KS3 / GCSE History: The legacy of Alexander the Great

In 356 BC, a legend was born in a kingdom to the far north of Greece, Macedonia. He would be a new kind of empire-builder and he’d take Greek culture deep into Asia.

According to legend, when he was a boy, a wild unbroken horse was brought to his father’s court in Macedonia. 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. The horse was called Bucephalus and the boy would, of course, grow up to be Alexander the Great.

Alexander 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 everything from history and geography to mathematics and philosophy, and one of the things that started to entrance Alexander, the stories of the Persians.

His father said to him, "My son, seek out a kingdom worthy of yourself. Macedonia’s too small for you."

Alexander became king of Macedonia at the age of twenty after his father was assassinated. His imperial ambition was said to be limitless.

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 founded seventy 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 Alexander was fascinated by the people he conquered, and he thought that knitting together their different traditions could create a new kind of almost multi-cultural empire.

Alexander wanted to actually mingle Macedonian and Greek customs with Persian customs. 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 the 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.

After the death of Cleitus, Alexander 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 had 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 wanted the children of these hundreds of Greek and Persian marriages to be the beginning of a new warrior people who would preserve his empire long into the future.

But within a year of the mass wedding, aged just thirty-two, 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, its poetry and its philosophy would shape the classical world and then later all the west.

In the broad sweep of human history, Alexander’s 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 reminds us of the uncomfortable truth, that war - however horrible - is one of the great change-makers in human history.