(Bloomberg) Alexander the Great continues to pit man against man 2,300 years after his death.

Last week, Reuters reported that the opening of Oliver Stone?s film about the military colossus will be darkened by a group of highly agitated Greek lawyers threatening to sue the director for suggesting Alexander was bisexual.

The Discovery program takes up the more interesting issue of exactly how Alexander died. His unexpected passing, says Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox, is the ?most controversial? death in antiquity.

No one is certain exactly how or why he shook his mortal coil in Babylon on June 11, 323 B.C., at the age of 32.

Discovery brings in Commander John Grieve of Scotland Yard to sift the available evidence, search out new clues and offer a learned verdict.

Grieve is gray-haired, kindly, jowly, with an eye-catching growth on his left cheek. He is assisted by an international group of doctors, scientists, and scholars in his effort to find out who or what done it.

Grieve explains there are two schools of thought regarding Alexander?s death. One has it that he succumbed to disease, perhaps malaria, which took hold after a night of massive wine guzzling.

The other school presumes that Alexander was poisoned by insiders weary of his brutality and ambition.

The disease prognosis finds some support in the ?Royal Diaries,? a contemporary chronicle of Alexander?s life and times. He suffered from a high fever for 12 days prior to expiration, which is suggestive of malaria.

Yet Dr. John Marr, a contributing consultant to the programme, points out that malaria turns the urine and blood into a black soup, and there is no mention of this in the diaries.

A better guess is West Nile disease, a theory given weight by a passage from Plutarch, which Grieve reads from the Penguin edition.

As Alexander approached Babylon he beheld a flock of birds pecking each other while in flight. Some fell dead from the sky.

This was taken as a bad omen. Indeed, Alexander succumbed to his final illness some two weeks after the incident. That is roughly the same time span that New Yorkers fell ill, in 1999, after a small group of birds had died from the disease.

Grieve, who has a calm gravitas about him, is respectful of the view that a mosquito bearing a virus might have brought down Alexander, yet he leans towards the idea that a human bearing poison is the more likely suspect.

For one thing, a poison plot was immediately suspected. Aristotle, Alexander?s tutor, was accused of supplying the poison to avenge a nephew whose death he blamed on Alexander.

There were other enemies as well. As Cornell University historian Barry Strauss points out, Alexander had probably killed more human beings than any other person up to his time and also expropriated a great deal of real estate: an empire of some 2 million square miles, from Macedonia to Egypt to the mountains of Afghanistan.

He was also brutal toward friends, at least when potted, which was often. Alexander speared to death a close friend during a drunken rage and another time put an entire city to the torch in a booze-fuelled frenzy.

?There was an awful lot of poison around in the ancient world,? Strauss notes, and plenty of people who would like to feed a few ounces to the master of that universe.

A nodding Grieve is comfortable with the idea that poison killed Alexander, but dismisses out of hand the idea that Aristotle would have been in on such a crime. Murder simply wasn?t in the great philosopher, he believes.

He also notes that assassinations, including that of Alexander?s father, King Philip, were in that era carried out by the blade. Poison simply wasn?t the kosher way to knock off a head of state.

So what happened? Grieve reconstructs the Babylonian banquet at which Alexander went into his fatal tailspin. Portrayed here as a blond with a few major crooks in his nose, Alexander drains a huge vessel of plonk, then falls down drunk.

About a half-hour later, as dancing girls swirl and his cronies munch their meals, Alexander suddenly cries out from his stupor as if someone had spiked his wine with Draino.

Dr. Leo Schep of New Zealand?s Poisons Institute believes the likeliest agent would have been a root-derived toxin called hellebore, which in low doses has medicinal uses.

Hellebore was prescribed for a short time in the 1950s to treat high blood pressure and was used widely in the ancient world as a purgative and antidepressant.

Alexander was known to use purgatives, Grieve says, and was deeply depressed and anxious at the time of his death. Some eight months previous a favourite general who doubled as a paramour had died. Alexander was also anxious to conquer Arabia and would likely have been purging his body to prepare for the upcoming campaign.

Final verdict: Alexander ordered an increase in his hellebore dose to fight off depression, flush his plumbing, and prepare him for the slaughter and conquest ahead.

Hellebore was probably mixed with his banquet wine, and his attending physicians re-dosed him over the next several days, until the great one went toes-up.

Grieve and his colleagues make a commanding case. One waits with interest to see how the view that this epic marauder and malevolent drunk was purged by a purgative, at his own direction, will fly with Greeks bearing lawsuits.

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