The demise of Alexander the Great at the tender age of 32 in June of 323 BCE in Babylon not only marked the end of an illustrious era but also ignited a maelstrom of conflict and treachery among his successors. As we delve into the dire circumstances surrounding his death, we will examine the rapid deterioration of his health following a night of revelry, leading to a mysterious illness that baffled contemporaries and historians alike. This episode will explore the myriad theories concerning the nature of his death, ranging from natural disease to the possibility of assassination, all while highlighting the chaotic power struggles that ensued in the wake of his passing. We will uncover the political machinations that transformed his empire into a battleground of ambition and betrayal, culminating in a succession crisis that irrevocably altered the course of history. Join us as we navigate through this tumultuous narrative, revealing the profound implications of Alexander's untimely end and the subsequent descent into chaos that shaped the ancient world.

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The narrative intricately weaves the final moments of Alexander the Great, juxtaposing his storied past as a formidable military leader with the vulnerability he exhibits on his deathbed in Babylon. The episode captures the palpable tension within the royal apartments as Alexander's friends and generals grapple with the implications of his declining health. The questions surrounding his final wishes, encapsulated in his fateful words to leave power to 'the strongest,' serve as a prelude to the ensuing chaos that would engulf his empire. Throughout the discourse, the episode meticulously examines the myriad theories surrounding the cause of Alexander’s untimely death, including the potential for a contagious disease, as well as the possibility of a meticulously orchestrated poisoning. Modern forensic insights are employed to dissect these theories, lending a contemporary perspective to an ancient mystery that has persisted for centuries. The narrative captures the emotional turmoil of those around Alexander as they witness his rapid decline, and it paints a vivid picture of the political intrigue and ambition that characterized the power struggles following his death. As the episode unfolds, listeners are invited to reflect on the broader implications of Alexander's demise, which not only marked the end of his illustrious reign but also initiated a period of bloody conflict among his successors. The discourse highlights how the fragmentation of Alexander’s empire into warring factions speaks to the inherent instability of leadership without a clear succession plan, an issue that would echo through history and inform future political structures, including the formation of the United States.

Takeaways:

• In June of 323 BCE, Alexander the Great's sudden illness and death sparked intense speculation and historical intrigue regarding the circumstances surrounding his demise.
• The immediate aftermath of Alexander's death led to a violent power struggle among his generals, resulting in a fragmented empire rife with treachery and ambition.
• Theories surrounding the cause of Alexander's death range from natural diseases to deliberate poisoning, highlighting the complexities of historical interpretation.
• Alexander's untimely death at the age of 32 not only marked the end of his conquests but ignited a series of events that shaped the political landscape of the ancient world.
• The chaotic succession crisis that ensued following Alexander's death showcased the vulnerability of his empire, ultimately leading to its division among rival factions.
• The legacy of Alexander's demise serves as a cautionary tale about the importance of clear succession planning in leadership, a lesson echoed throughout history.

It was June of 323 BCE in the ancient city of Babylon in present day Iraq.

Outside of the labyrinthine palace of Nebuchadnezzar ii, the oppressive Mesopotamian summer heat baked the mud brick walls.

Meanwhile, inside, the beautifully tiled walls and floors gleamed.

But inside the royal apartments in the center of the magnificent palace, the atmosphere was consumed by a suffocating feeling of panic.

Lying on a bed was the 32 year old conqueror of the known world, Alexander III of Macedon.

The man we call Alexander the Great was now screaming in unimaginable.

This was the famous conqueror who had systematically dismantled the mighty Persian empire and pushed Greek influence as far as the Indus river.

This was the man who had personally led cavalry charges across the Granicus, survived a crushed lung from an arrow and marched an army across the edge of the earth.

But in June of 323bce that same man was suddenly reduced to a helpless sweating husk after a single night of drinking at a party.

And it didn't make sense that Alexander's health would disintegrate so rapidly and critically.

He was young and had survived so much worse before.

Now, in his final feverish moments, his friends, advisors and generals gathered around Alexander seeking to understand his final wishes about who should take power next.

According to one ancient historical account, when they asked the dying king to whom he left his kingdom, Alexander whispered to the strongest.

Those three words guaranteed a world war.

Alexander's death wasn't just the end of an era, it was the starting gun for a multi generational crime syndicate.

The subsequent trials, assassinations and purges among his successors proved that his vast heterogeneous empire could only be sustained by the very treachery that may have killed Alexander in the first place.

Whether he succumbed to a contagious disease or was the victim of a meticulously planned poisoning, Alexander the Great's demise immediately triggered the greatest cold case in classical antiquity.

Welcome to history's greatest crimes.

I'm Michael.

And I'm Elena.

In this episode we will walk you through the fateful banquet of Medeas where Alexander fell ill. Grueling 12 day progression of Alexander's fatal symptoms and the modern forensic investigations that span from West Nile virus to flesh eating river bacteria.

