Zeus. Aware of these legends and of
their political usefulness, Alexander
was wont to refer to his father as Zeus,
rather than as Philip.
Contemporary bust of
Alexander the Great
North and east of classical Greece,
Macedon was regarded by most Greeks as
foreign and semi-barbarian.
Olympias herself was from
Epirus, another semi-Greek state to
the northwest of the Greek peninsula.
Philip selected
Aristotle to tutor young Alexander,
and their relationship lasted throughout
Alexander's life; even after the
execution of his nephew,
Callisthenes, Aristotle continued to
receive presents (plant specimens) from
the king.
In
336 BC, he succeeded his father on
the throne. Philip's assassination,
although perpetrated by a disgruntled
young man who had been one of Philip's
lovers, is now thought to have been
planned with the knowledge and possible
involvement of either Alexander or
Olympias, possibly both.
Philip having militarily and
diplomatically established Macedonian
hegemony in Greece, Alexander set off in
334 BC on his famous conquests, the
first and most well known of which was
the defeat and subjugation of
Persia (which then controlled a
large area including what are now the
modern nations of
Iran,
Iraq,
Syria and
Turkey). Within two years, he had
conquered the eastern
Mediterranean coast, entered Persia,
and near the town of
Issus defeated the great Persian
king
Darius III.
In
332 -
331 BC, he conquered
Egypt and, after defeating Darius
again in the
Battle of Gaugamela, occupied
Babylon. He proceeded to
Media and
Scythia, captured
Herat and
Samarkand and went on to
India. He adopted some elements of
Persian dress and customs at his court,
including notably the custom of
proskynesis, a symbolic kissing of
the hand that Persians paid to their
social superiors, but a practice which
the Greeks disdained. This cost him much
in the sympathies of many of his Greek
countrymen. His attempts to merge
Persian culture with his Greek soldiers
also included having his officers marry
Persian wives en masse, and
training a regiment of Persian boys in
the ways of Macedonians.
Alexander married several princesses
of former Persian territories:
Roxana of
Bactria; Statira, daughter of Darius
III; and Parysatis, daughter of Ochus.
However his greatest emotional
attachment is generally considered to
have been to his companion, and possibly
lover,
Hephaestion. He also took as lover
one of Darius' minions, the eunuch
Bagoas, as Plutarch tells us. Roxana
eventually gave birth to the boy
Alexander IV "Aegus", putatively his
son.
Many of his soldiers died when he
drove his army further and further east,
through deserts and other hostile
landscape. Having fought in
India, he returned west through
Makran trying to consolidate his
empire. He invaded India in
326 BC and fought with King
Purushotthama or Porus in the Battle
of Hydaspes. However, he avoided a war
with the Nanda empire that was ruling
vast areas of northern India and was
then the main power in India. Alexander
and his soldiers seems to have only
pillaged and vandalized the small,
mutually warring kingdoms in what is now
Pakistan.
According to one story, the
philosopher
Anaxarchus checked the vainglory of
Alexander, when he aspired to the
honours of divinity, by pointing to his
wounded finger, saying, "See the blood
of a mortal, not of a god." In another
version Alexander himself pointed out
the difference in response to a
sycophantic soldier.
Alexander had a legendary horse named
Bucephalus (ox-headed), supposedly
descended from the
Mares of Diomedes.
On
June 10,
323 BC, before he had returned, he
died of a sudden fever, in the palace of
Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon.
Alexander was only 33 years old.
He left a huge empire of Persio-Greek
culture to his successors (the Diadochi
or Diadochoi), who jostled for supremacy
over portions of his empire. When the
dust settled, virtually all of his
officers had disposed of their Persian
wives, and all but two of his top
officers, his mother, his wife
Roxana, his son
Alexander IV of Macedon (
323 -
309 BC), his illegitimate son
Heracles (
327 -
309 BC), his sister
Cleopatra, his half-sister
Euridice, and his half-brother
Philip III of Macedon, were dead,
only one of whom (Antipater)
died of natural causes.
His empire was divided at first into
four major portions:
Cassander ruled in
Greece,
Lysimachus in
Asia Minor and
Thrace,
Seleucus I Nicator in
Mesopotamia and
Syria, and
Ptolemy I (or Ptolemy Soter) in the
Levant and
Egypt.
Soon, Lysimachus obtained Cassander's
portion, and the empire was divided into
three major portions, controlled by the
descendants of
Ptolemy Soter in
Egypt,
Antigonus Monopthalmos (literally
"One-eyed") in
Greece, and
Seleucus in the Mideast. By about
281 BC, only two dynasties remained
in Alexander's old empire — the
Seleucid dynasty in the north and
the
Ptolemaic dynasty in the south.
Many eponymous towns remained:
Alexandrias, Alexandropolises and other
Alexvilles dotting the landscape of this
odd cosmopolitan mish-mash he had
conquered. Whatever dreams he might have
had of some kind of merging of Greek and
Persian cultures died shortly after he
did, with the Macedonians and Greeks
edging the Persians into less powerful
positions -- although there were Greek
Diadochoi (Eumenes in particular) none
of the Diadochoi were Persian.
Alexander is remembered as a
folk-hero in Europe and much of western
and
central Asia, where he is usually
called Iskander. In
Iran, on the other hand, he is
remembered as the destroyer of their
first great empire and as the leveller
of
Persepolis. Ancient sources are
generally written with an agenda of
either glorifying or slandering the man,
making it difficult to evaluate his
actual character. Most refer to a
growing instability and megalomania in
the years following Gaugamela, but it
has been suggested that this simply
reflects the Greek stereotype of a
medizing king. The murder of his friend
Cleitus in a drunken rage, something
Alexander deeply regretted, is often
pointed to, as is his execution of
Philotas and his father Parmenion for
failure to pass along details of a plot
against him, though this last may have
been prudence rather than paranoia.
Modern opinion is strongly divided as to
whether he was a heroic empire-builder
or an ancient
Hitler.
Modern historians treat the death of
Alexander the Great and the birth of the
successor kingdoms as the event that
divides
Hellenic civilization from
Hellenistic civilization.
Alexander's conquests and the
administrative needs of his
Greek-speaking successors promoted the
spread of the Greek language and Greek
culture across the eastern Mediterranean
and into Mesopotamia.
Ancient historians who wrote about
Alexander's campaigns include
Arrian and
Plutarch.
