Alexander the Great - an Introduction

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Transcript:

Today is a special episode because it's for the birthday boy.  This week marks the birthday of none other than Alexander the Great, at least according  to Plutarch.  And whether or not we can trust anything our sources say, it's going to be a bit  of a running theme this episode.  We have a really important episode today because it's about one of those important  great men of history that everyone keeps banging on about.  But do we know what we know?  Is it actually accurate?  For that we have a very, very special guest expert today.  Would you like to introduce yourself?  

Yeah, hi folks.  Thanks so much for having me, Alexandra.  My name is Stephen Harrison.  I am an ancient historian.  I teach at Swansea University.  I've been studying, writing about, teaching about Alexander the Great for, I guess, a bit  more than a decade now.  So looking forward to talking about him.  

I mean, if we're going to talk about Alexander the Great, you are the person to talk to.  And I really do want to talk about Alexander the Great today because he's one of those  people I think that everyone has this image of, a very clear image of, we're told  we know the story of Alexander the Great and everything about his life and career.  I am wondering if the picture is as clear as we think it is.  So let's talk about, to start off with, preconceptions.  A lot of people see him as this conqueror who is going off conquering the known world,  single-handed, gay icon.  Is it fair to say, do you think, that Alexander is perhaps misrepresented in the  modern perceptions of who we think he is?  

I think all of those elements that you've just mentioned are aspects of things that  happened in his reign.  So in that sense, saying Alexander went off and conquered the known world, or at  least a large part of the known world, is true.  But I think it's only part of the story.  And I think that's maybe where the misrepresentation comes in.  And I do, yeah, I do think Alexander's misrepresented.  And I think that the narratives that we usually see about Alexander are often  quite simplistic and hopefully as we'll be able to get into today, it's a  really complex story.  And you know, you started off by saying, do we know what happened?  And I can answer that in one word and the answer is no.  And it makes for a very short and boring podcast episode, but it's the  right answer.  And, you know, the ancient sources for Alexander are hugely problematic and  very, very complex.  We have better first, we're not quite first hand.  The evidence for Jesus is more reliable than the evidence for Alexander the  Great in terms of people being close to that figure, having written about  him in a way that survives to us today.  So that's something about the scale of the problem.  

Alexander is a truly extraordinary person.  I'm taking it that there would be people Ammongst his retinue lining up to  write about, "I knew this guy personally and I'm going to publish my memoirs."  Is that not the case then?  

Yeah.  Yeah.  Should we do a quick overview of the sources?  

Yes, please.  Okay.  So Alexander is alive, what, 356 to 323 BCE.  So it's a short life and his real kind of prominence is the 330s and  the 320s, that's when his campaigns happen and we'll talk about them.  There is somebody in his retinue who writes about him.  His name is Ptolemy and everyone listening to this knows a little bit  about Ptolemy, perhaps without realizing it, because after Alexander  dies, Ptolemy goes to Egypt, he sets himself up as king and he  founds the dynasty that ends with Cleopatra having an incident with  a snake and all of those stories.  Right?  So he's a hugely important person in the ancient world.  He's somebody who is massively neglected and massively overlooked,  but that's maybe, maybe that's a different episode, but he writes,  so he writes an account of Alexander the Great's reign.  So yeah, problem number one, it doesn't survive.  Of course.  Problem number two, he was writing at a time when he was trying  to set himself up as king of Egypt.  He is writing about what happened in Alexander's reign, trying to  make sure that he looks good.  There's a great story there in, I think it's in India or maybe  it's in Afghanistan and suddenly the army is struggling, but a man  from the Macedonian army rushes forward and kills a, I think it's  an Indian chief in single combat.  And of course that person is Ptolemy and you know, Ptolemy is  including those things to make himself look good, to make himself  look like the right full successor to Alexander because he's writing  at a time when all of Alexander's leading generals are fighting  to gain control of his empire.  So that means all of the people he's fighting against were also  people who served with Alexander.  So Ptolemy writes negatively about them.  

