south along the Indus, and while besieging the Mallian citadel he suffered a near-fatal wound when an arrow pierced his armor and entered his lung. He led part of his army back through the harsh Gedrosian Desert and Makran, losing many men, and reached Susa in 324 BC.

  At Susa he held a mass marriage of his senior officers to Persian and other noblewomen, though few of those unions lasted beyond a year. When his troops mutinied at Opis over his Persian customs and officers, he gave Persians command posts and Macedonian titles until the Macedonians begged forgiveness. Then at Ecbatana his closest friend, Hephaestion, died of illness or poisoning. The loss devastated him, and he ordered an expensive funeral pyre in Babylon and public mourning.

  On either 10 or the 11th of June 323 BC, Alexander died in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II in Babylon, at age 32, with a planned invasion of Arabia still ahead of him. Plutarch records that about fourteen days earlier he had been drinking with Medius of Larissa before a worsening fever left him unable to speak, while the common soldiers filed past as he silently waved. Diodorus instead describes a large bowl of unmixed wine drunk in honor of Heracles, followed by eleven days of weakness.

  Because Macedonian aristocrats were prone to assassination, poisoning theories spread, most often naming Antipater, recently removed as viceroy, with his son Iollas as the wine-pourer. The strongest argument against poison is that twelve days passed between the onset of illness and death, since long-acting poisons were probably unavailable. A 2003 documentary and a 2014 manuscript in Clinical Toxicology proposed the plant white hellebore, Veratrum album, whose prolonged course fits the events. Natural causes have also been suggested, including typhoid fever, malaria, and pancreatitis.

  Alexander's body was laid in a gold anthropoid sarcophagus filled with honey, placed inside a gold casket. Ptolemy seized the funeral cortege and took it to Memphis, and Ptolemy II later moved it to Alexandria. There a chain of admirers came to see it. Augustus allegedly knocked the nose off the mummified body by accident, and Caligula was said to have taken Alexander's breastplate. On his deathbed, asked to whom he left his kingdom, he reportedly answered "to the strongest," though Arrian and Plutarch claimed he was already speechless. After Perdiccas was assassinated in 321 BC, 40 years of war among the Successors, the Diadochi, settled the Hellenistic world into three power blocs: Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Syria and Persia, and Antigonid Macedonia. His death marks the conventional beginning of the Hellenistic period, whose Greek language remained the dominant tongue of the Byzantine Empire until its collapse in 1453 AD.