Alexander the Great

Alexander III of Macedon conquered the Persian Empire before he was thirty and died without arranging a succession, which undid the political unity of what he had taken while spreading Greek culture across three continents. Born at Pella in 356 BC to Philip II and Olympias, he was tutored by Aristotle from the age of thirteen and commanded the cavalry wing at Chaeronea in 338 BC, where Philip broke the Greek city-states. He inherited the throne in 336 BC when Philip was assassinated, secured it by executing rivals, and destroyed Thebes in 335 BC to end resistance in Greece. He crossed into Asia in 334 BC with about 40,000 men and an army his father had built. He won at the Granicus, defeated Darius III at Issus in 333 BC, took the Phoenician coast including a seven-month siege of Tyre, and was welcomed in Egypt, where he founded Alexandria in 331 BC. Gaugamela that October broke the Persian field army. He took Babylon, Susa and Persepolis, burning the palace there in 330 BC. Pursuing Darius into Bactria, he adopted Persian court dress and administrative practice and married Roxana, which alienated Macedonian veterans; he killed his officer Cleitus in a drunken quarrel in 328 BC and executed others on conspiracy charges. He crossed into India and defeated Porus at the Hydaspes in 326 BC, but his army refused to go further and he turned back, losing many crossing the Gedrosian desert. He died at Babylon in June 323 BC, aged thirty-two, of fever or possibly poison. Asked who should succeed him, he is said to have answered the strongest. His generals divided the empire and fought each other for forty years.

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