This chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s wealth by examining the sources of his income and his expenditure. In connection to the expenditure, the chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s coinage. The chapter suggests that while Alexander’s campaigns brought tremendous wealth to the king, much of his useable wealth was absorbed by the army necessary for the campaigns.

Plutarch devotes two speeches and a biography specifically to Alexander. Current scholarship prioritizes the author over his subject. The erudite Plutarch employs numerous Alexander sources for his own writerly purposes. In the speeches he argues that Alexander’s successes are due to his own efforts rather than gifted by fortune. It is to be doubted that Plutarch had a serious polemical or philosophical point to prove; his epideictic oratory aims at rhetorical display and furnishing evidence from ready knowledge. The Life is similarly moulded by generic requirements. Plutarch provides an episodic birth-to-death account of Alexander, in which he presents himself as a competent interpreter and adviser. He quotes early sources, in particular from a collection of letters by Alexander, to render his depiction more authentic. Focusing on the ‘signs of the soul’, Plutarch is most interested in court politics and personal morals. His Alexander is determined by his physical make-up and greatness of soul on the one hand, and how effectively education and philosophy direct his ambition on the other. His biography is not apologetic; rather he wishes to educate his readership on how personal morality impacts on governance. References to his own context, if at all present, are oblique.

The chapter collects what may be known of Alexander’s life up until the battle of Chaeronea, for which the source of primary importance is Plutarch’s biography. It attempts to sift what may plausibly regarded as historical from embellishments of various kinds (contemporary and subsequent, propagandist, folkloric or mythologyzing). Particular attention is given to: Alexander’s three birth myths; his education at the hands of Lysimachus of Acarnania, Leonidas of Epirus and Aristotle; Aeschines’ vignette of him as nine-year-old boy; the intriguing traditions bearing upon his horse Bucephalas; his regency during the Byzantine campaign, his foundation of Alexandropolis and his dealings with the Persian ambassadors; his role in the battle at Chaeronea.

Women were interwoven into the politics of Alexander’s itinerant court. Alexander’s mother Olympias and his full sister Cleopatra played the most important and enduring roles at court, even though they remained in the Greek peninsula and never saw Alexander again. His half-sisters Cynnane and Thessalonice and his niece Adea-Eurydice (also all resident in the Greek peninsula during Alexander’s reign) only grew to some level of importance after his death. His first wife, the Bactrian Roxane, mother of Alexander IV, played more of a role, though a still limited one, than his two Achaemenid wives. Though he never married the half-Persian Barsine, he fathered a son by her. Men and women worked together, not infrequently for violent ends. Women’s access to information, their participation in information networks covering great distances, their attempts to influence events and decisions, and their ability to exercise patronage to their own ends is striking. The violent deaths of all the female Argeads (by birth or marriage) resemble those of male Argeads and many of the Successors. All these women were, in the end, killed because they somehow constituted a problem, a threat to others, just as the men did.

We appraise Alexander’s court. We ask what constituted a ‘court’, as well as considering problems with assessing Alexander’s and those of the earlier Macedonian kings. A brief bibliographic survey follows, with salient literature about the court and institutions, Macedonian prosopography, and related topics. We then examine elite offices, specifically the Hetairoi or Companions, the Royal Pages or King’s Boys, the Royal Bodyguard, and specialized army units populated by the elite, such as the Royal Hypaspists. Finally, we consider two institutions exploited by the kings to engage with the Companions and read their mood: the royal symposium and the royal hunt.

This chapter examines the religious role of Alexander as king and military commander in the Greek world and the territory of the Achaemenid empire. It explores how he used sanctuaries of the gods to develop his relationship with the Greek cities, as locations for the meetings of associations of Greek cities, and as sites for making dedications. It considers the honours offered to Alexander by the Greek cities, arguing that these were offered spontaneously, and were not a response to any request from Alexander. It discusses his use of diviners and other religious experts while on campaign. It considers the extent to which Alexander engaged with the religious practices and expectations of the territories he conquered, including in particular Egypt and Babylon. It discusses the evidence that Alexander consciously attempted to emulate Heracles and Dionysus, and suggests that this is unlikely to reflect any historical reality. It then explores the story of Alexander’s visit to the oracle of Ammon/Amun at the Siwah oasis, suggesting that while Alexander was aware of the significance of his pharaonic titulary, including the phrase ‘son of Amun’, this did not lead to claims of divine filiation beyond Egypt.

