![]() Certainly Plutarch, who included this description in his masterly biography of Alexander in the second century A.D., couldn’t resist it. ![]() Swept away by the general enthusiasm, Alexander “started from his seat, and with a chaplet of flowers on his head and a lighted torch in his hand, led them the way, while they went after him in a riotous manner, dancing and making loud cries about the place which when the rest of the Macedonians perceived, they also in great delight ran thither with torches for they hoped the burning and destruction of the royal palace was an argument that he looked homeward, and had no design to reside among the barbarians.” It would be a fine thing, she said, if with her own hands and with Alexander looking on, she set fire to the palace built by King Xerxes, who a century and a half earlier had reduced her home city to ashes, “that it might be recorded to posterity that the women who followed Alexander had taken a severer revenge on the Persians for the sufferings and affronts of Greece, than all the famed commanders had been able to do by sea or land.” During a drunken revel characteristic of the rough Macedonian court, an Athenian woman named Thais, the mistress of one of the high officers present, made a startling suggestion. and his conquering army on a stretch of R&R at Persepolis, one of Persia’s great capitals, now marked out for plunder. ![]() An indelible scene from the life of Alexander the Great finds the prodigious warrior-king - just 25 years old in 330 B.C. ![]()
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