Alexander the Great and the Fall of Achaemenid Persia
It is often said that Cyrus and Darius created Persia (c 550 BCE), Xerxes inherited it, and his successors destroyed it. By the days of Darius III (340 BCE), Achaemenid Persia was but a shadow of the days of Xerxes... And then Alexander came…
It began as a slow decline fueled by violence and negligence on the throne—as well as the difficult task of maintaining unity within a population so diverse in language, religion, morals, and traditions. From the day when Xerxes turned back defeated from Salamis, it became evident that Greece would one day challenge the empire. It only needed a master who could give her unity. This unity came from a foreigner, a Macedonian. Yes, Persia had been declining, but the sudden fall brought forth by Alexander the Great between 334 BCE and 330 BCE is a fascinating tale of conquest. Alexander crossed the Hellespont in the spring of 334 with 30,000 footmen, 5,000 cavalry, and met Darius (III) at Issus. With all the stupidity that destiny could require, Darius had chosen a field in which only a small part of his ~50,000 men could fight at one time. When the slaughter was over, the Macedonians had lost some 450 while the Persians lost 110,000 men—most of these being slain in wild retreat. Darius fled ignominiously, abandoning his mother, a wife, two daughters, his chariot, and his luxuriously appointed tent. From then, battle after battle Alexander was outnumbered (sometimes as much as 20 to 1); but battle after battle the Persian casualties were 100 to 200 times higher than his. By 331 BCE, the two kings met at Gaugamela where Darius had gathered a new army of one million men chiefly from his eastern provinces. Alexander, with only 7,000 cavalry and 40,000 infantry, destroyed the Persian army in a single day thanks to superior weapons, generalship, and courage. Darius, again, chose the better part of valor—but his generals, disgusted with this second flight, murdered him in his tent. Alexander organized Persia into a province of the Macedonian Empire, left a strong garrison to guard it, and marched on to India.
Source: Durant, Will, 1885-1981, Our Oriental Heritage: Volume I Simon and Schuster, 1935.
Image by Berthold Werner under license CC BY-SA 3.0
Back to archive
Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!