Alexander the Great
What the Ancient Sources Say About 10 Famous Stories

Alexander III of Macedon, remembered as Alexander the Great, lived from 356 to 323 BC. He reigned for twelve years and eight months, by Arrian’s count. In that time he took over the Persian Empire and marched into India.

He is also the subject of a great many confident stories. Here are ten of the most familiar, and what the ancient historians and the modern scholars who read them say about each.

Quotations come from these English translations:

• Arrian: E. J. Chinnock’s translation of 1884.
• Plutarch’s Life of Alexander: Bernadotte Perrin’s Loeb translation of 1919.
• Diodorus: C. Bradford Welles’s Loeb translation of Book 17, and Russel M. Geer’s of Books 18–20.

English from the Latin of Curtius and Plautus is our own.

A short life

Becoming king. Alexander became king of Macedon in 336 BC, when his father, Philip II, was murdered.

The war with Persia. The main Macedonian army crossed into Asia in 334. In May of that year he won his first pitched battle, at the Granicus river. He defeated the Persian king, Darius III, at Issus in November 333. He beat him again at Gaugamela on 1 October 331, and took over the vast Persian treasure.

In July 330 Darius was murdered in a plot led by Bessus, the satrap, or provincial governor, of Bactria.

Into India. Three years of heavy fighting in Bactria and Sogdiana followed. In the spring of 326 he won the battle of the Hydaspes, in India. There his soldiers, weary of campaigning, made him turn back.

Death. He died in Babylon in 323 BC. He was in the eighth month of his thirty-third year, according to Aristobulus, whom Arrian follows. Even the length of his reign varies by source: twelve years and eight months in Arrian, twelve years and seven months in Diodorus.

Thebes and Tyre. The campaigns cost many lives, and the ancient writers record the worst of it plainly. Early in his reign Thebes revolted, stirred up by exiles returning to the city. They claimed that Alexander had been killed in Illyria.

When the city was taken, Alexander left its fate to the allies who had fought with him. They decided to raze it to the ground and sell its people into slavery. Priests were exempt, and so were those with ties to the Macedonian kings. Alexander, it is said, also spared the house and descendants of the poet Pindar.

Plutarch gives more than 6,000 killed and more than 30,000 sold. Diodorus gives over 6,000 dead and more than 30,000 captured.

Tyre held out against him for seven months in 332, and there the numbers differ more between sources.

• Arrian reports about 8,000 Tyrians killed and about 30,000 captives sold.
• Diodorus gives more than 7,000 killed, at least 2,000 men of military age crucified, and more than 13,000 captives.
• Curtius also gives 2,000 crucified.

What the sources can and can’t tell us

The histories written by men who marched with Alexander are lost. Arrian built his account mainly on two of them. One was by Ptolemy, a general who later became king of Egypt. The other was by Aristobulus, who also served on the campaign. Not even the titles of their books have survived.

The full narratives we have were all written long afterwards.

• Diodorus of Sicily came to Rome in the middle of the 1st century BC. His account of Alexander is Book 17 of a world history. The historian Ernst Badian judges it probably based on the novel-like work of Cleitarchus, whose history of Alexander survives only in fragments.

• Quintus Curtius Rufus probably wrote in the 1st century AD. His is the only surviving Latin book devoted to Alexander. Almost nothing is known of his life.

• Plutarch lived from about AD 45 to 120 and wrote the Life of Alexander. He warned his readers at the start: “it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives”.

• Arrian was a Greek from Bithynia. The emperor Hadrian made him governor of Cappadocia in AD 131. His Anabasis is written in a sober, simple style.

• Justin is usually grouped with Diodorus and Curtius in what scholars call the vulgate tradition, a group of accounts traced to Cleitarchus. The historian L. I. C. Pearson has argued that too few fragments of Cleitarchus survive to say anything definite about his work.

The ancient writers knew they were sifting stories. Arrian trusted Aristobulus because he had served on the expedition. He trusted Ptolemy partly because Ptolemy later became a king, and falsifying facts would have disgraced a king more.

Plutarch lists the writers who tell of a visit from the queen of the Amazons, and the others who say it is a fiction. Curtius admits that he reported more than he believed. So when the ancient writers disagree, or a story appears only in the most colourful accounts, it deserves less confidence.