But we won't stop at the deathbed.

Stay with us as we track the bloody fallout, the chaotic violent assemblies in Babylon and the horrific show trials orchestrated six years later by Alexander's terrifying mother Olympias as she sought vengeance in the ashes of Macedonia.

To understand a murder in the ancient history, you have to Understand the geopolitical and psychological state of of the victim's world.

That's right, Michael.

So let's go back to the beginning.

Alexander was born in Pella, the capital of the Macedonian kingdom, in July of 356bce to King Philip II and his fourth wife, Olympias.

The kings of Macedonia still practiced polygamy at this time, and ultimately King Philip had seven or eight wives who he had married at various times during his reign to strengthen his alliances with other kingdoms.

But even though Olympias was the king's fourth wife, she was apparently his favorite wife for quite a while, likely because she gave birth to Alexander, giving the king an heir.

It likely also helped that Olympias was supposedly strikingly beautiful, with long, flowing hair and sharp, elegant features.

Several legends surround Alexander's birth and childhood that tied him to the Greek mythology of the time.

According to the ancient Greek biographer Plutarch, on the eve of the consummation of her marriage to King Philip, Olympias dreamed that her womb was struck by a thunderbolt that caused a flame to spread far and wide before dying away.

And sometime after the wedding, Philip is said to have also seen himself in a dream securing his wife's womb with a seal engraved with a lion's image.

And it was said that on the day that Alexander was born, the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven wonders of the world, burnt down.

Some historians from the time period suggested that it happened because the goddess Artemis was away attending the birth of Alexander.

Such legends may have emerged when Alexander was already an adult and already king.

Actually, they may have developed at his own instigation to show that he was superhuman and destined for greatness from conception.

We can think of it like a form of propaganda in favor of Alexander.

As a boy, Alexander was raised in the manner of an elite Macedonian youth, learning to read, play the lyre, ride, fight and hunt.

As a teenager, he was tutored by the famous ancient Greek philosopher and polymath Aristotle, who also made the city Pella his home.

During his early education, Alexander associated and became friends with other children of Macedonian nobles.

Many of them would later become part of a specialized group known as the Companions, who were Alexander's most trusted confidants as he became an adult and ruler of an empire.

As a young man, Alexander also began to earn more responsibility over Macedonia as its future ruler.

King Philip spent much of his time attempting to expand his royal power to the south and into the Greek city states.

When Philip was away fighting with his troops, Alexander was often left in charge of the kingdom as the regent and heir apparent.

In 338 BCE, when Alexander was around 18 years old, he accompanied his father and his armies as they marched into the Greek peninsula, leaving a devastating trail of destruction and ejecting the Spartans wherever they found them.

We have to remember that the Spartans had been the superior fighting force for the Greeks for centuries and but infighting during the 5th and then 4th century BCE had left all of the city states weak, including the Spartans.

They were no match for King Philip's armies anymore.

But the king wanted to make sure that the Spartans never had a chance to come back and retake the power in Greece.

When Philip and Alexander reached the city of Corinth in southern Greece, the king established the League of Corinth.

Under the League, the Greek city states would be allied to each other and to Macedon, and all members would be guaranteed freedom from attack, freedom of navigation and freedom from interference in internal affairs.

In short, as long as the Greek city states recognized Philip as king and generally behaved themselves, they could pretty much do as they pleased.

This was an excellent deal for the Greeks and it allowed Philip to focus on his next goal of conquering the Persian Empire.

Unfortunately, Philip never fulfilled that goal because he was assassinated shortly thereafter in 336 BCE.

At the time, the king and his royal court were gathered to celebrate the marriage of the Macedonian princess Cleopatra to Alexander I of Epirus, a noble from one of the newly conquered Greek states.

While the king was entering into the town's theater, he was suddenly approached by one of his seven bodyguards who stabbed Philip in the ribs.

At the time, and to this day it's unclear why the bodyguard assassinated Philip.

Some historians have suggested that the king's wife and Alexander's mother Olympias had either ordered or been accessory to the assassination.

But again, we don't know for sure.

As the murderous bodyguard tried to escape, he supposedly tripped over a vine and was killed by the king's followers.

Alexander, who was present at the event, was proclaimed king on the spot at the ripe young age of 20.

One can almost imagine Alexander in this moment with his beautiful head of blonde curls, prominent nose and piercing eyes, wearing a laurel wreath as he often did to symbolize victory and status.

Alexander had been training to be the next king since he was born, and now it was happening.

As the new king of Macedon and Greece, Alexander wanted to make sure no one challenged his right to the throne and his position as king.

Consequently, he began to reign by immediately having his cousin and uncle and two other Macedonian princes executed based on accusations that they were plotting against him.

Alexander sent some of his loyal companions to carry out the killings discreetly.

But the message was loud and clear.

No.

