The conquests of Alexander

The story

A prince of Pella

Alexander was born at Pella, the capital of Macedon, in July 356 BC. His father was King Philip II, a very able ruler who had turned Macedon into a power and had subdued the Greek cities; his mother was Olympias, a princess of Epirus. As a boy he had Aristotle as his teacher, for about three years. A famous story tells of Bucephalus, a magnificent horse that nobody could ride. Alexander, at about twelve, tamed it, and the horse stayed with him until its death, in 326 BC.

In 336 BC Philip was assassinated, and Alexander, at only twenty, became king. Then, with the Macedonian army, he decided to carry out his father's plan: to attack the Persian empire.

From Greece to Egypt

In the spring of 334 BC he crossed the Hellespont, the strait that separates Europe from Asia, with his army. The first clash was at the river Granicus: he won, although he risked his life (a sword blow to his helmet narrowly missed him), and sent three hundred enemy suits of armour to Athens as a trophy. In 333 BC, at Issus, he faced King Darius III in person. Darius fled from the battlefield and Alexander captured his family. The ancient sources speak of more than a hundred thousand Persians dead, but modern historians think the figure exaggerated; the Macedonians had, according to the historian Curtius Rufus, about 150 dead.

Then the march went on southwards. The Phoenician city of Tyre resisted for about seven months, in 332 BC, and then Alexander took Gaza too. When he reached Egypt, at the end of that year, he was welcomed as a liberator and recognised as pharaoh. Here, in the Nile delta, he founded the city of Alexandria, planned with the help of the architect Dinocrates of Rhodes. It was the first of many cities that bore his name. He also made a long journey across the desert to the oasis of Siwa, where there was an oracle of the god Ammon: the sources do not agree on what the oracle said.

The fall of the Persian empire

On 1 October 331 BC, at Gaugamela, the decisive clash took place. The Persians were far more numerous: ancient historians speak of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, against about 40,000 Macedonian infantry and 7,000 cavalry (modern historians, however, think of many fewer Persians, between 50,000 and 120,000). Alexander won again, and Darius fled. The Macedonian king entered Babylon and Susa, where he seized enormous quantities of silver and gold. In January 330 BC he reached Persepolis, one of the king's palaces, which was devastated by a fire: the sources debate whether it was ordered or accidental. In the summer of the same year Darius III was killed by his own satraps, the governors of the provinces. Alexander found him dead and gave him a royal burial.

Towards India

Alexander did not stop. He pushed into Central Asia, into Bactria and Sogdiana, where he faced revolts that lasted a long time. In 327 BC he married Roxane, the daughter of a local noble, who was sixteen. In the spring of 326 BC he marched towards India. On the river Hydaspes he defeated King Porus in a hard and bloody battle and founded two cities, one of them Alexandria Bucephalus, in honour of his horse.

Further on, on the river Hyphasis, the army mutinied. The men, tired after years of marches and battles, refused to go any further east. Alexander had to give way. He went down the river Indus to its mouth and then turned back, crossing the harsh Gedrosian desert, while a fleet led by Nearchus explored the Persian Gulf.

A sudden end

In 324 BC, at Susa, Alexander organised a great mass wedding: eighty officers married Persian noblewomen and ten thousand veterans married local women. He wanted to unite Macedonians and Persians into a single people. A few months later his dearest friend, Hephaestion, died. Alexander fell ill at Babylon and died on 10 June 323 BC, shortly before turning thirty-three. The cause is still debated today: malaria, typhoid, poisoning and much else have been suggested, but none is certain.

According to tradition, when asked who should succeed him he answered with a confused phrase that can be understood as “to the strongest”. None of his heirs managed to hold the empire together. Wars broke out between his generals, the Diadochi, that is the “successors”. Ptolemy became pharaoh of Egypt, Seleucus founded the Seleucid empire in 305 BC, Cassander governed Macedon from 316 and became its king in 305 BC.