Alexander the Great: His Life and His Mysterious Death

by Anthony Everitt

AN UNTRIED KING OF Macedonia hardly out of his teens at the outset of his campaigns, Alexander conquered the vast Persian empire and never lost a battle. He was one of the world’s great commanders.

Alexander was naturally inquisitive and was intrigued by science and exploration. He enjoyed athletics and the arts, and used the poet Homer’s great epic about the Trojan War, the Iliad, as a bible.

His life ended when he was only thirty-three, but, paradoxically, this has kept him evergreen in our imaginations. However, his personality had a dark side. He glorified war and the fame it conferred on the valiant, as did many of his contemporaries. He enjoyed violence and was suicidally brave, appearing to see fighting in

battle as a form of healthy physi...

From time to time he committed acts of great cruelty, but he was also chiva...

On the river’s edge beside the palace, the Hanging Gardens astounded visitors. A set of ascending terraces, angled back one above the other, rested on great brick vaults. Each terrace contained a deep bed of earth and was planted with trees and shrubs. The effect was of a wooded hillside. A staircase led up to all the floors, and water drawn from the river by mechanical pumps irrigated each tier. The story was told that Babylon’s most successful king, Nebuchadnezzar II, constructed the Hanging Gardens for his wife, who missed the mountains of her childhood.

The Greek word for such a garden was paradeisos, from which we derive our “paradise.”

As the design of the Hanging Gardens goes to show, the people of Babylon and other Mesopotamians were skillful managers of water. They built canals and irrigation systems, and just to the north of the Southern Palace they constructed what seems to have been a large reservoir. On the eastern side of Babylon, an outer wall formed a first defense against attack and enclosed large areas of less populated ground.

It led to a so-called summer palace, two thousand meters north of the main city. Here ventilation shafts counteracted the heat of the day and, away from the crowded city center, afforded some relief to the ruling family. The palace may also have functioned as a military headquarters; there was certainly plenty of space for an army encampment nearby. Alexander preferred being...

Alexander knew well his Euripides, the Athenian tragic poet of the late fifth century, and recited verses from his play Andromeda. The plot concerned a beautiful young princess who was chained to a rock and awaited death from a sea monster. At the last minute the hero, Perseus, arrives on his flying horse, Pegasus, and rescues her. Only fragments of the drama have survived and we do not know what lines the king spoke, but one certainly fits his high opinion of himself.

It was increasingly obvious that he was gravely ill; his commanders and high officials were warned to stay within reach. Generals waited in the courtyard. Company and regimental officers were to gather outside the gates. On June 5 Alexander was ferried back to the Summer Palace. He stayed either there or in the royal tent in the nearby army encampment. The fever did not abate. By the next evening it was obvious that the king was dying. He had lost the power of speech and he handed his signet ring to his senior general, Perdiccas. In this way he dramatized an at least temporary handover of power.

On June 11, between three and six o’clock in the afternoon, Alexander died, a month or so short of his thirty-third birthday.

While still able to speak, he turned his disenchanted attention to the succession. When someone asked him: “To whom do you leave the kingdom?” he replied: “To the strongest.” He is said to have added: “I foresee great funeral games after my death.”

Perdiccas asked when he wished divine honors paid to him. He replied: “When you yourselves are happy.” It is reported that these were Alexander’s last words.

But the last messenger arrived from Pella, his capital city. His wife Olympias had given birth to a healthy boy. The official seers or soothsayers said that the arrival of a son timed to coincide with these other successes augured well. When he grew up he would surely be invincible. For his father, there was the prospect of continuing the dynasty. The infant’s name was to be Alexander.

Life, even for despots, was basic. The “father of history,” Herodotus, who flourished in the fifth century B.C., writes of the primitive Macedonian monarchy. His contemporaries would have recognized the simplicity of the royal lifestyle, which had changed little over the centuries.

Darius was unused to opposition. According to Herodotus, “He strung an arrow and shot it in the air, shouting: ‘Lord God, grant me vengeance on the Athenians!’ Then he ordered one of his attendants to say to him three times whenever he sat down to dinner: ‘Sire, remember the Athenians.’ ”

Aristotle spoke with a lisp; he had skinny calves and small eyes. He dressed well, wore rings, and had his hair cut short. His smart appearance contradicted the example of Socrates, the very model of a Greek philosopher, who seldom washed either his clothes or himself.

Aristotle encouraged his charge’s passion for Homer. He is reported to have prepared a special, annotated edition of the Iliad, which his pupil regarded less as a work of art than as a manual on the art of war. This was the so-called “casket copy,” which in later times Alexander carried about with him everywhere on his travels, almost as a holy relic. He prided himself on knowing the Iliad by heart as well as most of the Odyssey. When at leisure or at an evening meal, he liked to involve those around him in a literary game, asking them to quote favorite lines from Homer.

As a word-perfect lover of Homer and a daring fighter in the field, Alexander will have understood the need for an efficient medical service in his own army. He also learned about medicine from Aristotle, son as he was of Philip’s personal physician, whose groundbreaking treatises on human anatomy (sadly lost) helped develop the healing art. We may guess that the Macedonian expeditionary force was well supplied with the most up-to-date medical expertise.

Midas was the king who famously asked a god that anything he touched should turn into gold. But once the gift had been granted, he found that he could no longer eat or drink. Bread and wine became metal in his hand or on his lips. As the old proverb says, he should have been careful what he wished for, lest it came true.

“Alexander was by nature exceptionally generous and became even more so as his wealth increased. His gifts were always bestowed with grace and courtesy, and it is this alone which truly makes a giver’s generosity welcome.”

We learn that on his travels he encountered: people who were thirty-six feet tall, with forearms and hands like saws; fleas as big as frogs; beautiful women warriors, the Amazons. He once fed a naked woman to an ogre. He visited a spring of immortality (when his chef dipped a dried fish into the water, it came to life and jumped out of his hands). He placed red-hot life-size bronze statues in the front line of battle.

Alexander was essentially a soldier, but he was also a serious explorer. If we compare maps of the ancient world, we gain a clear idea of the new geographical knowledge for which he was responsible. In the world picture proposed by Hecataeus of Miletus two centuries before Alexander’s time, the river Ocean wraps round a world disc with nothing much beyond Persia; a century after his death, Eratosthenes allocates nearly half the world to India, identifies the Persian Gulf, and distinguishes the Asian subcontinent from Africa.

The theater at Aegae was built in the mid-fourth century B.C. and was still new when King Philip II of Macedonia was assassinated there in 336. Alexander, together with his terrifying mother, Olympias, may have been implicated in the crime. He certainly benefited from it, instantly seizing the throne and taking over his father’s plan to invade the Persian empire.

After his assassination Philip was buried in one of the royal tombs at Aegae, which were discovered by archaeologists in 1977. His remains were placed in a golden casket. A gold crown or wreath was also found.

Alexander greatly admired Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian empire, who died in 530 B.C. He visited the tomb, near the ancient Persian capital of Pasargadae, more than once and was enraged when it was robbed. Today the monument still stands, but empty of its owner.

is hunting down a stag. He is heroically nude in the Greek manner. If Macedonians were not killing men in battle, they were killing wild animals at their leisure. Alexander was a keen huntsman and often risked his life in the chase.

Coins were a unique means by which an ancient ruler “spoke” to his subjects. Here on the silver tetradrachm Alexander claims heaven’s endorsement. He wears the lionskin of Heracles and on the reverse, Zeus, king of the Gods, sits enthroned.