At Aigai in October 336 BC, the king was walking unguarded towards the theatre when Pausanias of Orestis sprang in close and drove a blade into his ribs. Philip II of Macedon, old enough now to have made Greece tremble, died there at the entrance to the town, and Alexander took the throne before the dust had settled.

His story began in 382 BC, when he was born the youngest son of Amyntas III and Eurydice of Lynkestis. After the murder of his brother Alexander II, Philip was sent as a hostage to Illyria, then held in Thebes from about 368 to 365 BC, where Epaminondas gave him a soldier’s education and he lived with Pammenes. Those years mattered, because when he returned to Macedon in 364 BC, he already understood how power and discipline could be made to serve each other.

In 359 BC, after Perdiccas III fell in battle against the Illyrians, Philip first became regent for the infant Amyntas IV and then seized the kingship for himself. He drove back the Paeonians and Thracians, beat 3,000 Athenian hoplites, and set about remaking Macedon’s army. The cavalry grew from 600 to 4,000 by 334 BC, the infantry learned the sarissa, and the Macedonian phalanx gave him a weapon no Greek city-state could easily match.

He did not rely on force alone. In 357 BC he took Amphipolis, then Pydna, seized Potidaea in 356 BC, and founded Philippi on the gold of Crenides. That same year he married Olympias of Epirus, and Alexander was born. With Audata, Phila, Nicesipolis, Philinna, Meda, and later Cleopatra Eurydice, he tied foreign dynasties to his house and made marriage serve policy as neatly as siege engines.

The harshest proving ground came in the Third Sacred War. At Thessaly he won the Battle of Crocus Field in 353 BC, where 6,000 Phocians fell and 3,000 were drowned, and he became archon of the Thessalian League. Then came Olynthus in 348 BC, razed to the ground, and Chaeronea in 338 BC, where Athens and Thebes were beaten together. After that, Philip stood as hegemon of the Hellenic League, preparing a campaign against the Achaemenid Empire.

Yet the last campaign was only just beginning. In 336 BC he sent Parmenion, Amyntas, Andromenes, and Attalus with 10,000 men into Asia Minor, and the Greek cities there began to revolt. Philip himself never crossed. He was dead at Aigai, and Alexander inherited not only the throne but the invasion. Macedon’s rise had taken less than 25 years, and it ended with a bodyguard’s knife and a son ready to finish the work.