Quote:
Macedonian king and conqueror who lived 356-323 BC, Alexander was the finest battlefield commander of the ancient war, and when he died of fever just before his 33rd birthday he had carved out the largest empire the world had ever seen, stretching 3,000 miles from the Adriatic sea to the Indus river… Alexander’s sprawling realm quickly fell apart after his death, and there arose instead several Greco-Macedonian kingdoms of the East, including Ptolemaic Egypt, the Seleucid Empire and Greek Bactria. These rich powerful kingdoms carried Greek culture halfway across Asia and overshadowed old mainland Greece, with its patchwork of relatively humble city-states.
David Sacks, “A Dictionary of the Ancient Greek World”, Oxford University
Press, 1995
Historians refer to this enlarged Greek society as the Hellenistic world. At the start of his reign, the 20 year old Alexander was the crowned king only of Macedon- a crude Greek nation northeast of mainland Greece-…. His mother Olympias, came from the ruling clan of the northwestern Greek region called Epirus…“
Want more of this? See these Posts:
Entries (RSS)