Who Was Alexander the Great?

1. The prince of Macedonia

Alexander was born in 356 BCE at Pella, the capital of Macedonia, the son of King Philip II and Olympias, daughter of the king of Epirus. Macedonia was, in Greek eyes, a rough northern kingdom, rich in soldiers and poor in culture, and Philip had spent his reign turning it into the dominant power in Greece. From about 343 BCE, when Alexander was 13, he was tutored by the philosopher Aristotle, with companions who later became his generals, studying politics, ethics, medicine and literature. Ancient accounts say he carried a copy of Homer's Iliad, edited by Aristotle, with him on campaign, and that he modelled himself on Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, whose anger and glory he admired. He commanded the left wing of the Macedonian army at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, when he was 18, and he became king two years later, when Philip was assassinated.

The education Alexander received from Aristotle is one of the most famous teacher-pupil relationships in history, and it is worth asking what it actually gave him. Aristotle taught him to think about politics, to value reason, and to see the world as a place that could be understood and ordered. But Aristotle also taught that Greeks were superior to barbarians, and that some peoples were natural slaves, ideas that Alexander's later policy of treating Persians as partners would contradict. The relationship between teacher and pupil is therefore complicated: Alexander learned from Aristotle, and then he outgrew him, and the pupil's empire was, in some ways, a rejection of the teacher's philosophy. That tension, between the Greek idea of superiority and the practical need to govern a multi-ethnic empire, runs through Alexander's whole career.

His accession was not smooth. Philip's assassination in 336 BCE left a 20-year-old king facing rivals at home, revolts in Greece, and a Persian Empire that was the largest in the world. Alexander moved fast: he secured Macedonia, crushed a revolt in Thebes so brutally that the city was destroyed as a warning, and then turned east, to the invasion of Persia that his father had planned. The speed of his response, and its ruthlessness, set the pattern for his reign: he would act first, think later, and deal with opposition by destroying it. That pattern won him an empire, and it also made him enemies who would outlive him.

2. The conquest of Persia: three battles that changed the world

Alexander crossed into Asia in the spring of 334 BCE and defeated the Persians at the Granicus River, then won the Battle of Issus in 333 BCE, where he defeated the Persian king Darius III in person, and then took Tyre after a seven-month siege and entered Egypt in 332 BCE, where he was crowned pharaoh and founded Alexandria. The decisive battle came at Gaugamela in 331 BCE, where Alexander's smaller army defeated a Persian force that ancient sources say numbered in the hundreds of thousands, though modern historians think the numbers were exaggerated. The victory broke Persian power, and Alexander took Babylon, Susa and Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Empire, which his soldiers burned, an act that is still debated: was it revenge for the Persian burning of Athens a century and a half earlier, was it an accident, or was it a deliberate statement that the old order was finished?

The military explanation for Alexander's victories is a combination of tactics, organisation and leadership. The Macedonian army, built by Philip, was the finest in the ancient world: its phalanx, armed with long pikes, held the enemy in place, while the Companion cavalry, led by Alexander himself, struck at the decisive point. Alexander fought in the front rank, sharing the danger with his men, and his personal courage inspired a loyalty that no other ancient commander matched. He also adapted: he learned from Persian tactics, he used siege engines at Tyre, and he marched his army through deserts and mountains that other generals would not have attempted. His campaigns are still studied in military academies, not because his tactics were mysterious, but because his combination of speed, surprise and personal leadership is so hard to replicate.

The scale of the conquest is worth pausing on. In thirteen years Alexander marched his army more than 20,000 kilometres, from Greece to India, through terrain that ranged from the mountains of Afghanistan to the deserts of Iran to the monsoon rains of the Punjab. He did it with an army that never numbered more than about 50,000 men, against empires that could field many times that number, and he did it without losing a battle. Julius Caesar, who wept when he read about Alexander because he had achieved so little by the same age, and Napoleon Bonaparte, who carried a copy of Alexander's campaigns with him, both measured themselves against him, and both fell short of his record. The conquest was a military achievement without parallel in the ancient world, and it is the foundation of everything else in his story.

3. Alexandria and the spread of Greek culture

Alexander founded cities wherever he went, most of them named Alexandria, and the most famous is Alexandria in Egypt, founded in 331 BCE. The cities were not only military garrisons; they were centres of Greek culture, with theatres, gymnasia, temples and markets, and they planted Greek settlers, language and institutions across three continents. Alexandria in Egypt became one of the great cities of the ancient world, home to the Library of Alexandria and to scholars who advanced mathematics, astronomy and medicine for centuries. The Hellenistic period, the three centuries that followed Alexander's death, was defined by these cities: Greek became the common language of the eastern Mediterranean, Greek art and philosophy spread to Central Asia, and the cultures of Greece, Egypt, Persia and India mixed in ways that had never happened before.

