He was dead before he turned thirty-three. In the space of thirteen years, he had marched an army from the Greek city-states to the border of modern India - over eleven thousand miles of campaigning across mountains, deserts, jungles, and some of the most formidable armies the ancient world had ever assembled. He had never lost a battle. He had founded cities across three continents. He had overthrown the greatest empire the world had yet seen. And then, in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, after a banquet and a fever that lasted eleven days, he was gone.Alexander III of Macedon - Alexander the Great - is one of those historical figures who seems almost too large for history to contain. The legends started during his own lifetime: that he was the son of a god, that he had a divine destiny, that the oracles of Egypt and Greece recognized him as something beyond the merely human. His campaigns reshaped the political map of the ancient world so thoroughly that the civilization that emerged after them - the Hellenistic world, in which Greek language and culture spread across western Asia - was fundamentally different from the world that existed before him.