So number one, his work doesn't survive.  Number two, the stuff that does survive is written from a very  particular perspective with a very particular political aim.  So we've got that issue.  He did write.  Another people wrote, a guy called Nearchus, who's one of  Alexander's admirals writes an account.  Chares who was Alexander's court chamberlain wrote an account.  None of those, what we'd call first generation sources survive.  So first generation, we're talking about people who were  essentially participants in the campaign.  I deliberately didn't use the word eyewitness because we need to  remember that just because people were at Alexander's court, it  doesn't mean that they saw everything.   

 So we've got that first generation of scholars, of historians.  None of those survive.  The earliest surviving account, literary account of Alexander  was written 300 years after he died.  That's a considerable gap.  And that's written by a guy called Diodorus.  Diodorus is writing what is translated in English as the  library of history.  And he's basically writing down everything that had happened in  the world up until the time he was alive.  And he dedicates this one big book to writing about Alexander.  When he's doing that Diodorus, because he's trying to write the  history of everything, he hasn't got time necessarily to read  every source that exists and to weigh them up and to do the  kind of history that we might do today.  So he uses primarily a figure called  Cleitarchus as his, as his source.  We think, we don't know for sure, but we think.  Who's  Cleitarchus?  And the answer is, well, we don't really know, don't really know.  The  Cleitarchus is a figure he's associated with Alexandria in Egypt.  He's definitely writing after Alexander died, but there's big scholarly debates.  Some scholars have him writing within 20 years or so of Alexander's death.  Other people have him writing 150 years later.  So, so there's that source tradition.  So Diodorus is the earliest source.  He's one of five authors from the Roman period who come down to us.  And they are Diodorus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Arrian, Plutarch, and Justin.  The two most important probably are Arrian and Curtius.  So I'll talk about them in a second.  

Let's deal with the others quickly.  Plutarch, he is writing what he calls Lives, what we would call biography.  And he opens up his account of Alexander by saying, he writes  these things called parallel lives where he, he writes the biography  of a famous figure from Greek history and a famous figure from Roman history.  And then he compares them.  Usually he's doing this to say, here are two really good, great men.  You used that term before, I'm sure you will unpack it, but here are two  great men from history, what can we learn from them?  Sometimes he uses bad examples and he says, look at how bad this  man was, don't behave like him.  But with Alexander, he pairs Alexander with, with Julius Caesar.  The obvious comparison, right?  Two great conquerors.  And then he says, in the life of Alexander, he opens up and he says,  readers, you're going to have to forgive me if I don't write down.  I should say I'm paraphrasing here.  I can't quote Plutarch entirely from memory, but he says essentially,  you're going to have to forgive me if I don't include all of the great  details of his campaign, because I'm interested in finding out about the  great battles in which thousands of people died and of course, the question  is something like that, how do we know about the jokes?  Who was writing down the little joke?  How do we know that these jokes were true?  So Plutarch's example, Justin.  So Justin, again, we don't know exactly when Justin is writing.  He's writing in the second or the third or the fourth or maybe  even the fifth century of the common era.  So potentially 800 years after Alexander died.  He is using, it's called an Epitome, his account, a summary.  And he's writing a summary of a work written by a Roman historian  called Trogus, which doesn't survive.  Trogus was writing when essentially when Augustus was around.  So first century CE.  And Trogus probably used  Cleitarchus.  So if I'm saying Justin is our fifth best source, and he was  writing 800 years after Alexander died, using the work of a Roman that  we don't know anything about really, who was using the work of  Cleitarchus  who we don't know anything about.  And  Cleitarchus must've got his information from somewhere because  he wasn't an eyewitness, so we're talking the fifth best sources,  fourth or fifth hand from Alexander.  

So everything we have is Chinese whispers.  