Don't undermine Alexander's authority as the new king.

After that, Alexander shifted his efforts south to put down any scent of revolt among the Greeks who might look at the former king's death as a good time to retake their independence.

And with Thebes, Alexander and his troops razed the city, killing the men and enslaving the women, women and children.

At that point, Alexander had gained control of Macedonia and the Greeks and he was ready to carry out his father's original goal of conquering Persia.

Persia in the third century BCE was still a huge, hulking empire located to the east and south and covered over 2.1 million square miles.

Alexander the Great knew something that later European leaders like Napoleon and Hitler wouldn't understand.

He recognized that he couldn't just attack a huge empire from one place and hoped to successfully infiltrate and take it over from one end to the other.

Instead, Alexander used a military approach known as a strategic line, which takes into account logistics, resources the enemy has access to, and timelines.

In other words, Alexander conducted multiple operations at the same time that came together to achieve his goal of bringing Persia to its knees.

After securing his Greek base, Alexander conquered Egypt, which helped to secure his army's rear and also disrupted an important supply line for the Persians.

Alexander then moved to confront the Persians directly.

In 334 BCE, Alexander arrived in Persia with 48,000 soldiers, 6,000 cavalry and a fleet of 120 ships with crews numbering roughly 38,000.

When he stepped onto Persian territory, Alexander supposedly threw a spear into the soil and declared that he accepted the Persian Empire as a gift from the gods.

If nothing, Alexander was pretty sure of himself.

No doubt, Elena.

But maybe he deserved to feel a little sure of himself.

Most accounts from the ancient world, regardless of whether they loved or hated him, acknowledged that Alexander was a military genius.

Using strategical moves that took his enemies by surprise and using terrain to the advantage of his own armies, Alexander slowly made his way through Persia, taking over town after town.

In 333Bce, Alexander defeated Persian forces in the southern Persian city of Isis.

The Persian king, Darius, fled the battlefield, causing his army to collapse.

He also left behind his wife, two daughters, his mother and a huge amount of treasure.

Alexander treated the Persian king's family with dignity, whereas many Others would have executed them outright.

In one famous story, when Alexander and his general Hephaestion went together to visit the captured Persian royal family, Darius, Mother knelt before the general to plea for their lives, mistaking him for Alexander.

Apparently, General Hephaestion was taller than Alexander and both young men were similarly dressed.

When she realized her mistake, she was acutely embarrassed.

But Alexander reassured her with the words, you were not mistaken, Mother.

This man too is Alexander.

By 331bce, Alexander had pushed even further eastward into Mesopotamia and captured Babylon.

Contemporary Babylonian astronomical diaries state that Alexander, who they refer to as King of the World, sent his scouts with a message to the people of Babylon before entering the city.

The message said, I shall not enter your houses.

This fit with Alexander's existing approach of offering peace to cities that surrendered without a fight and complete massacre and slavery to the cities that didn't.

As Alexander made his way into Central Asia, he was still chasing the former Persian king Darius, who who was simultaneously running from Alexander and trying to raise an army to retake his throne.

In October of 331 BCE, at the Battle of Gaugamela in present day northern Iraq, Alexander's men finally captured Darius and executed him.

Alexander claimed that while dying, Darius named him as his successor to the Persian throne.

That claim seems rather suspicious and highly unlikely, but but it definitely helped to legitimize Alexander's authority over the area.

In 328 and 327 BCE Alexander made it as far east as the Indus Valley in what is today northwestern India.

At this point he and his troops had been fighting and expanding for almost eight years.

And until now Alexander's troops had been extraordinarily loyal.

This was due to their high regard for Alexander as a military leader and his tendency to reward his soldiers with loot from their campaigns.

But now, after so many years, his armies were exhausted and they mutinied at the Hyphasis river, refusing to march farther east.

According to the historical accounts, Alexander tried to persuade his soldiers to march farther, but his generals eventually convinced him to return.

The men, they said, longed again to see their parents, their wives, then their children, and most specifically their homeland.

Alexander agreed, but ultimately the decision to return home to Greece and Macedon ended up being a disaster.

Instead of selecting the most direct route, Alexander divided his forces to create a demonstration of power and control.

Alexander sent some of his army with General Craterus in a northern direction.

He sent his Admiral Nearchus with a group to sail back along the Persian Gulf shore.

And Alexander and the rest of his troops took a southern route through the Gedrosian Desert in present day southeastern Iran and Pakistan.

This desert is known for its rugged terrain of mountains and rocky plateaus, extreme aridity and high temperatures with minimal rainfall.

It includes cracked salt flats, jagged ridges, dunes that shift, and large stretches of rock that scorched bare feet and blinded animals with reflected heat.

Even local inhabitants generally avoided long overland journeys and instead moved between hills and isolated wells.