The Argead Kingdom in Macedonia knew only primitive political institutions until the middle of the fourth century. Its Kings came from a family that had been divinely chosen and was differentiated from the rest of the population by a collective charisma. It was kept in power through its association with a Hetairoi (Companion) class, with which it socialized in symposia, which it fought with as cavalry in war, with which it hunted, sometimes for reasons of state. The royal hunt was sometimes more than a leisure activity, more than a bonding experience, and more than a preparation for war: it was one of a series of orchestrated showcases which validated and legitimized a King’s rule. In special hunts the King acted out the role of a hero, whose responsibility it was to protect all of his subjects from the forces of chaos both physical and metaphysical. As observers of the King’s prowess, the Hetairoi testified, where appropriate, to the King’s right to rule. Things began to evolve in Macedon at the end of the Peloponnesian War, but only picked up steam after the accession of Philip II. However, even as late as Alexander III, Macedonian expectations remained conservative and tradition-bound.

The image of Alexander flourished across the disiecta membra of the empire he created and far beyond it. Consideration is given here to the appropriation of the king’s image in the broader sense – and principally through the medium of texts – in relation to the founders of the greater two of the Successor dynasties, those of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The legend of Seleucus was richly bathed in Alexander-imagery, and this imagery was focused, in different ways, on the person of Seleucus himself. Some of the tales focus syntagmatically on his personal interaction with the king, whilst he yet lived, and indeed in one case even after even he had died. Others serve to establish paradigmatic or typological parallel between the actions of Alexander and those of Seleucus, and some seek to do both. The case of Ptolemy is different: whilst there is again some focus on Ptolemy’s personal interaction with Alexander, much of the legend-generation focuses rather on Alexander’s relationship with Ptolemy’s city of Alexandria, the glory of which was the king’s tomb. So long as Ptolemy remained ensconced in the city, he could afford to bask in a more indirectly reflected variety of the king’s charisma.

The chapter deals with the administration of Alexander’s empire. The main focus is on the satrapal administration. Although Alexander borrowed the system of regional governance from the Achaemenids, he introduced changes to it, adapting it to the new circumstances. Alexander’s actions in the administrative sphere were not aimed at a realization of any abstract ideal. They were taken to satisfy specific needs arising at given points. Nonetheless, it is obvious that all the actions of the king were in pursuit of one main goal: the creation of an effective administrative system for the Imperial lands that would allow him to control and exploit the subjugated peoples better.

The chapter discusses ancient and modern treatments of Alexander’s death. It describes the omens said to foretell his death and their cultural and historical background, treating ancient versions of what led to Alexander’s death and attempts by historians and scientists to detect the working of poison, conspiracy, or less-violent and sinister causes. The rest of the chapter focuses on Alexander’s so-called last plans, their authenticity, the reasons for their rejection, and the contentious history of his body and burial.

Alexander III inherited the Persian campaign from his father Philip II, who had aimed to conquer Asia Minor, probably in order to secure a permanent source of income from the revenues of its rich cities. Going further, Alexander ended the reign of the Achaemenid dynasty established by Darius I in 522/21 BC and campaigned to the borders of Achaemenid influence in the Indus region. Contrary to the panhellenic propaganda preserved by the Alexander historiographers, the war was about the acquisition of territory, influence and wealth – not a war of ‘liberation’ or ‘reprisal’. Since there exists no Persian historiography and the extant numismatic, administrative and archaeological sources reveal little of political history, it is difficult to view the events from a Persian perspective. However, scholarship’s traditional biased images of the Persian empire as weak, chaotic, compromised by decadence and inner strife, and hence doomed to fall, have come to be rejected as reflecting Greek and Roman stereotypes. In current scholarship, it is stressed that Alexander appropriated and adapted most of the political and administrative structures of the Achaemenid empire: it was the existing system that supported his conquest.

A. is born (6 Hecatombaeon = July 20) to Philip II and the Epirote princess Olympias.