Original subtitles

Tonight, the suspicious death of a legendary leader.

Alexander did more in 10 years

than other people do in lifetimes.

He basically creates the largest empire

the world has ever seen.

After all these years of campaigning and severe wounds,

he makes it back to Babylon

and then suddenly dies.

Historians are still baffled

by what happened in the last few weeks of Alexander's life.

He begins to see strange omens that convince him

that his days are numbered.

Alexander sees enemies everywhere

and he drowns his fears in the bottom of a wine cup.

Now we'll explore the top theories

surrounding the unsolved death

of one of history's most celebrated figures.

It would only take a small drop in his cup of wine

for it to all be over.

Alexander fails to name a successor

and that may have cost him his life.

Whatever killed Alexander,

it sure doesn't look like a natural death.

Who or what killed Alexander the Great?

323 BCE,

Alexander the Great lies on his deathbed in Babylon,

present-day Iraq.

His generals file past him

for a final glimpse of their king.

After all they've achieved,

it's hard to believe

that their seemingly invincible leader is dying.

Alexander was surely the most famous person

of ancient times.

He was feared, he was powerful, and he could be brutal,

but he was also highly educated and philosophical,

and that's what made him such an interesting figure.

Alexander the Great comes

from the Greek kingdom of Macedonia,

and during the fourth century BCE,

he basically rules over all of the city-states in this area.

The biggest arch rival of the Macedonians

is the Persian Empire.

At this time, the Greek city states are reeling

from a violent attack from the Persians a few years earlier,

and so Alexander is now out for revenge.

His plan,

to assemble the largest army Greece has ever seen

and march straight into enemy territory.

One thing that a lot of people might not realize

is that Alexander, at least initially,

is actually the underdog.

Although he has a highly trained army,

they are tiny in comparison to the Persian army.

What Alexander has in his favor

is that he's an expert at rallying troops

from all across these Greek kingdoms.

He's also someone who's a cunning military strategist.

Alexander's army defeats Persia in 331 BCE,

and he's just getting started.

In 10 years,

he conquers about two million square miles of territory.

It is the greatest empire

that had ever been seen at that time.

But as Alexander conquers this vast territory,

he changes,

he becomes removed from his own soldiers.

He begins to dress differently,

wearing luxurious robes and the crown of a Persian king

and even begins to think of himself as a God.

But in 324 BCE,

a tragic event brings Alexander down to earth.

Alexander's army is marching east

when his close friend Hephaestion falls ill.

Now, Alexander calls his doctor

and demands that he make Hephaestion well,

threatening him if he doesn't.

After about a week,

Hephaestion rallies, he seems to be getting better.

And when they present him with some food,

he immediately starts going into convulsions and he dies.

For Alexander, this tears him apart.

He's so overcome with grief

that he falls down on Hephaestion's body.

He clings to his corpse for days

until the generals manage to wrench him off.

After the funeral,

the Greek army continues marching west towards Babylon,

the empire's new capital.

But Alexander remains grief-stricken

and now obsessed with his own mortality.

As Alexander is returning

to the city of Babylon, right before entering the city,

they see ravens fighting in the sky

and several of them drop dead right at his feet.

Now, the actions of birds are often seen

as an omen of future events,

and having them fighting and dying is seen as a bad omen,

which made him paranoid.

He acquires a seer,

to have an animal sacrifice performed,

and the goal is to find out from the insides of the animal

what your fate will be.

Well, the seer notes that death is lurking

for someone powerful inside Babylon,

and Alexander is convinced

that he's the person this omen is meant for.

Once inside the city walls,

Alexander seeks distraction from his growing fears.

He finds it in alcohol.

By the time they get to Babylon,

the army, or at least what's left of it,

are in a celebratory mood.

And so we're talking about a lot of partying,

drinking fests going on for days, weeks even,

and Alexander is fully immersed in this.

For the Greeks, everything was a chance to have a contest.

The king has to be best,

he has to be the best fighter, the best hunter,

and he needs to be the best drinker.

