Alexander the Great: Conqueror of the Known World
In the spring of 334 BCE, a young king of Macedon crossed the Hellespont with an army of about 47,000 men and began one of the most remarkable military campaigns in history. Within ten years, Alexander the Great would conquer the entire Persian Empire, defeat three of its greatest kings, march from Greece to India, and create the largest empire the ancient world had ever seen. He died in Babylon at the age of thirty-two, possibly of fever, possibly of poison, but the empire he built survived in three Hellenistic successor kingdoms for almost three centuries. The Greek language, the Greek city, and the Greek way of life spread from Egypt to India, and the cultural fusion that resulted shaped the world from the Roman Empire to Buddhism.
This cluster page tells the story of Alexander’s life, his battles, his empire, and his legacy. It links out to the Death of Alexander the Great, the Battle of Gaugamela, and the wider story of the Ancient Greece and Ancient Warfare traditions.
The Boy from Pella
Alexander was born in 356 BCE in Pella, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Macedon, in the north of Greece. His father was Philip II, the king who in just twenty years transformed Macedon from a backward, semi-civilized kingdom on the edge of the Greek world into the dominant military power of the eastern Mediterranean. His mother was Olympias, a fiery princess of Epirus who told her son he was the son of Zeus.
When Alexander was thirteen, his father hired the philosopher Aristotle to be his tutor. Aristotle taught him rhetoric, philosophy, medicine, geography, and zoology, and (reportedly) gave him a copy of Homer’s Iliad, which he carried with him for the rest of his life. Alexander’s favorite hero was Achilles, and he saw himself as a second Achilles, leading a Greek army against the barbarian East.
The Rise of Macedon
Philip II had transformed Macedon. He had created a professional, hard-drinking, militarized society in which the king’s companions served as both his court and his officer corps. He had reformed the army, replacing the old Greek-style phalanx with a much more flexible, longer-speared Macedonian phalanx, and combining it with the famous Companion Cavalry, the core heavy cavalry of the Macedonian army. By 338 BCE, Philip had defeated the combined armies of Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea and become the master of Greece. He was about to lead a great pan-Hellenic crusade against Persia when he was assassinated in 336 BCE.
Alexander was twenty when he became king. Within two years he had crushed a series of rebellions in Greece, executed his rivals at home, and was ready to take up his father’s eastern crusade.
The Campaign Begins (334–330 BCE)
Alexander crossed the Hellespont in 334 BCE and within a year had won two major battles: the Battle of the Granicus, fought against a Persian satrap’s army in northwestern Anatolia, and the famous siege of Tyre, in which Alexander built a causeway out to the island city and breached its famous walls with siege engines (see The Phoenicians for Tyre’s earlier history). He then marched south into Egypt, where he was welcomed as a liberator, crowned pharaoh, and founded the city of Alexandria, the first of many.
The Battle of Issus (333 BCE)
In 333 BCE, the Persian king Darius III finally took personal command of a much larger army and met Alexander on the narrow coastal plain of Issus in southern Anatolia. Alexander led his Companion Cavalry in a direct charge across the river and into the center of the Persian line, personally killing several Persian nobles. Darius fled. The Persian army collapsed. Darius’ family — his mother, his wife, and his children — were captured and treated with respect by Alexander. He held them as hostages and used the fact of his generosity in Greek propaganda.
The Battle of Gaugamela (331 BCE)
The decisive battle came on 1 October 331 BCE, on the broad plain of Gaugamela in what is now northern Iraq. Darius had assembled a vast army — perhaps 50,000 or 100,000 men, by ancient sources’ varying accounts — including fifteen war elephants, 200 scythed chariots, and the famous Persian cavalry. Alexander’s force was considerably smaller, perhaps 47,000 men. The full story of the battle — Alexander’s feigned oblique approach, the decisive cavalry charge, the death of the Persian center, Darius’ second and final flight — is told in The Battle of Gaugamela.
Gaugamela ended the Persian Empire. Alexander marched to Babylon, to Susa, and to Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian kings. At Persepolis, according to a famous story, he burned the great palace of the Achaemenid kings in revenge for the Persian burning of Athens in 480 BCE. The story is probably not literally true, but it became one of the most powerful images in Western tradition.
The Conquest of the East (330–323 BCE)
Alexander now had to catch and kill Darius. The Persian king fled eastward, and one of his own satraps murdered him before Alexander could reach him. Alexander gave Darius a royal funeral, hunted down and executed the assassin, and then spent the next several years campaigning in the far east of the empire — in Bactria, Sogdiana, and northern India.
In 326 BCE, Alexander crossed the Indus River and fought the Indian king Porus at the Battle of the Hydaspes (now the Jhelum River). Porus used war elephants and a disciplined infantry against Alexander’s combined arms. Alexander won, but at heavy cost, and his exhausted troops refused to march further east. Alexander led them south down the Indus to the sea, then west through the terrible Gedrosian desert in what is now southern Iran, losing many men to heat and thirst.
The Death of Alexander (323 BCE)
In the spring of 323 BCE, Alexander returned to Babylon, the city he intended to make the capital of his empire. He drank heavily, fell ill after a long banquet, and after ten days of fever died on 10 June 323 BCE. He was thirty-two. The circumstances of his death remain debated — natural illness, poisoning, malaria, typhoid fever, even (in one modern theory) the cumulative effect of battlefield wounds.
You can read the full story in The Death of Alexander the Great.
The Successor Kingdoms
Alexander’s empire was divided among his generals, the Diadochi, after almost forty years of wars. Three great Hellenistic kingdoms emerged: the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt (which ended with Cleopatra in 30 BCE), the Seleucid dynasty in Syria and Iran, and the Antigonid dynasty in Macedon. Greek remained the language of administration and high culture in the entire eastern Mediterranean and Near East for almost a thousand years after Alexander’s death. The city of Alexandria in Egypt became the largest in the world and the home of the famous library, the lighthouse (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), and the intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world.
Alexander’s Legacy
Alexander was, by any standard, one of the most important individuals in the history of civilization. He is one of the few ancient figures who is still a household name. He has been admired, criticized, romanticized, and mythologized in equal measure. Napoleon carried a copy of Arrian’s An Alexandrou Anabasis (the most important ancient account of his campaigns) on his Egyptian campaign. Julius Caesar wept at the statue of Alexander in Gades. The modern world still uses the word “Hellenistic” to describe the world Alexander created, and the term “Alexander” has become almost a byword for ambition, genius, and doomed youth.