In the wake of his father's death, Alexander, then 19, was determined to seize the throne by any means necessary. He quickly garnered the support of the Macedonian army, including the general and troops he had had fought with at Chaeronea.
The army proclaimed Alexander the feudal king and proceeded to help him murder other potential heirs to the throne. Ever a loyal mother, Olympia further ensured her son's claim to the throne by slaughtering the daughter of King Philip II and Cleopatra and driving Cleopatra herself to suicide. Even though Alexander was the feudal king of Macedonia, he didn't obtain automatic control of the Corinthian League. In fact, the southern states of Greece were celebrating Philip II's death and expressed divided interests.
Athens had its own agenda: Under the leadership of democratic Demosthenes, the state hoped to take charge of the league. As they launched independence movements, Alexander sent his army south and coerced the region of Thessaly into acknowledging him as the leader of the Corinthian League. Then during a meeting of league members at Thermopylae, Alexander elicited their acceptance of his leadership.
By the fall of , he reissued treaties with the Greek city-states that belonged to the Corinthian League — with Athens still refusing membership — and was granted full military power in the campaign against the Persian Empire. But, before preparing for war with Persia, Alexander first conquered the Thracian Triballians in , securing Macedonia's northern borders.
As Alexander was nearing the end of his northern campaign, he was delivered the news that Thebes, a Greek city-state, had forced out the Macedonian troops that were garrisoned there. Fearing a revolt among the other city-states, Alexander leapt into action, marching his massive army—consisting of 3, cavalry and 30, infantry—southward all the way to the tip of the Greek peninsula.
Meanwhile, Alexander's general, Parmenion, had already made his way to Asia Minor. Alexander and his forces arrived in Thebes so quickly that the city-state didn't have a chance to pull together allies for its defense. Three days after his arrival, Alexander led the massacre of Thebes. It was Alexander's hope that the destruction of Thebes would serve as a warning to city-states contemplating revolt. His intimidation tactic proved effective; the other Greek city-states, including Athens, chose to pledge their alliance to the Macedonian Empire or opted to remain neutral.
In , Alexander embarked on his Asiatic expedition, arriving in Troy that spring. By fall, Alexander and his army had made it across the southern coast of Asia Minor to Gordium, where they took the winter to rest.
In the summer of , the troops of Alexander and Darius once again went head to head in battle at Issus. Although Alexander's army was outnumbered, he used his flair for military strategy to create formations that defeated the Persians again and caused Darius to flee. In November of , Alexander declared himself the king of Persia after capturing Darius and making him a fugitive.
Next up on Alexander's agenda was his campaign to conquer Egypt. After besieging Gaza on his way to Egypt, Alexander easily achieved his conquest; Egypt fell without resistance. In , he created the city of Alexandria, designed as a hub for Greek culture and commerce. As it became clear Alexander would win the Battle of Issus, Darius fled with what remained of his troops, leaving his wife and family behind. His mother, Sisygambis, was so upset she disowned him and adopted Alexander as her son.
By now it was clear that Alexander was a shrewd, ruthless and brilliant military leader—in fact, he never lost a battle in his life. Next, Alexander took over the Phoenician cities of Marathus and Aradus.
He rejected a plea from Darius for peace and took the towns of Byblos and Sidon. He then laid siege to the heavily fortified island of Tyre in January B. But Alexander had no navy to speak of and Tyre was surrounded by water. Alexander instructed his men to build a causeway to reach Tyre. All went well until they came within striking distance of the Tyrians.
After rejecting another peace offer from Darius, Alexander set out for Egypt. He was sidelined at Gaza, however, and forced to endure another lengthy siege. After several weeks, he took the town and entered Egypt where he established the city that still bears his name: Alexandria. Alexander traveled to the desert to consult the oracle of Ammon, a god of supposed good counsel.
Legends abound about what transpired at the oracle, but Alexander kept mum about the experience. Still, the visit furthered speculation Alexander was a deity. Following fierce fighting and heavy losses on both sides, Darius fled and was assassinated by his own troops. Finally rid of Darius, Alexander proclaimed himself King of Persia. With Bessus out of the way, Alexander had full control of Persia. To gain credibility with the Persians, Alexander took on many Persian customs.
