Chasing the Myth of Achilles

What if I told you the greatest conqueror in history wasn’t chasing land—he was chasing a myth.

Alexander the Great didn’t just admire Achilles. He wanted to be him.

As a boy, Alexander slept with Homer’s Iliad under his pillow, a copy annotated

by Aristotle himself. To him, Achilles wasn’t a legend—he was a blueprint for

immortality. At sixteen, Alexander was already leading cavalry charges.

At twenty, he became king of Macedon. By thirty, he ruled the largest

empire the world had ever seen, stretching from Greece to the edge of India.