[67][f] He showed his intent to conquer the entirety of the Persian Empire by throwing a spear into Asian soil and saying he accepted Asia as a gift from the gods.

Herakles died at 17. Anaximenes, also accompanied him on his campaigns. He then stormed the pass of the Persian Gates (in the modern Zagros Mountains) which had been blocked by a Persian army under Ariobarzanes and then hurried to Persepolis before its garrison could loot the treasury.[87]. The Alexander Romance, in particular, has had a significant impact on portrayals of Alexander in later cultures, from Persian to medieval European to modern Greek. [175] According to Diodorus, Alexander's companions asked him on his deathbed to whom he bequeathed his kingdom; his laconic reply was "tôi kratistôi"—"to the strongest".

[16], Ancient historians, as well as modern ones, have also written on Alexander's marriage to Roxana the beautiful [Persian] woman. Our source Justin raises some confusion about Herakles' age and date of birth by saying that he was 14 when he died, which should put his date of birth around 324 BC. During his youth, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle until age 16. Roxane was the daughter of Persian nobleman Oxyartes, a local ruler in Sogdiana who surrendered to Alexander during the siege of the Sogdian Rock. Most infamously, Alexander personally killed the man who had saved his life at Granicus, Cleitus the Black, during a violent drunken altercation at Maracanda (modern day Samarkand in Uzbekistan), in which Cleitus accused Alexander of several judgmental mistakes and most especially, of having forgotten the Macedonian ways in favour of a corrupt oriental lifestyle. Also, one of them probably killed the other two. Campaspe became a generic poetical pseudonym for a man's mistress. Bucephalas carried Alexander as far as India. A 1998 article in the New England Journal of Medicine attributed his death to typhoid fever complicated by bowel perforation and ascending paralysis. As in Tyre, men of military age were put to the sword and the women and children were sold into slavery. [49], Attalus was at that time corresponding with Demosthenes, regarding the possibility of defecting to Athens. [141] There are two different versions of Alexander's death and details of the death differ slightly in each. Alexander, as a matter of fact, employed these customs rather sparingly and kept for the most part to his accustomed routine, not wishing to offend the Macedonians. A wedding-feast for the two of them was arranged high on one of the Persian rocks. Announcing our NEW encyclopedia for Kids! Apart from a few inscriptions and fragments, texts written by people who actually knew Alexander or who gathered information from men who served with Alexander were all lost. No, it's not the quantity of marriages that makes Alexander's personal life such a drippingly juicy tabloid snack, but the fact that he was married to all three concurrently, and he got hitched to two of them during the same ceremony. [16], This article is about the ancient king of Macedonia. [20], During his youth, Alexander was also acquainted with Persian exiles at the Macedonian court, who received the protection of Philip II for several years as they opposed Artaxerxes III. "[268], In the first centuries after Alexander's death, probably in Alexandria, a quantity of the legendary material coalesced into a text known as the Alexander Romance, later falsely ascribed to Callisthenes and therefore known as Pseudo-Callisthenes. [178], Dissension and rivalry soon afflicted the Macedonians, however. [102], In 329 BC, Spitamenes, who held an undefined position in the satrapy of Sogdiana, betrayed Bessus to Ptolemy, one of Alexander's trusted companions, and Bessus was executed. [198] He had great self-restraint in "pleasures of the body", in contrast with his lack of self-control with alcohol.