Some later writers suggested that Alexander had chosen his route across the desert to copy the God Dionysus, whom Greek tradition claimed had once crossed the same region during a mythical eastern campaign.

Perhaps he was trying to return home in a blaze of glory.

Alexander was all about shaping an image to support his political goals.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way.

During the 60 days it took for the army to cross the desert, land seemed to swallow entire groups of men, while horses and camels collapsed from dehydration.

Scouts who searched for ancient wells couldn't find anything.

Soldiers began to break into storage carts, which sometimes led them to fight each other over single flasks of water and to ignore direct orders.

Panic and tension often spread through the units whenever a rumor circulated about a hidden spring or a village just ahead.

Yet most of the time, such rumors ended in disappointment or death.

Alexander refused to ride while his men marched, so he traveled on foot alongside them and rejected any water unless it could be shared equally.

But despite Alexander's heroic intentions, over half of his 60,000 troops, including infantry, cavalry, engineers, slaves and pack handler, died.

Thousands of horses, elephants and camels also died, and with them went the army's food, armor and communications equipment.

And the cherry on top of this disaster was that much of Alexander's baggage train carrying his treasury, official documents and tribute from India disappeared into those sands.

After this event, many people no longer saw Alexander as a flawless commander.

He may have been successful on the battlefield for years before this event, but the loss in the desert had simply been too great.

This time,.

In early 324 BCE, after wandering for 60 days in the desert, Alexander and his surviving troops reached the ancient Persian city of Susa, in what today is western Iran.

The trip had resulted in the deaths of thousands of loyal men, and those who survived didn't come out unscathed.

Memories of the crossing often troubled those who survived.

They told stories of men driven mad by thirst, of hallucinations and suicide, and of entire regiments that vanished without a trace.

Many soldiers had lost comrades, suffered permanent injuries, or lost faith in their commander's judgment.

Both Alexander and his father Philip prided themselves on their relationship with their armies.

They had always been on the front lines during battles, never allowing their troops to take action that they themselves wouldn't personally risk.

But after they returned, the traditional bond between king and army no longer held the same emphasis.

Alexander was also changed.

The ordeal in the desert seems to have affected his psyche, making him incredibly paranoid of his officials.

It didn't help that some of the officials he left in charge back home had misbehaved while he was gone.

In connection with this, Alexander began purging his own satraps and governors, executing officials for alleged mismanagement and treason.

And the friction wasn't just administrative, it was also cultural.

As Alexander conquered new territory, he had a tendency to adopt the customs of the people there.

He had, for example, taken on the traditional title for the pharaoh as the son of the Egyptian God Amun.

By taking on this royal Egyptian title, Alexander was both legitimizing his power and attempting to make connections with the Egyptian people under his control.

Looked at from this perspective, Alexander's tolerance was actually a really good way of preventing uprisings against his authority.

When Alexander returned to Susa after years of campaigning across the continent, he similarly attempted to connect and mix together Persian and Greek cultures among his people.

For example, in 324 BCE, Alexander arranged a mass marriage of his Macedonian and Greek soldiers and officers, two local Persian women.

And when I say mass wedding, I mean huge.

Approximately 10,000 marriages were arranged during this one ceremony.

Unfortunately, according to the records, few of those marriages lasted beyond a year.

Many of Alexander's soldiers and officers resented the expectation that they would just marry random women because the king told them to.

And Alexander himself married two women during the mass wedding, including the eldest daughter of the belated king, Darius III of Persia.

At this point, Alexander had three wives, including Roxana, an Iranian princess he had married a few years earlier.

Alexander also actively recruited tens of thousands of Persian youths into his armies, which terrified the Macedonian old guard who felt that they were being replaced.

But the ultimate breaking point came about because of proskinesis.

This was the Persian practice of prostrating oneself to royalty.

Alexander began to demand that all of his subjects adopt this practice.

But the Macedonians, who were proud of their warrior heritage, found it degrading to honor a king in such a manner.

And it was also considered controversial in Greek culture for Alexander to attempt to elevate his status to that of a God.

Around the same time, Alexander's close friend Cletus the Black openly criticized him at a banquet that Alexander was Also present at Cletus questioned some of his military decisions, criticized his adoption of Persian customs, and expressed concern over Alexander's growing arrogance and perceived divinity.

In response, Alexander supposedly seized a spear and drove it through Cletus chest in a drunken rage.

In another instance, Alexander targeted Callisthenes, a court historian and the nephew of Aristotle.

Callisthenes had refused to bow to Alexander during ceremonies, and soon afterward the young man was implicated in a failed assassination plot and died in custody.

This brings us to the prime motive for assassination.

The Macedonian old guard was absolutely terrified.

No one, no matter how long they had been loyal to Alexander, was safe from his rage and vengeance.

One of those filled with anxiety about his future was Antipater, a Macedonian general and statesman who had first served under Philip II and then Alexander the Great.

