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Memphis. The cosmopolitan capital of Ancient Egypt.
It's a bustling city home to a wide range of different cultures.
There are space markets, temples, a vast palace orchard growing things like olives and dates.
For about a decade now, Memphis has been under Persian rule, part of the largest empire in the world.
But today, a new conqueror will rise to power.
Alexander the Great is just 24 years old, but he's already a legend in his time.
In the last four years, he's been king of the Macedonians and much of Ancient Greece.
And he has recently invaded the Persian Empire, which spans over 2 million square miles.
Alexander has conquered city after city, and now he has come to Egypt.
A place that, in his mind, has an almost mythical status.
The young conqueror is actually greeted in Memphis as a liberator because he's defeated the hated Persian king, Darius III.
And perhaps also because he's shown respect for Egyptian religious traditions.
And today, he receives an incredible honor.
One that will change the way Egypt sees Alexander and the way Alexander sees himself.
Here, in Memphis, Alexander is declared Pharaoh of Egypt.
One account describes the scene.
A red and white crown is placed on Alexander's head, a crook and flail placed in his hands.
As Pharaoh, he's a political ruler, but he's also the closest thing to a divine being on Earth.
This moment seems to be a turning point in Alexander's inner life.
And really, wouldn't it be a turning point for anyone to be declared not just a king, but practically a god?
After this, Alexander will conquer more lands, take over more cities, cement his own legend, and perhaps begin to lose touch with the mere mortal men around him.
Within a decade, the young Alexander will be dead.
Today, Alexander the Great.
How did his imperial goals intertwine with his other goal of becoming an almost divine being?
And as he approached the edge of his known world, how did it all fall apart?
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As we try and answer not just the questions of what and where, but how and why.
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Alexander the Great becomes king of Macedonia at just 20 years old.
And the early years of his life typically get the most attention.
He's just this young, sort of implausibly successful king who just zooms through and seems to have absolutely frictionless, almost, conquest.
Rachel Kauser is a professor and author of a book about Alexander's later years.
She told us Alexander's early life seems easy, but there is a lot of drama.
Starting from the moment he becomes king.
We know for sure that his father, Philip II, king of Macedon, was stabbed right before Alexander's eyes.
Alexander's father, Philip, the king of Macedonia, is killed by one of his own bodyguards at his daughter's wedding celebration.
We know who the assassin was, but we don't know, rather like JFK, if he acted alone.
Or whether he was the vehicle of somebody else's ambitions.
Somebody else being, maybe, Alexander.
Philip had just married his seventh wife, and their eventual son could have competed with Alexander for the Macedonian throne.
Whether he engineered his rise to power or not, once he actually is king, Alexander's ambition is soon on full display.
He invades the Persian Empire, then the largest empire in the world, and he starts to win battle after battle.
But for Alexander, military victories are not enough.
He has a desire to make himself something more than just a leader of men.
Something almost...mythological.
As a child, Alexander had been obsessed with ancient Greek mythology, particularly the story of Achilles, which was retold in Homer's epic poem, The Iliad.
Achilles is a war hero with only one weak spot, his heel.
Alexander learns the story from his tutor, Aristotle, yes, that Aristotle, who personally annotated a copy of The Iliad to help his student understand the meaning behind Achilles's journey.
Alexander is said to have slept with this book under his pillow for the rest of his life.
He also believed, from the get -go, that he was descended from both Achilles on his mother's side, Heracles on his father's side.
So when this 20 -year -old becomes king and starts conquering the world, maybe he thinks he can be a mythical hero, too.
One of Alexander's early mythical moments comes in 333 BCE.
He's at Gordium, a major city in the Persian Empire.
Famously, Gordium is home to a knot, like K -N -O -T.
And they tell him that the story is that the person who can unravel this knot will be the true king of the Persian Empire.
Now, because this happened over 2 ,000 years ago, there are competing versions of what happens next.
In one of them, he realizes that there's a pin holding the knot together.
And he pulls out the pin, and the whole thing just miraculously unravels.
I tend to believe it's story number two, which is he takes the sword and he just goes, and slashes it.
It's almost too good to be true either way.
But it's clear that he needed to do it, and he needed to show that he was going to be king by hook or by crook.
Alexander is young, but he's learning how to rule.
And he realizes that he can't just come into this foreign land, the Persian Empire, take over and expect all of these new subjects to respect him.
It's important that he builds up a mythos around himself, and also that he does it in a way that reflects the local culture.
The Persians have learned something similar.
They often left local leaders in place after their own conquests.
And when Alexander makes it to Egypt, he's insistent on being crowned their leader, crowned a pharaoh.
