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00:00In our story of civilisation so far, we've come across plenty of what they used to call
00:12the great men of history. Mesopotamian priest-kings, Egyptian pharaohs, Assyrian conquerors, Persian
00:25great kings, Greek warrior-statesmen, commanding figures who seemed able to ride the wild horse
00:35of history without getting thrown. Well, none of them came close to the horsemanship of
00:44this man, Alexander of Macedon, known simply as the Great. In the 4th century BC, from
00:57the small kingdom of Macedon, on the fringes of the civilised world, this charismatic warrior-king
01:05forged an empire that stretched all the way to India in just a dozen years. But in the
01:17civilisation's stakes, what did it all amount to? It's difficult not to get dragged into
01:25the slipstream of this charismatic demigod as he fights his way across Asia into the
01:31realms of myth and legend. But I'm going to resist, because the journey that Alexander
01:39made was as singular as the man himself. A restless personal quest to find some kind
01:45of limit to define him to himself. Rich territory, perhaps, for the psychologist, but from a
01:55historical perspective, ephemeral, quixotic and ultimately futile. The irony is that Alexander's
02:07greatness would only become apparent after his death, when his successors struggled to
02:13make something coherent from his chaotic legacy. And in doing that, they would demonstrate that
02:22even the greatest of great men is less significant than the greatest idea.
02:33The idea of civilisation itself.
02:52Our story begins with a civilisation in crisis. The civilisation of the polis, as the Greek
03:15city-states were known. These small fractious political units had tried to build strong,
03:23stable, self-sufficient societies using a variety of political systems, from Athenian
03:30democracy to Spartan totalitarianism. But they had all failed. The polis had been the
03:44proving ground of many remarkable advances in literature, art, science and philosophy.
03:53But the goal of eunomia, good order, had eluded them, lost in an exhausting cycle of war between
04:00cities and civil war within them. By the fourth century BC, it was apparent that, as so often
04:10in the past, the chaotic, dynamic energies unleashed by the big city could only be tamed
04:18and controlled by the autocratic rule of a big man. It's easy to see civilisation as steady
04:27progress, but in fact it's full of doglegs, blind alleys and cul-de-sacs. And often periods
04:35of retrenchment follow hard on from periods of brilliance and genius. And that's exactly
04:41what happened to the Greeks after the halcyon days of the fifth century BC. The Greeks,
04:47despite their genius, had proved themselves singly ill-prepared to export the products
04:52of their greatness. It would take a barbarian kingdom to the north, on the very fringes
04:57of the Greek world, to turn Greekness into a global brand. That land was Macedon, on
05:06the northern borders of the Greek mainland. This was a world of mountain kings who would
05:13not have been out of place in one of Homer's epic tales. While the Greek city-states to
05:21the south had argued for centuries over the relative merits of democracy, oligarchy and
05:27tyranny, the Macedonians had clung to the time-honoured virtues of hunting, horse-riding
05:38and fighting. For them, politics was simply a question of loyally following the one who
05:45excelled at all three. This was the culture of big-man-ism writ large. It wasn't a civilisation
05:59of politicians and orators, but of ruthless autocrats, tribal horse-trading and ethnic
06:05loyalties. Macedon was a country of powerful clans, ruled over by a single monarch whose
06:12military prowess mattered above all else. Macedon's dizzying ascent from the periphery
06:18of the Greek world to Greek superpower was the work of two men. King Philip II and his
06:29son Alexander. Destined to become the most famous man in the ancient world. His legend
06:43would be one on the point of a new weapon in the armoury of war. In my left hand, I've
06:57got the Macedonian army's USP, the sarissa, a giant pike which is over five metres tall.
07:04If you compare it here with a normal spear, which is just a bit taller than me at two
07:10metres, you can see what a monster it was. Previously, hoplite warfare had involved a
07:18lot of pushing and shoving, and the real killing only started when people went to ground and
07:23their enemies could finish them off. So the sarissa was a way of stopping people ending
07:29up in the killing ground. With the sarissa out in front of his phalanxes, they could advance,
07:36and it'd be like the quills of a giant porcupine, and it was enough to keep the enemy at bay.
