Alexander the Great (356 BC – 323 BC), also known as Alexander III of Macedon (Ἀλέξανδρος Γ’ ὁ Μακεδών) was an ancient Greek King (basileus) of Macedon (336–323 BC). He was one of the most successful military commanders of all time and is presumed undefeated in battle. By the time of his death, he had conquered (see Wars of Alexander the Great) most of the known world (as known to the ancient Greeks).

Alexander assumed the kingship of Macedon following the death of his father Philip II, who had unified most of the city-states of mainland Greece under Macedonian hegemony in a federation called the League of Corinth. After reconfirming Macedonian rule by quashing a rebellion of southern Greek city-states and staging a short but bloody excursion against Macedon’s northern neighbours, Alexander set out east against the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which he defeated and overthrew. His conquests included Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Judea, Gaza, Egypt, Bactria and Mesopotamia, and he extended the boundaries of his own empire as far as Punjab, India.

Alexander had already made plans prior to his death for military and mercantile expansions into the Arabian peninsula, after which he was to turn his armies to the west (Carthage, Rome and the Iberian Peninsula). His original vision, however, had been to the east, to the ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea, as is described by his boyhood tutor and mentor Aristotle.

Alexander integrated many foreigners into his army, leading some scholars to credit him with a “policy of fusion”. He also encouraged marriages between his soldiers and foreigners, and he himself went on to marry two foreign princesses.

Alexander died after twelve years of constant military campaigning, possibly a result of malaria, poisoning, typhoid fever, viral encephalitis or the consequences of alcoholism. His legacy and conquests lived on long after him and ushered in centuries of Greek settlement and cultural influence over distant areas. This period is known as the Hellenistic period, which featured a combination of Greek, Middle Eastern and Indian culture. Alexander himself featured prominently in the history and myth of both Greek and non-Greek cultures. His exploits inspired a literary tradition in which he appeared as a legendary hero in the tradition of Achilles.

THE MACEDONIAN BACKGROUND

The kingdom of Macedon to which Alexander succeeded in 336 was an oddity in the Greek world. It resembled its southern neighbour Thessaly in being a territorial state rather than being centred on a polis or ‘city-state’ like Athens, Sparta or Thebes; but it was more centralised in its structure even than Thessaly, in that it was ruled by an absolute monarch of a pattern recalling that of the basileis of the Homeric poems.

Macedon, under a strong central administration, gradually obtained rule over neighbouring regions and peoples until, by the reign of Philip II (359-36), it controlled the regions of Paeonia to the north and the Lyncestian people to the west. These regions were known as Upper Macedonia. Philip’s conquests extended Macedonian territory eastwards as well, beyond the River Strymon to the Nestus (in which area he founded Philippi), and even beyond the Rhodope mountain range of Thrace, where he founded the city of Philippoupolis (Plovdiv). These conquests gave him full control of the gold mines of Thrace and the timber forests of the Strymon region, and enabled the huge growth in power and ambition that characterised his reign and that of his son.

A famous speech which Alexander is said to have made to his troops during the mutiny at Opis in 324 summarises the contemporary perception of these achievements:

THE CONSOLIDATION OF ALEXANDER’S RULE

Alexander’s first task as king was to secure his position. Whatever his own role in the assassination of Philip, there were others who might be expected to take advantage of Philip’s death to make a bid for the throne. So, despite the acclamation of the young man as king, he took steps to eliminate possible rivals. Plutarch (Plut. de fort. Alex. 1.3) says that at this time ‘all Macedonia was looking to the sons of Aeropus’. One of these, Alexander of Lyncestis, was son-in-law of Antipater and hastened to swear loyalty to Alexander, and thus survived. But his two brothers were immediately put to death. Two of the sons of the youngest Lyncestian, Arrhabaios, held significant commands in Alexander’s army in Asia, though according to Arrian (Arr. Anab. 1.20.1) the younger of them, Neoptolemus, defected to Darius; Diodorus (Diod. Sic. 17.25.5) has a different story. Alexander the Lyncestian himself was accused of treasonable correspondence with Darius in winter 334 and placed under close arrest; he was eventually executed in 330 in the aftermath of the conspiracy of Philotas. There was evidently no love lost between these two families.

The younger Lyncestians may have been executed less because they represented a direct threat than because they might support the stronger rival claims of Amyntas, the son of Perdiccas. Amyntas himself was a likely pretender to the throne, and was disposed of within the year, and probably much sooner.

THE WAR IN ASIA MINOR

The Persian Empire – or the Empire of the Medes, as the Greeks called it – had been founded by Cyrus the Great, king of Persis (in southern Iran), in 559 when he conquered Media (the northwest mountain region of Iran around Hamadan). In the 540s Cyrus gained control of Asia Minor including the kingdom of Lydia and the Greek cities of the Aegean coast (Ionia). In 529, Cyrus was succeeded by his son Cambyses, who brought Egypt under Persian rule. The long reign of Cambyses’ successor Darius (521-486) was interrupted by an unsuccessful revolt of the Ionian Greeks in 499. The involvement of Athens and Eretria in this revolt prompted a campaign against Greece in which the Persians were decisively defeated by the Athenians and their Plataean allies at the battle of Marathon (September 490). But when Darius’ son Xerxes came to the throne he prepared new plans for the conquest of Greece. Again the Greeks defeated the Persians in a series of great battles, by sea at Salamis (480) and later at Mycale (479), and by land at Plataea (479), where Thebes had fought on the Persian side. However, the Persian sack of Athens, and burning of the temples on the Acropolis, in 480 was a never-forgotten slight, and resistance to the Persians became one of the defining features of Greek identity. Even after 150 years, the ‘enslavement’ of the Ionian Greeks to Persia still rankled with mainland Greeks.

