Granicus · Issus · Tyre · Gaugamela · Hydaspes · The Diadochi · The Ptolemies & Seleucids · Alexandria · Hellenistic Science
Alexander III — known to history as Alexander the Great — was born on 21 July 356 BC in Pella, the capital of Macedon, the son of Philip II and his Molossian queen Olympias of Epirus, a woman of fierce religious intensity who claimed descent from the hero Achilles and who instilled in her son an unbounded ambition. From the age of about 13 Alexander was tutored by Aristotle, who instilled in him a love of Greek literature (he slept with a copy of the Homeric Iliad under his pillow) and of science. He was reportedly present at his father’s great victory at Chaeronea (338 BC), commanding the Companion cavalry on the left wing and personally cutting down the Sacred Band. On Philip’s assassination in 336 BC, the 20-year-old Alexander, acclaimed by the army and the Macedonian assembly, seized the throne at once, executing his rivals, and within two years had crushed revolts in the north and sacked rebellious Thebes (335 BC), selling its inhabitants into slavery as a warning to Greece — while sparing, out of respect, the house of the poet Pindar. With Greece cowed and the League of Corinth behind him, the young king turned to his father’s great project (World History Encyclopedia, "Alexander the Great," worldhistory.org/alexander_the_great/).
In the spring of 334 BC Alexander crossed the Hellespont into Asia with an army of perhaps 40,000–50,000 men (about 32,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry), including the Companion cavalry, the hypaspists and the sarissa-armed phalanx. He first visited Troy, where he honoured the tomb of Achilles — casting himself as the new Achilles. At the Battle of the River Granicus (May 334 BC) he defeated a Persian satrap army, winning his first great victory in Asia; he personally led the Companion charge and nearly lost his life, being saved at the last moment by his friend Clitus. He then marched down the coast, taking the great cities of Sardis, Ephesus and Halicarnassus, and in the winter of 334–333 BC, at Gordium in Phrygia, he performed the celebrated feat of cutting the Gordian Knot — the intricate knot which, according to prophecy, could only be loosed by the man destined to rule Asia. Alexander simply sliced through it with his sword (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Granicus," worldhistory.org/Granicus/).
King Darius III of Persia (r. 336–330 BC), who had awaited Alexander in the east, marched to meet him. The two armies clashed in November 333 BC at the Battle of Issus, on the narrow coastal plain between the mountains and the sea near modern Iskenderun in Cilicia, where the Persian numbers could not deploy. Alexander, again leading the Companion cavalry on the right, broke through and drove Darius from the field; Darius fled ignominiously, leaving behind his mother Sisygambis, his wife Stateira, and his children, whom Alexander treated with conspicuous courtesy. The defeat and the capture of his family humiliated and demoralised Darius; he would twice offer Alexander a treaty — ceding all lands west of the Euphrates and his daughter’s hand in marriage — and twice Alexander refused, answering (in the tradition) that "there cannot be two suns in heaven, nor two kings in Asia" (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Issus," worldhistory.org/Battle_of_Issus/).
Rather than pursue Darius into the interior, Alexander turned south along the coast to secure the ports and the grain of the eastern Mediterranean. The great obstacle was the island-city of Tyre, whose stubborn resistance cost Alexander one of the longest and hardest sieges of his career — seven months in 332 BC. He built an enormous mole (causeway) out to the island — an engineering marvel preserved in the topography of the site — and, once taken, Tyre was sacked and its defenders crucified or sold. In Egypt, which welcomed him as a liberator from the Persians, Alexander was crowned pharaoh at Memphis and, in early 331 BC, personally laid out the plans of a new great city on the coast at the mouth of the Nile: Alexandria, destined to become the greatest city of the Hellenistic world, home of the famous Lighthouse (Pharos) and Library. He also made the celebrated journey to the oracular temple of Ammon at Siwa in the Libyan desert, where (according to tradition) the priests hailed him as son of the god — a visit that fed Alexander’s own conviction of his divine descent and influenced how his successors would rule (World History Encyclopedia, "Alexandria," worldhistory.org/Alexandria/).