Yeah, essentially, essentially.  And that example, just an example, is quite an extreme one.  And it just gives you a sense of the problem.  I think the two, the two sources that are the most important, I  would say, are Arrian and Curtius.  So Arrian is writing in the second century CE.  He is a Greek, he's born in what's now Turkey, but he's working  as part of the kind of Roman imperial administration.  He is within kind of the circle of the emperor Hadrian, and he becomes  the governor of Cappadocia in Asia Minor, right?  So he becomes quite an important person.  And then he writes this history of Alexander.  The reason that his history is really important is that he opens it up by  saying, wherever Ptolemy, the son of Lagos, that's Ptolemy, wherever  Ptolemy and Aristobulus agree, I've recorded what they say as fact.  Right.  Where they disagree, I've kind of worked out what happened.  So he's saying my two sources are Ptolemy and Aristobulus.  And Aristobulus is another eyewitness.  Not as important as Ptolemy, but he seems to be like, I guess, a  mid-level kind of administrative person in Alexander's empire.  Ptolemy, I've talked about how he became king of Egypt.  Ptolemy was one of Alexander's closest friends.  He becomes one of the leading men in the empire.  So he's right at the heart of power.  So Arrian is drawing on their work.  And so when, when I kind of talk about what Ptolemy might have said  about Alexander, it's coming to us from, from Arrian.  And so because of that, we get from Arrian, quite a positive  picture of, of Alexander, we get a much darker picture from Curtius.  So Curtius, again, there's debate about when he's writing, whether  it's first century, second century, maybe even slightly later of the  common era, he is using  Cleitarchus as well.  So when historians talk about, I guess, the evidence for Alexander,  they tend to group them into two traditions.  

You have the tradition of Arrian, which is Ptolemy, and then you  have the tradition of Diodorus, Justin and Curtius, which sometimes  in older scholarship gets called the Vulgate, which comes from the  sense of them being vulgar or bad or negative or poor quality.  And it gives you a sense of the way scholars have viewed them.  

I mean, that's quite a loaded term.  Not a surprising term, but a loaded one.  

Yeah.  And it's because people are looking at Arrian as being a more reliable,  more authentic tradition because they're looking at Arrian as having  access to an eyewitness account.  And that, I think we're talking here about foundational scholarship  in the discipline, stuff that was being written in the 19th century.  And that's a time where if we want to kind of think a little bit about what  Alexander tells us about how historians view the past, this is a really good  example, I have a class when I teach this that's called Alexander  and the history of history.  And it's all about how you can see changing interpretations of Alexander  as a way to unpack different kinds of schools of historical thought.  And so in the 19th century, you've got this kind of influence of  people like von Ranke, who's this German historian who uses this phrase,  the history should be about showing how things,  wie es eigentlich gewesen, show things how they actually were.  And so what historians are doing is going back to the documentary  records and then using them to show people what happened.  And so historians are trying to go back to Arrian to do that  in the 19th century.  The problem, of course, is you're then making the assumption that  Arrian is looking at Ptolemy and just copying down what he says.  Right.  Okay.  Then so you're assuming that Arrian equals Ptolemy, but of  course that's not true.  That's not true.  That's not how historians operate.  When we think about ancient history, we've got to remember that the  rules about how ancient historians, historians writing in the ancient  world, worked are very different to how we work now.  So if I'm writing, if I'm going to quote another historian, I will  signal that by putting quotation marks around what they say, there  will be a footnote to the page where they say it in their work.  But that's not, that's not what Arrian is doing.  And so sometimes with, with ancient historians, they'll say,  oh, as Ptolemy says, and we don't know if when they say  as Ptolemy says, they are literally quoting him word for word, whether  they're paraphrasing, whether they're sitting with Ptolemy, the scrolls  of Ptolemy in front of them and paraphrasing, whether they read  Ptolemy 20 years ago, vaguely remember what he said and just say as  Ptolemy said, and so you've got those issues there.  Then the other problem, of course, is Arrian is choosing what to  include and what to exclude about Alexander and what happens in  Alexander's reign and he's not a neutral person in doing that  because none of us are neutral.  He is making choices that reflect his own aims and his own interests,  but also which reflect the interests of the people in the  world around him, his audience.  Some things are more important to them than others.  So sometimes when he's talking about particular incidents, he  basically says, oh, well, we all know this story.  Here's what I think.  But he's leaving bits out.  And so that shows you that Arrian doesn't equal Ptolemy.  Arrian is using Ptolemy as a source for his own history.  We can't just say this is an eyewitness account, you know?  So that kind of complicates the picture a little bit.  

