Final Period

In 330–327 tribes near the Caspian Sea and in present-day Afghanistan and Russian Turkestan were conquered. By this time Alexander was setting up governments in the conquered territories under native rather than Macedonian officials. In 327 he married a Bactrian princess, Roxana. The Macedonian troops resented their king's friendly treatment of conquered peoples, as well as his adoption of Persian dress. There was growing discontent also over going farther and farther from home.

In 326 the army crossed the Indus River to the Hydaspes (Jhelum) River in northwestern India. There Alexander met and defeated the army of King Porus, who became his ally for the rest of the Indian campaign. After a few more battles, however, the army openly rebelled against continuing the campaign. Alexander was forced to turn homeward. A great fleet was built on the Indus, and the ships accompanied the army down to the Arabian Sea. From there the land forces returned through the desert to Persia, while the fleet explored the coastline all the way to the Persian Gulf.

Back at Susa in 324 Alexander took steps to merge the people under his rule into a unified empire. He ordered mass intermarriages between his Macedonian soldiers and Asiatic women, and himself took two Persian princesses as wives. Persian troops were added to his army.

At the Olympic Games of 324 a spokesman for Alexander proposed that the king should thereafter be treated as a god. In Persia the Macedonian troops were offended by what they considered their ruler's growing arrogance. When Alexander undertook to replace some of his veteran soldiers with Persians, there was another rebellion, followed in a few days by a reconciliation. In the winter of 324–323 a campaign was waged against Mesopotamian hill tribes.

Alexander had returned to Babylon to make plans for a land-sea expedition around Arabia when he fell ill with a fever and died. He was not yet 33 years old. His body, according to legend, was preserved in honey within a glass coffin and placed in an imposing mausoleum in Alexandria, Egypt.

Control of the empire fell to a group of Alexander's generals, known as the Diadochi (Successors). In the struggle among them for supreme power, Alexander's mother and half-brother, his son by Roxana, and Roxana herself were all murdered. Eventually the empire was divided between two of the Diadochi—Seleucus in Syria and Ptolemy in Egypt—and Antigonus, grandson of another, in Macedonia.