In the Mediterranean, conflict was about to crash rival civilisations together. In 356 BC, a legend was born. He’d be a new kind of empire builder. According to legend, when he was a boy, a wild, unbroken horse was brought to his father’s court in Macedonia. He would come to be known as Alexander the Great of the Macedonian Empire.
The boy begged his father to let him try to tame the beast. He had noticed that the horse was afraid of its own shadow. Bucephalus was the name of this wild horse. And the boy would, of course, grow up to be Alexander the Great.
Macedonian Empire History of the World
Alexander the Great was brought up on stories of Homer’s heroes from the Trojan wars. He was a true child of the Greek Golden age. His father hired the great philosopher Aristotle and asked him to create a little school.
Here in a remote part of Macedonia, where he spent three years intensively teaching the young Alexander. He taught everything; from history and geography to mathematics and philosophy.
And one of the things that started to entrance Alexander were the stories of the Persians.
Cyrus the Great became a particular hero of his. His father said to him, “My son, seek out a kingdom worthy of yourself. Macedonia is too small for you.”
Alexander the Great
At the age of 20, after the assassination of his father. The title of King of Macedonia came to Alexander. With the new power of this position, his imperial ambition had no limits.
After finishing off independent Greece, he crashed through today’s Turkey, marched into the Middle East. Then into Egypt, before conquering the old enemy; Persia. And, carrying on towards Afghanistan and the borders of India.
Along with war and conquest Alexander the Great founded 70 Greek-style towns across North Africa and Asia. And Greek became the new common language across his Empire.
Alexander’s Macedonian veterans scattered his enemies wherever he led them. But, like his hero Cyrus, Alexander was fascinated by the people he conquered. And he thought that knitting together their different traditions could create a new kind of almost multicultural empire.
Cyrus the Great had tempered tyranny with tolerance, but Alexander wanted to go a lot further and actually mingle Macedonian and Greek customs with Persian customs.
Macedonian Empire
So he started wearing Persian clothes and the Persian Royal Crown. And, even making people prostrate themselves in front of him in the Asian manner.
So it’s not surprising that his plain-speaking Macedonian generals became outraged at his decadent clothing and his increasingly foreign habits.
Even Alexander’s trusted friend Cleitus thought he was going too far. Cleitus was a leader of the Macedonian cavalry. He’d once saved Alexander’s life in battle.
Now, he was taunting him for being more Persian than Greek. The Macedonians were famous across Greece for being great drinkers, and Alexander was no exception.
But this fight was just a bit worse than your average drunken brawl.
Death of Cleitus
After the death of Cleitus, Alexander the Great is said to have wept and fasted for three days. But he then briskly wiped the tears away and marched straight on, until his Empire was the biggest the world has ever known.
And to bond his peoples, he went far further in trying to fuse the cultures of Greece and Asia. He married not one, but two Asian princesses himself. And he then applied the same logic to his troops.
Alexander organised a mass wedding of Macedonian soldiers and Persian women and gave them all generous golden dowries.
And the marriages were extended way down into the Macedonian army. Alexander hoped that the children would become rulers for his new Empire; a literal marriage of East and West.
Alexander wanted the children of these hundreds of Greek and Persian marriages to be the beginning of a new warrior people. A people who would preserve his Empire long into the future.
Death of Alexander the Great
But, within a year of the mass wedding, aged just 32, Alexander was dead; some say poisoned. It’s more likely that he died unheroically of typhoid fever.
Alexander’s gigantic empire was divided up between feuding successors. But ,the spread of the Greek language and culture continued. From Athens to Syria, North Africa, right the way to Afghanistan.
And the culture of ancient Greece, its architecture and its legends, it’s poetry and its philosophy would shape the classical world and then, later, all the West.
However, in the broad sweep of human history, Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Empire was a heartbeat, a mere puff of smoke.
But, he acted as a kind of giant, bloody, cultural whisk, churning together the Greek and the Persian worlds. And his story remains; as does the uncomfortable truth that war, however horrible, is one of the great change-makers in human history.
During history, Alexander was not the only empire builder. Sennacherib was a cruel and powerful leader of the Assyrian Empire.
External Links
Macedonian Empire - Wikipedia Page
Alexander the Great: The Truth Behind the Myth
Alexander the Great: The Dissolution of the Persian Naval Supremacy
Macedonia (Bradt Travel Guides)
