Your Life as Every Rank in Alexander the Great's Army

You are born in 376 BC in the hill country of Upper Macedonia, a shepherd's child with a father whose knee has swollen for three winters. At 18, a soldier named Beryx finds you on a wet slope above Elimeia, and you are in King Philip II's new infantry, the foot companions, holding a pike about 18 feet long with both hands. This is one life from 18 to 53, lived through ten ranks of Alexander the Great's army. Each rank brings a new place and a new physical job: the rope-marked shoulders of the siege at Methone, the mud of Crocus Field, the smoke at Olynthus, and the long road east. The question it answers is what it was actually like to stand in that army, rank by rank. It covers the pay, the weight on your back, the rules you learn by watching the men ahead of you, and the money you send home to a mother who does not ask where it comes from. The kings stay at the edge of your life, seen from the ranks. The story follows you through Chaeronea, the Granicus, Issus, Tyre, Gaugamela, the Hydaspes and Gedrosia, until news of Alexander's death in Babylon reaches the column on the road.