Who Killed Alexander the Great?

Alexander the Great was murdered by a member of his court, according to a new book by author Graham Phillips. His Alexander the Great - Murder in Babylon is published this month to coincide with the release of Oliver Stone’s latest movie Alexander. 

In the fourth century BC, the Macedonian king Alexander created the largest empire the world had ever known, stretching from the Balkans to India.  In June 323 BC, in the ancient city of Babylon, he died suddenly of a mysterious illness at the age of just thirty-two.  Graham Phillips is convinced that Alexander, arguably the greatest soldier who ever lived, was finally brought down by being poisoned by someone he trusted.

“For centuries scholars have debated what really killed Alexander,” says Phillips.  “Ancient sources record every detail of his acute sickness after attending a feast, but the cause of death has never been established.”  The latest theories have suggested that Alexander died of typhoid but according to Phillips there is no record of an epidemic of typhoid or any other communicable illness in Babylon at the time.  “It would seem most unlikely that only one person would have come down with such a disease,” he says.

In search of answers, Phillips took a copy of the ancient records of Alexander’s death to forensic experts at the University of Southern California.  Although they could not offer a full diagnosis, they did conclude that if these reports were accurate then Alexander had to have been poisoned.  The ancient Greek biographer Plutarch and the Roman historian Curtius reported that Alexander’s body strangely failed to show any signs of decay for six days after death, although it lay exposed in a hot, sultry place.  “If these reports are true, then the only scientific explanation would be that somehow bacteria had been prevented from starting the process of decomposition,” Phillips argues.  “There could be only two causes: radiation - which could be discounted for the time - or a lethal does of a toxic substance that pervaded the corpse.”

Phillips matched the symptoms of Alexander’s sickness to the effects of certain poisonous plants, called alkaloid toxins, such as hemlock and deadly nightshade.  There was, though, a symptom Alexander is recorded to have suffered that could only have been produced by one such poison.  Before he died Alexander suffered from a condition known as trismus, commonly called lockjaw.  This is usually associated with the disease tetanus, although the other effects of this illness do not match those reported in Alexander’s case.  “There is only one alkaloid vegetable toxin know to cause lockjaw and that is strychnine,” says Phillips.  Strychnine comes from the fruit of the rare Nux Vomica tree that only grows in India, a country that Alexander’s army were the first Europeans to visit.

Murder investigation is about motive, means and opportunity.  After Phillips examined eight suspects in Alexander’s court whom he believes uniquely had the motive and opportunity to kill Alexander, he concluded that only one of them could have obtained the means - the strychnine.  This, Phillips believes, is the smoking gun that allowed him to solve what he purports to be a murder mystery that has remained unsolved for over two thousand years.

ENDS

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