Alexander the Great

Philip of Macedon forged the hammer. Alexander just swung it until it broke.

Philip spent two decades turning Macedonia from a backward kingdom of hill tribes into a military machine. He stretched the infantry spear into the eighteen-foot sarissa, drilled his phalanxes to pivot on command, and used heavy cavalry to punch through enemy flanks. He also hired Aristotle to tutor his teenage son. Alexander listened to lectures on biology and politics, but his real obsession was Homer. He slept with a dagger and an annotated copy of the Iliad under his pillow, convinced he was a direct descendant of Achilles and destined to surpass him.

When Philip was assassinated at a wedding in 336 BC, Alexander was twenty. He executed his rivals and flattened the rebellious city of Thebes to terrify the rest of Greece into silence. Two years later, he crossed into Asia with thirty-five thousand men and almost no money in the royal treasury.

What followed was twelve years of nonstop marching.

At the Granicus River, he charged across the water in bright armor and nearly caught a battleaxe to the skull. At Issus and Gaugamela, he broke the Persian imperial army by leading the Companion cavalry straight toward Darius III. The Persian king panicked and fled both times, leaving his chariot and his royal treasury behind. By twenty-five, Alexander was master of Egypt and the entire Persian empire.

He did not know how to stop.

In Egypt, he marched his army across the desert to the Siwa Oasis. The priests of Ammon greeted him as the son of god, a title Alexander took literally. He founded Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, one of dozens of cities he named after himself (along with one named after his favorite warhorse, Bucephalus). In Persepolis, after months of looting, he got drunk at a banquet and burned the ancient Persian palace complex to ashes.

As the territory expanded, his Macedonian officers grew bitter. Alexander began wearing Persian robes and demanding proskynesis, the custom of bowing flat on the floor before the king. To Greeks, bowing to a mortal was blasphemy. Paranoia took over. He executed his veteran general Parmenion, had Parmenion’s son tortured on treason charges, and stabbed his close friend Cleitus the Black to death with a spear during a drunken argument.

Still, he dragged his army further east into the mountains of Afghanistan and across the Hindu Kush into India.

At the Hydaspes River in 326 BC, his men fought in monsoon mud against King Porus and two hundred war elephants. They won, but the cost was brutal. When Alexander ordered the army to march toward the Ganges to conquer the rest of the subcontinent, his soldiers finally broke. At the Hyphasis River, weeping and exhausted, they refused to take another step.

Alexander sulked in his tent for three days before turning around.

He led his men back through the scorched wasteland of the Gedrosian Desert, where thousands died of thirst and heat stroke. He reached Babylon in 323 BC to plan new campaigns into Arabia, but his body was ruined by old wounds and heavy drinking. After a twelve-day fever, he died at thirty-two.

Legend says that on his deathbed, surrounded by his generals, someone asked him who should inherit the empire. Alexander allegedly whispered, “To the strongest.”

His generals took him at his word. Within weeks, the empire fractured as his commanders fought decades of bloody civil wars over the pieces. Alexander built no lasting political structure and left no adult heir. He spent an entire generation of Macedonian manpower on a personal conquest. But the wave of Greek culture he unleashed, from Egypt to the borders of India, reshaped the ancient world for centuries.