404 BC: Athens is exhausted at the end of a bloody war with Sparta and the mastership of Greece is left open for the taking. By 323BC, less than 100 years later, Athens, the rest of Greece, and a large part of the known world, has come under the control of a master of self-publicity and a model for despots for millennia to come: "megas alexandros", Alexander the Great. Michael Scott tells the dramatic story of how, over the space of merely a generation, the ancient world was turned completely on its head, in a brutal power struggle whose outcome would define the world for centuries.