07:42With his impregnable phalanxes, Philip expanded his northern kingdom into an empire which
07:53he then used to cajole and bully the reluctant city-states of the south into an alliance
07:59against the Greeks' old enemy, the Persians. The League of Corinth, as it was called, was
08:08a coalition of the unwilling, particularly in democratic Athens, which despised Philip's
08:14naked autocracy. The orator Demosthenes, in a series of vicious speeches known as the Philippics,
08:23flung the worst insult that he could find at this would-be leader of a crusade against the
08:30Persians. This was no Greek at all, but a barbarian from the north.
08:36But in casting Philip as a northern barbarian, Demosthenes was missing the point, perhaps
08:50deliberately so. Macedonia was part of Greece. True, not the Greece of Athens and Sparta,
08:57but an older Greece that still existed on its northern fringes.
09:01The Macedonians were certainly more than familiar with Greekness and the Greek thing. Treasures
09:19from Philip's tomb show a level of craftsmanship, sophistication and wealth which was on a par with
09:25anything produced by the great workshops of Athens.
09:29Self-absorbed and blinkered as they were, the city-states of Greece had no notion of how to
09:44take Pan-Hellenism forward. Philip, on the other hand, unfettered by the parochial and
09:51claustrophobic embrace of the polis, could see Greekness for exactly what it was,
09:56both its weaknesses and possibilities. The weakness of the Greek thing had always been
10:07its inability to unite politically. But its strength lay in its deep-rooted opposition
10:15to the Persian barbarians to the east. If someone could only harness this hatred of
10:24the others, it might equal the Sarissa in its impact on the battlefield. Philip did
10:34not live to lead his fellow Greeks against the Persians. He was assassinated at his daughter's
10:41wedding in the theatre next to the royal palace in 336 BC.
10:57But, of course, Philip had a successor, his son Alexander.
11:02Just 20 when his father died, Alexander was even more of an expert on the strengths and
11:12weaknesses of Greekness. His tutor had been Aristotle, the greatest political theorist
11:21in the Greek-speaking world. Aristotle's enemies had sniped when he had moved north to set up a
11:31school, housed in an authentic philosopher's cave, to teach Alexander and his companions.
11:38But Aristotle knew his politics, and he also knew where real power now lay.
11:53Philip spared no expense educating his son. Aristotle, his tutor, was the undisputed
11:59intellectual star of his day. His range was vast. He taught Alexander and his companions philosophy,
12:08politics, history, science, natural science, medicine and astronomy, amongst other subjects.
12:14But what didn't come with it was any commitment to the political systems that had spawned these
12:19great advances, particularly democracy. Alexander could talk the talk, walk the walk, but his was
12:27a very different Greek thing.
12:38Just how different the Greeks found out when the city of Thebes revolted in 335 BC.
12:48Alexander sacked the city, captured and enslaved 30,000 of its citizens, and razed it to the ground.
12:58Lesson number one in the Alexander school of Panhellenism was, don't mess with the big man.
13:13Now that the Greeks were united under the Panhellenic banner, whether they liked it or not,
13:18Alexander could now turn his attention to Persia. But his ambitions went far beyond just avenging
13:24the Persian wars. He would embark on the most extraordinary round of conquest ever seen in the
13:30ancient world. Within 10 years, his empire stretched all the way from Greece in the west
13:37to Afghanistan in the east. This was conquest by blitzkrieg.
13:41Aristotle may have dreamed that he was grooming an enlightened philosopher king,
13:57but Alexander was soon revealed as a charismatic, volatile, romantic adventurer.
14:03The most enduring legacy of Aristotle's teaching would be an annotated copy of Homer's Iliad.
14:12For Alexander, this was his guidebook, military manual and personal bible.
14:22As he crossed the Dardanelles from Europe to Asia,
14:25he played the role of a Homeric hero, returning to Troy five centuries too late.
14:34When Alexander first arrived in Asia, he was the first off the ship, and then he thrust his spear
14:46into the Asian soil, just like the first Homeric hero who'd arrived for the Trojan Wars.
14:52To live your life by the Iliad, a text which was already half a millennium old,
14:56would have struck most Greeks as being hopelessly anachronistic. But anyway,
15:01they considered Alexander to be a bit of a gauche buffoon, a boorish simpleton. But for a man
15:08who was ruling a kingdom through military prowess and individual force of arms,
15:14the Iliad would have made perfect sense.
15:16The historical re-enactment continued with a pilgrimage to Troy...
15:23..to honour the shades of Achilles.
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15:52Suitably inspired, Alexander's armies conquered their way
15:56city by city down the west coast of Asia Minor.
16:07They were closing in all the time on their prey, Darius, great king of Persia.
