Plutarch, a Greek from Chaeronea in central Greece, wrote Parallel Lives in the first and second centuries AD: paired biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, built around character rather than a year-by-year war diary. This life is Alexander, set beside Julius Caesar. Alexander of Macedon — a kingdom in what is now northern Greece and North Macedonia — became king at twenty, inherited a war against Persia (centered in today’s Iran), and died at thirty-two in Babylon, in Iraq, after taking an empire from Greece to India.

Plutarch watches the man: the fury, the drinking, the claim of divine birth, and the murder of friends who had ridden too far with him. Three battles — at the Granicus in western Turkey, at Issus in southern Turkey, and at Gaugamela in northern Iraq — broke King Darius of Persia. Then came the siege of Tyre on the Lebanese coast, a visit to the oracle of Ammon in the Egyptian desert, Persepolis burned in Iran, a mutiny at the Hyphasis (the Beas River in the Punjab), and a deadly crossing of the Gedrosian sands in southern Iran and Pakistan. It is a study of a conqueror, and of what victory did to him.