Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great was King of Macedon from 336 to 323 BCE, who in a single decade overthrew the Achaemenid Persian Empire and carried Macedonian and Greek rule from the Adriatic to the Indus valley. Trained in his youth by the philosopher Aristotle, he inherited a professional army and a fragile hegemony over the Greek city states from his father Philip II, then used them to invade Persian-controlled Anatolia in 334 BCE. Successive victories at the Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela broke the army of the Persian king Darius III, and Alexander went on to occupy Egypt, where he was received as pharaoh and founded the city of Alexandria, before pushing the campaign as far as the Punjab, where his exhausted troops finally refused to advance further. He died in Babylon in 323 BCE at the age of thirty two, probably of a fever, without a settled succession, and his generals divided the conquered territory among themselves in the wars that followed. His campaigns spread Greek language, institutions and culture across the Near East and Central Asia, opening the Hellenistic age that shaped the eastern Mediterranean world for the following three centuries.