Original subtitles

- [Narrator] Our history is no more

than a series of incredible events.

Each one of us can influence its course.

The tiniest of our decisions can influence

the future of mankind.

To know the past is to anticipate the future.

In 336 B.C.,

while at the peak of his glory,

Philip II of Macedon is murdered

by a member of his personal guard.

Two years later, his son,

Alexander III, narrowly escapes death on the battlefield.

In 328 B.C., Alexander III, now called Alexander the Great,

decides to push back the boundaries of the known world.

These three intimately connected events

are the key moments

in one of the most exciting of human adventures.

We shall see which.

(ominous orchestral music)

Today the world consists of some 200 countries.

Half of them are democracies.

People there are born free and equal under the law.

They can speak freely and choose their own rulers.

For these people, these rights are natural,

and they're prepared to fight to maintain them.

But there was a time when the very idea of equality

had never been articulated.

A time when only a handful of men dreamed of a free world.

This period is antiquity.

The foundations of our civilization were laid then.

It is the age of philosophers,

legendary warriors and mighty deeds.

(ancient singing)

In 350 B.C., the Mediterranean world

is dominated by two completely opposite peoples,

the Greeks and the Persians.

Persia is immense, its wealth fantastic,

and its art refined.

It is governed by local lords obedient to a great king.

He rules over regions with differing cultures,

but is careful to respect local customs.

Under his administration, a vast network

of communication and irrigation is developed.

The authority of the great king is absolute.

The good of the empire comes before everything else.

Persia is the king.

An alien world to the Greeks,

who consider it a barbaric system.

In Greece it's the opposite.

Each city is independent.

Athens, Sparta, Thebes govern themselves

and are constantly at war with one another.

In Greece, the nation does not exist.

You are Athenian, not Greek.

Each city is a laboratory of ideas

where philosophers debate the best form of government.

Greece is the city.

In Persia, a man has no significance.

In Greece, he is the center of all.

The two peoples cannot understand each other.

So, they confront each other.

- [Narrator] Welcome to the memory of humanity.

Here we can control time,

analyze and compare billions of events,

and alter them to rewrite history endlessly.

The Athenians invented democracy.

Of all the systems they tried, this was the least damaging.

However, it is a far cry from our present day democracy.

Imagine that we could transpose the ancient Greek system

to our contemporary cities.

New York, for example.

The megalopolis would be totally independent.

City dwellers would consider themselves New Yorkers

rather than Americans.

The city would have its own army

and would not recognize the authority

of the President of the United States.

It would choose its own policies, its currency,

and its educational program.

It would regularly be at war with Dallas or Los Angeles.

It would only enter into alliances with those cities

when faced with imminent danger.

All citizens would be free and equal under the law,

and would be able to put forward and to vote for laws.

All the citizens, not all of the inhabitants.

Because, in ancient Greece, to be a citizen,

you had to be not only a man,

which excludes half the population,

but a free man, not a slave.

And, of course, not a foreigner.

In addition, you had to be rich,

so as not to need to work,

and thus be able to take part in political debates.

Transpose to our period,

a mere 2% of New Yorkers would be considered as citizens.

Which is not exactly our conception of democracy today.

During the Greek period, as in our own,

the system is not perfect.

We still have some way to go before humanity as a whole

really gets an equal chance.

Let's continue.

- [Narrator] In Greece, the cities are divided.

Persia waits and watches.

Persia has long desired the Greek lands,

and the history of the two countries

is strewn with epic battles.

Marathon, Thermopylae, Plataea, Salamis.

(upbeat string music)

Twice, the Persian empire raises a mighty army

and invades Greece.

Twice, the Greek cities put aside their differences

and unite to fight a numerically superior enemy.

These invasions spark a deep hatred

of the Persians among the Greeks,

and they dream of revenge.

At this moment, King Philip II enters stage.

He is not Greek, but Macedonian,

a people tolerated by the Greeks.

For example, the Macedonians are allowed to enter

the Olympic games.

And Philip has a plan.

Put an end to the wars between the Greek cities,

provide Greece with a strong central power,

and then invade Persia.

With a combination of ruse and military force,

Philip achieves his first two objectives.

The Greek cities end their quarrels

and finally, reluctantly, recognize his authority.

Finally, he can now turn to Persia

and return the affront.

Philip fears nothing and nobody.

He does not wear his armor all the time,

however, threats can come from any quarter.

Including one's own camp.

Before the eyes of his son, Alexander,

Philip II is murdered by a royal guard.

Is it personal revenge?

Is it a plot?

The truth has vanished with the centuries.

On the death of Philip,

the new king is called Alexander III.

He's only 20, and all of Greece is asking the same question.

Will this young man measure up to his father?

- [Narrator] Unity is strength.

Look at the battles between Persians and Greeks.

The evidence is clear.

On the field of battle, the Greek army wins.

The Greeks explain this simply as their superiority

over all other peoples,

a flattering explanation, but a false one.

The key lies in the strategy.

Whereas the Persians fight without any real cohesion,

the Greeks gather in formations they call phalanxes.

These are tight groups armed with long spears

and presenting a wall of shields,

a wall bristling with spikes.

