pothos.org

All about Alexander the Great

Welcome to pothos.org, Alexander the Great's home on the web.

In 1994, this became the first web site dedicated to Alexander the Great - arguably the most famous secular person in history. The site has grown over the years and is maintained by a team of enthusiasts. The forum is our tour de force - a place where people can discuss Alexander, and argue about aspects of his life, career and death, at a level that suits them. Some of our forum members are beginners, people who are just starting out on their studies of Alexander; others are academics who might or might not specialise in Alexander studies. Whatever your level of interest and knowledge, you will find like-minded people who love to discuss and debate the life of Alexander the Great.

Past history of the site

About pothos.org - where did we come from?

Alexander's pothos.org started life hidden on an educational web site in 1994. It was the first web page dedicated to Alexander the Great, beating the second by about two months. In those days, images were an innovation in Netscape 2.0.

This site is maintained by a team of volunteers. All share a peculiar fascination with the Ancient King. If you want to find out about the authors, or when you want to include their names in papers or assignments, please click the link at the bottom of each article. A brief bio will pop up, including links to his or her various contributions.

Some people have asked me why there are so few images on this site. This is because I want people to see a page in full as quickly as possible. Also, images of Alexander are generally restricted to marble busts and archaeological finds, neither of which are very inspiring. I prefer to let the words do the talking.

Though pothos.org gets some 130,000 hits a month, the site has always been run on a not for profit basis (the google ads barely cover the hosting costs). We pay for it and we spend many hours in our spare time in order to establish a cyber space monument that does some justice to the magnificent phenomenon Alexander has been.

Everybody is invited to join the lively and busy Forum. It has been the beating heart of pothos.org ever since it was created in 1998. Feel free to post your questions and viewpoints, no matter if you are new to the subject or have been a long time student of history. Rest assured your fellow Forum members tend to be friendly, helpful and open minded.

In 2007, the site started to suffer from a series of server outages. Initially these were largely due to the (then) host brinkster.com who were hacked and had to change all the user passwords - without informing the clients that this would knock out the applications on the servers! By September brinkster was going seriously downhill and one of the tables in the database behind the forum was corrupted. This was painstakingly reconstructed but the time had come to move. The entire web site was updated and copied over to the new server in September (big thanks to Vergina Sun who did a majority of the content copying). The new web site is much more future proof, secure and reliable. The future of pothos.org is safe!

Thank you for your interest in pothos.org.

This is an archive of the old site https://web.archive.org/web/19970415141 ... /index.htm

2024 update

In 2004, the release of Oliver Stone's movie 'Alexander' starring Colin Farrell, caused a huge surge in interest in Alexander. Coinciding with the growth of the internet through wider availablity of broadband, the forum saw a great deal of activity over the next ten or twelve years, and the discovery of the Amphipolis tomb in 2014 saw another peak of activity. Though the number of forum contributors in 2024 has decreased, we are still going strong, and new contributors are always welcome!

In 2024, the site was transferred to a new host - Fasthosts. This gives us plenty of space, and hopefully, resilience. Many of the main site pages are now rather out of date, and it is intended that these will be revamped over the coming months. Watch this space!