Updated 8 October 2026: corrected claims about Alexander. See Corrections.
He inherited a kingdom at twenty after his father was murdered at a wedding, and the first thing he had to do was survive the month. He died at thirty-two in Babylon, in a palace that had belonged to a king he had beaten, having marched an army from Greece to the Punjab and back as far as Persia. Within a century, Ashoka was inscribing edicts in Greek at Kandahar, in lands Alexander had crossed.
Between those two points there are twelve years. There is no ancient equivalent, and there has not been a close one since.
The difficulty is that no contemporary account survives. Everything we have was written centuries later by men working from earlier books that are now lost, and the earliest of our surviving sources, Diodorus, is writing roughly three hundred years after the events.
Before Asia
Philip II of Macedon is the part of the story that gets compressed, and it should not be. Philip took a marginal northern kingdom and built the army that his son would use: the sarissa phalanx with its long pikes, the Companion cavalry as a strike force, siege engineering, and a professional standing force in a world of seasonal militias. He also took control of Greece.
Alexander’s education under Aristotle is well attested and endlessly overinterpreted. What can reasonably be said is that he retained a serious interest in geography, natural history and Homer, and that he sent specimens and observations back westward during the campaign.
Philip was assassinated in 336 BCE by one of his own bodyguards at his daughter’s wedding. Alexander secured the throne rapidly and violently, then went south, and when Thebes revolted he destroyed the city and sold the population into slavery, sparing the house of the poet Pindar. That happened in his first two years and it is not usually where the popular story begins.
The campaign, briefly
He crossed into Asia in 334 BCE with something in the region of forty thousand men and won at the Granicus. In 333 he met Darius III at Issus, in a narrow coastal plain that neutralised Persian numbers, and broke the Persian centre. Darius fled and his family was captured.
Rather than pursue, Alexander turned south to take the coast, which is the decision that reveals him as a strategist rather than a duellist. Persian naval power depended on Phoenician ports. Taking the ports removed the fleet without fighting it. Tyre, on an island half a mile offshore, took seven months and required building a causeway out to it, a piece of engineering that is still visible in the shape of the coast today.
Egypt received him without a fight and he founded Alexandria there, the most successful of the many cities he named after himself.
In 331 he beat Darius again at Gaugamela, on ground the Persians had chosen and levelled. Babylon, Susa and Persepolis followed. Persepolis burned, and the sources disagree on whether it was policy or a drunken accident during a party.
Darius was killed by his own satrap, Bessus. Alexander pursued Bessus, executed him, and thereby positioned himself as the legitimate avenger of the Persian king rather than his destroyer, which was the beginning of a serious political problem with his Macedonians.
Where it went wrong
The last stretch is the least romantic and the most revealing.
Central Asia took three brutal years of counter-insurgency in Bactria and Sogdiana. He married Roxana, a Bactrian noblewoman. He began adopting elements of Persian court practice, including the attempted introduction of proskynesis, a ritual prostration that Persians read as court etiquette and Greeks read as worship of a living man. His officers refused.
The friction turned lethal. Philotas, commander of the Companion cavalry, was executed after a conspiracy trial, and his father Parmenion, who was not present, was killed on Alexander’s order as a precaution. Cleitus, who had saved his life at the Granicus, was run through by Alexander himself during a drunken argument.
In India he beat Porus at the Hydaspes in a monsoon river crossing, then found his army would go no further. At the Hyphasis they stopped. He sulked in his tent for days and then turned back, which is the only recorded occasion on which anyone made him do anything.
The return through the Gedrosian desert killed a large part of the force, possibly more than any battle had.
He died in Babylon in June 323 BCE after a fever lasting about ten days. Poisoning was alleged immediately. Modern suggestions include typhoid, malaria and complications of alcohol and old wounds. Asked who should inherit, he is reported to have said the strongest, which if true was an answer that guaranteed forty years of war.
What was left
The empire fractured immediately among his generals into the Ptolemaic, Seleucid and Antigonid kingdoms. The Ptolemaic line ended with Cleopatra.
The durable consequence was not political. Greek became the working language of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East for centuries. Alexandria became the intellectual centre of the ancient world. Greek artistic conventions travelled as far as Gandhara, where they shaped the first figurative images of the Buddha, which is why early Buddhist sculpture has the drapery of a Greek statue.
He is also, uncomfortably, the model that ambitious men measured themselves against for the next two thousand years, which is a legacy with a considerable body count attached to it.
Frequently asked questions
How long did Alexander the Great rule? Twelve years and about eight months, from his accession in the autumn of 336 BCE to his death in June 323 BCE, at the age of thirty-two.
Did Alexander lose any battles? No pitched battle he personally commanded was lost. His campaign ended not in defeat but because his army refused to advance beyond the Hyphasis river in India.
How did Alexander die? He died in Babylon after a fever of roughly ten days. Ancient sources record poisoning allegations. Modern proposals include typhoid and malaria, and no conclusion is possible from the evidence.
Are the sources about Alexander reliable? No contemporary account survives. Arrian, Plutarch, Diodorus, Curtius and Justin all wrote centuries later, using earlier works now lost, which means even basic details are frequently disputed.
Why did his empire collapse? He left no adult heir and no succession mechanism. His generals divided the territory and fought over it for decades, producing the Hellenistic kingdoms.
What was his lasting impact? The spread of Greek as a common language across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, the founding of Alexandria, and a cultural exchange that reached as far as Gandharan Buddhist art.
Sources
Primary: Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, which draws on Ptolemy and Aristobulus and is generally the most reliable of the surviving accounts. Plutarch, Life of Alexander. Diodorus Siculus, book 17. Quintus Curtius Rufus, Histories of Alexander the Great. Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus. All are late, and none is contemporary.
Modern scholarship: A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (1988), which is the standard critical study and is properly sceptical about the sources. Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (1973), more sympathetic and very readable. Paul Cartledge, Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past (2004), for a thematic treatment.