In the late summer of 331 BC Alexander marched into Mesopotamia to meet Darius, who had gathered a vast final army. On 1 October 331 BC the decisive Battle of Gaugamela (also called the Battle of Arbela, near modern Erbil in northern Iraq) was fought. Darius had even cleared the battlefield of obstacles to allow his feared scythed chariots to charge, and deployed war-elephants and his mailed cavalry. Alexander’s answer was masterly: by refusing his right wing in the oblique order, he drew out the Persian left, then launched his Companion cavalry in a wedge straight at the Persian centre where Darius stood. The scythed chariots were shot down or parted harmlessly; the phalanx held; and when the Companions broke through, Darius again fled. Persian resistance in the field was at an end: Babylon and Susa surrendered without a fight, and in 330 BC Alexander burned the great palace complex of Persepolis — the ceremonial capital built by Darius I — a deliberate act (whether planned or accidental in a drunken revel, as sources differ) that symbolised the end of the Achaemenid empire. Darius III was soon murdered by his own satrap Bessus, who then claimed the throne; Alexander, pursuing, captured and executed Bessus and gave Darius a royal burial. The Persian empire, which had ruled the Near East for over two centuries, was dead (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Gaugamela," worldhistory.org/Battle_of_Gaugamela/).
Alexander, unsatisfied, pressed on into the eastern satrapies of the empire. In Central Asia (329–327 BC) he fought a brutal guerrilla war in Bactria and Sogdiana, founded Alexandria Eschate (“Alexandria the Furthest,” on the Jaxartes river), and took the Sogdian fortress of the Rock of Sogdiana. Here he married Roxane, a Bactrian noblewoman (c. 327 BC), in a marriage of alliance intended to reconcile the eastern peoples — the first of several such marriages (at Susa in 324 BC he forced his court to marry Persian noblewomen). He also had his old friend and general Cleitus killed in a drunken quarrel — a black mark on his legend — and, allegedly in grief and arrogance, had Callisthenes, the historian who had refused him proskynesis (prostration), executed.
In 327–326 BC Alexander invaded India (the Punjab), crossing the Indus and defeating King Porus at the Battle of the Hydaspes river (May 326 BC) — a hard-fought victory against Porus’ army, which included war-elephants, in which the Macedonian army for the first time struggled; Alexander was so impressed by the defeated Porus that he restored his kingdom to him as an ally. He had planned to march to the Ganges and the "end of the world," but his exhausted, homesick army, dreading a further monsoon and seeing the endless east, mutinied at the river Beas (September 326 BC; where the river Hyphasis is also called). Alexander, against his will, turned back. The return was a disaster of suffering — the march through the Gedrosian desert (325 BC) cost him a large part of his army to thirst and heat — and in Babylon, his new capital-in-planning, he died on 10 or 11 June 323 BC, aged just 32, after a brief and mysterious illness (malaria, typhoid, poisoning and alcoholic excess have all been suggested — the cause is unknown). His empire, with no agreed heir (his infant son by Roxane, Alexander IV, was deemed by many too weak), instantly dissolved into the wars of his generals, the Diadochi (World History Encyclopedia, "Alexander the Great," worldhistory.org/alexander_the_great/).
On Alexander’s death his marshals — the Diadochi (“successors”) — fell to fighting over his empire. The infant kings (Alexander IV and Philip III Arrhidaeus, Alexander’s half-brother) were figureheads under regents; the real struggle was between the generals. The first division at Babylon (323 BC) allotted provinces by lot, but the peace did not last: there followed a complex series of wars. The leading contestants were Antipater and Cassander (in Macedon and Greece), Antigonus I Monophthalmus (“the One-Eyed”) and his son Demetrius Poliorcetes (“the Besieger”), Ptolemy I (in Egypt), Seleucus I (in Babylonia and the east), Lysimachus (in Thrace and Anatolia) and Eumenes of Cardia, the brilliant secretary-general who fought for the royal house. By the decisive Battle of Ipsus in 301 BC, Antigonus was defeated and killed and the empire was permanently partitioned among the victors into several great kingdoms. The royal houses themselves were extinguished in family murder: Olympias was executed in 316 BC, and Roxane and the boy king Alexander IV were murdered by Cassander in 310 BC (World History Encyclopedia, "Wars of the Diadochi," worldhistory.org/Wars_of_the_Diadochi/).