16:16In September 333 BC, Alexander caught up with Darius at Issus.
16:27The Macedonian phalanx, with their bristling sarissas, forged their way through the centre
16:32of Darius's mighty army, towards the great king himself. Fearing for his life, Darius fled the field.
16:47Alexander had won his greatest victory to date, but his enemy had escaped.
16:58Now the road to the south lay open, and at the end of it was the great prize of Egypt.
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17:23Militarily, Egypt was a walkover.
17:27Occupied for 200 years by the Persians,
17:30it greeted Alexander as a liberator rather than a conqueror.
17:38Alexander went to Memphis, the old capital of Egypt, where in order to carry favour
17:44with the all-powerful priests who effectively ran the country, he sacrificed the Apis,
17:50the Egyptian bull god. It seems to have worked,
17:54because Alexander was subsequently crowned pharaoh of both Upper and Lower Egypt.
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18:10In Macedon, Alexander, the son of the mortal Philip, had dreamt of being a hero,
18:15the offspring of a god like Achilles. Now, in Egypt, he was a living god.
18:22It was in Egypt that the veneer of Alexander's Greekness began to wear thin,
18:28and the personal obsessions of this complex personality began to show through.
18:36His brush with the magic and mysticism of Egypt
18:39turned a military adventure into a pilgrimage.
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19:02Looking for verification of his divinity,
19:05he went in search of a remote oasis called Siwa, deep in the Sahara Desert,
19:11hundreds of kilometres from the heartland of Egypt, where an ancient oracle was to be found.
19:22The Siwa expedition was both mad and dangerous,
19:25and was typical of Alexander's increasingly mercurial and autocratic behaviour.
19:31What he said went, and where he went, he expected others to follow.
19:35But this time, he nearly killed himself and his troops.
19:41For days, they marched into the unknown,
19:44enduring blistering heat and blinding sandstorms.
19:48They became lost, and were saved only when one of Alexander's generals, Ptolemy,
19:54claimed that he had a vision of two talking snakes
19:57that finally guided them to the temple in Siwa,
20:01where Alexander would consult the Egyptian god, Amun.
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20:35This is the temple of Amun,
20:37where Alexander supposedly asked the oracle three questions.
20:41Now, the first of these questions
20:43was whether he had punished all of his father's murderers,
20:46and perhaps the reply was that Amun was his father, not Philip.
20:51And then, true to form,
20:53he asked whether he was going to rule over the whole world,
20:57to which the answer was yes.
21:00And lastly, he asked, when he reached the outer ocean,
21:03the supposed edge of the earth, which gods he should worship,
21:07to which the obvious reply was Poseidon, the god of the sea.
21:17So, although couched in terms of family duty and religious piety,
21:22Alexander's questions open a fascinating window
21:26onto his towering ego and limitless ambition.
21:33With the question of his divine parentage settled,
21:36Alexander could turn once again to more worldly matters,
21:40like finishing off the Persians.
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21:54The final victory came in 331 BC
21:58at Gorgamela in modern-day Iraq.
22:11Darius fled the battlefield again,
22:14only to be murdered by one of his own men.
22:22But victory revealed Alexander to be a destroyer of civilisation,
22:27rather than a creator.
22:29His contempt for the hard-won achievements of others
22:32can be seen in the brutal and unnecessary destruction
22:36of the magnificent Persian capital, Persepolis.
22:40The burning of Persepolis proved to be the bonfire
22:44of the Pan-Hellenic Crusade.
22:47The old enemy had been defeated, his capital city destroyed.
22:52Alexander's debt to his Greekness had been paid in full.
22:57From now on, he was in it strictly for himself,
23:01on a personal crusade for his own glory, his own legend.
23:06Alexander was a true autocrat.
23:08His systems and precedents would be discarded
23:11as he imposed ad hoc solutions to short-term problems
23:15before moving swiftly on.
23:17But this was no way to create an enduring empire,
23:21let alone a lasting civilisation.
23:24For the next seven years, Alexander marched his armies
23:28through Persia into Bactria, modern-day Afghanistan,
23:33and beyond to India.
23:36The further he went, the deeper he travelled,
23:40into the terra incognita of his own personality.
23:44Adopting the elaborate dress, court etiquette,
23:47and manners of the East in search of an identity
23:50that gave his achievements some meaning.
23:56Anyone that disagreed with him,
23:58including some of his closest Macedonian companions, were killed.