His knowledge and loyalty to the royal family made him a good choice for regent of Macedon and Greece while Alexander was away conquering.

And Antipater had done a pretty good job.

He had crushed revolts like that of King August III of Sparta and managed all of Greece's affairs.

He had also sent reinforcements to Alexander when he requested them and made sure to guard the northwestern border on the European front.

In general, he had done his job well.

The issue was that Antipater's once close relationship with Olympias, the ambitious mother of Alexander the Great, had fallen apart.

It's not clear exactly what happened, but now in 323 BCE, the two were locked in a vicious battle.

Olympias constantly wrote to her son, accusing Antipater of disloyalty and acting like a king.

Eventually, Alexander yielded to his mother's pressure and summoned Antipater to Babylon to formally hand over his regency to another general.

Antipater knew that a summons to Babylon was likely a death sentence.

So, playing for time, he instead sent his son Cassander to Babylon to defend the family's honor.

Not great dad behavior.

Nope.

The meeting ended up being a total disaster.

According to the historian Plutarch, when Cassander arrived at the royal court and saw Persian nobles performing proskinesis before Alexander, the young Macedonian burst into boisterous laughter.

Alexander's reaction was explosive.

Plutarch records that the king was so enraged that he physically grabbed Cassander by the hair and repeatedly dashed his head against the stone wall of the palace.

Apparently, Cassander survived that assault because later, when Cassander attempted to defend his father against charges of treason, Alexander mocked him and threatened the entire family with severe punishment.

And before sending Cassandra home.

The experience traumatized Cassandra so deeply that years later, the mere Sight of a statue of Alexander would cause him to physically tremble and suffer vertigo.

So you have a deeply paranoid king threatening a powerful aristocratic family.

You have Cassander physically assaulted and terrified for his life inside the palace.

And crucially, Cassandra's brother, a man named Iolaus, was also in the palace, currently serving as Alexander's royal cupbearer.

The delivery mechanism for poison was already in the room holding the king's wine.

The stage was perfectly set for regicide.

Now we have arrived at the night of May 29, 323 BCE.

Alexander had just finished hosting a large feast for his admiral Nearchus.

If you remember back to Alexander's march home to Persia, Nearchus was the leader of the fleet of ships going home by tracing their way along the Persian shore.

As Alexander was preparing to retire to his bedchamber after the feast, his close companion, Mettius of Larissa, invited him to continue drinking at a private party.

What happens next depends entirely on which ancient historian you believe.

In the version written by the historian Diodorus Siculus, during the after party, Alexander tried to drink from the massive cup of Heracles, a huge ceremonial beaker of unmixed wine.

Diodorus writes, instantly he shrieked aloud as if smitten by a violent blow, and was conducted by his friends who led him by the hand back to his apartments.

This sudden piercing pain is the cornerstone of the poisoning theory.

However, another version was described by Alexander's chief secretary.

This second version explicitly omits this sudden strike of pain.

Alexander simply drank late into the night, took a bath, slept, and woke up the next morning already plagued by a fever.

Regardless of the exact onset, the histories agree on the progression of Alexander's illness over the next 12 days.

For the first three days, Alexander remained feverish, but he was mostly functional in that he continued to bathe, perform daily sacrifices to the gods and play dice with friends.

On days four and five, Alexander's fever became severe.

He suffered from extreme thirst and agonizing nights.

His attendants moved him to a bed near the Great Bath in Babylon.

The Great Bath was one of the earliest public waterworks in history, dating back to around 3,000 BCE.

It measured 36ft long, 21ft wide and was over 7ft deep.

Like a giant swimming pool, it was primarily used for ritual bathing and social gatherings.

We can assume that Alexander's attendants hoped that the cool water would bring down his fever.

On days six and seven of his illness, Alexander grew so weak that he couldn't walk and had to be physically carried around on a litter to perform his sacrifices.

And on day eight, he started to suffer from paralysis.

He couldn't speak or move anything except his hands and eyes.

At this point, officials moved him back to the Babylonian palace, the old fortress of Nebuchadnezzar ii.

The palace with its massive walls and gates and seemed to offer the best refuge for the sick king.

But it also raised some suspicions since Alexander was now hidden from public view.

Around day 10 or 11 of his illness, a loyal group of Alexander's soldiers began to suspect that some sort of COVID up was taking place and that officials weren't being honest about what was happening.

The soldiers broke into the palace, found Alexander and saw with their own eyes how bad off he was.

According to the story, Alexander could only acknowledge his veterans with his eyes while they walked slowly by his bed.

And on day 12, now mid June of 323bce, officials visited the temple of Serapis, a Greco Egyptian deity of the sun.

There they asked the oracle if Alexander should be moved again.

The oracle supposedly responded that he should stay where he was.

At that point, Alexander was quite clearly near death.

His friends, advisors and generals gathered around him seeking to understand his final wishes.