Yeah.  Assuming that everything is a copy paste.  Okay.  So a lot of these sources come from the Roman period.  Can we assume then that Alexander's kind of reputation as the great was  already quite crystallized, solidified by that point.  Romans are really looking out to him, idolizing him back then.  So does that affect, do we think, how they're writing their  histories in the Roman period?  

Yeah.  I think I'd nuance what you said a tiny little bit.  I think Romans idolized aspects of his reign.  They also are very critical of Alexander in other ways.  Interesting.  The essential narrative of Alexander's campaign is comes to  power 336, invades Persia 334, wins a load of battles.  Darius the third, the Persian king is dead by 330.  Alexander now essentially in control of the Persian empire.  All sounds good.  The simplistic Roman period narrative is after that things go wrong.  And the reason things goes wrong is that Alexander is led astray by the  decadence of the Persian empire.  And there's a narrative of moral decline and it's seen in a few examples.  So in, oh, what year is it?  327, 328, at some point in the early 320s, at a banquet.  In Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, the Macedonians get drunk, a general called  Cleitus criticizes Alexander and Alexander kills him at the banquet.  One of his leading generals is murdered and Alexander goes back to his tent,  shuts himself up for three days and says, I've done a really bad thing.  I'm going to starve myself to death.  And then all of his men go, you can't starve yourself to death  because we are in the middle of nowhere.  If you starve yourself to death, oh, and there's no air.  We aren't getting home.  So let's just say what you did was justified.   And so that's seen as a turning point by an author like Curtius, for example. 

 And you then get another episode a few years later, where there's this  gesture called proskinesis, which is a gesture at the Persian court.  And the gesture, it's a Greek word, it just means I kiss towards.  And essentially at the Persian court, courtiers would come before the  king and they would bow a little bit and blow a kiss towards the king.  It might well be that they also had to kind of prostrate themselves.  So lie down on the ground as though paying homage to the king.  And that was a way in which essentially people said to the  king, we acknowledge your authority.  In the Greek world, that gesture seems to have some kind of divine connotation.  So Alexander's in a very difficult position with that gesture because  Persians are performing that gesture to him because it's what they do to  show that they acknowledge somebody's royal authority.  So when Persians are coming to meet him, they'll have been doing that.  He could say to them, stop doing this because I view it as being  hubristic or blasphemous, but if he does that, he's basically saying  to them, don't treat me like a king, or he can keep them doing it.  And then the Greeks, the Greeks and Macedonians are saying, oh, that  looks a bit dodgy.  And apparently what happens is he tries to extend the practice to include  the Macedonians, the Greeks.  And there's a big debate about this in which he's essentially accused  of blasphemy and he backtracks from it.  That debate is really complex.  So we won't go into it now.  We can unpack it later if you want.  But the point is that those are kind of like turning points and you  see Alexander become potentially more tyrannical, and at least that's  how the Roman sources like Curtius want to portray him.  And we've got to remember the context in which these Roman  authors are writing.  

People like Curtius are probably writing within the first century or so of  the transition from Republic to Empire in Rome, the people who are writing  these histories, and this includes people who wrote stuff that doesn't  survive to the present day.  You're talking here about the senatorial elite, the people who have  the lost power and influence by virtue of the transition from Republic to  Empire, and so Alexander becomes a figure through whom they can critique  the excesses of soul rule, if that makes sense, they're kind of using  Alexander, there's a eunuch called Bagoas, and Curtius absolutely slayed  Bagoas, and he says Bagoas leads Alexander astray.  And what he's really doing is he's critiquing the concept of  emperors having favorites who have their ear, because if you're a  royal favorite and you've got access to the emperor, what that  means is you can bypass traditional power structures and ignore the  Senate, ignore the traditional patrician families in Rome.  So it might be a bit dangerous to come out and criticize those people, but  you can legitimately have a go at Alexander.  So I think, and I think that's why the story of Alexander in the  Roman world is a bit more complicated than just saying they idolized him  because obviously they looked up to his military successes and said,  oh wow, what a phenomenal achievement, we want to understand what  happened there, but there is a different side to it as well that  reflects, I guess, the contemporary pressures historians were feeling.  