When a phalanx advances directly at the enemy,

nothing can stop it.

Nothing apart from another phalanx.

When faced with superior enemy numbers,

the phalanxes can hold a front line.

But they cannot achieve victory by themselves.

They are accompanied by heavy cavalry on their flanks,

whose aim is to attack the enemy from the rear.

This is the famous hammer and anvil tactic,

still taught in military academies to this day.

2,000 years later, the Zulus used a similar tactic

to crush the British in a battle.

And yet the British were armed with rifles.

Even the finest of soldiers can lose if they are poorly led.

Philip was an excellent general.

But what about Alexander?

- [Narrator] On the death of Philip,

the Greek cities think they will regain their freedom,

a grave error of judgment.

Although while Alexander is very young,

he already has the soul of a conqueror.

Like Philip, he excels in the art of warfare.

And like his father, he can drink to excess

and fly into a rage.

From his mother Olympius, Alexander inherited

his ambitious, calculating mind.

He knows how to take time to think,

especially as during his youth

he was instructed by the famous philosopher Aristotle.

Alexander is an inexhaustible warrior,

curious about everything,

and paradoxically, capable of infinite tenderness

as well as terrible rages.

He assumes the role of king without batting an eye.

When the city of Thebes revolts,

Alexander reacts at once with authority.

Thebes is vanquished and razed to the ground.

The message is clearly received by the other Greek cities.

There will be no more revolts.

Everybody steps in line.

As his father dreamed before him,

Alexander can now turn to Persia.

In 334 B.C., he crosses the sea

and attacks Asia.

In May we had the first confrontation with the Persian army,

the Battle of Granicus.

As always, Alexander rides in the front line

at the head of his elite cavalry.

Surrounded by enemies,

he is wounded within an inch of his life.

But his loyal protector Cleitus

saves him in the nick of time.

The adventure might have ended there,

with the young king dying on the field of honor, age 22.

But Alexander continues his irresistible march.

Miletus, Halicarnassus, then Issus,

where he crushes the army of Darius,

the great king of Persia, who flees for his life.

And after the city of Tyre, it's the Egyptian campaign.

There he founds Alexandria and becomes Pharaoh.

He then enters Syria.

He crosses the Euphrates and the Tigris.

On October the 1st, Alexander finds the army of Darius

in his path at Gaugamela.

Alexander's men are outnumbered,

far from home, and faced with a huge army.

But the Greek phalanxes absorb the shock.

They allow Alexander and his cavalry

to charge directly upon Darius

in the heart of the enemy army.

A mad gamble, 100 to one.

The charge is heroic.

Alexander comes almost within striking distance

of the Persian king.

Darius abandons the battlefield.

Persia is the king.

When the king flees, the army follows.

It's a debacle.

At the end of October, Alexander takes Babylon,

and then Persepolis.

Darius, fleeing, is murdered

and handed over to the young king.

The victory is total.

The Persian empire has just changed masters.

To achieve this victory, Alexander had to be ruthless.

Prisoners executed, cities destroyed.

But once the victor, he shows himself to be

extraordinarily merciful towards the vanquished.

He respects their customs,

supports the existing administration,

and even recruits Persians into his army.

Aristotle had taught him to behave

as an equal with the Greeks,

but as a master with the barbarians.

Alexander chooses a fresh path,

at the risk of making enemies in his own camp.

As of now the Greek soldiers fight side by side

with their Persian counterparts.

- [Narrator] To conquer,

strength is not enough.

Where his generals saw only a simple military campaign,

Alexander looks further.

He imagines a world united under his authority,

where everyone lives in peace.

Alexander does not want to destroy the Persian empire,

he just wants to take control over it.

Better still, he wants to merge it into the Greek world

to form one universal world.

For some, a revolutionary vision.

For many, insanity.

Because from the dawn of time,

each people has unfailingly considered itself

superior to others,

and the Greeks are no exception to the rule.

Let's fast forward to the 19th century.

The British were faced with the same questions.

Their vast empire covered a huge diversity of peoples.

But the difference from Alexander is this.

There's no question of merging

into a spirit of universality.

It's a question of imposing a model upon the vanquished.

Modern racism, whereby certain people think

they are naturally superior to others,

dates from this period.

The British of the 19th century

have much in common with certain Greeks of antiquity.

Convinced of their superiority over the Persians.

And for these Greeks, Alexander is going too far.

- [Narrator] It starts with the yearning

for the time of Philip, Alexander's father.

With him things would've been much simpler.

With Persepolis destroyed, and Darius dead,

we would have subjugated the Persian people

and then come home in triumph.

But for Alexander, the adventure is only beginning.

The king of Macedon, Pharaoh of Egypt, great king of Persia

considers himself the equal of the gods.

He thirsts for ever more conquests,

to the east and to the west.

Everything is now possible.

Coming under increasing criticism,

Alexander starts to see traitors on all sides,

and he might be right.

Parmenion, a leading general of Philip's generation,

is more and more virulent in his criticism.

He pays with his life.

During a typical Macedonian evening of drinking

one man gets carried away.