It's one of the first moments where we see his willingness to be not just a Macedonian king, but a king for all the people of his empire.
And to take on and embody in a fairly substantial and thoughtful way the roles that the conquered peoples of his empire expected their ruler to have.
In the ancient Greek world, rulers were generally not treated as gods.
There was nearly always a sharp distinction between mortals and the divine.
But in Egypt, the line is blurrier.
And Alexander seems curious to explore it.
So, soon after he is declared pharaoh, he goes to an oracle, a place where priests provide answers to life's biggest questions.
For Alexander, that question right now is something like, am I actually an Egyptian god slash king?
Alexander takes time out of establishing his government in Egypt to make a trek way out into the Libyan desert to go to this oracle.
This is the oracle of Siwa, said to be the only oracle able to communicate with the Egyptian god Amun.
Amun is the chief god equivalent to Zeus in ancient Greece.
And Alexander makes it out to this remote desert spot.
And supposedly there he's greeted by the priest, hail son of Amun, which is the appropriate thing you would say to a pharaoh.
Yeah, any pharaoh would be greeted this way, you know, sort of like your highness.
And we don't actually know what answers Alexander got once he went inside the oracle.
But this hail son of Amun, he takes it up very literally.
He makes it into a thing.
His followers even kind of complain about it and make fun of him later on for doing so.
But it is his first place where we really see him claiming to be in some way divine.
Alexander's next goal, the thing he feels he has to do to cement his power and his myth, is to finally capture the Persian king, Darius III.
He was hoping, desperately hoping, that what he would do is capture Darius alive, have him submit, have him acknowledge, bow down and acknowledge Alexander as the new great king of Persia.
That would give him something close to divine status in the eyes of the Persian Empire.
The Persian kings weren't necessarily gods, but they were chosen by their gods to rule.
So after he visits the oracle of Siwa, Alexander pursues Darius.
He spends the next two years on the hunt finally capturing Persepolis, the Persian capital.
But Darius has already escaped.
He knows that Darius is somewhere going east and he's rushing to get him and he sheds soldiers relentlessly in this really tough trek through the mountains and deserts of eastern Iran.
Some of Alexander's soldiers are beginning to question his leadership.
Many of them already feel that he's losing touch with who he is, ignoring his Macedonian roots.
He's embracing the religions of Egypt.
He's wearing purple like a Persian king.
Now they think we just sacked the Persian capital.
Haven't we already won?
Do we really have to keep chasing Darius?
So some soldiers call it quits.
Others are simply too exhausted to continue.
And Alexander has no problem leaving them in the dust.
He had an army of 30 ,000.
He's down to about 3 ,000.
After weeks of continuous pursuit from Persepolis, Alexander spots Darius's troops in the distance.
And they scatter. The remnants of the Persian army just run away and then there's supposedly this cart with grimy animal skins.
Darius had been transported in this humble cart.
No one would suspect that a former king was inside.
Alexander jumps onto the cart, pushing the skins aside.
Inside it is Darius stabbed to death.
Apparently when they saw Alexander's forces on the horizon, his soldiers had betrayed him, fearing that his presence endangered their own lives.
And that's the end of his hope of having that seamless transition of power that he was hoping for, that transfer.
This is a massive disappointment.
Darius is dead so now he can't submit.
And Alexander can't further elevate himself as a divine figure in yet another empire.
So he keeps pushing forward against tremendous opposition from his troops.
By this point, they are something on the order of 1 ,500 miles from home.
They have been fighting for four years.
They feel that they have spent a lot of time and suffered a lot.
And especially after Darius's death, they're ready to say like, this is it, enough already.
They're ready to go home.
But Alexander says we're not going home.
They're only about halfway through the Persian Empire.
And the whole Eastern Empire, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Pakistan is still unconquered and is still a threat.
So he has good strategic reasons for what he's doing.
But I think there is also part of him that just wanted to see what he could get, what he could do.
If you were to look at a world map from Alexander's time, you wouldn't recognize it.
Europe, some of Asia, some of Africa, they're all one mass of land surrounded by an endless ocean.
That's what Alexander thought was out there.
He was told by Aristotle that there is this ocean that surrounds the continents and is basically the end of the world.
And that is where Alexander wants to go.
Aristotle tells him that at the top of the Hindu Kosh mountains in Afghanistan, he's going to be able to see that ocean.
And it's going to be gray and it's going to be mysterious and it's going to be boundless and it's going to be full of monsters.
And that is what he's trying to get to.
He's partly just interested to see this thing he's read about to like prove a scientific hypothesis, confirm that this ocean exists.