Diodorus recorded that when they asked the dying king to whom he left his kingdom, Alexander whispered to the strongest.

As you can imagine, those three words kick started a competition that would tear the empire apart.

But here's where things got more complicated.

Just a few months after Alexander's death, his Persian wife Roxana gave birth to a son who she named Alexander iv.

Stay with us as we explore who would take Alexander's place and rule his ginormous empire.

So Alexander the Great, the famous conqueror king, unexpectedly dies at the age of 32 in the summer of 323 BCE.

But what exactly was the nature of Alexander's death?

Why had he become so sick so quickly?

And here's the question of the hour.

Was Alexander's death actually a crime?

For decades, modern pathologists assumed that the king died from natural causes.

Given that Babylon was surrounded by swamps teeming with endemic diseases, the University of Maryland School of Medicine proposed typhoid fever, which perfectly aligns with the progressive fever chills and the severe abdominal pain.

Another fascinating theory suggests West Nile virus.

According to the historian Plutarch, when Alexander entered Babylon after returning to Persia from India, a flock of ravens dropped dead at his feet.

Ravens are hosts for West Nile, making this a compelling ecological clue.

But there is a massive physiological anomaly that natural disease theories struggle to explain.

According to both Plutarch and the Roman historian Curtius Rufus, after Alexander was Pronounced dead, his body lay in the stifling humid heat of Mesopotamia for six days, and it did not show a single sign of decomposition.

At the time, some people saw this as proof of his divine nature.

But Dr. Katherine Hall, a medical researcher, has proposed a chilling Guillain Barre Syndrome.

GBS is an autoimmune disorder that attacks the peripheral nerves, resulting in paralysis.

Hall argues that Alexander likely contracted a bacterial infection, the most frequent cause of gbs.

And GBS explains his progressive inability to walk, the loss of his voice voice and his clear state of mind until the end.

Crucially, it also explains the miracle of these uncorrupted corpse.

If Alexander was totally paralyzed, his respiratory system would have been severely constricted, resulting in incredibly shallow breathing and dysregulated body temperature.

In an era where death was diagnosed primarily by detecting breath, ancient physicians may have mistakenly pronounced him dead while he was merely sleeping in a deep coma.

So according to Dr. Hall, Alexander's body didn't compose for six days because he may have actually still been alive, slowly suffocating in his own bed.

It's a horrifying thought.

And there's also the theories about poison and assassination.

The most famous example comes from an ancient history about Alexander and his death, known as the Liber de Mort Alexandri Magni test.

This source claims that Antipater, the former regent of Macedonia and Greece, was the source for the poison given to Alexander.

Cassander, Antipater's son and the previous assault victim of Alexander, supposedly transported the poison to the palace.

And Iolaus, Cassander's younger brother, is identified as the one who slipped the poison into the king's cup.

The biography claimed the poison was actually from the mythical River Styx and that it was so potent that it had to be transported in the hollowed out hoof of a mule, as the poison would eat through iron or clay.

If the poison ate through metal, wouldn't it also eat through a horse's hoof?

Like you, many people dismissed the source as pure myth.

But not too long ago, modern toxologists investigated the Mavrenary river in the Peloponnese, which was traditionally thought to be connected to the River Styx.

They found that the limestone crusts of the river harbor hosted an extremely lethal bacteria that produced a highly cytotoxic compound.

They also found toxic fungi there that excrete highly corrosive acid, which means that it's literally capable of dissolving metal, exactly as the ancient sources claimed.

We also have the theory of white hellebore, a plant with a deceptively beautiful white flower.

This plant was well known to the ancient Greeks as an herbal treatment to induce vomiting.

They also knew that a fermented wine made from white hellebore induced a prolonged agonizing poisoning characterized by severe abdominal pain, a slow heart rate, progressive weakness and eventual speechlessness.

The flower used is extremely bitter, but it could have been easily masked by the heavy unmixed wine of the cup of Heracles.

But the source is highly problematic.

Scholars have demonstrated that it was likely fabricated around 309 BCE and was meant to be propaganda for Ptolemy I. Ptolemy was a general who was present at Alexander's death and went on to rule Egypt, which came to be known as the Ptolemaic Kingdom.

By listing Antipater and Cassander as the ones who poisoned Alexander, Ptolemy's version succeeded in accusing his political rivals while completely exonerating himself.

The history even included a forged testament of Alexander that conveniently assigned favorable territories to Ptolemy himself.

Here's the thing.

What if this form of propaganda was actually true?

But regardless of whether Alexander was brought down by a bacterial infection or a toxic botanical wine, he died and his empire was in the hands of some of the most power hungry people around.

Diodorus records that when his generals asked the dying king to whom he left his kingdom, Alexander whispered to the strongest.

It's like Alexander was trying to make things interesting for everyone else after his death.

If that was the goal, he certainly succeeded.