Some stories are told by several writers and still cannot be confirmed. Take his meeting with Diogenes, who asked him to stand out of his light. It is told by Cicero, Plutarch, Arrian and Diogenes Laertius, and whether it happened, nobody can say. We look at it in Diogenes and the Cynics: The Famous Stories, Checked.

Even his title comes from later. The earliest surviving use of the Great for him is in a Roman comedy, Plautus’s Mostellaria, from around 200 BC.

A character there boasts that Alexander the Great and Agathocles, as people say, did two very great deeds. The Latin reads Alexandrum magnum atque Agathoclem. That is the earliest use we have, not proof that nobody said it sooner.

1. “Aristotle was his teacher”

Holds up The record supports this one, though the teaching was probably short. Plutarch says Philip sent for Aristotle, then the most famous and learned of philosophers. Philip gave teacher and pupil a place to work: the precinct of the nymphs near Mieza.

In 343 BC, at Philip’s request, Aristotle came to the Macedonian capital to teach the king’s thirteen-year-old son.

How much the teaching shaped the pupil is harder to say. Little is known for certain about their time together. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy concludes that some teaching took place, but that it lasted only two or three years. It adds that a longer association, of up to eight years, cannot be ruled out decisively.

2. “He cut the Gordian knot with his sword”

Still argued The ancient writers tell two versions of how he did it. The sword version is the one people remember.

At Gordium, Plutarch says, Alexander saw a famous wagon tied fast to its yoke. Whoever untied it, the story went, would become ruler of Asia in Arrian’s telling, or king of the whole world in Plutarch’s.

Arrian gives the sword version first, as something some people say: Alexander cut through the cord with his sword. Then he adds another. Aristobulus says he pulled out the pin of the wagon-pole instead, a wooden peg that ran through it and held the cord together.

Arrian then declines to choose: “How Alexander performed the feat in connection with this cord, I cannot affirm with confidence”. Plutarch says most writers tell the sword version, and he too credits the pin version to Aristobulus.

Either way the solution is a sideways one. Only the swordstroke is uncertain. We look at the knot as a thinking tool in Mental Models from History.

3. “He was never defeated in battle”

Partly His record in the great battles is real, so the claim starts from something true. None of the four great pitched battles went against him: the Granicus in 334, Issus in 333, Gaugamela in 331 and the Hydaspes in 326. But the same sources record three setbacks.

• The Persian Gates, 330 BC. On the road to Persepolis, the satrap Ariobarzanes blocked a mountain pass with a wall. Alexander’s first attack failed. Many of his men were wounded, Arrian says, and he retreated to his camp. He got through only by leading a force round the pass by night.

• The river Polytimetus, in Sogdiana. A force he had sent out under Pharnuches was trapped at a river crossing. In Arrian’s account, all but a few were killed with arrows. Alexander himself was not there.

• The Hyphasis, in India. Here the check came from his own men. The army refused to advance, and the soldiers made him agree to stop.

So he was unbeaten in his great battles, but not unchecked.

4. “He burned Persepolis in a drunken party”

Still argued The palace at Persepolis was burned in the spring of 330 BC. The ancient writers tell two stories about why. The party version is the more colourful of the two, with a torch, revellers and an Athenian woman urging them on.

A planned act. Arrian describes a decision. Alexander burned the palace although Parmenio advised him to spare it. He said he wanted revenge on the Persians for the invasion of Greece, when they burned Athens and its temples.

Arrian himself did not approve. He thought Alexander had not acted wisely. He adds that when Alexander passed that way again, on his return from India, Alexander himself did not approve of it.

A drinking party. Plutarch, Diodorus and Curtius describe a drinking party. An Athenian woman, Thaïs, urged them to set fire to the house of Xerxes, who had burned Athens. Alexander led the revellers there with a torch. Curtius adds that Thaïs was drunk herself: et ipsa temulenta.

Plutarch reports both versions: “This is the way the deed was done, according to some writers; but others say it was premeditated”. On one point, he says, they agree: Alexander quickly regretted it and ordered the fire put out.

The ruins. The ancient writers do not settle it, but the ruins add evidence they did not have. Alireza Shapur Shahbazi, writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, concludes that “the fire was deliberate”. He gives two reasons.

• The precious-metal fittings on the carved reliefs were systematically removed first.
• No one tried to put out the fire with water from the moat.

That leans toward Arrian’s version of a planned burning. Whether a drinking party was also the occasion is still argued, and the two need not exclude each other.

