Alexander III was the son of Philip II of Macedon and Olympias; in boyhood a pupil of Aristotle. Succeeding to the throne in 336 BCE, in not quite thirteen years he conquered the Persian Empire, reached India, founded a number of cities (above all Alexandria in Egypt), and created a dominion of unheard-of extent. He died at Babylon in 323 BCE, aged thirty-two, of a fever (the cause is also debated — drink, or poison). The empire fragmented at once in the wars of the Diadochi.

Alexander appears in Marcus not as a philosopher but as a historical exemplum: the greatest of conquerors, whose power and fame did not annul death. He is a figure for the memory of death, not a source of doctrine.

Significance in Marcus

Alexander is a recurring image of the levelling power of death. The most vivid instance is 06-24: "Alexander the Great and his muleteer came, in death, to one and the same state: either they were taken up into the same seminal principles (λόγοι σπερματικοί) of the world, or were alike scattered into atoms." The conqueror of the world is exactly as dead as the least of his servants; greatness in life changes nothing in the outcome. (Note: here too Marcus keeps ready the same fork "seminal principles or atoms" — the Stoics or Democritus.)

In 03-03 Alexander heads the triad of conquerors (with Pompey and Gaius Caesar), who "so many times razed cities to the ground and slaughtered myriads in battle" — and themselves "departed from life." The lesson of the catalogue: neither the scale of power nor the number of the slain ransoms one from death.

In 08-03 Alexander, Caesar, and Pompey are directly contrasted with the sages (Socrates, Diogenes, Heraclitus): the conquerors subdued bodies, the philosophers grasped the nature of things — and which proved the freer?

• 03-03 — at the head of the triad of conquerors in the catalogue of deaths.
• 06-24 — Alexander and the mule-driver made equal by death (the best-known image).
• 08-03 — conquerors against sages.
• 10-27 — Alexander among the five courts of "older history," beside Philip and Croesus: the same dramas, "only through others."
• 09-29 — Alexander, Philip and Demetrius of Phalerum: did they discern what the common nature willed and school themselves? If they "played it as tragedy," no one bids us imitate them.

• Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander; Plutarch, Alexander; Quintus Curtius Rufus; Diodorus Siculus, book XVII.
• The link with the Peripatetics runs through his teacher Aristotle; cf. the card theophrastus.
• A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great, Cambridge 1988.
• R. Lane Fox, Alexander the Great, London 1973.