Alexander the Great

Alexander was born in 356 BCE at Pella, the capital of the kingdom of Macedon, to King Philip II and Olympias, a princess of Epirus ^[1]. Ancient writers placed his birth in midsummer, and later tradition linked it to the night the temple of Artemis at Ephesus burned, a story that says more about his posthumous fame than about the event itself ^[2]. Macedon in those years was rising fast. Philip had reorganized its army around the long sarissa pike and was steadily pulling the Greek city-states into his orbit.

The boy's education matched his father's ambitions. From about age 13 Alexander studied under the philosopher Aristotle at Mieza, reading Homer, natural science, and medicine; he reportedly kept a copy of the Iliad with him on campaign ^[1]. A famous anecdote from his childhood has him taming the stallion Bucephalus after noticing the horse feared its own shadow, a tale first recorded by Plutarch ^[2]. Whatever its accuracy, the horse was real and carried him as far as India.

Responsibility came early. At 16, while Philip campaigned against Byzantium, Alexander served as regent in Macedon and put down a Thracian rising, founding a settlement in the aftermath ^[3]. Two years later, at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, he commanded the Macedonian left wing against the allied Greek forces and helped break the Theban Sacred Band, the engagement that made Philip master of Greece ^[1].

Philip II was assassinated in 336 BCE at the theatre of Aegae by one of his own bodyguards, and the army immediately acclaimed the 20-year-old Alexander as king ^[1]. His position was anything but secure. Rival claimants were eliminated, restive Balkan tribes had to be subdued, and the Greek states saw a chance to shake off Macedonian control. Alexander answered speed with speed. He marched south, was confirmed as leader of the League of Corinth, then swung north to campaign along the Danube ^[3].

In 335 BCE a rumor of his death set off a revolt at Thebes. Alexander covered the distance from the Balkans in about two weeks, stormed the city, and destroyed it, sparing (according to tradition) little beyond the temples and the house of the poet Pindar ^[2]. Thousands of survivors were sold into slavery. The severity was deliberate: no major Greek city rose against him again while he lived ^[4].

With the homeland quiet, Alexander turned to the project his father had planned, a war against the Achaemenid Persian Empire, publicly framed as retribution for Xerxes' invasion of Greece 150 years earlier ^[3]. In the spring of 334 BCE he crossed the Hellespont with a combined Macedonian and Greek force that ancient sources put in the range of 30,000 to 50,000 infantry and about 5,000 cavalry, and he is said to have thrown a spear into Asian soil to claim the continent as won by the spear ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Alexander the Great usually gets the same answer first: the general who never lost a set battle. His record rests on four great engagements. At the Granicus river in 334 BCE he beat the Persian satraps of Asia Minor; at Issus in 333 BCE he defeated Darius III in person, capturing the king's mother, wife, and daughters when Darius fled the field ^[4]. The seven-month siege of the island city of Tyre in 332 BCE, taken by building a causeway through open water, remains a landmark of ancient engineering ^[3].

Egypt surrendered without a fight in 332 BCE, welcomed him as liberator from Persian rule, and recognized him as pharaoh. There he founded Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile, the most famous of the many cities bearing his name, and made a desert journey to the oracle of Zeus Ammon at Siwa, after which stories of his divine sonship began to spread ^[1]. The decisive clash came at Gaugamela in 331 BCE, in what is now northern Iraq, where his outnumbered army broke a Persian force assembled from across the empire ^[4]. Darius fled again and was murdered the next year by his own satrap Bessus, leaving Alexander to claim the Achaemenid throne.

The wealth that fell to him was staggering. At Susa and Persepolis he seized royal treasuries that ancient accounts value in the tens of thousands of talents, and in 330 BCE the palace of Persepolis burned, whether as calculated revenge or drunken accident the sources never settled ^[2]. Among the most cited Alexander the Great facts is the sheer reach of what followed: three more years of hard campaigning through Bactria and Sogdiana (modern Afghanistan and Central Asia), then the crossing of the Hindu Kush into India, where in 326 BCE he won his last major battle against King Porus at the Hydaspes river, an engagement fought against war elephants in monsoon conditions ^[3]. Taken together, Alexander the Great achievements amounted to an empire stretching roughly 3,000 miles from the Adriatic coast to the Punjab, assembled in 11 years ^[4].

