Death is not the misfortune of the dead, but the misfortune of the living. Pen? Interesting? Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 info Nature.2

- Epicurus (representative of the hedonism of Arestepus)

After conquering Sidon, Alexander continued southward, and after a two-month siege, Egypt surrendered without a single shot; Alexander then stayed in Egypt for a while to give his army a respite, and founded Alexandria, the capital of what would become the Kingdom of Egypt, where the 24-year-old Alexander was hailed as Pharaoh and called him the son of the sun god Amun.

In fact, when Ptolemy, the governor of Egypt in Alexander's empire, established the Kingdom of Egypt, he insisted on using the title of pharaoh instead of the king of Egypt. The real first pharaoh was not Ptolemy I, who founded the Kingdom of Egypt, but Alexander the Great, who founded Alexander's empire!

After repairing in Egypt, Alexander then led his army to the East, marched north to the heart of Persia, and made a general reckoning with Darius; At the Battle of Arbela, also known as the Battle of Gaugamela, Alexander's 40,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry faced the overwhelming army of the tribes of the Persian Empire conscripted by Darius himself.

Plutarch's classical work, The Greco-Roman Biographies, says that the Persian Empire had a million troops, while the ancient historian Arian says that it was 40,000 cavalry, 1 million infantry, 200 chariots with scythes, and 15 war elephants. These figures are, of course, greatly exaggerated.

The true number of the Persian Empire's army is unknown, but the most conservative estimate is that it had 200,000 infantry and 45,000 cavalry; The Battle of Abella resulted in the collapse of the ancient and vast Persian Empire, and their emperor Darius desperately fled the battlefield.

After this victory, Alexander led his army into the two capitals of Babylon and Persia: Susa and Persepolis; Alexander then embarked on his long march, from Posepolis to Ecbadana, and then to Raga, passing through the Caspian Gate, and finally catching up with the enemy after a long and rapid march.

In order to prevent Emperor Darius III (not Darius the Great) from surrendering to Alexander, Darius's officers assassinated their emperor in 33o BC; But Alexander defeated Darius's heir, Perthas, and beheaded him, and after three years of fighting, conquered the entire western part of the Great 6 of the East, and continued to advance further east.

Alexander entered the eastern provinces of the Persian Empire, mainly Bactria and Sogdiana; After the execution of the local representative of the rebel Bessas, Alexander's army was bogged down in the guerrilla war in the east led by Spitamines.

Spitamines, who was a secretive man, once led a nomadic army to defeat a small army of Alexander, and captured some of Alexander's forts; Realizing the gravity of the situation, Alexander rounded him up militarily and brutally suppressed the local rebellion.

During this time, Alexander also defeated the nomadic cavalry of the Scythians, proving that the nomadic tactics of the archers were not a problem for him, and the Scythian leader immediately surrendered; Spitamines fought with Alexander for a while, but was finally completely defeated by Alexander's subordinate who was ambushed in the area, and was sacrificed by the locals and executed.

After the elimination of his main opponents, Alexander set out to suppress rebellions in various places, and at the Battle of Sogdiana Rock he demonstrated the mountain warfare skills of his troops, capturing the local nobles and the family of the rebel leader Akyatis.

Then he changed his brutal style in the region, and planned to officially marry Roxana, the daughter of Achatis; When his father heard the news, he personally surrendered, and since then the battle in the eastern province has been completely over, and there is no obstacle to the road to India.

By this time Alexander had conquered the entire Persian Empire, and he could have returned to the Macedonian kingdom to reorganize his new territory; But his conquest was not satisfied, and he wanted to continue to wave his army into India.

While marching east of the Indus River, Alexander confronted the Indian king Bolasg, who had come to fight against him, and fought the last of his four great battles, the Battle of Hydaspes, and completely routed Bolas's army.

Because of his admiration for Bolas's bravery, and in order to win the support of the locals, Alexander released the captured Bolas after winning the war, and still made him king of India; Although Bolas's two sons and one grandson were killed on the battlefield, Bolas himself remained loyal to Alexander.

By this time, Alexander's army had begun to become war-weary, and Alexander had to stop the expedition and begin to return west to the Macedonian kingdom, on the way he defeated the tribes who did not obey him, and sent a series of expeditions, including identifying the mouth of the Indus River, searching for the Persian Gulf, and mapping the coastal topography, and trying to find out whether the Caspian Sea was a sea or a lake, and so on.