And so Alexander would get involved sometimes

in these drinking contests,

and they were imbibing a fair amount of alcohol.

At one of these parties,

Alexander consumes this massive bowl of wine,

and almost immediately after doing so,

he gets these acute abdominal pains, doubles over,

and a really high fever.

All of the advisors are beginning

to get a little worried

because they've just fought to create this great kingdom

and Alexander the Great doesn't have an heir.

And they all wanna know who's gonna take over

in the event that Alexander dies.

They ask him over and over again,

"Who is gonna be your successor?"

And for the most part, he just refuses to answer them.

Finally, with one small breath, he says, "To the strongest."

Not long after,

the great conqueror dies

without any official pronouncement

of what did him in.

After all these years of campaigning and severe wounds

and all the stress and the exhaustion,

here he makes it back to Babylon and then suddenly dies.

One potential cause, therefore,

might have been all that partying and drinking.

As Alexander and his army move east,

he becomes increasingly paranoid

that someone might try to assassinate him.

One of the ways that he deals with this paranoia

is by drinking.

Alexander's fear grows

after an assassination attempt that involved Philotas,

the son of Parmenio, one of his closest advisors.

Apparently Philotas had known

that there was a conspiracy afoot.

He had heard rumors,

and yet he did not report this to Alexander.

Alexander gets wind of the assassination plot

and he goes absolutely ballistic.

He has Philotas killed

and he actually has Parmenio killed too.

And Parmenio is really an innocent bystander in this.

It's his son, but he doesn't know anything

about this assassination plot.

This means that no one is safe.

Anybody could be implicated in a conspiracy,

anybody could be killed.

From this point on,

Alexander is said to experience

uncontrollable fits of anger and remorse,

usually followed by drinking binges that last days

and sometimes turn deadly.

Alexander the Great has a friend named Cleitus,

one of his companions in battle,

who actually saved Alexander's life several times.

Cleitus is trying to give him some advice

and he says, "Now that you've defeated the Persians,

you should be following the Macedonian traditional customs

and not these Persian customs."

And Alexander gets so mad

that he actually takes a pike

and runs it through Cleitus and kills him.

Alexander, though, is immediately distraught,

he can't believe what he's done.

He locks himself in his room for several days.

He calls himself a murderer,

feeling tremendous guilt and shame.

Modern people would look at this and say,

this is classic alcoholic behavior.

We're talking about drinking leads to violence,

leads to grief, to shame.

He is volatile,

he is dangerous,

and for anyone around him,

they risk his wrath simply by saying the wrong thing.

Now in Babylon with little to occupy his time

and many of his closest companions dead,

Alexander's unrestrained drinking consumes him.

Very few of his advisors wanna stop him

for fear of losing their own heads,

but his doctors do come in and say,

"Look, you have to stop drinking alcohol here.

Just drink some water."

Instead of getting better,

Alexander is spiraling downward.

And even though he's tremendously thirsty,

he wants more wine.

Consuming excessive amounts of alcohol

without ever drinking water can lead to a condition

that's called acute necrotizing pancreatitis.

This is a condition where the pancreas rots

as it's overwhelmed with alcohol,

and so this can lead to pain,

it can lead to paralysis,

and ultimately death.

For many scholars,

alcohol poisoning remains the most likely cause

of Alexander's slow and agonizing death,

but others say it's not so simple.

It could have been

that Alexander the Great drank himself to death,

but maybe it wasn't something that Alexander did to himself,

maybe something malicious took place.

323 BCE.

Alexander the Great,

one of the ancient world's most victorious leaders,

is dead at 32.

As soon as the news is announced,

accusations fly about who is responsible.

If anyone could have seen Alexander's death coming,

it might have been him.

In fact, in his final years,

he sees plots everywhere,

and so if someone were to kill him,

they would have to be within his very small circle

of trusted confidants.

Very few Macedonian kings died of old age in their beds.

Most of them died with their boots on

and some of them died from assassination,

so conspiracies against the king certainly weren't uncommon.

