"2,300 years ago," "Alexander the Great invaded Asia, his goal to conquer the Persian Empire." "We followed in his footsteps, a 20,000-mile journey from Greece to the plains of India." "By the fifth year of the war," "Persia had fallen and the Persian king had been killed." "Alexander now set out to overrun their vast eastern empire, and he headed for Afghanistan." "Kabul, Afghanistan." "Ourjourney now brought us into a modern-day war." "A crossroads on the ancient routes to India," "Kabul has been a battleground for more than 2,000 years." "The city had been devastated by war." "Alexander wintered here in the fifth year of his campaign." "He founded a new city close by, another Alexandria, one more step to uniting the world under Greek rule." "For his teacher Aristotle had taught him it was fitting the Greeks should rule barbarians." "Settled with Greek and native colonists," "Alexander's city would foster a remarkable mixed culture," "Greek and Asiatic." "I was hoping to see its treasures in Kabul Museum but that rich legacy, the glass from Egypt, the ivories from India," "Chinese lacquer, was all gone." "What's left is locked down in the cellars, and even that has been looted and smashed." "How did you feel when you saw this?" "'When we saw all this,' the museum director said, 'it was as if our mother and father had died." "Our whole history was here.'" "Goodness me, look, a Buddhist head." "Look at that." "Look, here's a Greek period Buddha." "He's wearing a Greek toga, the kind of fusion of East and West, that happened in the arts, too, in Afghanistan." "This was an absolutely unique civilisation, and this museum was the chief record of it in the world." "Hmm, it's just heartbreaking." "It was a sombre introduction to Afghan history, but this is a tale of war and war destroys the past as well as the present." "Now we had no idea what to expect on the road ahead." "As Alexander saw it that winter, the eastern part of the Persian Empire was still unconquered." "The Greek historian, Arian, says a Persian nobleman, Bessus, had proclaimed himself King of Asia and was rallying resistance." "It was Bessus who had murdered the previous king, Darius." "Now, he'd retreated north beyond the Hindu Kush mountains, thinking Alexander wouldn't try to cross till the snows had gone." "Alexander took up the challenge." "The next stage of ourjourney was to follow Alexander over the Hindu Kush but to get out there, we needed a vehicle." "Hmm, certainly is a Land Rover." "So, do you think we'll get all the way up the Panshir with this?" "Yes, I'm sure." " Really?" " Of course, all of Afghanistan." "Really?" "So you're the expert then, are you, Mr. Dolmain?" "Alexander had burned his wagons when he entered Afghanistan." "They slowed the army, they were always breaking down, so his troops crossed the country entirely on foot or horseback." "'B.B.C.'" "Early in the spring, Alexander set off." "Ahead of him, the great mass of the Hindu Kush, which rises to 20,000 ft." "On the other side, his enemy Bessus was waiting." "There were three main passes." "Bessus expected Alexander to come the direct route and he'd devastated the land there to deny Alexander supplies, but Alexander never did what was expected." "He chose the longer, eastern route, went up the Panshir Valley, heading for the Khawak Pass." "Travelling up the Panshir Valley today, it's almost impossible to believe that a great army could have made its way through here, but they did." "Throughout the whole of history, armies had to find a way over the Hindu Kush and this tended to be the favourite route." "Tamburlaine the Great, for example, came this way on his way from the Oxus to India in 1398 and your main problem, especially in the spring, was not the terrain but with the cold and especially the lack of food and provisions," "and as it turned out, that was exactly the problem that Alexander faced." "The local people had buried their winter supplies to foil the Macedonian foragers, so Alexander's men had to take their own food with them." "OK, put the bonnet down." "You guys want to come and push?" "Our Land Rover soon began to struggle." "Alexander had been right:" "wheeled vehicles can be a liability on these roads." "The Russians also found their mechanised gear failed here against men fighting on foot and supplied by mule." "Eventually our Land Rover would go no further." "Jamie, can you hear me?" "We've developed a very bad clonking noise suddenly." "It wounds as if it could be the half-shaft, so we're going to pull in, OK?" "And it wasn't the last of our problems." " The road is closed." " The road is closed?" "Yeah, because of landslide." "And where is this?" "Could you ask the gentleman?" "Just after five minutes you will reach there." "Really?" "And impossible for vehicles to get through or...?" "No, it's impossible." "Only donkeys." "I told you we should use donkeys on this part of the trip." "How long do you think it will take a bulldozer to clear it?" "Bulldozer, one hour." " One hour?" " One hour?" "Yes, but then they have to build the road again." "Look, the road has gone." "We were obviously here for the night, so we