The Death of Alexander the Great

In June of 323 BCE, Alexander the Great died in Babylon. He was thirty-two.He had taken the known world from the Adriatic to the Indus in a decade. He had crossed two continents at the head of an army. He had survived a near-drowning in an icy river, a stone to the head, and an arrow through the lung. And then, over the course of eleven or twelve days, a fever did what no army had managed. The most powerful man on earth was dead before his next campaign began.We have several accounts of those final days, written by historians who were not there. We have a strange chain of rumors about poisoning, a court full of plausible suspects, and a body that — according to one source — did not begin to decompose for six days.The suspects are ancient. The arguments are not.