The reality, though, is it's really hard to murder a king,

especially one who's doing everything they can

to protect themselves from precisely that outcome.

Even Alexander's own trusted advisors

were having trouble accessing him.

There's really only one person

who would be able to get that close to him,

that's the person who shares his bed chamber.

While fighting n Bactria,

near present-day Afghanistan,

Alexander becomes infatuated with Roxana,

the beautiful daughter of a defeated king.

Scholars have debated

about exactly what she means for Alexander,

with many saying that in fact she was the love of his life.

Alternatively, she could have just been a pawn

in a political game to cement an alliance.

In either case, Roxana is incredibly ruthless

and capable in her own right.

You have to think through her eyes for a second.

Alexander has just defeated her father and her family,

and now he's literally taking her as his wife,

so she doesn't necessarily like this arrangement.

And then he's got this best friend, Hephaestion,

and maybe she's a little jealous of him.

For many years, Hephaestion is Alexander's closest friend

and probably his lover.

And when Hephaestion falls ill,

Alexander brings his doctors in to try to treat him,

he gets better temporarily,

but then when he consumes a meal,

he suddenly convulses and dies.

Some historians remain convinced

that these details point to one thing, poison.

According to some scholars,

there was only one person in Alexander's innermost circle

who would have had the nerve

to have actually executed someone like Hephaestion,

that would've been Roxana.

She has the know-how and the access,

and so perhaps she poisoned his friend

to secure her position.

If she's willing to do that,

then what's to stop her from poisoning Alexander?

Alexander and Roxana are very close.

She travels with him everywhere.

In fact, he takes her on his subsequent campaigning

in Afghanistan and even into India.

This is very unusual,

this is not something Greeks and Macedonians do.

Roxana poses another really important threat

to the Macedonian throne in that if she becomes pregnant,

she will produce a half-Bactrian offspring,

which could be a real legitimacy problem

for those who want him to have a purely Macedonian heir.

But after the war is won

and Alexander and his wife march home,

their special bond begins to fray.

On his way home,

Alexander visits the Persian kingdom

in order to consolidate his territory.

While there,

he marries the daughter of the dead Persian king,

her name is Stateira.

Immediately she becomes a threat to Roxana.

Two women, both capable of producing male sons,

one of them is gonna have her son succeed, not both.

Some historians theorize

that Roxana could be behind Alexander's death,

especially if the king decides that Stateira's child,

who is of more noble ancestry,

should inherit the throne and not Roxana's.

Let's remember that the progression

of Hephaestion's symptoms and ultimate death

are similar to Alexander's.

If it was a poisoning,

it's possible that the same poison may have been used

to kill them both.

At the time of Alexander's death,

both these women are pregnant.

And for women in a polygamous situation,

their main ties are not to their husbands,

but to their children,

that's how they stay alive.

According to Plutarch,

after Alexander dies,

Roxana sends a letter to Stateira,

but she signs it under the name of Alexander.

It instructs Stateira to go to Babylon.

When she arrives,

both her and her unborn child are immediately slaughtered

and their bodies are thrown into a well

and covered with earth.

It's an epic tale of jealousy and betrayal,

but to many it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Roxana would have a lot of trouble

going back to Greece without Alexander

because there are many native Macedonians

who could very easily take up the mantle

of Alexander's kingship,

and she would have no stake in continuing

to represent Alexander if she was alone.

Without the protection of Alexander,

she's a sitting duck.

And so once he's dead,

it wouldn't take much for any of the rival generals

to then turn around and have her killed.

In 323 BCE,

Alexander the Great rules over an empire

that spans three continents,

but he neglects to do one final thing before he dies,

name a successor.

Remember, Alexander's last words

when asked to whom did he leave his empire were,

"To the strongest."

So it wouldn't be a stretch to think

that one of his close associates

would try to be the strongest, get rid of Alexander,

and take over the empire.

According to several ancient sources,

Alexander's own mother has, quote, "Sound proof"

that somebody in Alexander's inner circle

was trying to poison him.

