The Hellenistic World

Alexander the Great died in Babylon on June 10, 323 BCE. He was thirty-two. When asked on his deathbed to whom he left his empire, the story goes that he whispered "to the strongest." Whether the anecdote is true or apocryphal hardly matters — it captures what actually happened with brutal accuracy.

Within hours of his death, the generals who had spent two decades fighting together from Macedon to the Indus turned on one another. What followed was forty years of war, betrayal, assassination, and palace intrigue known as the Wars of the Diadochi (the "Successors"). Perdiccas, who held Alexander's signet ring, was murdered by his own officers. Eumenes, the only non-Macedonian among the top commanders, was handed over to his rival in chains. Antigonus One-Eye nearly reunited the empire before being killed at the Battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE, aged eighty-one, still fighting on horseback.

By roughly 280 BCE, three great kingdoms carved from Alexander's conquests dominated the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. A fourth, Pergamon, would emerge later in Anatolia. Together, they created something the Greek world had never seen: a civilization Greek in language and education but Near Eastern in scale and ambition.