At 20, Alexander of Macedon inherited a kingdom, an army, and a grudge. At 32, he died in a palace in Babylon having conquered roughly 2 million square miles without losing a single battle. Between those years, he razed a great city, married a warlord’s daughter, took an arrow through the lung, and pushed his men so far east that they finally refused to go further. Born in Pella in July 356 BC, he was the son of Philip II, the one-eyed military genius who turned Macedonia into the dominant power in Greece, and Olympias, a princess from Epirus who kept snakes and claimed descent from Achilles.
She also insisted that Alexander’s real father was Zeus. The famous story of his horse is close to what ancient sources report. A dealer brought a massive black stallion to Philip’s court priced at 13 talents, an enormous sum for an animal no one could mount. When the horse threw every groom who tried, Philip ordered it taken away.
Alexander, then around 12 or 13, said the adults were wasting a good horse. His father told him he could pay for it himself if he could not ride it. Alexander had noticed what the professionals had missed. The horse was not wild.
It was frightened of its own shadow, which moved in front of it every time the animal shifted. The boy turned the horse’s head toward the sun, loosened the reins, waited for it to calm, and rode it. Plutarch says Philip wept and told Alexander to find a bigger kingdom because Macedonia was too small for him. The horse, named Bucephalus, carried him for the next 20 years.
Around 343 BC, Philip hired Aristotle to tutor his son. Alexander emerged obsessed with Homer, sleeping with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow next to a dagger. At 16, left in charge of Macedonia while his father was away, he crushed a revolt by the Maedi tribe, resettled the town, and named it Alexandropolis. Two years later, at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, Philip gave his 18-year-old son command of the left wing against the Theban Sacred Band, an elite unit that had never been beaten.
They died almost to a man. The family then fell apart. Philip took a new wife, and at the wedding feast her uncle toasted the couple with a wish for a legitimate heir, a direct insult to Olympias and her son. Alexander threw a cup at him.
Philip, drunk, tripped and fell. Alexander and his mother left the country for a time. In 336 BC, a bodyguard named Pausanias stabbed Philip to death during another wedding procession. Pausanias was killed while fleeing, so his story was never fully told.
Ancient historians have spent roughly 2,300 years suggesting Olympias arranged it, though there is no proof. Alexander, then 20, eliminated rivals quickly. His cousin Amyntas, who had a claim to the throne, was put to death, as were several nobles connected to the assassination. Olympias had Philip’s new wife and her infant daughter killed, which sources say genuinely upset Alexander, though he took no action.
When southern Greek cities heard Philip was dead, they moved to end Macedonian control. Alexander marched south so fast that Thessaly surrendered before it had fully decided to rebel, and Athens apologized. After a year securing the northern frontier, a rumor spread that he had been killed. Thebes believed it, killed the Macedonian officers stationed there, and declared independence.
In September 335 BC, Alexander appeared outside Thebes with about 30,000 men, roughly two weeks after the report of his death. He offered the Thebans a chance to hand over the ringleaders. They refused, inviting anyone who wanted to free Greece to join them. The city fell in a day.
Around 6,000 Thebans died, and nearly 30,000 survivors were sold into slavery. The city itself was leveled, and its land divided among neighbors. Alexander spared three categories of buildings: the temples, the citadel, and the house of the poet Pindar, who had died more than a century earlier but had written something favorable about one of Alexander’s ancestors. Pindar’s descendants were still living there and were among the few Thebans spared.
The point landed. No Greek city rebelled again during Alexander’s lifetime. In the spring of 334 BC, he crossed the Hellespont into Asia with roughly 32,000 infantry and 5,100 cavalry. Against the Persian Empire, which stretched from the Aegean to modern Pakistan, it was a small force.
He was also broke. Philip’s wars had drained the treasury, and Alexander borrowed heavily to fund the crossing, then gave away most of the crown estates to his companions. When asked what he kept for himself, he said hope. As his ships approached the far shore, he threw a spear into the sand and claimed Asia as land won by the spear.
He visited Troy, ran around the tomb of Achilles, and traded his armor for shields supposedly left over from the Trojan War. The Persians met him at the Granicus River in May. Their satraps set up on the far bank, forcing Alexander’s men to cross water and climb a muddy slope into cavalry. His most experienced general advised waiting until morning.
Alexander attacked immediately, leading the companion cavalry while wearing a helmet with two enormous white plumes so everyone would know where he was. That helmet nearly killed him. A Persian noble named Rhoesaces split it with a blow, and while Alexander was stunned, another noble, Spithridates, raised an axe over his head from behind. An officer named Cleitus the Black cut Spithridates’ arm off before the blow landed.