went back to the nearest village." "What is the name of the village where we leave the cars" " and we start to walk up to the pass?" " Khawak." "That's Khawak." "And Khawak is after Dashti?" " That's right." " Yeah, yeah." "Alexander always used local guides." "If they did well, they were rewarded." "If they misled him, they were killed." "Simple but effective." "ls it easy to find the men with the horses?" "So Halil organises the horses." "Commander Halil. ...oh, right, right, great." "You need the Sapper Corps to do this first." "ln fact Alexander's sappers and engineers were one of the keys to his speed of movement." "They did this kind ofjob for him all the way to India." "We abandoned our Land Rover and took a lift on towards the foot of the pass." "The track began to rise now." "We passed travellers walking in long zigzags up the hillside." "It was easy to imagine the Macedonians doggedly trudging forward." "This road was actually only made up for cars a few years ago, and until that point, it was really a track that only horses could use, and although Alexander's army must have been able to come along the river" "valley in those wide open spaces in the early part of the Panshir." "Here they would have been single file, so it would have taken them hours to pass any given point, and the army must have stretched for 10 miles, who knows, maybe all the way back down the Panshir," "which explains why he took 17 days to cross." "Finally we reached our goal, the horse station below the pass, and there was Commander Halil." "It's a bit like a Wild West out here, and for a moment, the atmosphere seemed threatening." "How much does it cost per horse to take a horse over from here in Khawak all the way to Andola, over the pass?" "You can't tell me he doesn't know." " lt's the price of, per horse, is 60,000 afghani" " Yeah, OK." "...but you are our guest, we will give you discount, 50,000." "Well, that's very kind, that's very kind." "One man will escort you to the top of pass." "That's very kind." "That's for your safety." "Thank you very much indeed." "OK." "We loaded up." "Our pack horses took 100 kilos each, the same as Alexander's." "His men, though, had to carry their own gear in backpacks." "That gets tough at high altitude." "All along the route, to my surprise, we saw people:" "traders, refugees, families." "The Khawak was still the thoroughfare to the north as it's been throughout history." "That night we ate with the local commander." "He recognised our cameraman, Peter, who'd covered the war with the Russians." "We were the first" "Westerners through here since then." "On Alexander's march, the Greeks said, the people here had never seen foreigners before." "So I'll always be discreet about money." "As Arian says," "Alexander's mind was now totally concentrated on defeating Bessus." "And here on the path that night, I could almost feel the magnetism of Alexander's leadership, and the sheer excitement that his men must have felt, marching with him." "Next day, the track went higher, the air was thinner, and the land more barren." "For us, as no doubt the Greeks, walking was now an effort." "As the crossing went into its second week, they ran out of grain and started killing the pack animals for food, but there was no firewood for cooking, and they had to eat the flesh raw." "This they did, says Arian, with the juice of a medicinal plant silphium." "Can you ask which part of the plant they used for medecine?" "So you get ajuice out of it, do you?" "They used this for accident, stomach pain, and swelling." "And for cuts as well?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "It's a tiny detail, but just imagine it:" "cold water, raw horse meat and the bitterjuice of the silphium." "They were over 11,000 ft. now, and the starving troops were suffering from chronic fatigue brought on by altitude sickness." "We brought few supplies with us and we took our snacks where we could find them." "They said good stuff for long-distance travelling, the dried mulberries compressed together, it's kind of dried fruit which the Mujahadeen lived on during the war with the Russians in these mountains, keeps your energy up." "At such times, Alexander was inspirational." "He'd run up and down the column, cheering the men, giving a helping hand, lifting those who'd fallen, unflagging." "Just below the summit, there was gunfire." "Our guards raced off." "There were bandits ahead." "Get out of the way, it's dangerous." "Come back here!" "Come here!" "Here is some highwaymen and robbers." "They see situation favourable for the robbery and they take everything like food stuff and money they think that you have, yes, you should be very careful here, yes." "So we're good targets, in other words." "Yes." "Yes, they carry on, on..." "Kalashnikov, yeah, of course." "Half-an-hour later, we got the all clear." "I think this is it." "Finally, we reached the top, and saw the view Alexander's men had seen all those years before." " We're here?" " Yeah." "OK." "Wonderful." "We made it." "The top of the Khawak Pass is about 12,000 ft." "and there the road stretching away down to the land of Baktria and