Histor is wont to bestow epithets on its more colorful characters, from the vertically challenged King Pepin the Short (714?-768), father of Charlemagne, to Ethelred the Unready, who ruled England with singular incompetence from 978 to 1016. Few, however, have so richly deserved their title as Alexander the Great (365-323 B.C.), the Macedonian king who led his armies on an odyssey of conquest from Greece to India, crushing the superpower Persian empire and taking Egypt along the way.
Alexander, however, might have disputed the epithet awarded by history -- likely he would have preferred "the Divine."
The future conqueror of almost all the known world, who acceded to his father's throne at age 18 and died of fever aged just 33, claimed descent from the immortal Hercules. His mother, Olympias, stoked her son's god-complex by claiming she was impregnated not by Alexander's father, Philip II of Macedonia, but by a giant serpent.