The immediate power vacuum in Babylon was catastrophic.

Alexander had no designated adult heir when he died.

His first wife, Roxanna was six months pregnant with a baby whose gender was unknown.

And Alexander's only other male relative was his older half brother Philip Arridaeus, who suffered from severe cognitive impairments and was deemed unfit to rule.

The Macedonian high command instantly fractured along socio political lines.

Perdiccas, who had been Alexander's close friend and general and present at his death, attempted to consolidate power as regent of the empire, demanding the army to wait and see if Roxana's child was a boy.

But the Macedonian veteran infantry fiercely rejected this.

Led by a populous infantry commander named Malegros, the soldiers actually mutinied inside Babylon, storming the royal palace and crowning the disabled Philip as king.

Civil war within the walls of Babylon was narrowly averted by a fragile, highly unstable compromise.

Alexander's brother Philip would be co king alongside Roxana's unborn child, with Perdiccas serving as supreme regent into the baby, assuming it was a boy, was old enough to rule.

Maleagros was temporarily placated with the position of Perdiccas deputy.

But Perdiccas was a master of ruthless statecraft.

He knew Milagros's populous control over the infantry was an existential threat.

To eliminate the dissenters, Perdiccas used a Macedonian religious tradition to set a trap.

He organized a massive purification ritual for the entire army in the plains outside Babylon.

According to the Roman historian Curtius Rufus, traditional Macedonian purification required the army to march between the severed bloody halves of a sacrificed dog.

As the infantry and the cavalry assembled on the field, Perdikkas suddenly demanded that the infantry surrender.

The ringleaders of the recent mutiny outmaneuvered.

And facing the terrifying prospect of Perdikkas heavy cavalry charging them on an open plain, the infantry yielded.

What followed was a horrific display of judicial terror.

Perdiccas ordered 300 of Milagros, most prominent supporters to be thrown before the army's Indian war elephants.

In front of the entire assembled army, the mutineers were systematically trampled and crushed to death.

Milagros fled to a temple for sanctuary, but he was promptly dragged out and murdered.

This bloodbath secured Perdiccas regency for now, but the unity of the empire was completely illusionary.

The next political drama involved Alexander's body.

Perdiccas had commissioned an opulent copy golden carriage to transport Alexander's embalmed body back to the royal tombs in Macedonia.

But Ptolemy I, the newly appointed governor of Egypt, recognized that possessing the conqueror's corpse offered unparalleled political legitimacy.

In late 321bce, as the slow moving carriage reached Syria, Ptolemy hijacked the funeral cart by force and diverted it south to Memphis, permanently installing Alexander's remains in Egypt.

What do you mean he permanently installed Alexander's remains in Egypt?

Well, when Ptolemy first did his body snatching, he interned Alexander in Memphis, the old capital of the pharaohs.

His son Ptolemy II later moved the body to Alexandria and placed it in a grand mausoleum.

The tomb became the heart of a royal burial complex for the Ptolemaic dynasty, and people recorded visiting it for centuries afterwards.

In fact, a couple centuries later, Octavian celebrated the deaths of Marc Antony and Cleopatra by visiting that tomb.

According to one Roman historian, Octavian requested to see the great conqueror's body and was so excited to see his hero that he accidentally broke the nose of Alexander's corpse.

But in the late 4th century CE, a series of earthquakes and tsunamis radically altered Alexandria's coastline and damaged many of its grand structures.

Religious strife may have also played a role.

In 391 CE, Emperor Theodosius ordered the closure of pagan temples across the empire leading to riots that destroyed many ancient buildings.

It is highly probable that Alexander's tomb was either destroyed in the chaos or the environmental disasters or possibly both, and was eventually built over.

Regardless, his tomb was eventually lost and to this day no one knows its location, although archaeologists continue to search for it with the hopes of finally figuring out what had caused Alexander's death.

This brazen theft of Alexander's body fatally undermined Perdiccas authority and provided the immediate spark for the first war of the successors.

Over the next 15 years the rival generals, families and friends of Alexander the Great fought for control over his empire.

Ultimately these challengers would divide Alexander's empire into three main the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt, the Seleucid Kingdom spanning much of the former Persian Empire and the Antigonid Kingdom based in Macedonia and Greece in the west.

The toxic fallout of Alexander's death devastated the Macedonian homeland.

Simmering tension among members of the royal family boiled over in 317 BCE in vicious proxy war spearheaded by two fiercely ambitious women.

On one side was Olympias, Alexander's mother and grandmother to the new child heir Alexander Ivan, fourth Roxana's son, and they went up against Eurydice, the militant young wife of Alexander's brother Philip.

Eurydice, acting on behalf of her husband, formed a strategic alliance with Cassander, who had recently succeeded his father Antipater as regent of Macedonia.

In response, Olympias marched out of northern Greece with her own army.

When the two armies met at the Macedonian border, no battle was fought.

