Cavalry commander at age eighteen, king at twenty, conqueror of the Persian Empire at twenty-six, explorer of the Indian frontier at thirty, Alexander the Great died before his thirty-third birthday: neither the ancient sources nor the modern literature take sufficient note of this brilliant commander’s extreme youth. He was widely despised by many of the subject Greeks, whose attitude might best be summed up by the comment attributed to one Athenian orator who, when informed of Alexander’s death, replied, “What? Alexander dead? Impossible! The world would reek of his corpse!” In the end, his achievement appears to have been a grand adventure tied to his own personal ambitions—conquest for its own sake. Kings, generals, and emperors discovered