former Soviet Central Asia, and around are the mountains of the Hindu Kush." "The Greeks knew that these mountains were part of a continuous chain which split Asia in two and was the source of all the great rivers of Asia, and following Alexander's footsteps up here, with this wind," "you can really feel, whatever you think about him, what an amazing achievement it was, to drive an army over these mountains." "Nothing stopped him, said the historian Arian, nothing put him off." "He just kept coming on and on, whatever the cold or the starvation, he drove on, and in the end, his enemies were struck with fear at the speed of his advance." "I'll bet they were." "Bessus was nowhere to be seen." "The gamble had paid off." "Just below the summit, a cairn of stones is said to mark the burial place of the Greeks who didn't make it." "On the other side of the Hindu Kush, in Northern Afghanistan, they found good fishing in the rivers." "There were big herds of livestock, too." "There was plenty of grain here." "They could draw breath and fill their bellies." "We, though, were still travelling through a civil war." "We now had to cross the lands of the local warlord, and there was the tricky matter of a front line to negotiate." "I have a letter from General Haroon..." "As chance would have it, I'd met the head of the local garrison in London before we set out." "He'd written me a letter of introduction to his front-line commander." "OK." "You're most welcome to?" "Oh, thank you very much indeed, thank you." "OK, I'll wait then." "So we waited." "With the fundamentalist armies of the Taliban closing in on Kabul, we weren't too keen to retrace our steps." "Oh, hi!" "Welcome to my country." "Very nice to see you." "How nice to see you." "I told you when I was in London I would finally get here." "Welcome to my country, and we can keep this later, you know, for next time if you come." "It'll be a nice souvenir, I'll stick it on my notice-board." " l'll just get my bag." " Yeah, sure." "Haroon's career has had its ups and downs." "He once delivered pizzas in Pennsylvania." "Then he was summoned home by the family, to a very different life." "At the beginning, it was so difficult for me, but now I'm used to it, you know." "Yeah." "You can just be travelling along a quiet country road and you run into some group that you've never heard of who decide they want to kidnap you for a bit." "Of course, yeah." "You know, what I believe, you know, this time life in Afghanistan is more risky than 15 years ago when the beginning of the revolution." "Yeah." "So it your life in danger frequently here?" "Yeah, of course it is." "Even your life is in danger when you come to this country." "Alexander, though, met no resistance." "'The people of this part of Baktria,' the Greeks said, 'are prosperous." "They grow grapes here and have all manner of fruits.' lt was a little haven." "A warlord's house wasn't quite what I expected, but soldiers are the same everywhere I guess, for all the guns and hi-tec." "The Macedonians perhaps were much like the Afghans:" "brave, tough, pious." "They lived hard and played hard, like soldiers throughout history." "The news that night was gloomy." "Rockets were falling on Kabul." "We'd got through just in time." "By this morning they had advanced more than 20 kilometres in the southern outskirts of the capital." "Reports from Kabul say the fighting has now eased but the government forces claim they're preparing for a counter-attack." "Next day, as we got ready to head north," "Haroon's tanks were rumbling through the streets." "They were moving their forces back towards the mountains." "Poor Afghanistan." "Now I began to understand Alexander's world." "We hired a battered Russian pick-up and drove on in Alexander's tracks." "Bessus was on the run, and Alexander pursued him like a hunter towards the River Oxus, which divides Afghanistan from Central Asia." "We're just coming into Tashkurgan." "It was the first of the ancient Baktrian cities that Alexander the Great reached when he came down off the Hindu Kush, but today Tashkurgan is run by Hisbizlami, one of the fundamentalist parties here in Afghanistan." "They don't like the West, they don't like the BBC and they don't like journalists, so we'll probably give their hospitality a miss tonight." "Yes, well, you won't believe what's just happened." "We actually broke down right in the middle of Tashkurgan." "We just stalled right in front of the border post, and fortunately there was a sandstorm had blown up and it was just sunset, so everybody must have been at their Friday prayers, so we just covered up the camera and all the gear" "and sat tight while Tim helped the driver to mend the engine." "It was summer now and Alexander was racing to the River Oxus." "The road goes through a wasteland covered by moving sand dunes, just as the Greeks described, but they weren't carrying enough water, and they'd lost their way." "Imagine, it was midsummer, blazing heat." "They had to cross this great belt of shifting sand dunes, and they had no water." "They probably had to camp here for two nights, and then they made the fundamental, unbelievable