The Conqueror'S Road

About This Book

In the spring of 334 BC a young king led some fifty thousand men across the narrow water that divided Europe from Asia, threw his spear into the sand of the enemy shore, and claimed a continent as a gift of the gods. He was twenty-two years old. Within a decade Alexander of Macedon had shattered the Persian Empire — the largest the world had ever seen — in four colossal battles, burned the palace of the Great Kings, marched his army beyond the last maps into the deserts of Central Asia and the monsoon of India, and turned back only when his own exhausted soldiers refused to follow him any further east. He died at thirty-two with the known world at his feet, and the empire he had built collapsed almost before his body was cold.

This is the whole sweep of that astonishing life: the boy of Pella and the horse called Bucephalas; the murdered father who forged the army that made everything possible; the sieges of Tyre and Gaza and the massacres that came with them; the oracle in the desert that hailed him as the son of a god; the burning of Persepolis; the paranoid years in Bactria with their murders, mutinies, and executed friends; the elephants of the Hydaspes and the death-march through the Gedrosian sands; and the mysterious death at Babylon that no one has ever fully explained.

Clear, vivid, and honest about both the genius and the brutality — the visionary who fused Greek and Persian and seeded three centuries of Hellenistic civilization, and the conqueror who left a trail of burned cities behind him — this is narrative history at its most gripping: the unforgettable story of the man who marched to the ends of the earth, and of the world he remade and could not hold.