Alexander III of Macedon

Alexander son of Philip and Olympias of Epirus, born at Pella in 356 BC — by the conventional tradition on the same day as the burning of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, a calendrical coincidence the biographer Plutarch plays for effect. Pupil of Aristotle at Mieza in the Gardens of the Nymphs from 343 to 340. Regent of Macedon at sixteen, cavalry commander of the left wing at Chaeronea at eighteen, king of Macedon at twenty on Philip's assassination (336 BC). Crossed the Hellespont in spring 334 with ~40,000 men; won Granicus (334), Issus (333), Tyre after a seven-month siege (332), Gaugamela (331); took Babylon, Susa, and Persepolis (331–330); pursued Darius III into the eastern satrapies where Bessus had him murdered (330); campaigned through Bactria and Sogdiana (329–327); crossed the Hindu Kush; won the Hydaspes against Porus and his elephants (326); was turned back by his army's mutiny at the Hyphasis; marched home through the Gedrosian desert with catastrophic loss (325); staged the mass marriage at Susa (324); and died at Babylon between the evenings of 10 and 11 June 323 BC, age 32 years and 8 months, after ten days of fever that began at the banquet of Medius of Larissa. He had no adult heir; his empire was partitioned among the Diadochi within a generation. The Zeus-Ammon paternity tradition Alexander cultivated after the 331 BC pilgrimage to Siwah is carried in the alternate-parentage slot.

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