The following year, Alexander reached Gordium in central Turkey, where an old oxcart sat in a temple tied with a knot that had no visible ends. Prophecy said whoever undid it would rule Asia. Alexander drew his sword and cut it in half. In November 333 BC, Darius III came to handle the problem personally with a large army.
The two forces marched past each other in opposite directions, leaving Darius behind Alexander’s supply line. The resulting battle at Issus happened on a narrow coastal strip where Persian numbers meant little. Alexander drove his cavalry directly at Darius. The Persian line bent, and Darius fled, first in his chariot and then on horseback, leaving behind his war chest, tent, baggage, and his mother, wife, and children.
When Alexander visited the captured royal women, the queen mother Sisigambis bowed to Hephaestion, Alexander’s closest friend since childhood, because he was taller. Alexander shrugged and said Hephaestion was Alexander too. He treated the family with courtesy for years. Then came Tyre.
A Phoenician city built on an island half a mile offshore, with walls dropping into the sea and a navy to defend them, it refused Alexander entry to the temple of Melqart inside the city. He decided to build a road to them. The siege ran from January to July 332 BC. His engineers used rubble from the abandoned mainland city to push a causeway roughly 200 feet wide across the channel.
The Tyrians burned his towers. He rebuilt them wider, collected ships from surrendered Phoenician cities, blockaded the harbors, and mounted battering rams on decks. When the walls broke, somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 Tyrians died in the fighting and the killing afterward. Quintus Curtius Rufus reports 2,000 men were crucified along the shoreline.
About 30,000 people were sold into slavery. The causeway he built is still there, and Tyre has been part of the Lebanese mainland ever since. Egypt did not fight. Under Persian occupation and thoroughly done with it, Egypt welcomed Alexander around late 332 BC.
He sacrificed to Egyptian gods, was recognized as Pharaoh, and chose a fishing village on the Nile Delta as the site of a new city. Alexandria became the largest city in the Mediterranean world. He founded it in his early 20s on his way to somewhere else. He then traveled roughly 300 miles through open desert to the oasis of Siwa to consult the Oracle of Amun.
The journey nearly killed his party. At Siwa, Alexander went into the sanctuary alone and never told anyone what he heard. He came out satisfied, and from then on the idea circulated that the god had called him son. His Macedonians did not love this, and it started a crack that widened for the rest of his life.
On October 1, 331 BC, on a flat plain in what is now northern Iraq, Darius made his last attempt. He had the ground leveled for his 200 scythed chariots and assembled contingents from across the empire. Modern estimates of his force range from 50,000 to well over 100,000. Alexander had about 47,000 men.
Parmenion, the veteran general, suggested a night attack. Alexander refused, saying he would not steal a victory, then reportedly slept so deeply his officers had to wake him. His plan was to march his whole line diagonally to the right, drifting away from the ground Darius had prepared. The Persian left had to shuffle sideways to keep up, and a gap opened between their cavalry and center.
Alexander formed his companions into a wedge, drove into the gap, and turned straight at the king. Darius watched a wall of cavalry coming at his chariot for the second time in two years and fled. Parmenion, fighting hard on the other wing, sent for help, and Alexander broke off the pursuit to rescue him, which very possibly cost him the war’s cleanest ending. The empire was finished anyway.
Babylon opened its gates. Susa handed over its treasury. At Persepolis, the ceremonial heart of the empire, Alexander took possession of close to 120,000 talents of silver, a quantity of money so large it distorted the Mediterranean economy when he began spending it. In 330 BC, Persepolis burned.
Sources split. Some call it deliberate policy, revenge for the Persian burning of Athens a century and a half earlier. Others describe a drunken party where an Athenian courtesan named Thais said the sweetest revenge would be for a woman’s hand to burn the palace of Xerxes. The men grabbed torches, and Alexander led the procession.
Darius never got a last stand. His own satrap, Bessus, arrested him, and when Alexander’s pursuit got close, Bessus stabbed him and left him dying in a wagon. Alexander found the body, covered it with his own cloak, and sent it to Persepolis for a royal burial. He spent the next year hunting Bessus across Central Asia, caught him, and had him executed for regicide.
He had spent a decade trying to destroy Darius and was apparently furious that someone else got there first. After that, something shifted. Alexander began wearing Persian dress, kept Persian officials in their jobs, and experimented with proskynesis, the court ritual of bowing before the king. To Persians, it was ordinary etiquette.
