Tristan Hughes

You've got trappings of the Persian court.

You've got all of this coming in and the celebration, the ceremony surrounding the king.

And you've also got the changing of the guard to some extent in terms of the people around Alexander are more of his contemporaries and younger men who've proven themselves in recent years.

The men like Clitus the Black are fewer in number.

Philip's old hands, the real veterans.

And that clearly Alexander likes being flattered.

And that's reflected in the histories that are written by his court historians that ridiculously exaggerated events that have occurred.

When he didn't need to, it is rather childish almost that this man delighted in being said he's even more wonderful than he really was.

Because if they just stuck to the bare facts, it's spectacular.

So you get a group that are praising Alexander and denigrating Philip.

And Clytus, who is, as are all of them, quite highly inebriated at this point, because again, you've still got this very strong drinking culture of the clansmen of the king and his warriors, basically, celebrating together.

So he starts mocking this.

Some of his friends realized that it's going a bit too far.

He's starting to criticize Alexander, you know, and reminding him about, you'd be dead if it wasn't for my right arm.

This sort of thing, you know, you need, we're the people who fought this.

Some of his friends managed to sort of usher him out.

And then, as is sometimes the way with drunks, he somehow gets free and thinks it's a great idea to come back in and start insulting Alexander again.

Alexander flies off the handle completely, grabs a spear from one of the guards that's there and runs Clytus through and kills him.

At this point, he's shocked by what he's done.

He takes the spear and is then trying to kill himself with it.