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Toxic bacteria killed Alexander the Great? | Scientists are claiming that a deadly bacterium in the The Styx River, the legendary portal to the underworld, may have ended Alexander's life. An extraordinarily toxic bacterium harboured by the "infernal"
Styx River might have been the fabled poison rumoured to have killed Alexander
the Great (356 -323 B.C.) more than 2,000 years ago, according to a scientific-meets-mythic
detective study. According to the study, calicheamicin, a secondary metabolite
of Micromonospora echinospora, is what gave the river its toxic reputation. It
was the Styx where gods swore sacred oaths. "If they lied, Zeus forced them to
drink the water, which struck them down. The 8th-century B.C. Greek poet Hesiod
wrote that the gods were unable to move, breathe or speak for one year," Discovery
News quoted co-author Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar at Stanford University's
Departments of Classics and History of Science, as saying. The researchers believe
this mythic poison must be calicheamicin. "This is an extremely toxic, gram-positive
soil bacterium and has only recently come to the attention of modern science.
It was discovered in the 1980s in caliche, crusty deposits of calcium carbonate
that form on limestone and is common in Greece ," author Antoinette Hayes, toxicologist
at Pfizer Research, said. Whether Alexander really died from poisoning, as some
of his closest friends believed, is pure speculation, Mayor and Hayes concede.
"We are not claiming that this was the poison that killed Alexander, nor we are
arguing for or against a poison plot," Mayor said. "However, such a sacred poison,
used by the gods, would be appropriate for Alexander, who was already being thought
of as semi-divine," she added. Alexander fell ill at one of many all-night drinking
parties in Babylon with abdominal pain and a very high fever - he was pronounced
dead on June 11, 323 B.C. "Notably, some of Alexander's symptoms and course of
illness seem to match ancient Greek myths associated with the Styx . He even lost
his voice, like the gods who fell into a coma-like state after drinking from the
river," Mayor said. "Cytotoxins cause cell death and induce high fever, chills,
and severe muscle and neurological pain. Therefore, this toxin could have caused
the fever and pain that Alexander suffered," Hayes said. |
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