mistake of broaching the wine supplies because they had nothing else to drink." "It made them feel better for the moment, said one of the Alexander historians, but the after-effects were terrible." "Maybe they had no choice, but Alexander's elite ended up hung-over and dehydrated, stumbling over sand dunes, trying to find the Oxus River." "The Greeks reached this place just about the same time of the day, late afternoon, early evening and when they saw the river, the troops were so thirsty that they all piled down to the river bank and just started drinking," "and there were a lot of deaths due to over-consumption of the water of the river, which isn't particularly good apparently." "ln desperation, Bessus has burned all the river boats, but Alexander made rafts from tents stuffed with straw, and ferried his troops across in five days." "Bessus was running out of places to hide." "Ourjourney now took us into Central Asia, to Uzbekistan and the road to Samarkand." "Despite the intense heat," "Alexander advanced relentlessly." "Then, a very strange thing happened." "Somewhere on this road, Alexander came to a small town." "To his surprise, the people here spoke Greek." "As Alexander and his officers strolled around, they saw Greek faces in the market-place." "The townspeople had quite a tale to tell." "Their ancestors had been Greeks from the Aegean coast of Turkey." "Though bilingual now, they still kept up Greek customs," "but they had a dark secret." "Their ancestors were the priestly family of the temple of Didyma, the Branchidae." "150 years before, they'd collaborated with the Persians in the hated war which Alexander had vowed to avenge, so what would Alexander do now?" "Salaam." "Early next morning," "Alexander came through the gate with a small detachment of troops, apparently to receive the hospitality of the Brachidae." "ln fact, during the night, the army had been given instructions to surround the town, and at a pre-arranged signal, they began to attack with the intention of massacring everybody inside." "The Brachidae had suspected nothing, but despite their kinship of language, their desperate entreaties, the fact that they were holding olive branches in their hands, the symbol of peace, the savagery didn't stop until everybody had been killed." "And afterwards the Greeks levelled the town, destroyed its walls and even cut down its woods and sacred groves, so that no trace remained." "The expedition historian, Callisthenes, did his best tojustify the massacre." "The aim of Alexander's crusade, after all, had been to punish Persian wrongs." "Arian, though, says nothing." "I imagine he felt that however you gloss it over, a war crime is still a war crime." "Alexander now received word that support for Bessus was crumbling in the face of the Macedonians' lightning advance." "Alexander sent his general Tolomi on ahead, to arrest him." "The last resistance in the Persian Empire he thought had now collapsed." "Tolomi left Alexander behind, pushed on as fast as he could, up this road towards Samarkand..." "with light arm cavalry." "He did a ten-day march in four days, in this kind of heat, summer heat really hard men." "Bessus's supporters were just terrified." "They turned him over to the Greeks." "When Alexander arrived, he was standing by the roadside, humiliated, naked, in a wooden dog-collar." "Bessus met a gruesome end." "His nose and ears were cut off, and he was sent back to Persia to be impaled, the Persian punishment for traitors." "Alexander pushed on to the Syr Darya River, the outermost edge of the Persian Empire." "Here he founded a city which he called Alexandria the Farthermost." "It's still here today," "Hojent in Tajikistan." "To understand why he stopped here, we have to imagine the world as he saw it." "As far as he knew, he was near the northern edge of the world here." "Beyond the Sir Darya lay only a belt of arid plains as far as the Great Ocean which encircled the earth." "There was no point in going any further." "To mark his northern limit," "Alexander built altars to his favourite god," "Dionysus, perhaps on the very spot where now there's a great statue of Lenin monument to another tide of history which has come and gone." "It's a nice place, the Farthermost." "I think the Greek colonists might have felt quite at home here, figs and olives in the market." "Alexander said he hoped the town would one day become rich and famous." "Perhaps he remembered the words of his teacher, Aristotle, that civilisation will only thrive on cities and trade." "Ah, thank you." "I don't understand." " Money." " Money." "Hojent was one of more than 20 Alexandrias the king founded between Egypt and India." "The empire was linked by a system of post horses and racing camels." "The troops received letters from home, medical supplies came out here by the ton." "Look at this." "Oh, thank you very much indeed, thank you." "Thank you." "Alexander even had his favourite books and fresh fruit sent out here from Greece." "My parcel came from a friend in Athens." "Great, a Greek newspaper." "Olives, Greek olives." "Aristotle was right, the fruits of civilisation." "A