But as is often the case with Alexander, there's also a mythological component, one that goes back to the Iliad, which some say he still keeps under his pillow.
Ocean is a character.
Oceanus is a character.
He's the father of Thedas, the grandfather of Achilles.
So it's both a kind of, you know, sort of scientific thing, but also a kind of mystical thing.
The Persian empire is not enough.
Alexander wants to expand his reach to the end of the world.
But it is not at all clear that he can get his remaining soldiers to join him on this quest.
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Having sacked the Persian capital, Alexander the Great is looking east.
He wants to expand his empire to the edge of the known world.
Bringing himself closer to the Greek heroes that he worships.
Whatever the cost. So he moves his troops deeper into the remains of the Persian Empire.
Fighting battle after battle.
Losing more and more soldiers.
The ones that do survive are exhausted.
Some of them haven't been home in over six years.
And the campaign isn't going all that well.
Over a year after Darius's death, Alexander's army's pace has slowed.
At the end of 329 BCE, Alexander is forced to spend part of the winter in Marakonda, a city in present day Uzbekistan, while he waits for reinforcements to arrive.
During this waiting period, Alexander organizes a banquet to honor the Greek god of wine, Dionysus.
There are two things that I think you should never have simultaneously at a feast.
One of them is alcohol, and the second is weapons.
At this banquet, the drinks are flowing.
And many of Alexander's top officers are present, including Klytus the Black.
Klytus, who is a Macedonian officer, a kind of bluff, hard -drinking guy who's a generation older than Alexander about the age of his father.
Klytus had been a cavalry officer under Alexander's father, Philip.
And he's been with Alexander since the beginning.
They have a special bond.
Klytus had once saved his life in battle by cutting off the arm of somebody who was about to attack this rather impetuous young king.
So he's somebody to whom he owes his life.
He's forever indebted.
But now, Klytus' patience is beginning to wear thin.
At this banquet, he's listening to Alexander's supporters go on and on about how Alexander is a greater warrior than Philip ever was, how he's the son of Zeus and the son of Amun.
And it seems that Klytus has had enough.
So Klytus gets really drunk, and he starts this to raid against Alexander.
He says, basically, Alexander, calling yourself a god is blasphemy.
And he doesn't stop there.
He says that he doesn't live up to his father, that his father fought men like Macedonians and Greeks.
And he is fighting Persians, which is like fighting women, the ultimate insult for a Macedonian soldier.
So Klytus is blatantly insulting the Persians, and by extension, insulting Alexander the Great, whose guards can see that things might get out of hand.
Alexander is getting really angry, but he's trying to control himself.
And his bodyguards have carefully tried to move away all the swords and all the spears and everything.
And he looks around for his sword and realizes it's not there.
He panics, and he lunges at Klytus.
His bodyguards all grab him the way that you can imagine.
Like a college drinking party, you're trying to prevent your friend from doing something that they are going to regret the next morning.
Alexander is freaking out.
He's quite drunk, and he doesn't really understand why his own men are holding him back.
He thinks that he is going to be killed like Darius.
He thinks he's about to be assassinated.
And he orders them to let him go, so they're finally like, OK, enough, whatever, he's the king.
Alexander turns on Klytus the Black.
He grabs this 18 -foot -long spear from a nearby officer, plunges it through Klytus, kills him at once.
Klytus, this loyal soldier that had served both Alexander and his father, is dead, killed by Alexander.
He sort of comes to himself, realizes that he's just killed this guy to whom he owes his life, and he tries to kill himself.
He pulls the spear out from Klytus' body and points it towards his own body.
It's the only time we know of that he ever contemplates suicide.
And his bodyguards grab the spear at that point and take him away, and he's weeping and crying.
He refuses food and drink for three days.
I mean, it is, for him, I think, a devastating moment.
Rachel Kauser says, this is really Alexander's rock bottom.
In many ways, it's the beginning of the end.
And yet he continues east through two more years of brutal fighting.
Finally, Alexander has made it to the Hyphasis River in modern -day India.
It's clear from the literary sources that he's just planning to just keep on going.
And the soldiers are just like, oh, no.
And they're terrified to say anything because how could they disappoint their king?
Alexander and many of his men have now been on this campaign for eight years.
Their armor is worn out.
Their horses' hooves are worn out.
And for the last 70 days, it has been raining.
Alexander consents their exhaustion.
And he gives a speech all about how they're on the brink of creating a universal empire.
He says he can complete a task greater than those of the Greek demigod Heracles.
And then it's time for the soldiers to talk.
Coynus, who's one of his closest companions and closest friends, takes off his helmet and begins to speak.
