In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great

- Season 1

(1998)

Michael Wood begins the series as 21-year-old Alexander and his Greek army set out to invade Asia and overthrow the Persian Empire. En route, he recounts Alexander's early years. His mother, Olympias, was intensely devoted to strange religious cults, but Aristotle, one of the great philosophers, tutored Alexander. He was 21 when he succeeded to the throne in 336 BC, following the assassination of his father. The kingdom he inherited already dominated a Greece exhausted by the war between Athens and Sparta. Shortly after becoming king, Alexander journeyed from northern...

Traveling through the heart of modern-day Persia on the second leg of the trek, Michael Wood journeys to the shores of the Caspian Sea, where the young conqueror was declared Lord of Asia; poised to invade Afghanistan. Entering modern Iraq, Michael is unable to travel to the site in Northern Iraq of Alexander's decisive victory against Darius and the Persians, as it lies behind a modern military frontline. Instead he flies there and, directly above the battleground, he describes the conflict for the navigator with the help of the aircraft's computer system. After the ...

Michael Wood makes his way through war-torn Afghanistan on a dramatic march with pack horses over the Hindu Kush Mountains. At Kabul, Michael finds himself in the middle of a siege of the city by the fundamentalist Taliban. Hiring horses for the camera equipment and armed guards to ward off ambushes, he sets off to follow Alexander's trail, 20,000ft up in the Hindu Kush Mountains, to make it through the Khawak Pass and Central Asia. On the other side, the historical traveler stays with a local warlord before pushing on by jeep across the Oxus river into former Soviet ...

Michael Wood recounts the tale of Alexander's final days before his sudden and mysterious death at the age of 32 in Babylon. After trekking through the Khyber Pass and into the valleys of Pakistan's North-West frontier, Michael encounters a retired Pakistani general who used to lecture about Alexander at a military college. The old soldier explains the tactics of Alexander's decisive battle with the Indian King Porus and his war elephants, before Michael crosses into India. At this point of his journey, Alexander decided to return to Iran through the deserts along the...