One name quickly comes under suspicion.

If anyone out there thinks that they have rightful claim

to Alexander's empire,

it would be the person who is back in Greece

essentially keeping the throne warm

while Alexander's off on his exploits.

While Alexander was away,

campaigning in Asia for some 11 years,

he had left Greece under the watchful eye

of a regent named Antipater.

Antipater came to power as one of Philip II,

Alexander's father's generals.

Antipater, in his mind,

has been running things for Alexander for the last 10 years.

He should be in power if Alexander's dead.

Alexander never saw it that way.

In his mind, Antipater's handling of

the Greek city-states

is a minor issue next to this glory

that Alexander has seized for himself in Persia.

Antipater might have expected

that eventually this man will fall in battle

and that he'll have an easy path to succession.

So when Alexander conquers Babylon and Persia

and now is preparing to come back to Greece a victor,

Antipater knows that his time is running out.

The idea would be to do it while he's still away,

maybe while he's still celebrating, while he's weak,

while he's not paying attention,

and so the place to do this would be Babylon.

If Antipater is gonna make his move,

it's gotta be now.

And in fact,

with Alexander drinking himself into a bloody stupor,

now is the perfect time.

But Antipater can't knock off his rival

in person,

there are too many eyes on him.

Instead, some historians believe the general sends

one of his sons to do his dirty work for him.

All it will take is a dash of poison

and Alexander never leaves Babylon.

It's a clever plan if Antipater's son can pull it off.

Alexander, at this point, is quite paranoid

about conspiracies,

so it's gonna be pretty hard

for somebody to smuggle poison into the palace.

In order for this to work,

it would have to be a very small amount of a lethal poison.

This poison would have to be so potent

that it would do the job in one dose.

There is an ancient poison

that perfectly fits this description.

Alexander has a decline that moves progressively.

It begins with stomach pains,

then he begins to experience a complete lack of energy.

His heart rate slows,

then he slips into a coma and dies.

Scientists and historians have come up

with one potential poison

that seems to match what it was that Alexander suffered.

It's a small plant called Veratrum album,

and a little bit of this plant goes a really long way.

All it would take would be a tiny drop of poison in his cup

and it would all be over.

But there's one key symptom

Veratrum album doesn't cause,

something mentioned in nearly every account

of Alexander's death,

a high fever.

Historians theorize

that another poison could have also been used.

It's a little known poison

that would account for all of Alexander's symptoms,

it also is found along the River Styx.

In Greek mythology,

the River Styx,

besides being a gateway to the underworld,

is also the place where the God Zeus

has all the other gods swear oaths to him.

If they lie, he makes them drink from the River Styx

and they can't speak, they can't move,

they can't do anything.

Modern toxicologists believe

there's truth behind this legend.

The River Styx is a mythological river,

but is often identified

with the Mavroneri River on the Greek Peloponnese.

And in this river there is a bacteria

that grows there called calicheamicin,

and when ingested can lead to paralysis and then death.

And one of the things about calicheamicin

is that it causes high fever.

It would be easy to smuggle calicheamicin

into Alexander's palace

because it's basically in the form of water,

and so bringing in a jug of water

would be completely above suspicion.

There's no definitive smoking gun evidence

that it was Antipater,

but his actions after Alexander's death

do suggest a certain amount of ruthlessness.

In addition to immediately

consolidating his hold on Greece,

he also summons Roxana and her son back to him,

throws them in a dungeon,

and ultimately, his henchman murder them.

Not everyone agrees that Antipater would risk

sending his son and heir to the banquet,

especially considering that Alexander deeply mistrusts him.

All of our major sources on Alexander's death

acknowledge this rumor that Antipater is somehow involved,

but it's very difficult to disentangle

what is the truth and what isn't

because the struggles between Alexander's generals

in the division of his empire following his death.

In the successor wars,

it got so incredibly nasty.

You wanted to blacken the name of your opponents,

and so this appears to have been a story that is fostered

by another side in this fight.