24:06In the years following his death,
24:08Alexander was forced to leave his homeland
24:11and be killed.
24:37Alexander's quest for personal fulfilment and world domination
24:40had to come to an end, sometime, somewhere.
24:44They did on the 10th of June, 323 BC, in Babylon.
24:49He was 33 years old when he died.
24:52Not a hero's death in battle, but probably of a mosquito bite.
24:56A weather-watching Babylonian chronicler would mark the passing
25:00of the king with the following laconic comment.
25:03The king died. Clouds.
25:11The big man was dead.
25:20Now it was up to lesser men to try and make some sense of his legacy.
25:26To do that, they would have to attempt something more difficult
25:29than building a legend.
25:33They would have to build a civilisation.
25:37We're told that immediately after his death,
25:40Alexander's successors met in the tent
25:43where the empty throne of their dead hero stood
25:46and debated what should be done next.
25:51When they spoke, it's said they imitated his voice
25:54in even the way that he held his head.
25:59According to one account, they felt as if a god was leading them on.
26:06Well, that was the official line anyway,
26:09but the political reality was a good deal less starry-eyed.
26:13Alexander had left no immediate successor.
26:16There was an unborn son to a Bactrian princess
26:20and a half-brother Philip,
26:22but the son was half-barbarian and the brother half-man.
26:26So anybody with sufficient military muscle at their disposal
26:30grabbed what they could.
26:32Whilst parsley declaring, they were just holding it in trust
26:35until a rightful heir emerged.
26:48Predictably, the son and the half-brother were bumped off
26:52and his true heirs could take the gloves off
26:55in proper Macedonian style.
26:59No-one had sufficient muscle to claim all of Alexander's lands.
27:10And when the dust finally settled, after much bloodletting,
27:14his empire had been carved up into four massive territories.
27:20Greece and Macedon were taken by Cassander, a former cavalryman.
27:27Asia Minor was ruled by Lysimachus, an ex-bodyguard.
27:33The East, or Asia, was run by Seleucus, an infantry commander.
27:39And Ptolemy, a childhood friend of Alexander's,
27:43and his former food-taster, got Egypt.
27:48These were empire-sized kingdoms, ruled by big men
27:52who'd learnt their art of kingship from Alexander
27:56and the Greek heroes of old.
28:05What was the first thing that came to Alexander's mind?
28:10What they did, Alexander never would, or could.
28:15They knuckled down to the prosaic business of administering their kingdoms,
28:21levying taxes, seeing off their rivals and establishing dynasties.
28:27And what they achieved was far more concrete than any mere legend.
28:32Alexander might have conquered the world,
28:35but it was his successors who Hellenised it.
28:46Spreading the fruits of Greek civilisation around the known world
28:50was no easy task.
28:53It's in Alexandria, in Egypt,
28:55that you can best appreciate the range of problems faced by the successors.
29:01The way in which they tackled them
29:03was not with the improvisational genius of a warrior king,
29:07but with patience and tried and tested tools
29:11taken from the toolbox of civilisation.
29:15It started with getting basic infrastructure in place.
29:24Alexander decided to found a new city,
29:27here on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt,
29:29and enthusiastically set about planning its wide boulevards,
29:33its library, and which gods would have their temple where.
29:37But other, more practical considerations seemed to have slipped his mind,
29:41like what the citizens of his new foundation were going to drink.
29:58These are the cisterns of Alexandria.
30:02Now, fresh drinking water has always been a problem here.
30:05The nearest source is the River Nile.
30:07But Alexander wanted his city here,
30:10between a brackish lake and the salty sea.
30:13So there was nothing for it but to bring the River Nile to the city,
30:17a distance of some 30km.
30:20It was Ptolemy who ordered a canal to be dug from the Nile
30:24to the gates of the new city...
30:29..from where the water was fed by a network of channels
30:32into vaulted underground cisterns to store the water.
30:37But heavy investment in vital infrastructure
30:40was also visible above ground.
30:45This is Fort Kiteby, a medieval garrison base.
30:49It was built by Alexander the Great
30:51in order to protect the city from the invasion of the Romans.
30:55It was built by Alexander the Great
30:57in order to protect the city from the invasion of the Romans.
31:02This is Fort Kiteby, a medieval castle,
31:06which is Alexandria's great landmark today.
31:10The fort's impressive,
31:12but it's built on top of the ruins of something far more iconic,
31:16the great lighthouse of Alexandria,
31:18considered by the ancients to be one of the seven wonders of their world.