He began dressing like a Persian and adopted the practice of proskynesis, a Persian court custom that involved bowing down and kissing the hand of others, depending on their rank. The Macedonians were less than thrilled with the changes in Alexander and his attempt to be viewed as a deity. They refused to practice proskynesis and some plotted his death. Increasingly paranoid, Alexander ordered the death of one of his most esteemed generals, Parmenio, in B. Pushed too far, Alexander killed Cleitus with a spear, a spontaneous act of violence that anguished him.
Some historians believe Alexander killed his general in a fit of drunkenness—a persistent problem that plagued him through much of his life. Alexander struggled to capture Sogdia, a region of the Persian Empire that remained loyal to Bessus. Supposedly, one of those on the rock was a girl named Roxane. As the story goes, Alexander fell in love with Roxane on sight.
He married her despite her Sogdian heritage and she joined him on his journey. Some tribes surrendered peacefully; others did not. Even so, after a fierce battle in a raging thunderstorm, Porus was defeated. One event took place at Hydaspes which devastated Alexander: the death of his beloved horse, Bucephalus. Alexander wanted to press on and attempt to conquer all of India, but his war-weary soldiers refused, and his officers convinced him to return to Persia.
So Alexander led his troops down the Indus River and was severely wounded during a battle with the Malli. After recovering, he divided his troops, sending half of them back to Persia and half to Gedrosia, a desolate area west of the Indus River.
In early B. Unsurprisingly, plots against him began to simmer. Devastated, Alexander declined rapidly. He reached Babylon in spring BC, and in June took to his sick bed. His condition worsened and within days he was dead, aged just Was it a fever that killed him, or had his liver simply given up?
Perhaps he was poisoned? He was, after all, not short of enemies. Alexander the Great never made it home to Macedon. But then he never intended to. As the greatest military leader in ancient history, he left a monumental legacy: his vast Asian empire.
Historian Paul Cartledge looks into the personality of the 4th-century BC military genius to discover what drove him to create a huge empire covering three continents…. Alexander the Great had no low opinion of himself.
Nevertheless, he appears to have been aware of the value of self-promotion, so besides his armies of soldiers he employed a small army of writers and artists to project the image of himself that he wanted to disseminate to the world at large. Hardly anything of those original writings survives today, unfortunately — though we do have the works of ancient Greek and Roman historians and biographers such as Curtius Rufus, Arrian and Plutarch who themselves had access to the lost texts by Ptolemy, Aristoboulus, Nearchus and others.
On the other hand, large numbers of portrait coins and medallions and sculptures do survive intact, some contemporary or near-contemporary, so that we have a very good idea of the impression Alexander wished to create for his many hundreds of thousands of subjects scattered from what is today Greece including Macedonia in the west, as far east as what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan. One thing is very striking about all these various images. They all aim to elevate Alexander not only above the common herd of ordinary men, but above the status of the merely mortal altogether: to the status of a semi divine hero or even a god.
Scholars argue as to whether Alexander sent down a formal decree from Babylon in Iraq , one of his several capitals, actually ordering his subjects to worship him as a god. But there is no question but that he was indeed worshipped as a living god, by Greeks as well as by Orientals, and there is every likelihood that Alexander wanted to be so worshipped. Philip II was, according to one contemporary historian, the most remarkable man Europe had produced. He raised his kingdom of Macedon from a small player on the Greek scene to the major protagonist and arbiter of the Greek world.
However, Alexander did once quip that the highly-strung Olympias made him pay a high rent for the nine months she had housed him in her womb. Apart from his parents, there were two great influences on his life from boyhood. One was the great Thessalian stallion Bucephalas, whom Alexander himself tamed and from whom he was pretty much inseparable from at least his early teens until the death of the great horse, aged about 30, in Pakistan in So moved was Alexander by his loss that he actually named one of his new city foundations after him, in the Indus valley.
He came from an elite Macedonian family, and was among the close group of comrades who had the privilege of being taught with Alexander by the philosopher Aristotle at Mieza, to the west of the Macedonian capital of Pella.
Hephaestion was a bit older, and a bit taller, than Alexander, and it is probable that at some stage their relationship was more than platonic.
Yet for Alexander sexual gratification was apparently not that important. Or, as his best surviving historian Arrian a Greek from Asia Minor writing in the second century AD put it, warfare and military exploits gave Alexander the sort of thrill that others derived from sexual conquest.