bottle of nausa." "But the local people were not prepared to buy into the idea of a Greek world empire." "That summer, the famed horsemen of Baktria were gathered, the Solphians too came out in revolt." "For 2,000 years or more, they bred the finest horses in Asia here, and they fought the kind of war" "Alexander had not prepared for." "No battles, just hit and run." "You can imagine what he was up against when you see them play buzkhashee, but this, just a game." "'Alexander couldn't beat us because we were such good horsemen,' the old man said." "'Even an 8-year-old could ride and throw a spear." "As horsemen, we had greatness.'" "'Our forefathers used to say," ""The horse is the wings of the man." "A horse is strong and fierce, like a fierce spirit." '" "ln heavy fighting," "Alexander was seriously wounded in the head and throat and lost both sight and speech." "Worse was to follow." "A Macedonian column was wiped out near Samarkand, their first defeat for 30 years." "At his base on the Syr Darya River, he suddenly found himself crippled and at bay." "Alexander was now at one of the lowest points in his entire career." "Surrounded by enemies, he was suffering from a leg wound, he had malnutrition, dysentery coming on, his throat wound had not healed, so he could hardly speak." "His voice was so quavering that people even close to him couldn't hear him." "He couldn't stand in the ranks, he couldn't ride a hose, he couldn't give his army encouragement and instructions, the very thing on which his generalship depended." "There's a vivid image of Alexander at this moment, opening his tent flap at night to gaze across the river at the twinkling fires of the nomad armies." "Being Alexander, though, he had to act." "He forced his way across the river and won a stunning victory, even though his dysentery was now so bad, he had to be carried back." "Now began his hardest war." "That winter, he regrouped in Balkh." "The next spring, massively reinforced, he took fire and sword across Central Asia." "Five mobile army groups, 50,000 men, spread up the river valleys of Tajikistan in a search-and-destroy operation almost as far as China." "ln the autumn, they reunited at Samarkand." "Samarkand, most famous and glamorous city on the Silk Route." "ln Alexander's day, it was the chief town of Sovdia, today's Uzbekistan." "Here, that September, took place one of the most fateful incidents of Alexander's life." "Just outside the city gate lies the mound of the ancient tongue, and remains of a Sovdian palace." "One night, Alexander held a banquet here." "Among the guests was a veteran cavalry officer called Cleitus." "One of Alexander's father's generation," "Cleitus had saved Alexander's life back in the early days." "With everyone drunk, the evening turned nasty." "Alexander was harping on about his relationship with his father, and clearly felt very embittered and competitive, it was real Freudian stuff." "'My father never gave me the credit for my part in his victories,' he said, 'bore me ill-will and jealousy.'" "Cleitus, who was one of the old guards, stood up, and he said," "'Everything you have achieved was based on what your father did." "ln fact your father's achievements are far greater than yours, and he won them fighting men, not women.'" "At this point, Alexander who'd been relatively calm and unruffled flew into a rage." "He threw fruit at Cleitus, tried to grab a spear in order to hit him, and kept calling out in Macedonian to give the alarm for the royal bodyguards to come in." "Alexander's friends meanwhile had grabbed hold of Cleitus and they pulled him out of the door and actually got him across the moat over there, but just when everybody thought everything was over, in comes Cleitus again," "'Here I am, Alexander.'" "Alexander grabs a long spear from one of the guards at the door and runs him through." "There's blood everywhere, and Alexander collapses on to the body in a drink-sodden heap in floods of tears." "Some said Cleitus got what was coming to him, and the king now suspended freedom of speech, but at the tomb of Tamberlaine, another tyrant or hero, depending on your point of view, the words of eye-witness came to mind" "who spoke of the fear which people round Alexander now felt." "He was a very violent man, with no regard for human life, who was said to be melancholy mad." "Meanwhile Alexander had still not crushed the Central Asian revolt." "The ringleaders were holding out in the rugged mountains on the Tajik-Uzbek border." "With their wives and children, they'd taken refuge on an inaccessible peak known as the Sogdian Rock, but where was the rock?" "It's never been found." "We were sleeping at a village high in the mountains." "Hearing of our search for the rock, over breakfast the local men showed us an old manuscript of the Alexander Legend." "There were old traditions, they said, that Alexander had come this way, and that the lost citadel of Sogdian lay in the mountains close by." "Stories like this are ten a penny in these parts, where you'll find Alexander's Legend everywhere." "But my ears pricked up when they began to tell us about a mountain a