From the wreck emerged the stable "Hellenistic" kingdoms that dominated the eastern Mediterranean for two centuries:
Beyond these lay the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms in Central Asia and the Punjab (where Greek-speaking kings ruled from about 250 BC to the 1st century BC and produced superb bilingual coinage), which carried Greek culture all the way to the borders of China and India.
The Hellenistic world produced the greatest scientific and scholarly achievements of antiquity. At Alexandria, mathematicians and astronomers built on the work of the masters. Euclid (c. 300 BC) wrote the Elements, which for two thousand years remained the standard textbook of geometry. Eratosthenes (c. 276–194 BC) calculated the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy. Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310–230 BC) even proposed a heliocentric system (that the Earth orbits the Sun), an idea over a millennium and a half ahead of Copernicus. Hipparchus of Nicaea (c. 190–120 BC) founded scientific astronomy and trigonometry, cataloguing the stars and measuring the precession of the equinoxes. The astonishing Antikythera mechanism — a geared bronze "analog computer" of c. 205–60 BC, recovered from a shipwreck in 1901 — was a Hellenistic Greek instrument that calculated the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets, the oldest known device of its kind in the world (World History Encyclopedia, "Antikythera Mechanism," worldhistory.org/Antikythera_Mechanism/).
In the practical sciences, Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287–212 BC) — mathematician, engineer and inventor — established hydrostatics (his principle of buoyancy) and the principles of levers and pulleys, and used his engines in the defence of Syracuse against Rome; the tradition that he ran naked through the streets crying "Eureka!" upon discovering buoyancy is among the best-known stories of antiquity. Herophilus of Chalcedon and Erasistratus of Ceos founded systematic anatomy and physiology by dissecting human bodies in Alexandria — for a time, the only place the practice was permitted. The physician Galen (129–c. 216 AD), born at Pergamon, synthesised Greek medicine into a system that dominated Western and Islamic medicine for fifteen centuries. Meanwhile Hellenistic art turned from the ideal to the realistic and emotional — the Nike of Samothrace, the Venus (Aphrodite) of Milos, the writhing Laocoön group, and the colossal Colossus of Rhodes (one of the Seven Wonders) all date from this period, and the poetry of Theocritus (bucolic idylls), Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes (his epic the Argonautica) shows a literary culture of brilliant self-consciousness. It was a cosmopolitan, urban, individualistic age — the "Hellenistic" age in which Greek culture fused with the cultures of the East and was carried to the furthest corners of the known world (World History Encyclopedia, "Hellenistic Period," worldhistory.org/Hellenistic_Period/).
The Hellenistic kingdoms were slowly drawn into the orbit, and then the empire, of the rising power of the west, Rome. Rome’s victory over Philip V of Macedon at Cynoscephalae (197 BC) and over the Seleucid Antiochus III at Magnesia (190 BC) and Thermopylae (191 BC) broke Macedonian and Seleucid power; the proclamation of Greek "freedom" by the Roman general Titus Quinctius Flamininus at the Isthmian Games of 196 BC masked what was in fact Rome’s suzerainty. The destruction of Corinth in 146 BC completed the conquest of southern Greece, and the annexation of Pergamon (133 BC) and Syria (63 BC) followed. The last act came in Egypt: after the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII by Octavian (the future Augustus) at the Battle of Actium on 2 September 31 BC, and the suicides of the doomed lovers in 30 BC, the last Hellenistic kingdom fell to Rome. The Hellenistic Age was over; Greek culture, however, would survive and flourish within the Roman world — as the next volume relates (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Actium," worldhistory.org/Battle_of_Actium/).