While the citizens of Greece are shocked

by Alexander the Great's sudden death,

the king had feared it for years.

By the time he arrives in Babylon in 323 BCE,

Alexander is so paranoid

that the list of people who can get close to him

is very short.

At the top of that list is his most trusted friend,

and some say the man with the most to gain

by getting his king out of the way.

One of Alexander's closest associates is Ptolemy.

He had grown up with Alexander,

been educated with him, trained with him,

and he was there by his side through the whole campaign.

This was a general that Alexander trusted,

he was essentially his right-hand man.

So maybe Ptolemy is thinking to himself,

if anybody's gonna take over, it's gonna be me.

Alexander treats him like a brother,

so if he's the one who's behind this suspicious death,

Alexander would never have even seen it coming.

Ptolemy's insider knowledge of future campaigns

may give him a strong motive for ending Alexander's reign.

After a decade of relentless war,

Ptolemy and his army have had enough.

Alexander and his men saw everything

you could possibly imagine over the course of this decade,

arid desert, famine, monsoons,

winter in the mountains,

and it would have worn these men down

to an unimaginable degree.

Once they get to India,

Alexander wants to keep going,

but his men have other ideas.

In fact, they mutiny, refusing to go further.

In a rage, Alexander says he's just gonna leave them behind.

If they don't follow him,

he's gonna keep going and take all of the glory for himself.

Once Alexander realizes that even his

own generals don't want to continue the campaign,

he retreats into his tent for three days.

When he comes back out,

he tells everyone that he's communicated with the gods

and they have told him that it is unwise to advance further.

Of course, this allows Alexander to save face.

He doesn't have to say, well, I gave into the troops,

they made me turn back,

no, it was the gods who did this.

So now they're back in Babylon.

They've conquered everything that you can,

all of Western Asia.

They've watched a lot of their friends, their comrades, die

and they wanna go home.

Unfortunately for his soldiers,

Alexander is not finished.

He doesn't want to just go home,

he wants to embark on another huge campaign,

he wants to invade Arabia,

and no one is particularly eager to do that.

It might be at this point that a man like Ptolemy steps in

if only to save the army from the commander.

Already the men are broken,

they don't wanna move on,

but Alexander does.

This is the time to put a stop to all of this.

So the idea would be that maybe Ptolemy used a poison

that wasn't super potent,

but that killed over a longer period of time.

And a poison that acted in this way

that was readily available is arsenic.

Arsenic is found in soil and rock

all over the world.

It's tasteless and it's odorless.

It's a poison that works in a very generalized manner

across the body,

and so people will see physical symptoms,

but not necessarily be able to trace it to one cause.

An interesting thing about arsenic

is that it gets into the tissues

and it slows the process of decomposition.

And one thing that the ancient sources say

is that Alexander's body took a very long time to decay.

But one has to wonder whether Ptolemy,

who is obviously traveling on campaign like Alexander

in much greater comfort than an ordinary soldier,

would've murdered his friend

just because the army had lost the will to fight.

Ancient historians suggest

that a more personal motivation

may be behind Ptolemy's desire to kill his king.

Alexander has never named a successor,

and there's a question of who is going to follow him

if anything happens to him on the field of battle.

Ptolemy might well have wanted to ensure

that he was the person who would take over.

Some believe Ptolemy's actions

immediately after Alexander's death

suggest he played a role in the king's demise.

The body of Alexander becomes

a really important ideological tool,

and so his successors fight over his body as a way to show

that they are the real chosen heir of Alexander.

Ptolemy is the first one to hijack the body

and take it with him to Egypt.

By bringing Alexander's body to Egypt,

Ptolemy is being quite shrewd politically.

This legitimizes not only his reign in Egypt,

but perhaps a claim to Alexander's entire empire

as the rightful successor.

It also is a convenient way to control the body

and thus preclude any possibility

of people noticing any suspicious signs

of arsenic poisoning,

if that's indeed what Ptolemy did.

Not everyone is on board with this theory.