The question of whether Alexander intended this cultural fusion, or whether it was an accident of his conquests, is one of the central debates about him. His supporters point to his policy of fusion: he married a Persian princess, Roxana, and later two more Persian princesses in a mass wedding at Susa, he adopted Persian dress and court ceremony, he appointed Persians to high office, and he encouraged his soldiers to marry Persian women. They argue that he had a vision of a united world, in which Greeks and Persians would live as partners, and that his empire was a deliberate attempt to create a new, mixed civilisation. His critics argue that the marriages and the Persian appointments were practical politics, a way to govern a vast empire with too few Macedonians, and that Alexander's vision, if he had one, was of himself as a god-king, not of a multicultural utopia.

The truth is probably between the two positions. Alexander was a practical ruler who understood that he could not govern Persia with Macedonians alone, and he was also a man of large ambitions who enjoyed the idea of being a universal king. His adoption of Persian customs angered his Macedonian generals, who saw it as a betrayal of Greek values, and it led to quarrels, executions and a growing distance between the king and his army. The tension between his vision and his men's expectations is one of the tragedies of his reign: the more he succeeded in becoming a ruler of the world, the less he remained a king of Macedonians, and the men who had followed him from Greece began to wonder whether they still recognised him.

4. India, mutiny and the limits of conquest

In 326 BCE Alexander crossed the Indus and defeated the Indian king Porus at the Battle of the Hydaspes, one of his hardest-fought victories, in which his army faced war elephants for the first time. He wanted to go further, to the Ganges and to the eastern ocean, but his army refused. At the Hyphasis River, his soldiers mutinied, exhausted by eight years of campaigning, by the monsoon rains, and by the prospect of facing the Nanda Empire, which was said to have an army larger than any they had yet met. Alexander sulked in his tent for three days, hoping they would change their minds, and then he turned back. The mutiny was the first time his army had said no to him, and it marked the limit of his conquests: he had reached the edge of the world his men were willing to conquer.

The return journey was a disaster. Alexander marched his army through the Gedrosian desert, in what is now Pakistan and Iran, and thousands of his soldiers died of thirst and heat. The march is still debated: was it a deliberate test of endurance, was it a mistake, or was it a punishment for the mutiny? Ancient sources say that Alexander shared the suffering of his men, refusing water when they had none, and that his willingness to suffer with them restored their loyalty. Modern historians are less certain, and they note that the losses in the desert were among the worst of his whole reign. What is clear is that the army that returned to Babylon in 324 BCE was not the army that had left Macedonia in 334 BCE: it was older, wearier, and less certain of its king.

The Indian campaign also changed Alexander himself. He had always fought in the front rank, and he had been wounded several times, most seriously at the siege of a Mallian town in India, where he was struck by an arrow that pierced his lung and nearly killed him. The wounds, the drinking, and the years of strain took their toll, and the Alexander who returned from India was a harder, more suspicious man than the one who had left. He executed generals he suspected of disloyalty, he demanded that his men prostrate themselves before him as Persians did before their king, and he quarrelled with his oldest friends. The king who had once been the companion of his soldiers was becoming a distant, oriental monarch, and the change frightened those who had known him longest.

5. Death in Babylon and the wars of the successors

Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BCE, aged 32, after a short illness. The cause is disputed: ancient sources suggest fever, poisoning, alcohol or malaria, and modern scholars have proposed many theories, from typhoid to West Nile virus to assassination by one of his generals, but no cause is proven. He had no clear heir: his son by Roxana, Alexander IV, was born after his death, and his half-brother Philip Arrhidaeus was mentally unfit to rule. On his deathbed, when asked to whom he left his empire, he is said to have replied, to the strongest, and his generals took him at his word. Within a generation the empire was divided among them in a series of wars that lasted for decades, and the unity Alexander had built was destroyed by the men who had built it with him.

The speed of the empire's collapse is one of the most striking facts about Alexander. He had built the largest empire the ancient world had seen, and it did not survive him by a year. The reason was that the empire was held together by one man, not by institutions: there was no administration that could function without him, no succession law that could name an heir, and no capital that could govern the whole. The Hellenistic kingdoms that emerged from the wars, the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids in Asia, the Antigonids in Macedonia, were Greek kingdoms, and they carried Alexander's culture forward, but they were not his empire. Genghis Khan, who built an even larger empire eight centuries later, faced the same problem, and his empire also divided among his sons. The lesson is that conquest and government are different skills, and that Alexander, for all his genius as a conqueror, was not a builder of institutions.

