The Conquests of Alexander

The historians who marched with Alexander told this as a Greek war of revenge. Persia had burned Athens a century and a half earlier, and Alexander threw a spear into Asian soil and came ashore first.

His own courage backs the claim. He led cavalry into the worst fighting at Issus and Gaugamela both, and at a fortress in India an arrow went through his lung and his own bodyguards carried him out over the wall.

The cities were not raiding camps. Alexandria in Egypt held three hundred thousand people within a generation, and a library that stayed the center of Greek learning for nine hundred years.

Persian officials and a mass wedding at Susa, where eighty of his officers married Persian noblewomen: this account calls that statesmanship. Someone had to govern fifty million people, and Macedonians alone could not.

Before the Sogdian Rock, Plutarch, writing about four hundred years after Alexander was dead, has him tell his own men this.

The empire Alexander ended had run from the Aegean to the Indus for two hundred and twenty years, the largest the world had yet seen, administering twenty three provinces in multiple languages.

Alexander burned Persepolis after a banquet. He sent five thousand mules and three thousand camels to carry off the treasury first, an estimated four thousand seven hundred metric tons of silver.

The stone reliefs survived. The archives, the wooden ceilings, and the textiles did not, and with them went nearly every Persian word about what happened, written by the people it happened to.

Everything historians know about Darius the Third comes from the Greek and Roman writers who beat him, which is why he reads as a coward who fled two battles, not as the king whose own tax and grain records kept running up to the day the Macedonians arrived.

Ferdowsi wrote Iran's national epic, the Shahnameh, more than thirteen hundred years later, and it still calls him the destroyer.

Greek writers describe a giant of a man on the largest elephant on the field. Indian sources do not mention him at all, and that silence is itself the argument: a battle that fills Western accounts of Alexander barely registers in Indian memory.

Porus fought with his full army at the Hydaspes, two hundred war elephants against a phalanx that had never faced them in that number. Alexander crossed the river in monsoon rain and won, but it cost him his own horse, Bucephalus, dead of wounds or exhaustion.

Arrian, writing about four hundred seventy years later, is the only place Porus's answer to the victor survives.

Alexander restored him as a vassal and marched on. His own army refused to go further at the next river, and the Macedonians turned back. Within five years, Chandragupta Maurya overthrew the Nanda dynasty and built an empire larger than anything Alexander held in India.

The cities Alexander planted across Central Asia became nodes on what would later be the Silk Road. Tajik and Uzbek historians ask what those cities were founded for.

A Sogdian nobleman named Spitamenes led a guerrilla campaign that killed two thousand Macedonian troops and held Alexander to two years of counterinsurgency, the longest resistance he met anywhere. Alexander answered by wrecking the region's farmland and deporting its people.

Central Asian tradition reads the marriage to Roxana differently than the Greek sources do: not a love match at a banquet, but a political price, paid to end the resistance by giving her father a satrapy.

Curtius Rufus, a Roman writing about three hundred seventy years later, needed one sentence for the whole campaign.

Strip away the romance and the count runs from a hundred thousand dead to seven hundred fifty thousand, depending on which ancient tally a person trusts, across the destruction of Thebes, Tyre, and Persepolis.

After three hundred and thirty before the common era he began demanding the prostration Persian court custom required, and executing men who refused it. Callisthenes, his own tutor Aristotle's nephew, was arrested for refusing and died in custody.

He executed his general Philotas, and had Philotas's father Parmenion, seventy years old and his most experienced commander, quietly assassinated the same day.

He marched his exhausted army through the Gedrosian Desert to outdo the legendary conquerors before him, and it cost roughly fifteen thousand of his own men.

He built no civil service and named no heir. Asked on his deathbed who should have the empire, later writers give him one two word answer, to the strongest, though the Greek could just as easily have named his own general Krateros.