Alexander married three times, in each case for reasons entangled with politics. His first wife, Roxana, was the daughter of a Bactrian noble; the wedding in 327 BCE helped settle the hardest region of his conquest ^[3]. In 324 BCE, at a mass ceremony in Susa, he took two Achaemenid brides, Stateira (a daughter of Darius III) and Parysatis, while about 90 of his officers married Persian noblewomen in a staged fusion of the two ruling classes ^[4]. Roxana was pregnant when he died; the posthumous son, Alexander IV, was murdered in the wars that followed.

The deepest attachment of his life was to Hephaestion, his boyhood companion, senior officer, and eventual second-in-command. When Hephaestion died of a fever at Ecbatana in 324 BCE, Alexander's grief was extravagant even by ancient royal standards: he ordered an enormously costly funeral and sought divine honors for his friend ^[2]. Ancient and modern writers have debated the nature of the relationship without a firm conclusion, since the surviving sources were written centuries after the events ^[5].

His character drew contradictory notices from antiquity onward. He could be generous to defeated enemies, notably the family of Darius, yet he killed his officer Cleitus the Black with a spear during a drunken quarrel in 328 BCE, an act he is said to have bitterly regretted ^[2]. His adoption of Persian dress and court ceremony, including the attempted introduction of proskynesis (ritual prostration), angered Macedonian veterans and fed conspiracies, two of which ended with the executions of the officer Philotas and the court historian Callisthenes ^[4].

The army, not the enemy, finally stopped him. At the Hyphasis river in 326 BCE, after eight years and thousands of miles, his Macedonian troops refused to march deeper into India, and Alexander, after sulking in his tent for days, agreed to turn back ^[1]. The return was costlier than most of the fighting. While storming a town of the Malli on the way down the Indus he took an arrow in the chest and nearly died, and the march across the Gedrosian desert in 325 BCE killed a substantial part of his column through heat and thirst ^[3].

Back in the Persian heartland he found the empire's administration frayed and responded with a wave of purges among satraps and officials who had abused their posts or assumed he would not return ^[4]. At Opis in 324 BCE his Macedonian veterans mutinied over his integration of Persian troops into the army; he faced them down, executed the ringleaders, and then staged a banquet of reconciliation before discharging 10,000 veterans homeward under his general Craterus ^[3].

In June 323 BCE, while at Babylon preparing a naval expedition to Arabia, Alexander fell ill after a banquet, weakened over roughly ten days of fever, and died in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II shortly before his 33rd birthday ^[1]. The cause remains one of antiquity's most argued questions. Malaria, typhoid fever, and poisoning have all been proposed, and modern medical reviews can only weigh probabilities from secondhand ancient reports ^[5]. Asked on his deathbed to whom he left the kingdom, he is reported by later sources to have said 'to the strongest,' though the story may itself be a product of the wars that followed ^[2].

The empire did not survive its maker. Within a generation his generals, the Diadochi, carved the conquests into rival kingdoms: Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Asia, and Antigonid Macedon chief among them, while his mother, wives, son, and half-brother were all killed in the struggle ^[4]. Yet the world those kingdoms governed had been permanently altered. Greek became the language of administration and commerce from the Mediterranean to Central Asia, and the three centuries historians call the Hellenistic age are conventionally dated from his death in 323 BCE ^[1].

Cities were his most durable monuments. Around 20 foundations bore his name, and Egyptian Alexandria grew into the largest city of the Greek-speaking world, home to the Library and the Pharos lighthouse ^[3]. His body, hijacked by Ptolemy on its way home and eventually enshrined in Alexandria, was visited by Julius Caesar and Augustus; its later fate is unknown, and the lost tomb still attracts searches and speculation ^[6]. Roman commanders measured themselves against him, and the legend spread further still: the medieval Alexander Romance was translated into dozens of languages, Islamic tradition discussed a conqueror figure named Dhu al-Qarnayn whom many commentators linked to him, and Persian poetry recast him as Iskandar ^[5].

Modern judgment is split in ways the ancient record invites. Military academies still study his use of the Companion cavalry and combined-arms tactics, while historians also count the destroyed cities, massacres such as those at Thebes and Tyre, and the mass enslavements that paid for the glory ^[4]. Few disputes touch the central point: a king who died at 32 set the frame within which the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia lived for centuries, which is why the search for Alexander the Great facts, and arguments over what they mean, has never stopped ^[6].