Not that Alexander was a monk; he is said to have had sex even with a mythical Amazon queen, and to have fathered a child with his beautiful Sogdian bride Roxane from what is today Uzbekistan. He allegedly had affairs with the Persian wife of a dangerous Greek opponent fighting on the Persian side, and a liaison with a Persian eunuch.
Philip is said to have fought his wars by marriages, that is by concluding diplomatic marriage alliances as a way to secure a victory, or as an alternative to fighting in order to decide the issue of territorial control. Alexander preferred to settle disputes by fighting, on the whole. However, even he took three wives, the other two besides Roxane both being Persian princesses.
When Alexander was not fighting, there was nothing he loved to do more, for relaxation, than hunt. In Macedon there were two tests of manhood: killing a wild boar and killing a man in battle. Alexander had passed both of those by the time he was sixteen, besides hunting the wild mountain lions and sharp-eyed lynxes that still abounded in the western Macedonian upland country. Bucephalas served Alexander no less faithfully as his hunting mount than as his number one warhorse.
In one of these hunting sprees near modern Samarkand, no fewer than 4, animals were allegedly slaughtered. One theory takes us back to our starting point, to his self-projection as more than merely mortal. Certainly, he was religious, even superstitious, a trait he seems to have inherited or at any rate could easily have learned from his mother. Aslo, where is Alexander the Great buried, and has his tomb actually been found?
Professor Paul Cartledge gives his view…. He relied especially heavily on the guidance of his personal diviner, Aristander, a Greek from Telmissus in what is now southwestern Turkey. But what that was has to be inferred from his subsequent behaviour. It was something to do with the truth about his origins; the oracle seems to have confirmed Alexander in his belief that he had been born the son of a god, rather than a mortal.
Persians too had not been in the habit of recognising their Great King as a living god but had seen him rather as the vicar on earth of the great god of light Ahura Mazda.
Posterity has generally been more kind to Alexander, variously venerating or indeed worshipping him as a saint as well as a wonder-working holy man and military hero. Within the sphere of recent critical scholarship, however, a distinct note of hostility can be detected, influenced perhaps by contemporary experience of bloodshed in regions such as Afghanistan and Iraq that Alexander himself once traversed.
Author Jennifer Macaire shares six surprising facts about the Macedonian conqueror…. Polo, one of the oldest sports in the world, likely originated somewhere in Central Asia. Mounted nomads played a version of polo that was part sport, part training for war, with as many as men on a side. Some stories say Alexander the Great spent time with the Persian royal family when he was young, accompanying his father on diplomatic missions. Writing attributed to the Greek philosopher Aristotle references a diving bell, describing a cauldron forced straight down into water, thus keeping the air within it.
There are stories about him visiting the bottom of the ocean in a glass ball during his famous siege of Tyre Lebanon , where it is said Alexander used divers to remove underwater obstacles from the harbour, and that the divers used crude glass diving bells. These may very well be just legends, but it is conceivable that Alexander, who was curious to learn about everything, had a go in a glass diving bell himself. The Azara herm is a Roman copy of a bust of Alexander the Great that was almost certainly made by the Greek sculptor Lysippus.
Thanks to its original inscription, this figure can be definitely identified as Alexander the Great, son of Philip II of Macedon. The bust was unearthed in during an excavation at Tivoli, Italy, organised by Joseph Nicolas Azara — , the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See and, later, to France. Azara presented the sculpture to Napoleon Bonaparteas a diplomatic gift.
Today it resides in the Louvre museum in Paris. For a time, this was the only known portrait of Alexander the Great, and it is generally regarded as the surviving portrait that looks the most like him. The Greek writer Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives, his series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, in pairs: his famous biography of Alexander is paired with Julius Caesar. He lived years after Alexander the Great and contemporary writings were scarce.
He also describes how Alexander the Great spent the night before the battle in his tent with his diviner, Aristander, performing certain mysterious ceremonies and sacrificing to the god Fear.
The phalanx — a rectangular mass military formation made up of closely ranked troops — was a formidable fighting machine. The spears used by soldiers in a phalanx were long — sometimes as long as five metres — and made of sharpened wood or metal-tipped wood.
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