Which I think is really, really good to talk about, because if  people kind of know a little bit about Alexander and maybe a little  bit about Julius Caesar, they'll probably know the anecdote about Julius Caesar  weeping and saying, well, he conquered so much of the world and I'm the  same age and I've done bugger all.  But it sounds like as a wider habit, it was absolutely possible to  look at Alexander's story a little bit more critically.  

People, you know, we should say people were definitely kind of  imitating Alexander in a positive way, you know, Pompey, the Roman  kind of senator and general who conquers parts of the East styles  himself as Pompey the Great in imitation of Alexander.  So there's very much kind of positive imitation as well, but it's just, I  think that there is more complexity towards the Roman and indeed the  ancient attitude to Alexander kind of more generally, because we talked  about it from our own perspective, there's obviously very different  perspectives of Alexander in the ancient world if you look at it  from a non-Western perspective.  

Sure.  I think it'd be really interesting if we try and do a little bit of a  chronological reconstruction, talk about some of the stories that  people think they know really well and work out what is believable  and what we need to look at a little bit more cautiously.  So let's start from the beginning.  What about his childhood?  I know that he was born into the royal family of Macedonia.  Was he the first son?  Was he the heir or was he the spare?  

Alexander's father is Philip the second of Macedonia.  Alexander's born not long after Philip has come to power.  And at this point, this is Alexander's born 356, Philip  comes to power probably about 359.  Before this Macedonia has been essentially a bit of a  irrelevance in the Greek world that you see it mentioned in the  great historians work of antiquity.  So Herodotus and Thucydides, but only really because more  important things have started to bring Macedonia into the picture.  But Macedonia doesn't exert much influence on Greek affairs.  And that changes during the course of the reign of Philip the second.  But Philip the second is the youngest of three sons.  He shouldn't come to power.  He comes to power because both of his brothers die.  His middle brother, who he succeeds, is killed in battle  against a tribe called the Illyrians who are Western  neighbors of the Macedonians.  So Macedonia is in the North of what is now modern day Greece.  So the kingdom is potentially on the verge of collapse and  chaos when Philip comes to power.  And he, during the course of his reign is able to  transform Macedonian fortunes.  And essentially he does this through a couple of different measures.  One is through a series of military reforms, which increases the kind  of power and professionalism of the Macedonian army, but those  military reforms are supported by economic and social changes.  So you get this kind of, I guess, military revolution is probably  an overused phrase, but it seems to me to apply to this period  of Macedonian history, because you go from a period where Macedonia  has been military quite weak to Macedonia becoming the strongest  military power in the Aegean Greek world.  

What he also does, and this goes back to your question about  was he the heir or the spare?  Was he the oldest child or whatever?  Philip is polygamous.  So he marries multiple times.  He has a tendency to use marriage as a kind of diplomatic tool.  So when he conquers a neighboring area or is trying to form links  with neighboring territories, he contracts marriage alliances  with powerful families.  So Alexander's mother is called Olympias and she is from the  kingdom of Epirus, so again, one of those kind of Western powers  in what is now the Balkans.  We don't know exactly when they got married, but Philip had, well,  in the end he had six other wives, but he had kind of five other  wives in this kind of very close period of time in the 350s.  Alexander did have a half brother, a guy called Arrhidaeus, who would  ultimately become king after Alexander's death.  We don't know exactly which of the two is older.  And that's because, you know, we tend to think like oldest  child succeeds the throne.  That isn't necessarily true in the ancient world.  Best example of it is Circuses, famous king of Persia, was not  the oldest child of Darius I and admits that in his  own inscriptions in Persia.  So yeah, he's got at least one sibling around the same age  and he has some sisters as well.  But yeah, that's 350s.  And then during kind of Philip's reign, Macedonia really  develops itself as a major power.  And the high point of this is in 338, when the Macedonians win  the battle of Chaeronea against Athens and Thebes, the two  major powers in Greece.  And that essentially gives Philip control of the Greek, the  Greek mainland, and it makes Macedonia the most important  power in the Greek world.  But then Philip has this choice.  He's like, he could try to rule Athens and Thebes directly  and he could garrison it and he could try to impose a  particular ruler and things like that.  And he does of course have, there's a garrison in Thebes,  but he creates this organization called the League of Corinth,  where all of the Greek cities are allegedly a part of this.  Everyone joins, apart from Sparta, because the Spartans  want to do their own thing.  But this is a kind of a common alliance and a common piece.  So the idea is none of the Greeks are going to make war  on each other anymore.  And instead, what they're going to do is they're going  to make war on the Persians, the old enemy across the sea.  

