Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Historical Outline 33
In 331 b.c.e., he won the last of his great victories at Guagamela
on the River Tigris. He followed it up by burning down Persepolis,
the palace that had been built by King Xerxes, leader of the expedition
against Greece in 480 b.c.e. Shortly afterward, Dareios
was murdered and Alexander was able to proclaim himself king
of Persia. Following the final defeat of Persia, he undertook two
further expeditions, the first to Bactria and the second to India.
On his return to Susa, the Persian capital, in 324 b.c.e. , he held a
great banquet at which he married Dareios’s daughter, insisting
at the same time that his Macedonian officers should marry Persian
women. Not surprisingly, his policy caused bitter resentment,
particularly among the Macedonians, who considered themselves
racially superior to the Persians. He pressed on eastward as far
as the River Ganges in India before his troops refused to go any
further.
Alexander died of unknown causes at Babylon in the spring of
323 b.c.e. after a short illness following a prolonged banquet and
drinking bout. He left behind him an empire that stretched from the
Adriatic in the west to the Punjab in the east, from southern Russia
in the north to Ethiopia in the south. He was 32.
It seems highly probable that the conquests of Alexander the Great
were provoked partly by an increase in population. It is thought
that mainland Greece was more heavily populated between the
fifth and the third centuries b.c.e. than at any time in its history
until the late nineteenth century, and that, on the eve of Alexander’s
departure for the East, it had reached a peak of about two million
inhabitants.
THE HELLENISTIC WORLD
On Alexander’s death, each of his generals tried to seize as much
of his empire as he could. It took nearly half a century before three
stable kingdoms finally emerged: Macedonia, ruled by the Antigonid
dynasty, founded by Antigonos Monophthalmos, meaning
“one-eyed”; southern Turkey, Babylonia, Syria, Iran, and central
Asia, ruled by the Seleucids, founded by Seleukos I Nikator, meaning
“conqueror”; and Egypt, ruled by the Ptolemies, founded by
Alexander’s bastard half-brother Ptolemy Soter, meaning “preserver.”
Historians refer to them collectively as the Successors, the
Diadochoi, of Alexander the Great.
In addition, in mainland Greece, there were two federated leagues,
the Aetolian League in the north and the Achaean League in the