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HiI read your note with interest. Alexander has fascinated me since I first read of him - albeit a bit later in life than in your case. I read Arrian first, moving on to others, including Robin Lane Fox. The BBC produced a very watchable series "In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great" and I was hooked. There are some characters in history that defy belief, and Alexander is top of the pops.

Hi Chris and Ruthaki,
I just watched that mini-series again the other day...it is very interesting, but Michael Woods is a little hard to take sometimes. He may be a bit disallusioned? by Alexander, and I think he might have even said this a few times while narrating the trek. Of course, he does have the advantage of having actually gone the route and suffered a bit from the heat and elements...particularly in Gedrosia. We saw Issus, Siwa, Tyre, Mount Olympus, perhaps the Sogdian rock, the remains of Persepolis, the Persian gates, and come close enough to Guagemela and Hydaspes to get a feel for them, and assuming they haven't changed too much since antiquity, we get a look first hand of what Alexander saw. In this way it is an invaluable piece, and very enjoyable.
later Nicator

I couldn't agree with you more. And believe it or not, his spirit is still very 'alive' in Macedonia!

I have taped it for my archives. An interesting look at parts of the country that are no longer available to us.

One thing I wondered is how much the land would have changed since Alexander's day - Wood says at one point that it would have been more fertile in the interior than it is now. Anyone got any ideas?I have the tapes, but haven't watched them all the way through - I thought it was much more about Michael Wood than Alexander

Well, that's true to a point - in as much as areas of the Fertile Crescent were more fertile than they are now. I don't think that the area that was Bactria and Sogdiana was any more so, for example, but Mesopotamia certainly was. I used to have some quite detailed information about the differences but, just my luck, I haven't a clue where it is!All the bestMarcus

I'm sure there's a lot of change in the Valley of the Rivers but I doubt the areas of the Hindu Kush and Northern Afganistan have changed very much at all.