The legacy of Alexander the Great
Alexander was born in 356 B.C. as the son of the Macedonian king Philip II (359-336 B.C.) and queen Olympus. Because the son later claimed to be the son of the supreme god, whom he called Zeus or Ammon, stories about his procreation and birth were invented. In fact, these stories were unnecessary; the boy was born for greatness.
Alexander grew up in a society that was permanently at war, and his father Philip, when not fighting, encouraged his soon to learn a variety of battle skills. Alexander received an excellent education. Between the years 343 and 340 B.C. Alexander's teacher was the famous Macedonian biologist and philosopher Aristotle. In 336 B.C. King Philip was murdered by one of his guards as he was in route to join his troops. Alexander, only twenty years of age, inherited the throne and the war in Asia. Greece and the Balkan Peninsula secured, Alexander then crossed (334 B.C.) the Hellespont and, as head of an allied Greek army, undertook the war on Persia that his father had been planning. The march he had begun was to be one of the greatest in history. At the Granicus River (near the Hellespont) he met and defeated a Persian force and moved on to take Miletus and Halicarnassus. For the first time Persia faced a united Greece, and Alexander saw himself as the spreader of Panhellenic ideals. Having taken most of Asia Minor, he entered (333 B.C.) N Syria and there in the battle of Issus met and routed the hosts of Darius III of Persia, who fled before him. Alexander, triumphant, now envisioned conquest of the whole of the Persian Empire. It took him nearly a year to reduce Tyre and Gaza, and in 332 B.C, in full command of Syria, he entered Egypt. There he met no resistance. When he went to the oasis of Amon he was acknowledged as the son of Amon-Ra, and this may have contributed to a conviction of his own divinity. In the winter he founded Alexandria, perhaps the greatest monument to his name, and in the spring of 331 B.C. he returned to Syria, then went to Mesopotamia where he met Darius again in the battle of Guagamela. The battle was hard, but Alexander was victorious. He marched S to Babylon, then went to Susa and on to Persepolis, where he burned the palaces of the Persians and looted the city.