And so Philip, by the late 330s, has this plan to  invade Persia.  He's actually started to implement it by 336.  There was a Macedonian expeditionary force in Persia,  in modern-day Turkey, preparing the ground for a  potential invasion.  But before Philip is able to launch this, he is murdered.  

Okay.  So how does this affect a young Alexander?  What kind of age is he when he suddenly becomes in charge?  

So he's pushing 20 probably, when he becomes king,  or he's put in charge, yeah.  In terms of the effect on him, I think it's really hard to  measure anything like a psychological impact, just  because the source problems are so significant.  The only written source that we have that gives an account of  Alexander's childhood is Plutarch.  That's the only one, he's the only one of the ancient  historians who mention it.  We have sources, of course, from the Greek world who talk  about things that are happening at Philip's court and  things like that.  The best example of it is probably Aristotle.  Aristotle, who famously was enlisted to teach the  young Alexander for a brief period of time.  He mentions things that happen at Philip's court,  including talking about Philip's murder in  parts of his work.  He's not writing a detailed history of  Macedonia though.  So yeah, in terms of effect on him, where we  might see an influence is the question of polygamy.  And this is where we can get into some quite  interesting historical debates, because Alexander does  have brothers.  And just before Philip is killed, he is married again.  He's done the thing that white men in their fifties do,  which is he's fallen in love with a pretty young teenage  girl and he's made the fatal mistake of blowing up his  household to fall in love with her and to marry her.  And the story goes in Plutarch that at the banquet  to celebrate their wedding, this girl Cleopatra, she's  called, not that one.  She has an uncle or a guardian who's a guy called  Attalus, and at the banquet to celebrate their marriage,  he stands up and says, let's pray that the gods bless  this union with a legitimate heir.  And Alexander's like, Oh, what do you think?  Do you think I'm a bastard then?  Do you think I'm a bastard?  And Attalus said, yeah, I do.  I do.  What are you going to do about it?  And then Alexander's like, Oh, daddy,  daddy, can you help me?  He's being mean to me and that man's being  mean to me.  He's calling me bad words.  And then Philip gets up and draws his sword and  then moves to attack, not Attalus, but Alexander,  but he's so drunk that he falls over.  And then Alexander looks down on him and says,  there's the man who was about to cross from Europe into  Asia, can't cross from one couch to another.  And then he goes off into exile.  That story's in Plutarch.  

And you know, I said the kind of anecdote stuff is a real  problem with Plutarch because you can see that line,  that story builds towards the line.  It builds towards that line.  He's about to cross from Europe to Asia, as in he's  about to launch an invasion of the Persian Empire.  He can't cross from one couch to another.  So he can't cross from one dining couch to another  dining couch.  Yeah.  It's a brilliant line.  Yeah.  But who in that room, who heard that, wanted to  write that down.  It's in no one's interest for that information to get out.  

It does sound like someone is writing a script for his biopic instead of a history.  

