Episode Details

Alexander the Great conquered the known world before his thirty-third birthday — then drank himself to death in a Babylonian palace. His campaigns reshaped the ancient world, but the man behind the legend was driven by an insatiable hunger for glory that consumed everyone around him, including himself.

This episode traces Alexander's meteoric rise from Macedonian prince to master of an empire stretching from Greece to India, and the physical and psychological toll that turned history's greatest military mind into a paranoid, grief-stricken ruler who died before he could enjoy his conquests.

• Alexander's education under Aristotle and his complicated rivalry with his father Philip
• The military genius behind the battles of Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela
• The increasing paranoia, executions of friends, and the mutiny that stopped the march east
• The mysterious death in Babylon and the empire that shattered overnight