Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History It.

Talk about Alexander the Great today, you may have heard of him, Alexander of a Macedon.

And I'm very relaxed about this, I've got to say, but by the age of 30 he had created

one of the largest empires in history that point it reached from Greece, which is from

the Balkans, to Northwest India.

He's certainly one of the most remarkable military commanders in history.

His victories at Issas and Gargomele particularly are fascinating, so much so that I will be

reenacting the Battle of Gargomele with the crowd at the Chalk Valley History Festival.

It will show in a couple of weeks time, if you can take part in that.

You can have the exciting job of a Macedonian, outmaneuvered and cut down where you stand,

or you might be lucky enough to be in the companion cavalry, with me the Macedonian companion cavalry.

And take part in the reconstruction of one of history's most infamous cavalry charges.

Anyway, yeah, so come on to the Chalk Valley History Festival, it's great fun.

But in terms of this podcast we were talking about Alexander's death, the events of his death

and what followed, and it got pretty weird, pretty quick. While I'm on the subject, Alexander

Great is a great saying he had, which is, only sex and sleep remind me that I'm mortal.

Every time I have a crushing hangover, or I'm physically exhausted for my hard days,

potting or filming or whatever, I always think, do you know what, there's a lot that reminds me

I'm mortal. And maybe Alexander Great should have had a bit more awareness of his mortality,

because he went out on a massive drinking session, had a big old hangover, and died. So there you go.

Not even Alexander Great can cheat nature. And when he died, as you can hear in this podcast,

in June, 3, 2, 3, B, C, all hell broke loose. And to talk us through it, I got Tristan Hughes.

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