5. “He named a city after his horse”

Holds up Arrian and Plutarch both record it, and both put the city on the Hydaspes.

After the battle of the Hydaspes, Arrian says, Alexander founded two cities. He named one Nicaea, for his victory, and the other Bucephala, in memory of his horse Bucephalas. Plutarch agrees that he built a city in the horse’s memory on the banks of the Hydaspes, and calls it Bucephalia.

They differ on how the horse died. Arrian says the horse died at about thirty, not from any wound but from toil and old age. Plutarch says most writers blamed wounds, though Onesicritus, the pilot of Alexander’s ship, said old age.

Plutarch also passes on a story that Alexander named a city after his dog, Peritas. He tells it only as something people say.

6. “He conquered the known world”

Doesn't hold up His conquests were vast, so the phrase is easy to reach for. But they had edges that Greeks of his time knew about.

The historian Pierre Briant sums up the result: the conquest restored the empire to the limits Darius I had given it. In other words, his conquests roughly matched the Persian Empire as it had been under Darius I.

Beyond those limits lay lands that Arrian’s sources talked about. Some said that in his last years Alexander was thinking of sailing round Arabia and Africa to conquer Libya and Carthage. Others said he meant to go to Sicily, because the spreading fame of the Romans made him jealous.

Arrian himself wrote that he could not guess with any certainty what the plans were.

In India he turned back at the Hyphasis. Yet in the speech Arrian gives him there, Alexander says the distance to the Ganges is not great. A planned voyage round Arabia, Briant notes, did not happen.

7. “He wept because there were no more worlds to conquer”

Doesn't hold up There is an ancient story of Alexander weeping over worlds, which may be why this one sounds so solid. But it runs the other way.

In Plutarch’s essay On Tranquillity of Mind, Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus talk about an infinite number of worlds. When his friends asked what was wrong, he answered with a question, given here in W. C. Helmbold’s 1939 translation.

“Is it not worthy of tears that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?”

Plutarch sets him beside Crates. Crates owned only a bag and a threadbare cloak, yet spent his whole life joking and laughing. In Plutarch, the tears are about wanting more, not about having run out.

8. “He set out to spread Greek culture across his empire”

Still argued Greek language and culture did spread after his conquests, across the Middle East. So it is natural to assume he planned it. Whether that was his aim is still argued.

The case for a plan rests partly on Plutarch. In the Life, he says Alexander picked thirty thousand boys and had them taught Greek and trained to use Macedonian weapons.

In his essay On the Fortune of Alexander, he goes much further. There he says that under Alexander, Homer was widely read, and that Alexander founded more than seventy cities among tribes he calls savage.

The translator, F. C. Babbitt, calls these essays epideictic orations: speeches written for display.

The case against comes from historians of Persia. Briant points out three things.

• Alexander adopted Persian court etiquette, royal robes and ceremonies to win over the Iranian upper classes.
• He kept the Persian system of provinces.
• His measures “were responses to the demands of the hour”.

On the old idea of a “policy of fusion”, a deliberate blending of Macedonians and Iranians into one ruling class, Briant urges caution. He even calls Alexander, in many ways, the “last of the Achaemenids”, the dynasty of Persian kings he defeated.

The evidence leans toward Briant’s reading, for two reasons that show in the sources.

• Plutarch’s own reason for training the 30,000 boys is political. Alexander thought that mixing customs, rather than force, would keep his rule secure while he was far away.

• The grand civilising picture comes from a display speech, not from Plutarch’s biography.

The argument is about what he intended, not about the spread itself.

9. “He was poisoned”

Still argued One account, said to come from a court journal, describes a fever. The poison story came later, Plutarch says, and even writers who doubted it still passed it on.

A fever. The first story comes from the court journal, the Royal Diary. Arrian and Plutarch both quote it, and Plutarch says most of his account follows it word for word.

It describes a fever that set in after drinking at the house of a friend, Medius, and grew worse over days. Aristobulus, Plutarch adds, says he had a raging fever.

Poison. The second story says poison was sent by Antipater, Alexander’s governor in Europe. In that story, Antipater’s son, the royal cup-bearer, gave it to him. Arrian reports this, but says he records such stories only so as not to seem ignorant of them, not because he believes them.

Plutarch says that at first, no one suspected poison. He adds: “Most writers, however, think that the story of the poisoning is altogether a fabrication”. Diodorus tells of a huge beaker of unmixed wine and a sudden pain. He then gives the poison version as one that some historians tell.