Not any man. Cleitus.

The most loyal of Alexander's lieutenants,

the man who saved his life only a few years earlier.

In front of all, Cleitus harks back

to the period of King Philip.

He criticizes the presence of Persian barbarians

alongside noble Greeks.

He goes so far as to insult the king.

Both men are drunk.

Alexander, in a fit of rage,

kills Cleitus with his bare hands,

and immediately regrets it.

Faithful to his dream of one universal world,

Alexander marries a Persian woman.

He orders 10,000 of his men to do the same.

The king of the Macedonians dresses in Asian style,

recruits Darius's former soldiers into his army,

even into his own personal guards.

Those close to him ask him to stop there

and consolidate his conquests.

His generals beg him to give his men a well-earned rest.

Alexander could return to Macedonia for a while,

reassure his people, and consolidate his power.

Then he could launch a new campaign

towards the west in Italy.

Against all advice, Alexander decides

to venture further afield.

Now he wants to conquer India.

The die is cast.

(ominous music)

- [Narrator] We have just reached a turning point.

(curious music)

A turning point is a key event,

a cross roads in our history

where the world swings one way or the other.

What would've happened if Alexander

had decided to turn around and go back to Greece?

At this moment, he has the advantage of immense glory,

a monumental war chest,

the best army in the world,

and an insatiable thirst for discovery.

He didn't have to be satisfied with Persia.

He would've certainly conquered

the rest of the Mediterranean,

Italy, Gaul, Spain, North Africa.

Greek and Persian cultures would've been mingled

with those of the Celts and the Latins.

The Roman empire would never have come to be.

He would've left a Greco-Persian world,

a universal world, as Alexander had dreamed.

Closer to our time, another man was faced

with the same type of choice.

After forcing Europe to its knees,

Napoleon weighed the pros and the cons for a long time

before invading Russia

at the head of his grand army.

A choice that finally brought about the fall of his empire.

Back with Alexander, to Parmenion,

who is reported as saying to him,

"If I were Alexander, I would stop here."

The king is said to have replied,

"So would I, if I were Parmenion."

Amongst Greek philosophers,

karos is the art of making the right choice

at the right time.

But to achieve this, one must distinguish

between perseverance and stubbornness.

Does Alexander make the right choice

when he directs his armies towards India?

(thunder rumbling)

- [Narrator] The India campaign

is the one campaign too many.

From Greece, Alexander's army

has already traveled 9,000 miles.

His men now fight because they have to.

Their heart is no longer in it.

After the battle of Hydaspes,

and despite yet another victory,

the army categorically refuses to go on.

Even the veterans have had enough.

With iron in his soul, Alexander orders the return home,

a journey that will prove long and difficult.

Haunted by the questionable death of his most loyal friend,

Alexander is stricken with fever in the spring of 323.

During the night of 10th to 11th of June

in the year of 323 B.C.,

Alexander III of Macedon,

known as Alexander the Great, dies.

He was at the head of the greatest empire

ever known at that time.

He was just 33 years old.

In shock, his generals are lost.

Alexander has a child but he's far too young to rule.

So who is to command?

Who must fill this immense void?

Very soon, they are all trying

to take advantage of the situation.

Former brothers in arms finally come to blows.

Alexander's generals will tear his empire apart.

Nothing will remain.

Even his son is murdered.

Mighty kingdoms will be created from this breakup,

but none of them will be strong enough

to counter a rising power.

(dramatic rock music)

On the other side of the Mediterranean,

on the Mount Palatine, in the heart of faraway Italy,

a young city is destined for a great future.

But that is another story.

- [Narrator] So who was Alexander?

For some, a bloodthirsty tyrant.

For others, a humanistic conqueror.

This page of history was written 2,000 years ago.

It comes down to us through testimonies

that have survived the ages.

On several occasions these texts

come close to disappearing.

Some of them have been lost forever.

Sometimes fantasized, sometimes exploited for propaganda,

rewritten on many an occasion,

the history of our ancestors has been modified and altered

by generations of human beings.

It is for the historian to seek the truth.

Like an investigator, he or she must discover information,

sift the true from the false,

remain as objective as one can.

A task that is made all the more difficult

because our history is in perpetual motion.

Our judgment of events changes with every new discovery,

and most importantly, with our point of view.

During the American war of independence,

the British considered the colonials in revolt as rebels.

They saw themselves as patriots.

During the French revolution,

King Louis XVI referred to the rioters

when speaking of those fighting under the name of citizen.

The Iraq War is seen by some

as a war of liberation in the name of democracy.

For others, it is an illegal invasion

intended to seize oil supplies.

(techno music)

The facts remain the same,

but interpretations change radically

according to points of view and interests.

So what of Alexander?

Tyrant or humanist?

Over the centuries, many have opted to see him as a guide

who has allowed them to dare to follow their own path.

In his name, some of the most insane and ambitious projects

have come to pass.

His image has come down the centuries

and it still inspires us today.

Alexander the Great, the invincible conqueror

who went to the end of the world,

the man who united people by his will alone.

Maybe after all, that is the greatest of his legacies.

(dramatic orchestral music)