And he basically says, we can't go any farther.
We are exhausted. If you have the energy to go further, send us back, create another army, and take them, but we can go no further.
And Alexander is clearly dumbfounded.
He's not expecting this.
And he goes and he sulks in his tent for three days.
And I think he is hoping that they're going to kind of back down.
They don't back down.
And realizing that he's not going to be able to convince his men to continue on, he turns once again to the divine.
He summons his soothsayers and has them make sacrifices to the gods and consult omens.
And the omens conveniently say that you really shouldn't go any farther.
And so this allows him to say, okay, it's not that I'm giving in to my soldiers.
The gods are against me.
We're going to go home.
Alexander doesn't go all the way back to Macedonia.
He establishes a new capital in the ancient city of Babylon in modern day Iraq.
His empire now includes most of the Persian empire, the Egyptian empire, the kingdom of Macedonia, and the Greek states his father had conquered.
And Alexander realizes that he's now accumulated enough power to make a new demand of the Greek city states.
He sends them a message.
I, Alexander, am now officially a Greek god too.
Demosthenes, an Athenian politician and critic of Alexander, reacts sarcastically, let him be son of Zeus and Poseidon too if he likes.
Most of Greece, however, seems to accept Alexander's deification.
He seems to believe he's a god.
And now so do the Greeks.
At least they believe him enough.
And that's also good for Alexander politically.
He needs to continue to consolidate power if he's going to finish his conquest of the world.
Alexander is setting his sights on Arabia, the Arabian peninsula.
The only sort of major unconquered area in the heart of his empire.
But this next conquest would never come to pass.
It's still a mystery.
We know that he has a fever.
We know that he has it for about 10 days.
In 323 BCE, Alexander falls ill.
We have some extensive descriptions, but they're not clear enough to me to diagnose an illness, although I must say some ancient history -loving medical doctors have tried.
Some of them diagnose malaria, which of course for a swampy place like Babylon, it's not surprising.
Some of them diagnose typhoid, also very common in the ancient world.
And of course, some of the literary sources say this was poison.
We'll probably never know the exact cause.
But at the age of 32, Alexander the Great dies, his mythic dreams unfulfilled.
But his death does show just how successful he was in manufacturing his own divine image.
Shortly after his lifetime, he is honored as a god and called Alexandros Megas Alexander the Great.
And yet, to me, a big question is what is that greatness?
Should we call him that?
He certainly would have wanted us to.
Alexander seems to have believed that he was a god.
And he tried his best to act like one.
And so while I see him certainly as a charismatic, in some ways larger -than -life figure, I also see him struggling and terribly young.
He becomes king at 20, which is mind -boggling.
Rachel Kauser says Alexander did really try to be a good ruler.
He may have had an insatiable drive to expand his empire, but that drive, and even his drive to be seen as a god, it had this collateral effect of uniting people behind him.
Here is a guy who is trying to forge a nation out of very disparate peoples, religions, cultures, all of that.
And he does it in part by taking up the customs of these other cultures, becoming the Son of Zeus, the Pharaoh of Egypt, the Son of Amun.
He also makes sure that people from kingdoms he conquered were then represented in his military, creating a true international force.
And so I think that to me is sort of like that capacity is what makes him compelling, and I think something we could learn from.
In The Iliad, Alexander's favorite book, the hero Achilles defeats Hector, a Trojan prince and his main adversary.
But the book doesn't end there.
Instead, where the Iliad ends is with Hector's father, Priam, coming to Achilles, asking for the return of his child's body, and Achilles recognizing the humanity of his enemy and giving the body back.
It's a scene that I can be sitting on the subway reading, and I burst into tears every time it gets me.
Alexander looked to Achilles as a heroic figure, as someone who relentlessly pursued greatness and vanquished anyone in his way.
But maybe the Iliad, this epic story, also inspired Alexander's other legacy.
I wonder if, in fact, what Alexander took from the Iliad wasn't just the ideal of this kind of extraordinary heroism, but the part of the heroism was, in fact, being able to recognize the humanity of the enemy.
Thanks for listening to History This Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with The History Channel.
To stay updated on all things History This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast .com.
And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at historythisweek at history .com.
Special thanks to our guest, Rachel Kouser, Professor of Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology at the City University of New York and author of Alexander at the End of the World, The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great.
This episode was produced by David Weisbord, produced and sound design by Ben Dixteen, and produced and story edited by me, Sally Helm.
For Back Pocket Studios, our Executive Producers are Ben Dixteen and David Weisbord.
From the History Channel, our Executive Producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler.
Don't forget to follow Rate and Review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week.
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