31:32The lighthouse was the great symbol of Alexandria around the world...
31:39..towering 100 metres into the sky
31:42and burning brightly for 17 centuries.
31:54The Pharos started out as a response
31:57to another of Alexander's oversights.
32:02He'd chosen to site his port city
32:04on a treacherous stretch of rocky coastline.
32:09So Ptolemy, playing Mr Fix-It as usual,
32:12ordered a lighthouse to be built
32:15to guide ships safely into Alexandria.
32:20Sadly, it was destroyed by a series of earthquakes in the 14th century AD,
32:25but it has not been lost forever.
32:27Its ruins lie at the bottom of the sea
32:30alongside the fort.
33:01Diving amongst the ruins of the Pharos
33:04gives you a sense of its monumental scale and ambition.
33:10It's a bit like swimming through an architectural salvage yard.
33:14There are thousands of pieces of masonry scattered about,
33:18and it's a bit like being in the middle of the desert.
33:21It's a bit like being in the middle of the desert.
33:24It's a bit like being in the middle of the desert.
33:27There are thousands of pieces of masonry scattered over the seabed.
33:32They range from instantly recognisable icons of the old Egypt...
33:38..to massive slabs of granite, some weighing more than 150 tonnes.
33:45These formed the imposing superstructure of the lighthouse.
33:51The Pharos was pure propaganda,
33:54a statement of the Ptolemy's power and prestige.
34:17Oh! That was great.
34:21Fantastic.
34:23Broken columns, huge platform,
34:27lots of sphinxes, decapitated sphinxes.
34:30Amazing.
34:32Yes, an incredible sight, a really incredible sight.
34:42With its plumbing fixed and its port no longer a graveyard for shipping,
34:48Alexandria could at last become something more than a mere vanity project
34:53of an all-conquering hero.
34:56Under Ptolemy and his successors,
34:59Alexandria would become one of the powerhouses of the Hellenizing Project.
35:06Alexander's conquests had carried the ideas and institutions
35:10of classical Greece away from the narrow confines of the city-states
35:15and exposed them to the non-Greek world.
35:20These ideas were now available as a range of commodities
35:24for Greeks to exploit and for non-Greeks to buy into.
35:31The Hellenistic kings were heirs to an incredibly rich
35:35and robust cultural tradition,
35:37honed by the cut and thrust of the agora,
35:40the marketplace for ideas in classical Greece.
35:44Now these cultural products had been created there,
35:47such as crowd-pleasing plays, scientific ideas,
35:51the philosophical debate, would be introduced to a wider world.
36:00Today, most of ancient Alexandria has been built over,
36:04but you don't have to dig too deep to find evidence
36:08of one of the great cultural success stories of the ancient world.
36:13It was here that Ptolemy proved himself
36:16to be the canniest of all the successor kings.
36:31Ptolemy well understood the brutal realities of power politics,
36:35but he also knew how to deploy the most subtle weapons in the royal armoury.
36:40Iconography, a symbol of propaganda,
36:44was said that Ptolemy had once been Alexander's food taster,
36:48the last line of defence against any would-be poisoner.
36:52And perhaps when you think that every meal might be your last,
36:56you learn important lessons about the illusion of power and prestige
37:00and how to manipulate them.
37:05In the wake of Ptolemy's takeover of Egypt,
37:09an estimated 150,000 Greeks moved to Alexandria
37:14to be close to this new source of power and patronage.
37:18But if they thought they were coming to some kind of Athens on the Nile,
37:22they were wrong.
37:26There'd be no public debates about the finer points of politics
37:30in Ptolemy's Alexandria.
37:34It was an autocracy, pure and simple.
37:37No dissenters, democrats and troublemakers could expect to be stamped on.
37:51Ptolemy himself was no homesick expat longing for the hills of Macedon.
37:57He committed to Egypt for the long haul,
38:00declaring himself pharaoh and founding a dynasty.
38:04In the days of the British Raj, they would have said,
38:08the old boy's gone native.
38:14Though the native Egyptians were definitely second-class citizens
38:18in Ptolemy's Egypt,
38:20he tried to build bridges by contributing another god
38:24to this god-drenched land.
38:26Serapis was an Egyptian-Greek hybrid
38:30designed to appeal to Greek and Egyptian alike.
38:36He had an impeccable Egyptian pedigree, with the bull god Apis
38:40and the god of the underworld, Osiris, in his family tree.
