From Macedon to the Ends of the Earth

Alexander's whole arc in one sitting — a twenty-year-old king who crossed into Asia with a borrowed treasury, broke the Persian Empire at Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela, marched through Bactria to the rivers of the Punjab, defeated Porus and turned back only when his own army refused to go further, survived the Gedrosian desert, and died at thirty-two in Babylon, master of the known world.