Alexander the Great had conquered everything between Greece and India by the age of thirty-two. Never lost a battle. Not one. In the spring of 323 BCE, he was heading back to Babylon — the ancient city in modern-day Iraq — when a group of Babylonian priests rode out to warn him: do not enter from the west. Disaster was coming. Alexander tried to circle around, but the swamps blocked his army. So he walked right through the western gates anyway. He had eleven days to live.
0%
Crowns & Conquests·2/6·1′
The place
Babylon
The Death of Alexander
The last eleven days of the greatest conqueror who ever lived — and a mystery two thousand years old
June 10 or 11, 323 BCE -- the death that shattered the ancient worldBabylon
Moral of the Story
“Alexander conquered every kingdom he faced except the one that killed him — his own body. The man who planned to march to the ends of the earth couldn’t cross the space between his bed and the door. All his armies, all the wealth of Persia, all the prayers of Egypt couldn’t buy him one more heartbeat. The lesson isn’t that ambition is pointless — his thirty-two years reshaped the world more than most civilizations manage in centuries. The lesson is that your body doesn’t care how important you are, and when death comes, it doesn’t negotiate.”
Characters
A
Alexander the Great -- King of Macedon, conqueror of the Persian Empire, dead at thirty-twoM
Medius of Larissa -- the companion at whose drinking party Alexander's fatal illness beganH
Hephaestion -- Alexander's closest companion, whose death months earlier shattered the kingT
The Chaldean priests -- Babylonian astrologers who warned Alexander not to enter the cityP
Perdiccas -- general to whom Alexander may have given his signet ringSource
Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri, Book VII (primary account, based on Ptolemy and Aristobulus); Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 73-77; Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica XVII.116-118; The Royal Diaries (Ephemerides) as preserved in Arrian and Plutarch; Hall, Katherine. 'Did Alexander the Great Die from Guillain-Barré Syndrome?,' The Ancient History Bulletin 32, 2018; Schep, Leo J. et al. 'Was the death of Alexander the Great due to poisoning? Was it Veratrum album?,' Clinical Toxicology 52, 2014; Oldach, David W. et al. 'A Mysterious Death,' New England Journal of Medicine 338, 1998; Bosworth, A.B. 'The Death of Alexander the Great: Rumour and Propaganda,' Classical Quarterly 21, 1971