Wars of the DiadochiPolitical
Death of Alexander the Great
Alexander dies in Babylon at age 32, leaving his vast empire without a clear heir. His generals, the Diadochi, begin to carve up the territories.
After more than a decade of unbroken conquest from the Aegean to the Indus, Alexander succumbed to a fever in Nebuchadnezzar's palace at Babylon, having named no successor and leaving only an unborn child by Roxana and a half-brother of limited capacity. Ancient sources, principally Arrian, Plutarch and the so-called Royal Diaries, attribute his death to illness, perhaps complicated by exhaustion and heavy drinking, while a persistent later tradition alleges poisoning at the hands of Antipater's family; modern scholarship generally favours malaria or typhoid. According to Diodorus, Alexander left his ring and empire 'to the strongest', and the resulting power vacuum unleashed nearly half a century of civil wars among the Macedonian marshals, out of which the Hellenistic world would emerge.
