Alexander (Alexandros). 1. Alexander of Pherae (in Thessaly), nephew and successor of Jason, tyrant of Pherae 369–358 BC. He was opposed by most of the cities of Thessaly and allied himself with Athens to counteract Theban expansion. When the Theban general Pelopidas visited him on one of his expeditions, he detained the general as a hostage until the latter was eventually rescued by a second Theban expedition in 367. As the result of a fresh appeal from Thessaly in 364, Pelopidas marched against him and defeated him at Cynoscephalae, but was himself killed. Later, a larger Theban army defeated Alexander and forced him to become the ally of the Thebans. In 362 he felt free to make piratical raids against Athens and raided the Piraeus. He was assassinated in 358 by his wife's brothers.

2. Alexander the Great, Alexander III of Macedon (356–323 BC), son of Philip II and Olympias of Epirus. He was educated by Aristotle and became king of Macedon in 336 upon the murder of his father. Before his death Philip had been about to lead an army against Persia in punishment for the wrongs inflicted on Greece in the Persian Wars 150 years earlier. Alexander aimed to continue this war, and in 334, after securing his position in Greece (rivals were put to death), he crossed the Hellespont into Asia to join the remnants of his father's advance army. He had a force of about 43, 000 men and a fleet of the Greek allies with about fifty warships.

He routed the Persian king Darius III at Issus (333) and captured his family, treating them with notable chivalry. In the following year he occupied Phoenicia (where the capture of the city of Tyre is regarded as his most brilliant military feat), Palestine, and Egypt, and after crushing the Persians again at Arbela (331), he sacked Persepolis (330), the ritual centre of their empire. (Alexander is said to have been incited to this act of destruction by the Greek courtesan Thais and to have later regretted it.) When Darius was murdered in 330, Alexander regarded himself as the legitimate ruler of the Persian empire, and between 330 and 327 he subdued vast tracts of the outlying areas of the empire—Hyrcania, Areia, Drangiana, Bactria, and Sogdiana.

In 327 he invaded northern India, and in 326 he crossed the Indus and reached the river Hydaspes (Jhelum). Here he fought his last great pitched battle to defeat the local king Porus and his formidable elephants. This was the last battle too for Bucephalas, Alexander's horse since childhood, which was wounded and died soon after the battle. Alexander advanced quite easily through the rest of the Punjab to the river Hyphasis (Sutlej) and contemplated proceeding across India to the Ganges but his army, exhausted by the monsoon as much as by the campaigning, refused to go further. He turned back, and in 323, at Babylon he fell suddenly ill at a drinking party, perhaps through fever, perhaps through poison, and after ten days died, aged 32. His body was finally brought to rest in Alexandria, where three centuries later his coffin was seen by the young emperor Augustus. It was probably destroyed in riots during the late third century AD.

Alexander is the greatest general of antiquity. This position he owes partly to the splendidly organized Macedonian army and its technically improved siege weapons, partly to his own versatile and intelligent strategy, but much more to qualities that were uniquely his: an unprecedented speed of movement, resolution in tackling the seemingly impossible, personal involvement in the dangers of battle and the rigours of campaigning, and a heroic sense of style in all that he did. To these qualities as well as to his generosity Alexander owed his ascendancy over the army. His most unusual characteristic was his double sympathy with the life styles of the Persians as well as the Greeks (his two wives—Roxana and Barsine—were Persian, and he encouraged his soldiers to follow his example). His desire to see Macedonians and Persians alike ruling his empire was not popular and may have been partly the cause of the various plots against his life.

Alexander clearly felt an intense concern for religion and showed scrupulous respect for local gods wherever he encountered them. In his lifetime he was widely acclaimed as divine, the son of Zeus, and he seems to have believed in his own divinity and to have been encouraged in this belief by his mother. Certainly he strove to emulate those other sons of gods, the Homeric heroes. His most lasting achievement was to extend the Greek language and institutions over the eastern world in such a way that he brought about an absolute break with the past. No region once conquered and settled by Alexander resumed its old ways uninfluenced by the conquest. The Greek city-states too never regained the independence that they lost with Philip. The centre of the (Hellenistic) Greek world shifted to Alexandria, and with that shift arose a new kind of Greek culture.

The principal extant authority for the history of Alexander's campaigns is the Anabasis of Arrian, who used as sources the writings, now lost, of Alexander's officers Ptolemy (later King Ptolemy I Soter of Egypt), Aristobulus of Cassandreia, and the sea-captain Nearchus, all of whom were sympathetic to Alexander. He may also have used Alexander's lost journal (Ephemerides), but some scholars doubt the existence of an authentic journal. There is also a tradition, which may be seen in the fragmentary history of Quintus Curtius, of writers hostile to Alexander, who represented him as a tyrant corrupted by power; most of them are of the Peripatetic (Aristotelian) School, whose hostility was natural enough after Callisthenes' death. Plutarch's Life is compiled from every kind of source, good and bad. The most influential tradition, however, stems from the narrative of Cleitarchus, written in the third century BC and known to us through the writings of Diodorus Siculus; Cleitarchus introduced the fabulous, an element that was further developed in the various Eastern versions of Alexander's life. From Latin versions supposedly translated from Callisthenes the legends passed into French poetry of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, thus giving the twelve-syllabled alexandrine line its name. There are two Old English works of the eleventh century based on the Latin legend, but it is from the French poems that the Alexander legends passed into the Middle English metrical romances such as ‘King Alisaunder’.

3. Alexander of Aphrodisias (flourished c. AD 200), the most important of the early commentators on Aristotle. Of his commentaries (in Greek) a few survive, and his works are widely quoted by later writers.

4. Alternative name for Paris (1).