Arrian of Nicomedia, a Greek under the Roman Empire and a student of Epictetus, wrote the best surviving story of Alexander the Great’s march, using the lost accounts of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, who had been there. This is Book 1 of the Anabasis of Alexander. Philip of Macedon is dead. His son, twenty-two, is king in Macedon, in northern Greece.

Alexander burns Thebes but spares the poet Pindar’s house. He crosses the Dardanelles, races to Troy, and hangs his armor in the temple. At the Granicus, a river in western Turkey, Persian governors and Memnon’s Greek mercenaries hold the bank. Alexander leads the Companions, his elite cavalry; an axe finds his helmet; Cleitus cuts the man down. Sardis opens. Halicarnassus, Memnon’s fortress, does not. The Gordian knot is cut or pulled, depending on the source. Memnon wanted to strip Asia Minor and fight at sea; the governors wanted a river fight and got one. A young man who sleeps on Homer wakes to the loot of Lydia. The Persian empire, from the Aegean to India, has not yet sent its king.