Paul swore by the Cream of Sum Yung Gai.
Posted on 07/19/2010 6:39:05 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The Styx River, the legendary portal to the underworld, harbors a deadly bacteria that may have ended Alexander's life. An extraordinarily toxic bacterium harbored by the "infernal" Styx River might have been the fabled poison rumored to have killed Alexander the Great (356 - 323 B.C.) more than 2,000 years ago, according to a scientific-meets-mythic detective study... reviews ancient literary evidence on the Styx poison in light of modern geology and toxicology. According to the study, calicheamicin, a secondary metabolite of Micromonospora echinospora, is what gave the river its toxic reputation... Another account by the Greek geographer Pausanias (110 - 180) reported that the river could ruin crystal, pottery and bronze. "(The) only thing able to resist corrosion is the hoof of a mule or horse," he wrote. "Indeed, no ancient writer ever casts doubt on the existence of a deadly poison from the Styx River," Mayor, author of the Mithradates biography "The Poison King," said. The researchers believe this mythic poison must be calicheamicin... Now called Mavroneri, "Black Water," the Styx originates in the high mountains of Achaia, Greece. Its cold waters cascade over a limestone crag to form the second highest waterfall in Greece... Whether Alexander really died from poisoning, as some of his closest friends believed, is pure speculation, Mayor and Hayes concede.... Retrodiagnoses for his mysterious death have included poisoning, heavy drinking, septicemia, pancreatitis, malaria, West Nile fever, typhoid, and accidental or deliberate poisoning (hellebore, arsenic, aconite, strychnine).
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
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Maybe it was Aids...don’t all the gay rags claim he was one of them?
I thought he died of malaria. That can kill quite quickly.
I thought he died of alcohol poisoning.
He gargled on his best friend’s private parts, yes, but AIDS is a recent phenom.
We do know he died. From something.
...and from all accounts that I’ve been able to locate, he’s still dead.
Paul swore by the Cream of Sum Yung Gai.
He lived fast and left a good-looking corpse is all we really know.
I can’t think of anybody his age who is still alive!
Seems like I read somewhere he died of a lingering infection caused by a severe chest wound.
The author doesn’t even speculate on how water from a river in Greece could get to Persia to poison Alexander.
“We do know he died. From something.”
You sure?
Might have been that one of his seers got a peek at the future with the IRS in it and ol’ Alex decided to get a head start on hiding... or... what do they call it? Drop off the grid? Yeah. I think that’s it.
head start on hiding-drop off the grid
Could be- however if so he missed the boat entirely- think of the gazillions he could make if he sold his solution/potion or whatever he had- to live so long.
I think he caught an arrow in the chest while storming a fortified city that was blocking his fleet’s move down the Indus to the ocean. There was also a long overland march through a desert while the fleet moved parallel to the line-of-march. That couldn’t have been good for a sucking chest wound. Plus you can bet everyone had malaria.
Plus, the article indicates they've not even sampled the water from that stream. It's all sheer speculation. They also conflate mythology about the stream in Hades and its effects on the Gods with the speculation about actual stream that according to legend was the source of the mythical river.
They might think about Occam's Razor and look at all those years on the march or the very hard party life he enjoyed after his conquests or someone using a poison available in Babylon as more likely causes.
Incidentally, Alexander was planning a campaign to conquer Arabia at the time of his death. What would the history of the Arabs have been like if they had been absorbed into a Hellenistic kingdom??
It didn’t seem to do the folk of Bactria (Afghanistan and Pakistan) a lot of good.....
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