LA Times · Jul 7, 2015
How Greek was Alexander the Great?
A skate boarder performes in front of a statue of Alexander the Great and his horse Bucephalus, in cental Thessaloniki, northern Greece, in May of 2009. (Nikolas Giakoumidis / Associated Press)Alexander the Great was the first global celebrity: a hero, a superman and, so he believed, a god. Not only did he rule most of the known world at the time of his death in 323 BC, he also became a model of paranoid absolutism for all the Caesars and Kaisers and czars to come.
Millenniums later two nations — Greece and the neighboring Republic of Macedonia — are locked in a heated dispute over his inheritance.