Many scholars contend that Ptolemy has more to gain

with Alexander alive than dead.

Alexander is leading the army and Ptolemy has his ear.

There's no clear succession plan,

and so if Ptolemy were to plot his death,

he would have no way of knowing

whether he would end up being the successor.

Why take the risk of assassinating Alexander

when he could have simply succeeded him

had Alexander died of other unusual causes?

After Alexander the Great ends

his military campaign,

he seems eager to regain the trust of his troops.

Some historians wonder if this desire may be behind

his untimely sickness and death.

When Alexander gets to Babylon,

he decides he's gonna make this his new capital.

For one, it's this famous city in the east,

two, it's much closer to all of this land

that he's just conquered.

Babylon is 2,000 years old at this time.

It's a wonderful city,

but it is also cramped and in drastic need of renovation,

and so Alexander immediately inspects the defenses

to make sure they are secure.

As a leader of men,

he wants to be close to his soldiers,

so he goes out there on inspections

and he shows his soldiers that he's not above them,

that he's willing to get his hands dirty.

Military camps have long been known

as breeding grounds for all kinds of diseases.

In the Old Testament,

there's a story about a Mesopotamian king

who lays siege to the city of Jerusalem

until a plague breaks out in his camp,

and suddenly the soldiers are thrown into disarray

and they stagger back home.

It makes sense that if Alexander is out there

walking around in the city,

getting really close to people,

that he would've been exposed to very unsanitary conditions,

the precise conditions that would've given rise

to some sort of terrible illness.

History's earliest mention of an epidemic

actually comes from a Mesopotamian tablet.

It's a medical record that lists the cause of death

of the people on the tablet,

and it uses a word that most scholars translate

to either be plague or pestilence.

In Alexander's home country of Greece,

there was a plague that is believed

to have originated in Ethiopia,

and it was carried to Athens on ships

and it killed about 1/3 of the entire population.

Some scholars think that this might have been a variant

to bubonic plague.

Others think that this might have been typhus or measles,

both of which were incurable in this period.

But there's a more likely killer

hiding in Alexander's military camps.

Today, the area around the city of Babylon

is this dry, arid desert,

but in Alexander's time, it would've been this marshland

that was a breeding ground for mosquitoes.

Some epidemiologists have suggested

that the true killer might have been West Nile virus.

In very marshy conditions,

West Nile virus is rife

and it infects mosquitoes, but also birds.

And we know from the sources that Alexander saw ravens

that were fighting with one another

and then they just collapsed dead at his feet,

so they may have been infected with West Nile virus.

It's possible that these waterborne mosquitoes

contract the disease from these ravens,

and it's only a matter of time

before it transfers to the human population.

What's interesting about West Nile virus

is that its symptoms mimic very closely

what Alexander's symptoms were,

so headaches, problems with breathing,

respiratory distress, and fever.

Mosquitoes also carry

an even more lethal threat,

one of human history's greatest mass murderers.

At one time, people speculated that malaria had killed

almost half the human beings who had ever lived.

While recent reevaluations have said

that statistic is probably a bit overblown,

malaria is still one of the biggest killers

of humans throughout history.

Ancient texts from Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece

have described illnesses that have malaria-like symptoms.

And more recent studies have even shown

that malaria was present in these populations

at the time of Alexander the Great.

While there are four types of malaria,

only one, falciparum, is especially fatal.

The parasites develop silently in the liver

until they mature,

and then they multiply and invade the red blood cells.

The trajectory of the disease closely mirrors

the account of Alexander's decline,

and ultimately, his death.

Alexander dies in late May,

and mosquitoes are most active during this period

of the late spring and the early summer.

When you consider the incubation period of malaria

of one to two weeks,

that would fit with the timeline

with Alexander inspecting these camps,

possibly even boating in the marshes.

Writings of the time also say

that as Alexander becomes sick,

his sleep patterns are thrown way off,

and this is a symptom that's also consistent

with falciparum malaria.

Additionally, malaria causes

stabbing back pain, delirium.