Exactly.  And so these are the kinds of anecdotes that are  probably created much later.  Another good example is the story of how he meets  Bucephalus, his famous war horse.  And the story goes that this man's trying to sell  Bucephalus to Philip.  Philip is like, this is a rubbish horse because  nobody will, Bucephalus won't let anybody ride him.  And Alexander mutters under his breath, like, oh,  that's a good horse they're turning down.  And Philip says, oh, do you think you know better  than us?  And Alexander's like, yes, mate, I do.  It's afraid of its own shadow watch and turns it  away from the sun and then jumps on the horse  and rides the horse.  And then Philip says at the end of this, oh,  you need to find a kingdom that's big enough  for you because Macedonia is too small for  you, as in yours.  So I think that's just so obviously back  projection that what somebody like Plutarch is  doing is he's trying to find, because you  sort of said like, what can we learn about  Alexander from, what impact might his  childhood have had on Alexander?  And of course, that's almost the question  that people like Plutarch were asking.  They were interested in what can we learn  about Alexander's moral qualities from his  childhood and how can we learn from them  and adopt them and to become as successful  as him.  So they ended up creating these stories  that explain the future success and they  kind of suggest it's all written in the  stars and it's all kind of innate to him  that he has these innate qualities when he's  born and that kind of fits into that old  kind of great man's school of history.  If we're thinking about influences on him,  what I think you can see is you can see  the challenges of a polygamous court.  He would have lived that, the  competition between different branches,  the competition between different people.  The other thing, of course, that he  gets is significant experience in a  military environment, a significant example  of a military kingship.  You know, Philip II had one eye and  walked with a limp because he'd lost an  eye in a siege and his leg had been  run through in battle.  Macedonian kings fought from the front.  That explains a lot of what Alexander's  behaviour in battle is like in the  future and it reflects the kind of  culture that he's growing up in.  I think you also can say that he  grows up at a time as Macedonian  power is really expanding and there's  a lot of success in the air and  perhaps a sense of optimism and stuff,  you know.  

It sounds almost like Philip walked so  that Alexander could run.  

Or to frame it another way, Alexander  ran because he had to run because if  he didn't run, having seen Philip walk,  he'd have been killed.   That's part of the other side of this  because one of the questions that I  quite often get asked is why did  Alexander invade the Persian Empire?  And a legitimate response to that is  that if Alexander had not invaded  the Persian Empire, the Macedonians  would have found somebody else who  would because Philip, you know,  we talked about that image of  military kingship, the one-eyed man  limping at the front of his army.  That's basically saying, stand up if  you think you're hard enough.  If you don't, you know, in  Macedonian history, I can never  remember the precise numbers off  the top of my head.  But in the 150 years where  we've got like recorded lists of  Macedonian kings that we can be  pretty confident actually existed.  I think there's three of them died  peacefully.  Loads of them were murdered,  deposed, killed in battle.  So you've got that culture in  which kings are expected to lead  from the front.  They are warrior kings.  And because Philip had already  kind of instigated this invasion  and there was this plan, you  can be pretty sure there were  people at court, people who had  been Philip's major advisors,  people who were his military  leaders, who were pretty keen to  go and have a go at the Persians.  I mean, I don't want to dismiss  out of hand the idea that he  was personally just maybe really  ambitious, but it sounds like  it was a lot of peer pressure  as well, expectations.  It's not as simple as he  was born great.  It's not as simple as saying  Alexander was really ambitious  and he wanted to invade the  Persian Empire.  So he told everyone, right lads,  we're invading the Persian  Empire.  And everyone, oh, that's a good  idea.  I had not thought of that.  You know, the point is that he  is a product of his time.  And I'm sure he was incredibly  ambitious and I'm sure that he  liked hunting and that he got a  thrill from being in battle and  things like that.  But the reason that he got a  thrill from being in battle  and things like that is  because that was the kind of,  I guess, martial valor that  was prized in the society  that brought him up.  So it's not surprising that  that's the kind of things he  might value.  

Which begs the question, if  Alexander had stayed, if he'd  have been born with slightly  different personality or level of  talent, then maybe.  It's not necessarily that he's  just a singular person.  It's just that he happened to  be the person to do it?  

Yeah, I think it's a tricky  balance, isn't it?  Because, you know, I'm very  suspicious of the Great Man  School of History and just, you  know, to explain what that is  in a nutshell for people.  Great Man School of History,  I guess, is it's something  that is innate in all history,  going right back to, you  know, Herodotus and early  kind of histories, but it's  given real voice as a way of  explaining the past in the  19th century.  And a really good example of it  comes from a Scottish writer  called Thomas Carlisle.  And he talks about,  essentially, I'm going to  paraphrase, I can't quite  remember the full quote off  the top of my head, but he  basically says that the reason  that history happens is  because of the great ideas  that dwell in the minds of  great men, that they're the  people who inspire other  people to make things happen.  And so historical change is a  product of ideas out of the  head of great individuals.  And I'm deeply suspicious of  that and, you know, you  can see, you can make the  obvious remark that Carlisle  talks about great men and  you're going, what about  great women, you know?  

