Alexander crushes the mountain tribe of the…

Alexander crushes the mountain tribe of the Ouxians, then presses on over the Zagros range into Persis proper.

Successfully turning the strong defensive position known as the “Persian Gates”, held by the satrap Ariobarzanes, only after an unsuccessful and costly initial assault, he enters Persepolis, the official Achaemenian capital.

Plundering the city, he ceremonially burns down the palace of Xerxes, as a signal to dissident Greeks at home that the Panhellenic war of revenge is at an end (for such seems the probable significance of an act that tradition later explains as a drunken frolic inspired by Thaïs, an Athenian courtesan. The authenticity of this anecdote, which forms the subject of John Dryden's Alexander's Feast (1697), is doubtful, since it is based upon the authority of Cleitarchus, one of the least trustworthy of the historians of Alexander.).