CivStory

Alexander's World: Macedon, Persia and the Hellenistic East

Alexander's campaign seen from both sides. Macedonian propaganda presented it as revenge for Xerxes' invasion; for Iran it meant the end of the Achaemenid dynasty, whose satrapies, roads and capitals Alexander took over. Iranian events are linked rather than retold.

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Part 1

In 338 BCE, probably in August, Philip II of Macedon, with his son Alexander commanding one wing, defeated Athens and Thebes at Chaeronea. The next year Philip gathered most Greek states into the League of Corinth under his leadership and announced a war on the Achaemenid Empire, presented as revenge for Xerxes' destruction of Greek temples in 480. Philip was murdered in 336, and Alexander took over the plan.

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Part 2

Alexander crossed into Anatolia in 334 BCE and in November 333 met Darius III at Issus, near the modern Gulf of İskenderun. Darius was defeated and fled, leaving his mother, wife and daughters in Macedonian hands, but he still held the heart of the empire and offered terms. The battle is known from Greek and Roman writers, chiefly Arrian, who wrote centuries later from lost Macedonian histories.

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Part 3

After the long siege of Tyre, Alexander entered Egypt in late 332 BCE, and the Persian satrap surrendered without a fight. Egypt, conquered by Cambyses in 525, had broken away in 404 and been retaken by Artaxerxes III only in 343, so Persian rule there was recent. On the coast Alexander founded Alexandria, later the capital of the Ptolemaic kings.

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Part 4

On 1 October 331 BCE, near Gaugamela east of the Tigris, Alexander defeated the army Darius III had gathered from across the empire. No Persian account of the battle survives; it is known from Greek and Roman writers and from a Babylonian astronomical diary that records the defeat of the king's army. Darius fled east, and in 330 he was killed by his own satrap Bessus, ending the Achaemenid dynasty.

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Part 5

Alexander took Babylon and Susa and, in January 330 BCE, Persepolis, whose treasury he carried off; the palaces burned that spring. Arrian presents the fire as deliberate revenge for Xerxes' burning of Athens, while Diodorus, Plutarch and Curtius describe a drunken feast, and historians still weigh policy against impulse. The fire made it harder for Alexander to present himself as the legitimate successor of the Achaemenid kings. Iranian memory kept two images of him: Zoroastrian texts in Middle Persian call him gujastak, 'the accursed', beside Zahhak and Afrasiab, while Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, drawing on the Alexander romance, makes him a son of Darab and half-brother of Dara.

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Part 6

After three years of hard fighting against Iranian resistance in Bactria and Sogdiana, led first by Bessus and then by Spitamenes, Alexander crossed into the Punjab and in 326 BCE defeated King Porus on the Hydaspes, the modern Jhelum. Greek accounts, chiefly Arrian's, say Alexander left Porus as king under his authority. Further east, on the Hyphasis, the modern Beas, the exhausted army refused to go on, and Alexander turned back.

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Part 7

Alexander died in Babylon in June 323 BCE, aged 32, a date fixed by a Babylonian astronomical diary that records simply that 'the king died'. He had kept Persian satrapies, court ceremony and Babylon as a capital, and some historians, following Pierre Briant, read him as 'the last of the Achaemenids'. He left no adult heir, and his generals fought for decades over the empire, from which the Ptolemaic, Seleucid and Antigonid kingdoms emerged.

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Part 8

In Alexandria, under Ptolemy I or his son Ptolemy II (ancient sources disagree), a library was founded beside the Mouseion, a community of scholars supported by the king. Its scholars collected and edited Greek texts, while priests such as Manetho in Egypt and Berossus in Babylon wrote histories of their own lands in Greek. In Iran the Seleucids ruled until the Parthian Arsacids, established in the north-east from the mid-3rd century BCE, took Media and Mesopotamia in the 140s BCE.

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