The Macedonian soldiers, confronted by the awe inspiring presence of Alexander's mother, mutinied against Eurydice and defected en masse to Olympias, handing her total control of the kingdom without a single casualty.

However, the historian Diodorus Siculus notes, Olympias did not carry her good fortune as a human being should.

Instead of consolidating her bloodless victory, she weaponized her long standing paranoia and grief unleashing a wave of catastrophic show trials and purges.

Targeting her enemies, she began by imprisoning Alexander's brother Philip and his rebellious wife in a microscopic walled off dungeon, feeding them through a narrow slit before eventually tiring of the spectacle.

Recognizing that Philip was a focal point for resistance against her, she ordered Philip stabbed to death.

For the defiant Eurydice, who continuously asserted that she was the rightful ruler of Macedonia, Olympias arranged a grotesque mockery of judicial suicide.

She sent Eurydice a sword, a noose and a goblet of hemlock, demanding that she choose her method of execution.

Exhibiting remarkable stoicism, Eurydice ignored the sword and the poison, prayed that Olympias would eventually meet a similar fate, cleansed her murdered husband's wounds and hanged herself with her own clothes.

Olympias, thirst for revenge, then turned toward the alleged architects of Alexander's assassination.

Operating on the accusations later formalized in the Libra Demort, she officially blamed Antipater's family for poisoning her son.

She executed Nicanor, one of Cassandra's brothers, and slaughtered 100 of Cassandra's most prominent aristocratic supporters.

Her most macabre act, however, was reserved for Iolaus, Cassander's other brother and the former royal cupbearer accused of physically administering the poison to Alexander.

Because Iolaus was already dead at this point, Olympias held a posthumous trial.

She found his corpse guilty of regicide, ordered his tomb exhumed and had his ashes scattered to the wind to obliterate his memory and deny him an afterlife.

But Olympias atrocities proved politically fatal.

Her ruthless weaponization of the state alienated the Macedonian public and when Cassander marched north and besieged Olympias, the population abandoned her.

Following her capture, Cassander orchestrated a show trial of his own.

Denying Olympias the right to speak.

He allowed the families of her victims to stone her to death to complete the cycle of desecration.

Cassander denied Olympias a proper funeral, leaving her body to rot.

From Alexander The Great's death in 323 until 310 BCE, his successors wreaked havoc on his former grand empire in an effort to claim it for themselves.

Finally, in 310, Alexander's infant son was almost 14, the age at which a Macedonian noble would be normally introduced to the royal court and thus old enough to make political decisions, Alexander IV and his supporters argued that he should now be able to reclaim his father's empire and rule without a regent.

That outcome was unacceptable to Cassander, who was still acting regent for Alexander IV and ruler of the Antigonid kingdom of Greece and Macedonia.

After the killing of Olympias, Cassander attempted to keep his hard won authority and kingdom.

So he commanded one of his officials to secretly assassinate Alexander and his mother Roxana.

The orders were carried out and they were both poisoned.

The assassinations officially extinguished the bloodline of Alexander the Great and cemented the permanent fracturing of the former enormous empire.

The death of Alexander the Great remains the paramount cold case of the ancient world.

It is an enigma wrapped in competing layers of imperial propaganda, clinical pathology and geopolitical terror.

Whether the 32 year old conqueror succumbed to a devastating pathogen that left his paralyzed body to suffocate silently beneath the gaze of his generals or whether he fell victim to poison orchestrated by a desperate Antipater, the biological truth is eclipsed by the political reality.

Alexander's demise was the catalyst for an unprecedented era of state sponsored violence and.

The bloody spectacle of his death.

Death, the immediate military coup in Babylon and the horrific purges in Macedonia did not merely shape the Hellenistic world.

They cast a long historical shadow that deeply influenced history all the way up to the birth of the United States.

Over two millennia later.

As the American founding fathers drafted the US Constitution and wrote the Federalist Papers to advocate for its ratification, they obsessively studied the collapse of Alexander's empire.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay utilized the ancient histories by Polybius, Plutarch and Diodorus as a tool to diagnose the fatal flaws of weak federations and unchecked ambition.

The chaos resulting from Alexander's failure to establish a clear plan for a successor also heavily informed Hamilton's arguments in Federalist paper number 70.

The strict rules governing presidential succession, the separation of military command from civil governance and the checks and balances embedded within the US Constitution were engineered to prevent the sort of catastrophic violent fallout that consumed the Macedonian Empire following 323 BCE.

The events that followed Alexander's death demonstrate that his giant empire was fundamentally unsustainable.

Today, we are left with the haunting image of Alexander's lost tomb in Alexandria in Egypt.

The greatest crime scene in history, swallowed by the sea, taking the final truth of his death with it.

Thanks for listening to history's greatest crimes.

I'm Michael.

And I'm Elena.

Until next time, stay curious.

Sam.