Trace Alexander the Great's conquests and explain how Hellenism spread Greek culture across a vast area even after his empire quickly fractured.
Philip II of Macedon united the fractious Greek city-states under his control after the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE, ending the age of fully independent poleis. When Philip was assassinated, his twenty-year-old son Alexander, tutored personally by Aristotle, inherited the throne in 336 BCE and immediately turned his father's army against the Persian Empire. Alexander defeated the Persian king Darius III at Issus (333 BCE) and again decisively at Gaugamela (331 BCE), then continued into Egypt, where he was crowned pharaoh and founded the city of Alexandria, and finally pushed as far as India, winning the Battle of the Hydaspes (326 BCE) before his exhausted troops refused to march further.
Alexander died suddenly in Babylon in 323 BCE at only thirty-two, and his enormous empire -- built in barely a decade and stretching from Greece to India -- immediately fractured among his rival generals into separate successor kingdoms, including Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Persia. Yet Alexander's conquests left a lasting cultural legacy historians call Hellenism: Greek language, art, and ideas spread across this huge area and blended with local Egyptian, Persian, and Indian cultures. Alexandria in Egypt became a legendary center of learning, home to its famous Library, and Hellenistic-era scholars made major advances, including Euclid's geometry and Eratosthenes's remarkably accurate calculation of the Earth's circumference.
Mastery looks like: They can sequence Alexander's major conquests and explain the difference between his empire's political collapse and Hellenism's lasting cultural spread.
Common stumbles: Assuming Alexander's empire stayed unified after his death, or confusing his military conquests with the separate concept of Hellenistic cultural spread.