The invasion of Asia Minor by Alexander the Great in 334 BC was an act of filial piety. Suspected of complicity in the murder of his father, Philip of Macedon, he put into action Philip’s plan for a great crusade that would free the Greek cities of the Diaspora from Persian rule, return their temples to the Greek pantheon, and avenge the Persian invasion of mainland Greece under Xerxes.

The political and military endeavour became not only a process of imperial expansion ever east towards China, the Oriental Ocean and the far end of the world, but for Alexander himself a metamorphosis from man to god.The invasion of Asia Minor by Alexander the Great in 334 BC was an act of filial piety. Suspected of complicity in the murder of his father, Philip of Macedon, he put into action Philip’s plan for a great crusade that would free the Greek cities of the Diaspora from Persian rule, return their temples to the Greek pantheon, and avenge the Persian invasion of mainland Greece under Xerxes.

The political and military endeavour became not only a process of imperial expansion ever east towards China, the Oriental Ocean and the far end of the world, but for Alexander himself a metamorphosis from man to god. It was in Aegean Turkey that the seeds of his conviction in his personal divinity were sown; by the time he reached the Temple of Siwa in the Libyan desert three years later, the conversion was complete, for there he exchanged his human father for the mystical paternity of Zeus Ammon, becoming the demi-god to whom medieval myth attributed flight on the wings of gryphons, and descent beneath the sea in a diving-bell of glass.

Alexander subdued Aegean Turkey at a leisurely pace, even wintering at length in Phaselis, securing the souther coast as far as Side in the early months of 333 BC. Then, a year after crossing the Hellespont, in a bout of furious activity he marched north into the heartland of Anatolia to divide the Persian satrapies and form alliances with local chieftains…