38:44But the Greek side of his heritage was unmissable.
38:49With his long-flowing locks and human appearance,
38:52Serapis doesn't really look like an Egyptian god.
38:55That was because he wasn't.
38:57He was the creation of the Greek artists and intellectuals
39:00at Ptolemy's court.
39:02In Alexandria, a magnificent temple was built in honour of this new god,
39:07the Serapium.
39:12It was a smart move,
39:14which helped transform Serapis
39:17into one of the most popular gods of the ancient world.
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39:45But it would be a temple of another kind
39:48that would seal Alexandria's reputation.
39:51A temple of learning.
39:54The Great Library.
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40:10This rather spectacular underground gallery
40:13is thought to have been part of the Sister Library
40:16of Alexandria's Great Library.
40:18It lies directly underneath the Serapium.
40:21These niches that you can see here
40:23are thought to have held the papyri scrolls,
40:25the ancient books.
40:30This local branch library offers a tantalising glimpse
40:34of what the Great Library would have been like.
40:37A hothouse of learning and ideas.
40:40At its peak, it housed a quarter of a million volumes.
40:45Its aim was to collect all of the books in the world,
40:49and any that were found on ships docking at Alexandria
40:53would be confiscated until they had been copied
40:56by the library's legion of scribes.
41:01The Great Library was destroyed in late antiquity,
41:05and nobody knows where it stood,
41:07but its legacy lives on.
41:14In 2002, a state-of-the-art new library,
41:18the Bibliotheca Alexandrina,
41:20was opened in homage to the contribution
41:22that the city's ancient library made to the spread of civilisation.
41:36The library proved the truth of the old adage,
41:39knowledge is power.
41:46The library gave the Ptolemies huge prestige,
41:49and Alexandria quickly became the intellectual epicentre
41:53of the Hellenistic world.
41:55The cream of Greek academia enticed here
41:58to study philosophy, literature, physics, mathematics,
42:02medicine and geography.
42:08The library's alumni reads like a who's who
42:11of the great mimes of the ancient world.
42:15Archimedes of Eureka fame,
42:18who invented his screw water pump here.
42:25Euclid, who laid down the rules of geometry.
42:32And Hero, the da Vinci of his day,
42:35whose best-known work, the Pneumatica,
42:38was full of the most amazing inventions.
42:45Now, this was Hero's greatest invention.
42:48It's a steam engine,
42:50and I'm going to see whether I can get it to work.
42:53I've got to say, I'm a bit nervous about doing this,
42:56because I was so bad at science at school,
42:58they didn't let me take my chemistry and physics O-levels.
43:02Right, so that's all in.
43:04Now, screw the top in tightly.
43:08Light the wick.
43:13And now we wait.
43:18And now we wait.
43:22And now we wait.
43:26And now we wait.
43:31And now we wait.
43:37Now, I can hear the steam just beginning to come up.
43:43And you can see now, as the water evaporates
43:46and the steam is forced through the two holes
43:49on the opposite side of the metal ball,
43:51they're forcing the metal ball to rotate.
43:55Now, for Hero, this was just like a little toy.
43:58But who knows if he'd really understood what he had on his hands.
44:02The Industrial Revolution could have happened here, in Alexandria,
44:062,000 years ago.
44:18The library also invented a new invention.
44:22The library also influenced the arts, as well as science.
44:29The Ptolemies were generous supporters of artists,
44:32and they used their freedom to treat the human form with daring realism.
44:38They were helped by the scientific research
44:41into anatomy that took place at the library.
44:45Some of the best-known sculptures of the ancient world,
44:48including the Venus de Milo,
44:51the winged victory of Samothrace,
44:55and the dying Gaul,
44:57are all products of this cross-fertilisation.
45:02Marble's a fantastic medium for showing the human form.
45:06And here, the sculptor is showing off his skill
45:09by having the hand clenching a ball
45:11so that the muscles and the veins are bulging
45:14and we can see the tautness of the tendons.
45:19What this shows us is the extent to which, in Alexandria,
45:23artists were working closely with anatomists.
45:26There was a much better understanding of the human body and how it worked.
45:36But the library wasn't just the meeting ground of art and science.
45:40It was the place where East and West were reunited.
45:49In the thousand years since the collapse
45:52of the great Bronze Age civilisations,
45:55the geographical gap between East and West
45:58had hardened into a cultural and racial one.
