The Conqueror's Road

In the spring of 334 BC a young king led his army across the narrow straits dividing Europe from Asia, stopped to honor the ruins of Troy, and hurled a spear into the sand of the far shore — claiming a continent as spear-won land. He was twenty-two years old. Twelve years later he was dead, master of the largest empire the world had yet seen, worshipped as a god, having marched his men from Greece to the edge of India and never lost a battle. This is the story of Alexander the Great — the boy who tamed a horse no one else could ride and was tutored by Aristotle; the general who shattered the vast Persian Empire at Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela; the conqueror who founded cities, burned Persepolis, married a Bactrian princess, and drove his exhausted army to the ends of the known world before they finally turned back. It is also the story of the man behind the legend: brilliant and charismatic, generous and murderous, a visionary who dreamed of fusing East and West and a tyrant who killed his closest friends in drunken rage. Clear-eyed about both the genius and the brutality — the empire that dissolved within a generation and the Hellenistic world that outlived it for centuries — this is the unforgettable account of the conqueror whose road ran from Macedonia to the Indus, and whose shadow has fallen across every would-be world-conqueror since.