Alexander the Great

For nearly two years, metalworkers hammered sheets of gold to adorn a rolling temple. It measured about eighteen feet by twelve — the footprint of a one-car garage — roofed in golden scales set with jewels, guarded at its corners by golden lions. Sixty-four mules, each wearing a golden crown and a bell, dragged it across the earth. Inside lay the embalmed body of the man who had conquered the known world before his thirty-third birthday. And on the road to his tomb, one of his own officers stole it.

Key Terms

The Iliad: Homer’s poem about the warrior Achilles, which Alexander kept in a jeweled casket taken from Persian loot and slept with beneath his pillow, beside a dagger.
Achilles: The Homeric warrior Alexander did not just read about — he resolved to actually become him.
Sarissa: An ash-wood pike up to 21 feet long, its two halves joined by an iron sleeve and its butt end tipped with a heavy bronze spike.
Syntagma: A block of Macedonian pikemen arranged 16 rows by 16 — 256 men moving as one, their first five ranks lowering pikes together.
Chaeronea: The battle fought in August of 338 BC where Macedon’s phalanx and cavalry broke the combined Greek armies and ended their independence for good.
Granicus River: The river Alexander charged across at the head of his cavalry in 334 BC, opening his invasion of the Persian Empire.
Issus: The 333 BC battle where Alexander met the Persian king face to face, and that king turned his chariot and fled, abandoning his own family in the camp.
Darius III: The Persian king who fled his own battle line at Issus in his chariot, then watched his last great army destroyed two years later.
Gaugamela: The 331 BC battle where the Macedonian phalanx shattered the last great army the Persian king could raise.
Tyre: An island fortress whose walls rose 65 feet from the waves, taken only after Alexander built a half-mile causeway to it and besieged it for seven months.
Beas River: The river where Alexander’s exhausted men sat down in the rain and refused to march farther, forcing a conqueror who had never lost a battle to finally turn for home.
Diadochi: The name for Alexander’s rival generals and friends who fought one another for control of his empire after he died in 323 BC.
Catafalque: A grand carriage built to carry the body of an important person — Alexander’s was an 18-by-12-foot rolling gold temple guarded at its corners by golden lions.
Ptolemy: The general who intercepted Alexander’s golden funeral carriage on the road in 322 BC and turned its mules toward Egypt instead of Macedonia.
Babylon: The city where Alexander fell ill in its palace in June of 323 BC, suffered a ten-day fever, and died on the eleventh day at age 32.
Alexandria: The Egyptian city founded by Ptolemy’s family that became home to a Great Library holding tens of thousands of papyrus scrolls.
Pharos Lighthouse: A lighthouse guarding the harbor at Alexandria, rising about 250 feet — as tall as a modern 25-floor building — with a fire burning at its top to guide ships through the dark.
Ai-Khanoum: A city at the edge of the Hindu Kush in what is now Afghanistan, its Greek columns standing in the heat of Central Asia thousands of miles from Greece.
Hellenistic Age: The name historians give to the era after Alexander’s death, when Greek language, science, and art spread and mixed with cultures across three continents.
Delphic Maxims: Short Greek rules for living, first carved at the temple of Apollo at Delphi and later copied more than 3,000 miles away to be carved again near the mountains of Afghanistan.