To Macedonians, it was what you did in front of a god. The friction turned lethal in 330 BC. Philotas, commander of the companion cavalry and son of Parmenion, was accused of knowing about a plot and not reporting it. He was tried, tortured, and killed.
Alexander then had Parmenion assassinated before the news of his son’s death reached him. Parmenion had served Philip and won Alexander’s right wing at Gaugamela. He was about 70. Two years later, at a drinking party in Maracanda, Cleitus the Black got loud.
He had enough of the Persian clothes and the flattery. He started shouting that Alexander’s victories belonged to his father’s veterans. Alexander threw a javelin through his chest. This was the man who had cut an axe out of the air over his head at the Granicus.
Alexander pulled the weapon out and tried to turn it on himself. His guards stopped him. He lay in his tent for three days refusing food, calling Cleitus’s name. In 327 BC, he married Roxana, the daughter of a Bactrian nobleman, in what everyone agrees was politically useful and several sources insist was also genuine.
Then India. At the Hydaspes River in May 326 BC, King Porus waited on the far bank with 200 war elephants. Horses will not charge elephants. So Alexander cheated.
For weeks he marched troops up and down the riverbank at night making noise until the Indian scouts stopped reporting it. Then during a thunderstorm, he took a force 17 miles upstream and crossed in the dark. The elephants went into the Macedonian infantry, and it became the ugliest fight of the campaign. The animals eventually panicked and trampled their own lines.
Porus, wounded, was brought in at the end. Alexander asked how he wished to be treated. Porus said, “As a king. ” Alexander gave him back his kingdom and added territory to it.
Bucephalus died after that battle at about 30 years old, and Alexander founded a city on the riverbank named after his horse. A few weeks later, at the Hyphasis River, the army stopped walking. They had been gone eight years and marched roughly 20,000 miles. The monsoon had been falling on them for 70 days.
An officer named Coenus stood up and told Alexander, out loud, that the men wanted to see their parents and wives, and that a good commander knows when to stop. Alexander went into his tent and stayed there for three days. When he came out, he announced the omens were against crossing. The trip home was worse than the war.
Fighting his way down the Indus, he attacked a Mallian town and, impatient with the pace, went up a scaling ladder himself. It broke behind him. He jumped down inside the wall with two or three bodyguards and fought until an arrow went through his breastplate into his lung. His men, hearing their king was dead, took the town and killed everyone inside it, including women and children.
He survived but never fully recovered. He then chose to march part of the army home through the Gedrosian desert in what is now southern Iran and Pakistan. Arrian says he had heard two previous armies tried it and failed and wanted to be the one who did not. The desert killed soldiers, camp followers, and animals in numbers the sources never pinned down.
One story says soldiers found a helmet of water and brought it to him, and he poured it into the sand rather than drink while they went without. At Susa in 324 BC, he threw the strangest wedding in history. He and roughly 90 of his officers married Persian noblewomen in a single ceremony, and he recognized the existing relationships of around 10,000 soldiers, clearing their debts as a bonus. Most of the officers divorced their wives the moment he was dead.
The army mutinied again at Opis when he tried to send veterans home, accusing him of replacing them. He responded by firing all of them, handing their jobs to Persian units, and locking himself away until they came to his door begging. In October 324, Hephaestion died of a fever in Ecbatana. Alexander refused food for days, cut his hair short in mourning, had the doctor killed, banned music across the empire, and ordered a funeral monument that would have cost thousands of talents.
Whatever exactly they were to each other, it was the load-bearing relationship of his life. Eight months later, in Babylon, he attended a banquet, drank heavily, and came down with a fever. It lasted about 12 days. He grew weaker, lost his voice, and on June 10th or 11th of 323 BC, he died.
He was 32. Nobody agrees on what killed him. The candidates include typhoid, malaria, West Nile virus, pancreatitis from the drinking, an infection from the old lung wound, and poison, which the ancient rumor mill preferred and modern medicine mostly does not. One theory suggests a paralytic condition that made him appear dead before he actually was, which would explain the persistent report that his body showed no decay for six days.
Asked on his deathbed who should inherit, he supposedly said, “To the strongest. ” If he actually said it, it was the single most destructive sentence he ever produced. His generals spent the next 40 years killing each other over the pieces. Roxana and their son were murdered.
His mother was murdered. His empire, the largest anyone had ever assembled, did not survive a decade in one piece. He had worked out at 12 that the thing terrifying the horse was just its own shadow and that you could fix it by turning the animal toward the sun.
Twenty years later, nobody ever managed to tell him what was chasing him.