46:04The ideology behind Alexander's Pan-Hellenic Crusade
46:08was fuelled by crude ethnic caricatures
46:11that contrasted virile, rational, freedom-loving,
46:17Greeks with effeminate, superstitious, despotic, Asians.
46:29But by conquering the world, the Greeks had been exposed to the world
46:33and couldn't help but be curious about it.
46:39This is exemplified by one of the library's most important legacies.
46:45A map drawn by its chief librarian, Eratosthenes.
46:55It's a map of the known world in 220 BC.
46:59And this is directly connected, this map, to Alexander's conquests.
47:05Here we can see the places in Asia Minor, going into Persia,
47:09you've got places in the Red Sea,
47:11you've got places in China, going into Persia,
47:14you've got places in Arabia,
47:16and you go on to Bactria, and we've even got India here as well.
47:22And one of the things he managed to work out
47:24was that all seas were connected together.
47:27So, theoretically, it would be possible to circumnavigate Africa
47:31and also to sail from Spain in the west all the way to India.
47:42You have to travel a long, long way from Greece
47:46to really appreciate the full irony of Alexander's story.
47:51The meagerness of his greatness
47:53compared to the greatness of his legacy.
47:57I'm in the Punjab, near Islamabad in Pakistan.
48:01And, as you can probably tell, I'm a long way from Macedon.
48:062,300 years ago, Alexander the Great was here with his army.
48:11And the only reason he was here
48:13was because he wanted to see the world.
48:16He wanted to see the world.
48:18He wanted to see the world.
48:20He wanted to see the world.
48:222,300 years ago, Alexander the Great was here with his army.
48:27And he only turned back when his long-suffering troops mutinied.
48:31Now, Alexander might have been defeated, but Hellenism wasn't.
48:35And it triumphed here in some very surprising ways.
48:46150 years after Alexander,
48:49a man called Demetrius invaded India
48:52from his kingdom in modern-day Afghanistan.
48:57Demetrius was tough and ambitious enough
49:00to create a substantial Indo-Greek kingdom
49:03that would hold sway in this region for the next two centuries.
49:10Once the fighting was over,
49:12Demetrius quite naturally built himself a city,
49:16Saqqup.
49:20It was classically Hellenistic.
49:23Its streets laid out in a Greek-style grid pattern,
49:27with 15 roads running into one central avenue.
49:32There would have been an acropolis.
49:35And temples, as well as a gymnasium,
49:40libraries and a marketplace,
49:43all the familiar components of the Greek city-state.
49:49But Saqqup was also the meeting ground
49:52of a vigorous Western Hellenistic civilisation
49:55and the civilisations of the Indian subcontinent.
49:59Ancient worlds in their own right,
50:01with their own rich and fascinating story
50:04of how to solve the conundrum of civilisation.
50:10This is the shrine of the double-headed eagle.
50:13It's a wonderful hybrid of the Greek and the Indian.
50:17With its Corinthian pilasters and Greek pediment,
50:21alongside an Indian torana, an ornamental gateway.
50:28In Saqqup, Greek and Indian language and learning merged,
50:32and religious ideas, Greek, Zoroastrian, Hindu and Buddhist, co-existed.
50:40MUSIC CONTINUES
50:47King Demetrius himself was a follower of the Buddha,
50:51whose life and teachings were contemporaneous
50:54with the golden age of classical Greece in the 5th century BC.
51:01The Greeks here, who straddled both worlds,
51:04would play an important part
51:06in the development of Buddhism throughout Asia.
51:11It was Greek artists that first gave the Buddha his human face.
51:15And it was techniques pioneered at the great library of Alexandria
51:19that gave these Buddhas their wonderfully naturalistic and fine features.
51:24And it would remain the dominant artistic canon in Central Asia
51:28for nearly a millennium.
51:36The Greeks also produced some of the most exquisite gold jewellery
51:40of the ancient world,
51:42which is reminiscent of the treasures found in Macedon.
51:54Greek and Buddhist ideas and philosophy came together too.
52:00In the most important Graeco-Buddhist work, the Milinda Punya,
52:04the Greek king, asks questions to a Buddhist monk.
52:08The moral message is Buddhist, and it was written in Sanskrit.
52:12But the style echoes the great Athenian philosopher, Socrates.
52:18We tend to think of multiculturalism as being an aspiration
52:22which is the exclusive preserve of liberal democracies.
52:26And even then, with a great deal of soul-searching and breast-beating.