Cleopatra, who ruled Egypt three centuries after Alexander, was a descendant of Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals, and her kingdom was one of the Hellenistic states his conquests had created. Her story is, in a sense, the long tail of Alexander's: the Greek culture he spread, the cities he founded, and the dynasties his generals established shaped the eastern Mediterranean for three hundred years, until Rome conquered them. Alexander's empire died with him, but his world did not, and that distinction, between the empire and the world it created, is the key to his legacy.

6. Hero or destroyer? The debate over Alexander

Historians have argued about Alexander for two thousand years, and they still cannot agree on whether he was a hero or a destroyer. His admirers point to his military genius, his vision of cultural fusion, his founding of cities, and the spread of Greek science, philosophy and art that followed his conquests. They argue that he opened the East to the West, that he created the Hellenistic world, and that without him there would have been no Library of Alexandria, no Greek influence on India, and no common culture for the Roman Empire to inherit. His critics point to the destruction: Thebes razed, Tyre's population massacred or enslaved, Persepolis burned, and the countless dead of his campaigns, and they argue that his conquests were an exercise in personal ambition that brought misery to millions and that his vision, if he had one, was of himself as a god, not of a better world.

Both sides have evidence, and the debate is really about how to weigh achievement against cost. Alexander's campaigns killed, by some estimates, hundreds of thousands of people, and they destroyed cities and cultures that had existed for centuries. They also created a world in which Greek and Eastern cultures met, in which trade and ideas flowed across continents, and in which the foundations of modern science were laid. The question is whether the second justifies the first, and there is no answer that satisfies everyone. Modern historians are more likely than their predecessors to stress the cost, and to note that Alexander's own contemporaries, including his soldiers, were often horrified by his brutality, but they also acknowledge that his impact was real and lasting, for good and for ill.

There is also a question about Alexander's character that has no resolution. Was he a visionary who believed in the unity of mankind, or a megalomaniac who believed he was the son of Zeus? Ancient sources say he visited the oracle of Ammon in Egypt, where he was declared the son of the god, and that he believed it. He demanded divine honours, he drank heavily, and he killed friends in fits of rage, most famously Cleitus, who had saved his life at the Granicus, whom Alexander murdered in a drunken quarrel. These are not the actions of a philosopher-king, but they are the actions of a man who had been told, from the age of twenty, that he was the greatest conqueror in history, and who had begun to believe it. His life is a study in what unlimited success does to a person, and it is a warning as much as an inspiration.

7. Legacy: the conqueror who built a world

Alexander's death in 323 BCE is the conventional beginning of the Hellenistic period, the three centuries in which Greek culture dominated the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. Alexandria became one of the great cities of the ancient world and a centre of learning, and its library and museum shaped the science of the ancient world. His campaigns are still studied in military academies, and he remains the archetype of the conqueror in history and literature, the standard against which every later conqueror has been measured. Julius Caesar wept at his statue, Napoleon carried his campaigns, and generals from Hannibal to Montgomery have studied his battles. No other ancient commander has had that influence, and none is likely to.

His legacy is also cultural and intellectual. The Greek language, spread by his conquests, became the language of the New Testament, of the eastern Roman Empire, and of the scholarship that preserved Greek science for the modern world. The trade routes he opened connected Europe, Asia and Africa in ways that had never existed before, and the cities he founded became centres of commerce and learning for centuries. The Hellenistic world he created was the world in which Rome rose, in which Christianity spread, and in which the foundations of Western civilisation were laid. That is a legacy that goes far beyond military conquest, and it is the reason Alexander is studied by historians, not only by soldiers.

For readers who want to go further, the best starting points are the ancient sources themselves, above all Arrian's Anabasis, the most reliable account of his campaigns, and Plutarch's Life of Alexander, which gives the man behind the conquests. Modern biographies, from Robin Lane Fox to Pierre Briant, present the two sides of the debate, the hero and the destroyer, and they are worth reading together. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life; the ancient sources give his world, and they are the reason he is still argued about, and still admired, more than two thousand years after his death in Babylon.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Alexander the Great
• Wikipedia — Alexander the Great
• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Hellenistic age
• Livius.org — Alexander the Great

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• Who Is Xi Jinping? — Xi Jinping has led China since 2012 as general secretary of the Communist Party and since 2013 as president, shaping its policies and vision.
• Who Is Zinedine Zidane? — Zinedine Zidane won the World Cup as a player and three Champions Leagues as a manager, and in July 2026 was appointed head coach of France.
• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.