day's walk from their village." "This, their forefathers had told them, was the Sogdian Rock." "They offered to take us there." "It seemed worth a try." "The mountain lies right in the heart of ancient Sogdia." "It's called Hazrati Sultan." "It's 14,000 ft. high, and the last few thousand feet form a sheer cliff." "The Sogdians thought they were safe." "Alexander was about to give up attempting to see the Sogdian Rock, but one of the ambassadors who came down from the Sogdians irritated him so much," "Arian says, that he had to go on and seize it in the pursuit of glory." "The ambassador simply said, in response to Alexander's demand for them to surrender," "'Just find soldiers who can fly." "Nobody else is going to be of any concern to us.'" "Alexander asked for volunteers with experience in mountain-climbing." "300 men came forward, herdsmen from the Macedonian uplands." "They took ropes, made pitons from iron tent pegs." "The climb was difficult enough for our local guides, but Alexander's men did it at night, on the back face where they wouldn't be seen." "On the other side, a narrow path led to a ravine which was massively defended." "32 of Alexander's climbers died on the rock." "Dawn the next day," "Alexander's 300 mountaineers appeared over the top of the ridge up there, waving flags." "The Barbarians, said Arian, were absolutely staggered." "They had simply not thought it was possible." "Alexander's herald rushed up to their front line and shouted across to them," "'You better surrender now,' he said." "'You see, I found the soldiers who could fly.'" "The rebels gave up there and then." "The story was remembered ever after as proof of Alexander's almost superhuman powers." "But now comes the most amazing twist in the tail, for a peace was finally brokered, not through war but through love." "At least that was how the Greeks told it." "One night, a splendid banquet was held by one of the Sogdian barons," "Alexander's erstwhile enemy, Oxiates." "It was a feast of typical barbarian splendour, the Greeks said, I imagine not unlike the great Uzbek wedding feasts you see today." "At the feast was the baron's beautiful daughter," "Roxane, little star." "She'd been captured on the Sogdian Rock." "Now, with her girl-friends, she danced before the king." "When Alexander set eyes on her, Arian said, it was love at first sight." "With the same impulsiveness which had killed Cleitus," "Alexander proposed to Roxane." "With his sword, he cut the bread as they still do to mark an engagement in Uzbeka." "He was 29, she at a guess in her mid-teens." "His friends were staggered, to put it mildly." "He'd had a relationship with a woman before, but his real intimacies, emotional and physical, had been with men, and to cap it all, he ordered some of his generals to marry the local women, too." "Was it really love, orjust a clever political ploy?" "Who can say?" "Alexander's marriage with Roxane sealed the conquest of Central Asia." "He now returned with his new bride to Balkh in Northern Afghanistan, to prepare for the invasion of India." "We flew there in a warlord's helicopter." "Alexander's expedition would open up the heart of Asia and for a thousand years after the Greeks," "Balkh would be the greatest crossroads on the Silk Route to China." "You can see its ruins below us, a wall stretching for 7 miles with the remains of 100 Buddhist monasteries," "Zoroastrian fire temples, and later Christian and Jewish settlements, and the huge mosques of the Muslim period." "When the Arabs came here in the 7th century, they called it simply 'the mother of cities'." "Fate, though, still had another card to play in this story." "Here in Balkh," "Alexander announced that he wished to be worshipped as a god," "Persian style." "You can imagine how that went down among the Macedonian veterans." "And now for the first time there was a serious plot against Alexander's life." "A group of royal pages planned to assassinate him." "They were betrayed and tortured to death." "But the dissension over Alexander's divinity climaxed in a sensational falling-out with the man who'd helped create Alexander's image," "Aristotle's nephew, the historian Callisthenes." "The final rift took place here in the citadel of Balkh, after a bitter exchange." "Callisthenes left the royal presence and turned to reiterate two or three times a single line from Alexander's favourite book," "The Iliad." "The line is this:" "A better man than you by far was Petropolis, but still death did not spare him." "ln other words, you're not a god, Alexander." "The king's response was predictably savage." "Using the pages' plot as a pretext, he arrested Callisthenes and had him tortured and crucified." "Of all Alexander's deeds, it was said, this left the bitterest taste, for everyone agreed" "Callisthenes was innocent, yet he was brutally killed without trial." "It was the act of a tyrant, and as Aristotle said," "'No-one freely endures such rule.'" "Alexander had already achieved more perhaps than he could have dreamed, but now the question was no long his ability to do things but whether his men would still follow him on into the unknown."