52:30But what happened here in Sukkot reminds us
52:33that the story of alien cultures coming together
52:36and finding common ground is much older than that.
52:40And that's the promise of civilisation.
52:43So thank you, Alexander the Great,
52:45for inadvertently making that promise become real
52:48here in ancient Pakistan.
53:03The Hellenistic kings had forged
53:05one of the world's first truly global cultures.
53:09And they had taken it to the very edges of their world,
53:12where it had flourished.
53:15And yet, for them, Alexander would always define
53:19what it meant to be great.
53:22Their gymnasia, their libraries, their theatres,
53:26all that they had built would be overshadowed by his example,
53:30a constant temptation to the not-so-greats
53:33to follow in his fatal footsteps.
53:37Not everybody understood that the big-manism of Alexander
53:41was no way to build up a lasting legacy, let alone a kingdom.
53:45There were still plenty of adventurers, warlords
53:48and Alexander wannabes out there.
53:50And the most intriguing of this cast of characters was this man,
53:54Pyrrhus.
54:01Pyrrhus was a Hellenistic king of Epirus,
54:04a small mountain kingdom roughly where Albania is now,
54:08in the first quarter of the third century BC.
54:12He was a brilliant general.
54:17And just as Alexander had modelled himself on Achilles,
54:21Pyrrhus modelled himself on Alexander.
54:25In 280 BC, Pyrrhus finally got his chance
54:29to lay his claim to being the new Alexander.
54:32The Greek cities of southern Italy were being menaced
54:35by a new emerging power, Rome, who seemed to be hell-bent
54:39on taking over the whole of the peninsula.
54:42In their desperation, they now turned to Pyrrhus.
54:49It was a smart move.
54:52It was a smart signing.
54:54Pyrrhus landed in Italy...
54:58..and crushed the Romans in a series of battles,
55:02using elephants for the first time in Western Europe.
55:09Pyrrhus was soon within striking distance of Rome itself.
55:12But after a famous victory over the Roman legions at Ausculum,
55:16his losses were so great,
55:18that he's said to have passed the comment,
55:20another victory like this, and we've had it.
55:27He followed up his Pyrrhic victory
55:29by taking on the other great power in the Western Mediterranean,
55:33the Carthaginians.
55:39Like an old war horse,
55:41he had responded to the appeal of the Greek cities in Sicily.
55:48And soon captured the seemingly impregnable
55:51Carthaginian stronghold of Erex,
55:54leading from the front in a daring due assault.
56:03But the question for the all-conquering hero
56:06is always the same.
56:08What to conquer next?
56:12The problem with the Alexander technique
56:14was there were only two possible outcomes.
56:17One was a premature death like Alexander,
56:20which at least preserved your heroic status,
56:23and the other was inevitable defeat.
56:26Because unless you were Alexander,
56:28there was always somebody tougher round the corner.
56:37Fate decreed that Pyrrhus' death would come at the age of 46.
56:43For Alexander's, it would be touched with banality.
56:50Ejected from Sicily by ungrateful allies,
56:53he returned to take on the stubborn Romans,
56:56but with little success.
56:58Later, in Greece, during a siege,
57:01an old woman stunned him with a roof tile
57:04and an enemy soldier chopped off his head.
57:09Pyrrhus' career, which promised so much,
57:12but actually delivered so little,
57:14showed that it took more than charisma, courage,
57:18tactical genius, limitless ambition
57:21and a copy of the Iliad to conquer the world.
57:27And if you wanted to do something more difficult
57:30and build a civilisation rather than just a legend,
57:34it needed patience and guile
57:36and a political and economic system
57:39that was hard-nosed, clear-eyed and ruthless.
57:45A big idea, in other words, which would beat a big man every time.
57:55Even Pyrrhus understood that the days when the Greeks
57:58had been the movers and shakers of the ancient Mediterranean
58:01were now well and truly over.
58:03As he left Sicily for the last time,
58:05he predicted that the island would now become the wrestling ground
58:08for the Romans and the Carthaginians.
58:11Pyrrhus might have been yesterday's man,
58:13but he clearly understood the future.
58:18That future can be summarised in a word.
58:22Rome, the greatest idea in the story of civilisation.
58:31There's drama coming up this evening here on BBC HD,
58:34the final part of Mad Men in just a few moments.
58:37And then at 10.45, another case for Luther to unravel
58:40when a wealthy couple are kidnapped.