Alexander the Great

By Lin Yue

He was twenty when he inherited the throne, thirty-two when he died, and in the twelve years between he redrew the map of the known world so thoroughly that two thousand years of history are dated from him.

Alexander was born in 356 BCE at Pella, son of Philip II of Macedon — the military genius who had united Greece — and Olympias, a formidable Epirote princess. Aristotle tutored the boy, who reportedly wept that his father would leave him nothing to conquer. When Philip was assassinated in 336, Alexander moved with terrifying speed: he crushed a Theban revolt so completely that the city was razed as a warning, secured Greece, and in 334 crossed into Asia with some 40,000 men to take revenge on Persia.

What followed is the most brilliant sustained campaign in military history. At the Granicus he smashed the Persian satraps; at Issus in 333 he routed King Darius III himself and captured his family; at Tyre he built a causeway into the sea to take an island fortress deemed impregnable. In 331 he founded Alexandria in Egypt — the city that would become antiquity's greatest center of learning — and at Gaugamela that same year he destroyed the Persian army for good. He burned Persepolis, pursued Darius to his death, married the Bactrian princess Roxana, and pushed into India, defeating King Porus at the Hydaspes in 326 in a battle fought across a monsoon-swollen river against war elephants. Only there did his army stop him: at the Hyphasis, his veterans mutinied and refused to march further east. He turned back, and in 323 he died at Babylon — of fever, most likely — at thirty-two, planning his next campaign.

Alexander's empire died with him, carved up by his generals into warring kingdoms. But his project survived the partition: everywhere he marched, he founded Greek cities — some seventy Alexandrias — settled veterans, and planted Greek language, law, and art in Asian soil. The result was the Hellenistic world: a vast zone from the Mediterranean to the Indus where koine Greek became the common tongue of commerce, science, and administration. It was in that world that the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek, that Euclid wrote his Elements at Alexandria, and that a new religion from Judea would later find a ready-made language to carry it across an empire. Alexander fused East and West into a single oikoumene — one inhabited world — and though the fusion was violent, the world never unfused.

Impact on civilization

Alexander created the Hellenistic age: three centuries in which Greek became the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, carrying science, philosophy, and administration from Spain to India. The koine Greek he spread became the language of the New Testament and of early Christianity's expansion, and the cities he founded — above all Alexandria in Egypt — became the ancient world's great centers of learning. His model of the world-conqueror shaped every subsequent imperial imagination, from Rome's generals to Napoleon. Most consequentially, by smashing the barrier between Greek and "barbarian" worlds, he made the first genuinely interconnected civilization of the West — the cultural common ground on which Rome would build its empire. His conquests also opened the first sustained contact between the Mediterranean and Indian worlds: Greek kingdoms in Bactria and India minted coins bearing Indian deities, Buddhist art adopted Hellenistic forms in Gandhara, and the Silk Road's western terminus ran through cities he founded. East and West have been in conversation ever since.