The year after returning to the Persian Empire, Alexander spent nearly a year reorganizing his empire and army, a major reorganization; From an early age, Alexander believed that the Greek nation represented the only truly civilized people, and that all non-Greek peoples were barbarians, which was certainly a popular view throughout the Greek world, and even Aristotle.

Although Alexander had completely defeated the Persian army, he gradually realized that the Persians were not barbarians at all, that they were as intelligent and talented as the Greeks, and that they were just as worthy of respect; Thus he conceived the idea of merging the two parts of his empire, and thus created a unified Greco-Persian republic, with himself as its own supreme ruler, of course.

As far as the Romans knew, he did want the Persians to be equal partners with the Greeks and Macedonians; In order to realize this plan, he incorporated a large number of Persian troops into his own army, and also held a grand banquet for the "union of East and West".

At the banquet, thousands of Macedonian soldiers from the Western Big 6 were formally married to the women of the Eastern Big 6; Although he himself had been married to a princess of the Oriental Big 6 in the past, this time he married the daughter of **Lis.

It was clear that Alexander was trying to use this reorganized army to carry out another campaign of conquest, and it was known to all that he intended to invade Arabia, and perhaps the regions north of the Persian Empire, and perhaps to invade India again, or to conquer Rome, Carthage, and the Western Mediterranean.

Whatever his calculations, any further conquest he wanted was unsuccessful; In early June 323 B.C.E., Alexander suddenly fell ill with fever in Babylon and died ten days later, when he was not yet thirty-three years old.

The cause of Alexander the Great's death has long been disputed, and most accounts record that Alexander contracted malaria after a heavy drink in Babylon, and typhoid fever may also be another murderer; It is also theorized that he died of sneezing root poisoning, and that the conspirators may have included his wife Roxana, his subordinate Antipater, and his teacher Aristotle.

More important than the cause of Alexander the Great's death is the question of his heirs; Alexander did not leave behind a legitimate successor to the throne, and was closest to him was a weak and incompetent half-brother, and there was no other heir by blood.

Legend has it that when his friend asked him to appoint an heir before he died, he vaguely said, "Let the strongest inherit." After his death, his generals attempted to divide the empire, which led to the dissatisfaction of some young officers with this arrangement, and a series of wars ensued, in which Alexander's mother, wife, and children were killed.

Finally, in 3o1 BC, a decisive battle was fought in which three victors (i.e., Ptolemy, Seleucus, and Antigonus I) divided Alexander's empire, ushering in the Hellenistic era; With the exception of Macedonia itself and India, the Great 6 of the East was succeeded by the general Seleucus, which is the Seleucid Empire that now dominates the Great 6 of the East.

Egypt was succeeded by the general Ptolemy, which was the Ptolemaic dynasty of the Kingdom of Egypt, which is now indirectly controlled by the Augustan Empire; Antigonus I established a brief reign in the northern part of the Great 6 of the East, but soon came to an end.

The Seleucid Empire's control over Indian territory was short-lived, and when Seleucus I was defeated by the king of the Kingdom of India, the connection between the Seleucid Empire and the Indian region was completely severed; Later, after the Seleucid Empire fell into internal chaos, many of the more eastern territories of the entire Seleucid Empire were also lost, and finally the current Seleucid Empire was formed.

From the age of twenty when he succeeded to the throne of the Kingdom of Macedonia to the age of thirty-three when he died as Emperor of Alexander's Empire; It took Alexander the Great thirteen years to build the largest empire in human history.

If fate had given Alexander the Great another ten years, he would have had plenty of time to consolidate his empire, and he could also train a worthy successor for his empire; Then the world will all belong to Alexander the Great, and even the Romans living on the Apennine Peninsula will not be able to escape the final conquest by Alexander the Great.

Unfortunately, fate was unwilling to allow Alexander the Great to establish greater feats, and when Alexander the Great was just beginning to step onto a bigger stage, the world lost Alexander the Great, and Alexander's empire fell apart.

Although the Augustan Empire was powerful and had incredible potential, its overall strength could not be compared with Alexander's empire at its peak; As for Oscar, he is less than five years away from turning thirty-three.

Perhaps in five years, the Augustan Empire will be even more powerful than Alexander's Empire; But no one dares to guarantee that Oscar's life will end at the age of thirty-three, and if Oscar lives another ten or eight years, there will be only one Augustan Empire left in this world that dominates the world, which is something that no one can accept! (To be continued.) )