Alexander Dies at 32: Empire Shatters Without Heir

Alexander the Great died in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II in Babylon on June 10 or 11, 323 BC, at the age of thirty-two, having conquered an empire stretching from Greece to the borders of India in thirteen years. He had begun his campaign at twenty, leading a Macedonian army across the Hellespont into the Persian Empire after his father Philip II was assassinated. He defeated the Persian King Darius III at the battles of Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela, took Egypt and founded Alexandria, pushed through Central Asia to the Hindu Kush, and reached the banks of the Hyphasis River in India before his exhausted troops refused to march further. The cause of his death remains disputed: ancient sources describe a fever that developed after a prolonged drinking bout, and modern historians have proposed typhoid fever, malaria, poisoning by his own generals, and complications from a wound he received during the siege of Malli. He had not named a successor. When asked on his deathbed who should inherit his empire, he reportedly replied "to the strongest" or possibly "to the best." His generals took him at his word. The Wars of the Diadochi, fought among Alexander's former commanders over the next forty years, carved his empire into rival kingdoms: Ptolemaic Egypt, the Seleucid Empire in Persia and the Near East, Antigonid Macedonia, and several smaller successor states. All of them adopted Greek as their administrative language, spreading Hellenistic culture across the ancient world in a way that Alexander's military conquests alone could not have achieved.