Alexander the Great's legend outsold nearly everything but the Bible
Alexander of Macedon never lost a battle and built one of history's largest empires before turning 30. Yet his most lasting conquest may have been literary: a book of tales about him, the Alexander Romance, spread into almost every European and Islamic language and became, after the Bible, premodern Europe's most popular reading.
He was born in Pella in 356 BC, the son of King Philip II and his fourth wife, Olympias, and was taught by Aristotle until he was 16. When Philip was assassinated in 336 BC, the 20-year-old took the throne. Within a year he had reimposed control over Thrace and parts of Illyria, destroyed the rebellious city of Thebes, and taken charge of the Greek alliance his father had formed.
In 334 BC he led the combined Greeks against the Persian Achaemenid Empire, opening a decade of campaigning. After taking Asia Minor, he broke Persian power in great victories at Issus and Gaugamela, overthrew King Darius III and absorbed the entire empire, so that Macedonian rule stretched from the Adriatic to the Indus. Seeking the ends of the world and the outer ocean, he pushed into India in 326 BC and defeated King Porus at the Hydaspes River in Punjab. His exhausted soldiers then refused to go further, forcing him to turn back at the Beas River.
He died in Babylon in 323 BC, in the city he intended as his capital, with an invasion of Arabia still in the planning. His generals, the Diadochi, fought a series of civil wars that tore the empire apart, and his death is conventionally taken as the start of the Hellenistic age.
The cultural consequences outlasted the political ones. He founded over twenty cities, Egypt's Alexandria above all, and Greek settlers carried their culture as far as the Indian subcontinent, blending with local traditions into forms such as Greco-Buddhism and Hellenistic Judaism. Greek became the common language of the region and remained dominant in the Byzantine Empire until 1453. Military academies still study his tactics, and later commanders measured themselves against him.
Source: Alexander the Great