Modern guesses. Modern writers have proposed many causes. A 2014 review lists, among others, old wounds, the effects of alcohol, and malaria, typhoid fever, or some other parasitic or viral illness. Its authors argue only that if the king was poisoned, the plant Veratrum album is a more plausible cause than arsenic, strychnine and other plant poisons.

A 2003 paper suggested West Nile virus, and drew published replies. The 2014 review also notes that the diary was only said to have been kept at the royal court, so the symptoms reach us second-hand. The evidence does not settle the cause, and we do not lean either way.

10. “His empire fell apart the moment he died”

Partly It did break up, but over years rather than at once. In Babylon, Diodorus says, the throne was empty, because the king had died leaving no child. His wife Roxana was expecting a child.

The army and generals agreed on a shared arrangement. Alexander’s half-brother Arrhidaeus was made king under the name Philip, and Perdiccas became regent. The leading generals took the provinces and were to obey the king and Perdiccas.

The generals soon fought each other. But for years they did so in the name of Alexander’s family. A treaty of 311/10 BC still named Cassander general of Europe until Alexander’s son by Roxana came of age. Soon afterwards Cassander had the boy and his mother killed.

Only in the Athenian year 307/6 BC did Antigonus put on the royal diadem and call himself king. The other generals, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Lysimachus and Cassander, then called themselves kings too. The separate kingdoms grew out of the wars that followed his death.

Our reading

The Alexander of the ancient sources is more argued over than the Alexander of the popular stories. The knot, the fire at Persepolis and his death were already disputed by the writers we depend on, and they said so. The popular versions keep the drama and drop the doubt: one swordstroke, one drunken night, one poisoned cup.

The record also includes Thebes and Tyre, told plainly by the same writers who admired him. Both belong to the story, and we give no verdict on the man.

Why it matters

Arrian and Plutarch often said when they were unsure, and named the writers who disagreed. So when a story about a famous life feels settled, it can help to ask how many versions the oldest sources give, and whether any of them hesitated.

Sources

• Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander, trans. E. J. Chinnock (Hodder and Stoughton, 1884): preface; 1.7–9; 2.3; 2.24; 3.18; 4.5; 5.19; 5.25–28; 6.30; 7.1; 7.25–28.
• Plutarch, Life of Alexander, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library vol. VII (1919), via LacusCurtius: chs. 1, 7, 11, 18, 38, 46, 47, 61, 75–77.
• Plutarch, On Tranquillity of Mind 4, trans. W. C. Helmbold, Loeb Moralia vol. VI (1939), via LacusCurtius.
• Plutarch, On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander I, trans. F. C. Babbitt, Loeb Moralia vol. IV (1936), via LacusCurtius.
• Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Book 17 trans. C. Bradford Welles, Books 18–20 trans. Russel M. Geer (Loeb), via LacusCurtius: 17.14, 17.46, 17.72, 17.117–118, 18.2, 19.105, 20.53.
• Quintus Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni, Latin text via LacusCurtius: 4.4.17, 5.7.3.
• Plautus, Mostellaria 775, Latin text via The Latin Library.
• Pierre Briant, “Alexander the Great”, Encyclopaedia Iranica (1985).
• Alireza Shapur Shahbazi, “Persepolis”, Encyclopaedia Iranica (2009, updated 2016).
• Marie Louise Chaumont, “Arrian”, Encyclopaedia Iranica (1986).
• Ernst Badian, “Diodorus Siculus”, Encyclopaedia Iranica (1995).
• Philip Huyse, “Curtius Rufus, Quintus”, Encyclopaedia Iranica (1993).
• Rüdiger Schmitt, “Cleitarchus”, Encyclopaedia Iranica (1992).
• George Karamanolis, “Plutarch”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010, revised 2024).
• Christopher Shields, “Aristotle”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008, revised 2020).
• Richard Stoneman, “Naming Alexander”, Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, University of Oxford.
• L. J. Schep, R. J. Slaughter, J. A. Vale and P. Wheatley, “Was the death of Alexander the Great due to poisoning? Was it Veratrum album?”, Clinical Toxicology 52(1) (2014), abstract.
• J. S. Marr and C. H. Calisher, “Alexander the Great and West Nile virus encephalitis”, Emerging Infectious Diseases 9(12) (2003).

Checked October 2026.

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