Alexander the Great: Man, Myth, or Somewhere In Between.
Alexander the Great, one of the most superb military minds of history; a man that single-handedly changed the course of the evolution of culture in a vast majority of the world, even though greatly studied and researched can still be considered mostly a mystery in our time. The man and the legends have been intertwined with each other so much, that over time it has become virtually impossible to distinguish any fact or fiction of his existence with any real authority. I"m sure there are plenty of historians, past and present, that have claimed to have truly understood Alexander and his history, yet I doubt that any of them have truly understood him on a whole, as I am almost positive that I never will either. Sure there are tad-bits of information here and there that can be either classified as solid fact or sure myth, but there are also all of the ones in the middle, which can only be left where they are. Some called him a savior and a hero, others a devil and a plunderer, but one thing is for sure, he had an impact on everyone who knew his name, and that is why he was the first man of history to be given the title of, "the Great". .
For anyone to begin to understand Alexander, they need to start where he did, whether it is son of Phillip, or son of Zeus. Just like anybody today, you can tell a lot about a person by the way in which they were brought up, and Alexander of Macedon's upbringing was anything but ordinary. He was born to Phillip and Olympia in late July of 356 BC. It was a well known fact that Alexander's parents did not get along. Phillip, such was the custom, had more than one wife, and Olympia was not fond of these conventions. So much so, that when one of Phillips other wives gave birth to a son whom was retarded, many thought that Olympia had poisoned the child. This is just a glimpse of the kind of childhood that Alexander went through.