No institution sums up the Hellenistic genius better than the Great Library and Museum of Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy I and developed under Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r. 283–246 BC). The Museum (“shrine of the Muses”), a state-supported research institute, gathered the leading scholars, poets and scientists of the age — including Euclid, Eratosthenes, Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes and Herophilus — who lived and worked at the king’s expense. The Library set out to collect every book in the world: its holdings, by tradition, reached several hundred thousand scrolls, acquired by purchase, by copying, and by the notorious (and likely legendary) practice of confiscating the books of visiting ships. Scribes and copyists produced the standard texts, critics such as Aristarchus of Samothrace established the scholarly editions of Homer, and the Library’s catalogue — the Pinakes of Callimachus — was the ancestor of the modern bibliography and library catalogue. The Library made Alexandria the intellectual capital of the world and preserved the literature of Greece through antiquity. Its fate is famously disputed: part of it may have burned during Caesar’s siege of 48 BC; the "daughter library" at the Serapeum was destroyed in the late 4th century AD; and much was lost in the turmoil of the city’s later history. Yet in its greatness it embodied the Hellenistic faith in knowledge, collection and scholarship — the ancestor, in spirit, of every modern library, encyclopaedia and research university (World History Encyclopedia, "Library of Alexandria," worldhistory.org/Library_of_Alexandria/).
The Hellenistic age transformed religion. The traditional Olympian gods continued to be worshipped, but alongside them flourished saviour cults and mystery religions that promised individuals a personal relation to divinity and hope of afterlife: the mysteries of Isis and Osiris (whose cult, brought from Egypt and Hellenised, spread across the Mediterranean), of Cybele the Great Mother, of Mithras, of Dionysus, and the new philosophy-religions of Stoicism and Epicureanism which taught a universal brotherhood and the pursuit of inner peace in a changed, cosmopolitan world. Most revolutionary was the ruler cult — the worship of living kings as gods. Alexander had begun it, proclaimed (in Egypt) son of Ammon and, in the ambiguous proskynesis, treated as divine; his successors institutionalised it, with the Ptolemies and Seleucids and the cities of the east honouring their kings with temples, festivals and divine titles. This was partly policy — a way of binding together diverse subjects under a single, superhuman authority — and it deeply influenced later history: it provided the model for the imperial cult at Rome, and thereby for the veneration of rulers that persisted for centuries (and faintly echoes even in modern state ceremonial to this day). The religious cosmopolitanism of the age also prepared the ground for the spread of a universalising faith — Christianity — which would emerge a few centuries later in this same Greek-speaking, east-west world (World History Encyclopedia, "Hellenistic Period," worldhistory.org/Hellenistic_Period/).
Alexander and his successors founded dozens of new cities (“Alexandrias’’ and re-founded settlements — some seventy Alexandria cities are attributed to him in the tradition), which became the instruments and showcases of Hellenistic civilisation. The most famous is Alexandria in Egypt, laid out by Alexander’s architect Dinocrates (c. 331 BC) on the coast at the Canopic mouth of the Nile, designed on the grid plan of the architect Hippodamus of Miletus, and destined to be the greatest city of the age — its Pharos lighthouse (one of the Seven Wonders, completed c. 247 BC) guiding ships into its great harbour. Across the conquered east, new foundations — Antioch on the Orontes (founded by Seleucus I, capital of the Seleucids), Seleucia on the Tigris, Pergamum in Asia Minor, Apamea, and the Alexandria Eschate (“the Furthest”) on the Jaxartes — carried Greek urban life, gymnasia, theatres, baths and language into the heart of Asia. Greek colonists, soldiers, traders and administrators settled in these cities; Greek became the common language (koine) of the eastern Mediterranean; and a new, cosmopolitan, mixed culture arose in which Greek institutions and learning met Egyptian, Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and Indian traditions. It was through the medium of these Hellenistic cities and the koine that the ideas, the literary texts and eventually the Christian gospel would travel, and by which the heritage of Greece was carried toward the modern world (World History Encyclopedia, "Alexandria," worldhistory.org/Alexandria/).
https://www.worldhistory.org/alexander_the_great/https://www.worldhistory.org/Granicus/https://www.worldhistory.org/Battle_of_Issus/https://www.worldhistory.org/Battle_of_Gaugamela/https://www.worldhistory.org/Alexandria/https://www.worldhistory.org/Wars_of_the_Diadochi/https://www.worldhistory.org/Ptolemaic_Dynasty/https://www.worldhistory.org/Seleucid_Empire/https://www.worldhistory.org/Hellenistic_Period/https://www.worldhistory.org/Antikythera_Mechanism/https://www.worldhistory.org/Battle_of_Actium/There is nothing impossible to him who will try.— attributed to Alexander the Great (reported in Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander)