Alexander the Great: The Conquests and the Kingdoms After Him

Alexander's campaigns from the Granicus to India, the debates over Persepolis and his death, and how his generals carved up his empire.

Avevide · Last reviewed October 24, 2026 · 8 min read

Between 334 and 323 BCE, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art summarizes it, "Alexander the Great and his armies conquered much of the known world, creating an empire that stretched from Greece and Asia Minor through Egypt and the Persian empire in the Near East to India." He died in Babylon in June 323 BCE, in his early thirties. Within a generation his empire had split into rival kingdoms ruled by his former officers.

Alexander's story is famous, but it is also unusually hard to pin down. Men who marched with him wrote accounts of the campaign, and later writers drew on them, chose among them and sometimes argued with them. The two most important for modern readers are Arrian, whose campaign history is the most detailed, and Plutarch, whose biography focuses on character.

This guide follows the conquests and the world that came after, and it pays close attention to where the sources, and modern historians, disagree.

Who tells Alexander's story?

Arrian lived under the Roman Empire. His translator, E. J. Chinnock, says he was born near the end of the first century CE at Nicomedia, and notes that one of his other works, on tactics, was composed in 137 CE. In the preface to his Anabasis of Alexander, Arrian explains his method. He accepted as authentic whatever Ptolemy, son of Lagus, and Aristobulus agreed on, both of whom had served on the campaign. "Different authors have given different accounts of Alexander’s life," he writes, "and there is no one about whom more have written, or more at variance with each other."

His reasons for trusting Ptolemy are revealing. Ptolemy was credible, Arrian says, partly "because he was himself a king afterwards, and falsification of facts would have been more disgraceful to him than to any other man." A modern reader may see it the other way around. Ptolemy became king of Egypt, and a king writing about the founder of his world had his own reasons to shape the story.

Plutarch, in the translation by Aubrey Stewart and George Long, warns readers at the start of his life of Alexander: "I am writing biography, not history." He was looking for the small incidents that reveal character, and he left the full military record to others.

From the Granicus to Persepolis (334–330 BCE)

Alexander crossed into Asia in 334 BCE and won his first major battle against Persian forces at the Granicus River that year. In 333 BCE, he defeated the Persian king Darius III at Issus. In 332 BCE, according to the Met, he took Egypt, where he founded the new city of Alexandria on the northwestern Delta coast.

In September 331 BCE, the date Chinnock gives for the battle often named after the city of Arbela, though Arrian notes that Ptolemy and Aristobulus place it at the village of Gaugamela, Alexander defeated Darius again in a battle that broke Persian resistance in the heartland. Arrian reports that about 100 of Alexander's men were killed, while of the enemy "there were said to have been about 300,000 slain." Numbers like these should be read as the claims of the victors' tradition rather than as counts anyone could have made.

Then came one of the most debated episodes of the campaign. At Persepolis, Alexander burned the Persian royal palace. Arrian says his general Parmenio advised him to preserve it, but Alexander said he wished to take vengeance on the Persians for their invasion of Greece, when they burned the temples of Athens. Arrian's own verdict is blunt: "Alexander does not seem to me to have acted on this occasion with prudence."

Plutarch tells a different story. At a drinking party, an Athenian woman named Thais urged the guests to burn "the house of Xerxes, who burned her native Athens," and Alexander himself led the way with a torch. Plutarch then admits the uncertainty: "Some historians say that this was how he came to burn the palace, while others say that he did it after mature deliberation: but all agree that he repented of what he had done."

In 330 BCE, Darius was killed by one of his own commanders, Bessus, while retreating east. Alexander now claimed the Persian empire.

To India and back (329–323 BCE)

The following years took Alexander through Bactria and Sogdiana and into the Indus region. In the spring of 326 BCE, Chinnock dates the battle at the Hydaspes River, where Alexander defeated the Indian king Porus.

At the Hyphasis River, his army refused to go farther. Arrian describes Alexander retiring to his tent for days, waiting for the soldiers to change their minds. They did not. When sacrifices for crossing the river proved unfavorable, he announced that he would march back. The soldiers wept with joy and blessed him, Arrian says, "because by them alone he suffered himself to be conquered." He ordered twelve great altars built as thank-offerings and monuments.

Not everyone reads this as a mutiny that stopped a man bent on endless conquest. The French historian Pierre Briant, as Thomas Banchich explains in a review of his short book on Alexander, argues that Alexander never wished to push beyond the Indus, the easternmost boundary of the Persian realm, and he rejects the tradition that Alexander's "Last Plans" included conquering the western Mediterranean.

How did Alexander die?

Alexander fell ill in Babylon and died in June 323 BCE. Arrian, citing Aristobulus, says he "lived thirty-two years, and had reached the eighth month of his thirty-third year," and had reigned twelve years and eight months. Asked, according to some writers, to whom he left his kingdom, he is said to have replied: "To the best."

Rumors of murder followed. Arrian records the story that Antipater, the father of Cassander, sent poison, that Aristotle procured it, and that the royal cup-bearer Iollas administered it. Arrian reports these tales "rather that I may not seem to be ignorant that they have been made, than because I consider them worthy of credence."

Plutarch adds that "No one had any suspicion of poison at the time," but that six years later Alexander's mother, Olympias, put many men to death over it. "Most historians, however," he writes, "think that the whole story of Alexander's being poisoned was a fiction," noting that his body lay unattended for days in the heat while the generals quarreled and yet, he says, showed no signs of decay. Whatever one makes of that argument, it shows that ancient writers, too, were weighing evidence.

The Successors and the Hellenistic kingdoms

The empire's fate fell to the generals, known, as the Met puts it, as the Diadochoi, "successors." Violence began at once. Plutarch reports that Alexander's widow Roxana, who was pregnant, was jealous of Statira and had her and her sister killed.

For two decades the generals fought each other. The first to call themselves kings, Plutarch says in his life of Demetrius (in Bernadotte Perrin's translation), were Antigonus and his son Demetrius, saluted as kings by the crowd after Demetrius's naval victory off Cyprus, an event the Loeb editor dates to 306 BCE. Ptolemy's followers responded by giving him the royal title too, and "their emulation carried the practice among the other successors of Alexander." Lysimachus began to wear a diadem, and Seleucus used the title with Greeks.

The decisive clash came near Ipsus in Phrygia in 301 BCE. Demetrius chased the enemy cavalry too far, the enemy's elephants blocked his way back, and Antigonus died under a cloud of javelins, still watching for his son.

The kingdoms that emerged lasted for centuries. According to the Met:

The Ptolemies ruled Egypt from 305 BCE, when Ptolemy became Ptolemy I, until 30 BCE, when Rome took over after the defeat of Cleopatra VII.
Seleucus I Nicator, who reigned from 312 to 281 BCE, founded a dynasty in the former Persian lands, with capitals at Antioch in Syria and Seleucia in Mesopotamia; its remnants ended when Pompey made Syria a Roman province in 64 BCE.
The Antigonids ruled Macedonia, while Greek city-states formed alliances such as the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues.

The Met notes that "Hellenistic kingship remained the dominant political form in the Greek East for nearly three centuries" after Alexander's death, a world of royal courts, great libraries at Alexandria and Pergamon, and a common Greek culture spread far beyond Greece.

Builder or destroyer? Where historians disagree

Few figures divide historians as sharply as Alexander.

Motives. Ancient writers offered grand motives, such as the revenge on Persia that Arrian's Alexander gives as his reason at Persepolis. Briant, in Banchich's summary, "rejects psychological explanations" and denies that Alexander ever thought of his campaign as a war of reprisal.
Character. Some modern accounts portray a ruthless, increasingly unstable conqueror. Briant argues against the picture of "an enraged and crazed (or drunken) megalomaniac," presenting instead a pragmatist for whom violence was one tool among many.
Persepolis. Was it revenge (Arrian's Alexander), drunken impulse (Plutarch's story) or policy? Briant reads it, in a Persian context, as Alexander's demonstration that he was in control and that resistance should cease.
Legacy. Briant warns that labeling Alexander "a builder or a predator" is an "epistemological trap" that says more about modern historians than about Alexander. His point about the empire's weakness is telling: "the unity of the empire was a notion linked more or less directly to the royal person." When the person died, so did the unity.

The best way to read Alexander is to keep asking who is telling the story. A Macedonian officer who became a king, a Roman-era historian choosing among sources, and a biographer hunting for revealing anecdotes will each give you a different man.

Key takeaways

Alexander conquered an empire from Greece and Egypt to India between 334 and 323 BCE, winning major battles at the Granicus, Issus, Gaugamela and the Hydaspes.
Arrian, writing under the Roman Empire from the accounts of Alexander's officers, and the biographer Plutarch are our main guides, and they often disagree.
His army's refusal to advance at the Hyphasis turned him back, though some historians argue he never meant to go much farther.
Ancient writers reported poison rumors after his death in June 323 BCE, but Arrian and most historians Plutarch knew doubted them.
His generals fought for two decades and founded kingdoms, including those of the Ptolemies and Seleucids, that lasted until Roman conquest.

Sources

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Alexander the Great: The Conquests and the Kingdoms After Him

Who tells Alexander's story?

From the Granicus to Persepolis (334–330 BCE)

To India and back (329–323 BCE)

How did Alexander die?

The Successors and the Hellenistic kingdoms

Builder or destroyer? Where historians disagree

Key takeaways

Sources

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