SON OF AMMON

Once he had crossed into Cilicia in summer 333, Alexander could no longer pose as the liberator of the Greeks. He had come beyond Greek territory; from here he must come as, in Persian eyes, a usurper. At this point it must have begun to cross his mind that he was on course to become ruler of the Persian Empire, even if it was still, first and foremost, military necessity that dictated his continuing advance. He could argue that Darius needed to be forced into acknowledging his authority over the conquered regions. Furthermore, he had not yet secured the coastline, and the logical next move was to march through the Levant. Egypt must necessarily be taken into allegiance, too. But not all that occurred in Egypt can be taken as having direct military significance. The visit to the oracle of Ammon in winter 332/1 may have been propaganda, it may have been piety, or it may have been adventure; whichever it was, it takes us into the realm of Alexander’s psychology and of his impact on his contemporaries.

The road south from Issus posed few problems. Cilicia and Syria were left in the hands of two of the Companions, the picked close friends of the king who, in Homeric style, acted as his advisers, war council and, when necessary, military commanders.

THE CONQUEST OF PERSIA

Alexander’s army crossed the Euphrates in the high summer of 331 (probably mid-July). Alexander’s objective was Babylon, but how was he to approach it? One possibility was to march directly down the Euphrates through the Mesopotamian plain, which reaches temperatures in the 40s centigrade in the summer, and is arid and short of food supplies. There are some signs that this is what Darius expected. The satrap Mazaeus advanced up the Euphrates close to Alexander’s army, and then retreated burning the land as he went, which would make Alexander’s advance more difficult. Peter Green suggests that Darius was expecting Alexander to repeat the tactics of Cyrus the Younger, who had marched down the Euphrates for Babylon in 401 and won the battle of Cunaxa but had been killed in the process. If that is so, Mazaeus’ actions made such a move more difficult. Instead, Alexander moved northwards and eastwards, skirting the mountains of Armenia, and arrived at the Tigris near Mosul. He spent several weeks on this journey of a mere 500 kilometres, which could have been done in a fortnight. As he arrived, there was a total eclipse of the moon, which Arrian tells us prompted him to sacrifice to Sun, Moon and Earth; Aristander the seer interpreted the eclipse as an omen favourable to Alexander.

THE EXPEDITION TO INDIA

It had been for some time part of Alexander’s plan to conquer India. It was here that his pothos, his ‘yearning’, came into full play. The geographical conceptions of the time made it possible to believe that India represented the last land before the encircling Ocean, so that an invasion of India would constitute a conquest of the entire world to the east of Greece. (The west would come later.) This plan had first been made explicit when Alexander received an embassy from Pharasmanes, a king of the Chorasmians on the Oxus. (His name was later to be attached to a ‘Letter to Hadrian’ describing the fabulous beasts of India and the Far East.) Pharasmanes had promised help in Central Asia; and Alexander had also received an embassy from the ruler of Taxila, Ambhi (Greek Omphis), whose dynastic name was Taxiles. Both saw advantages to themselves in lending aid to Alexander’s conquests.

Mythology also came into his considerations. Alexander consciously modelled his exploits on those of the gods and heroes of Greece, as well as of human predecessors such as Cyrus the Great. Dionysus was supposed to have come from India to make himself a god in Greece, with his retinue of panthers and maenads, his garlands of grapes and ivy; Alexander would retrace the god’s steps to his origins. Heracles, too, had been this way. Finally, the legendary Queen Semiramis of Assyria was a constant object of emulation; she alone of western rulers had carried her conquests to

ALEXANDER IN BABYLON

Alexander’s arrival back in the Iranian heartland of his empire reintroduced him to problems of administration and rule which had been put in abeyance, if not forgotten, during the expedition to India. While still in Pura he had heard of trouble with the satrap of Oreitis, Apollophanes, whom he promptly deposed. Craterus had also had to crush a revolt some way to the north of Pura. The satrap of Carmania, Astaspes, was welcomed to the celebrations for the return home; but his execution turned out to be one of the entertainments at the revel. Several other executions followed, including those of the Macedonian generals Cleander and Sitalces, accused of maladministration in Media. A little later, when Alexander arrived in Persepolis, he executed the satrap Orxines, on the grounds that he had allowed the tomb of Cyrus to be robbed, and replaced him with the loyal Peucestas, who had been one of his saviours at the town of the Malli. Peucestas, according to Diodorus (Diod. Sic. 19.14.5), was the sole satrap permitted to wear Persian dress, an indication of the importance attached to the adhesion of the inhabitants of this satrapy. These regions could not be dropped as soon as won in the way that the kingdom of Porus had been.

These acts of retribution for maladministration seem to have had an impact on one of Alexander’s longest-standing administrators, Harpalus, the treasurer, based in Babylon. In spring 324