Who was Alexander the Great?

Alexander the Great was born in the Kingdom of Macedon, part of Ancient Greece, in 356 BC. He was the son of King Phillip II and the heir to the throne. He was given a sound education as a boy, in the physical strengths and fighting skills involved in becoming a man by his instructor, Leonidas; but perhaps infinitely more significantly, in a scholastic sense by Aristotle. The latter had himself been schooled by Plato, who had previously learned from Socrates.

One day, the young Alexander was with his father, studying a horse which was said to be untameable. The young man picked up on something in the horse's behaviour and asked his father if he could tame the horse, could he keep him. His father agreed, so Alexander simply turned the horse to face the sun and mounted him. He had realised that the horse, Bucephalus, was afraid of his own shadow and the two were thereafter together for many years.

Alexander's relationship with his father became ever increasingly stormy and after one blazing row, Alexander left Macedon with his mother for her native Epirus. Although Alexander later made up with his father and returned to Macedon, his mother never did.

Alexander's father, King Philip, was assassinated when Alexander was about twenty years old, making him King Alexander III. The full circumstances of his father's death were never established but there were even whispers that Alexander and his mother had been implicated.

Regardless of this, Alexander assumed the throne and quickly crushed the rumblings of rebellion within the Kingdom. He subsequently began his expansion plans for Macedon and set about establishing his new empire, which became known as the Hellenistic Empire. Over a period of little more than a decade, he expanded his empire as far as India in the East and as far as Egypt to the West.

Alexander the Great was not, however merely an outstanding soldier and military tactician. Courtesy of Aristotle, he had learned a great deal about philosophy and the ways to deal with or manipulate people and their opinions. He did not therefore try to assert Macedonic cultural influences upon the peoples he ruled over but rather tried to incorporate their own culture in to his own people's. Marriage between the races was actively encouraged and, in this respect, he was responsible for spreading the Greek civilisation, culture and language far and wide.

Like that of his father before him, Alexander the Great's death was shrouded in mystery. Some reports suggested that he had been poisoned, some blamed an excess of alcohol and yet others referred to a recurrence of a previous bout of malaria. Whatever the cause, a few weeks short of his thirty-third birthday, Alexander the Great died, in Babylon, in 323 BC.

Alexander the Great may have died more than two thousand years ago but never since has he been forgotten. He was revered, in fact, in the Roman Empire by a succession of prominent Emperors and Statesmen, including Julius Caesar. Even in modern times, his busts and images appear in the unlikeliest of places, including a large statue of him mounted on Bucephalus in the forecourt of Edinburgh City Council Chambers in Scotland (pictured above right.)