Both of those are things that Alexander suffers from

in his final days.

We also know

that Alexander is susceptible to malaria

as he most likely caught it once before.

The ancient records show that when Alexander was 23,

he did contract malaria,

but he was young, he was healthy.

And so after two months of bedrest,

he recovered and went on to become Alexander the Great.

10 years later,

after fighting all these battles, accumulation of wounds,

excessive drinking,

it's possible that Alexander's body was not able

to fight off the disease in the way that it had before,

and he ultimately succumbed to it.

Before Alexander the Great dies,

he leaves three odd instructions for his funeral.

One, that his unsuccessful doctors carry his coffin.

Two, that his earthly treasures be scattered

along the way to his grave.

And three, that his hand swings free from his coffin.

Alexander could be saying,

"Look, I'm mortal, I'm dying,

all of the best doctors couldn't save me,

I'm not taking anything with me.

Nobody could defeat me, only death itself."

Despite the oppressive Mesopotamian heat,

his body doesn't decompose in a normal way.

And so in fact,

his followers increasingly see him as a God.

Alexander had actually been proclaimed a God

by Oracles in Greece and in Egypt.

And so as someone divine,

many people would've imagined

that perhaps his body would have never rotted or decayed,

that it would in fact have been preserved eternally.

But a recent theory suggests

that what these mourners are witnessing is no miracle.

According to this recent 2018 theory

from a New Zealand researcher,

Alexander was not mummified magically,

but was in fact trapped in his body,

unable to speak or even indicate that he was still alive.

Guillain-Barre syndrome is a rare autoimmune disorder.

It essentially causes the body to be paralyzed,

even as the mind is still active.

The exact cause of this disorder is actually unknown,

but interestingly, scientists have traced it back

to a particular bacterium called campylobacter.

It's often in uncooked poultry,

and if it's ingested,

then it multiplies and it ends up attacking the brain.

The syndrome progresses slowly.

It first begins with just a lack of energy,

and then some sleep aberrations,

but then you begin to get numbness in the limbs,

which eventually develops into paralysis.

If the body is unable to fight off the disease,

then the brainstem begins to fail.

Heartbeat is going to slow,

respiration is going to slow,

almost to the point of people thinking that they're gone.

If this is what happened to Alexander the Great,

then what all of the ancient doctors would've seen

was a dead individual,

but actually Alexander would've been in a deep, deep coma.

This could explain why Alexander's body

doesn't decompose for almost a week.

We don't know for sure whether the mind is conscious

or simply functioning on a low level.

However, those infected could actually stay alive

for several days,

even though it appears that they're dead.

Imagine if Guillain-Barre syndrome

is what Alexander suffered from.

He may well have still been alive and conscious

and witnessing his own funeral.

Eventually,

Alexander's brainstem would stop working completely,

this is when true death occurs.

With Guillain-Barre syndrome,

one is comatose, but still alive,

potentially for almost a week.

And after six days,

Alexander's body does finally start to decompose.

After Alexander's funeral,

his vast kingdom that he worked so hard to build up

immediately begins to fracture.

Individual territories start rebelling

in the vacuum of power.

His generals, wanting to seize control,

begin fighting with one another.

And many different parts of the empire will collapse

within a few decades.

Alexander did more in 10 years

than other people do in lifetimes.

It wouldn't be until the Roman Empire

that you would ever see an empire as large,

and that took hundreds of years.

Alexander was more than

just a great military conquer.

By unifying three continents,

Europe, parts of Africa, parts of Asia,

it resulted in a mixing of cultures

that changed the course of history.

Nobody has been able to accomplish something

like this either before or since Alexander,

and he did all this before the age of 32.

Alexander the Great is regarded

as one of history's most successful military leaders.

He has inspired everyone from Julius Caesar to Genghis Khan

and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Even today,

Alexander's brilliant war strategies are studied

at West Point Military Academy,

but how this iconic leader died remains a perplexing riddle

yet to be solved.

I'm Laurence Fishburne.

Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.