Of course.  

That might be a point, but  also, of course, you know,  great men don't, great men  don't operate alone.  Certainly in Alexander's  case, when you've got, you  know, he's famous for winning  military victories.  And that's, you know, that  you can point to examples  where Alexander made  decisions on the battlefield  or in preparation for battle,  which directly contributed to  military victory.  That's absolutely undeniable.  But it's also true that  there were 30,000 men with  spears on a beach or on  the desert for hours on end  stabbing people to death.  And their professionalism,  their training, their morale,  their pride, all of those  things factor into things.  It's also true, of course,  that Alexander had an  incredibly able set of kind  of subordinates who were  were influencing things.  So, you know, it's that  tricky balance where the  great man view that it's  just Alexander and it's all  him is obviously too  simplistic.  I don't, I don't think we  should get to a point  where we say, like  Alexander's nothing and you  could just replace Alexander.  I'll give you a good  example.  

I said Alexander had a half  brother, a guy called  Arrhidaeus, Arrhidaeus had some  kind of disability.  We're not entirely sure  what it was, but it meant  that he wasn't able to  rule alone.  So when he does become  king after Alexander's  death, there has to be a  regent for him.  And that situation ends  with civil war.  So if Alexander, suppose  Alexander hadn't been  born, Philip only had one  son and that son was  Arrhidaeus and Arrhidaeus  has succeeded Philip in  326, then the situation  may well have been very  different.  And you've got to be  careful of getting into  the counterfactuals, the  what ifs and all of that.  The nature of who Alexander  was matters, but I think  Alexander became who he  was because of the  environment that he was  brought up in.  I don't think it's like  an innate thing.  

We're operating in the  gray area, nothing's  black and white.  

Yeah, exactly.  

Perfect.  Okay.  So let's talk about  Persia.  Can you briefly summarize  why the Greeks have it  in for the Persians  quite as much as they  do at this point?  

Yeah, I mean, it's  simple in a line.  The Greeks hate the  Persians because the  Persians had invaded  Greece, the Greek mainland.  And it's that simple.  And I guess let's do,  should be 30 seconds,  quick history of Persia.  

Yes, please.  

Persia itself is in the  south of modern day Iran.  And in the middle of  the sixth century BCE,  a king called Cyrus became  the king of the Persians.  And under Cyrus, the  Persians became the most  important power in the  ancient Near East.  They captured Lydia,  so Turkey, they  captured Babylon.  And then under Cambyses,  they captured Egypt.  And what that essentially  meant is that for the  first time in history,  the ancient Near East  was united under  the rule of one empire.  And so it makes, in a  sense, the Persians are  the first superpower  of the kind of,  certainly the kind of,  I guess you can't quite  call it a Western world,  but of the world that  abuts the West, you  know, there's significant  power in China at this  time too, but the  Persian empire is often  talked about as the  first, the first sort of  superpower.  Darius I becomes  king in 522.  And during his reign in  the 490s, there is a  rebellion in part of  his empire.  And the part of his  empire that revolts is  a place called Ionia.  Ionia is the kind of  Western part of  modern day Turkey on  the Aegean Sea.  And it is populated by  Greeks.  So there are  Greek cities there.  And those Greeks  revolt against the  Persians and what they  do is they get in  touch with the Greeks  on the mainland and  say, can you help us  out?  And Athens and Eretria  say yes and send some  ships.  The Persians put down  this revolt in Ionia  and then kind of go,  all right, well, what  about these Athenians  and what about these  people in Eretria who  helped the people who  revolted?  And so what they do is  they initially try to  attack Athens and they  lose the battle of  Marathon in 490.  It's hard to know  exactly what to make  of that moment in  terms of the Persian  perspective, because  this is the king  doesn't command this  army in person.  He sends a kind of  expeditionary force.  It's defeated.  And then a few years  later, 486, Darius  dies.  So there's no  follower from Darius.  His son is Xerxes.  Xerxes succeeds him.  And in 480 BCE,  Xerxes leads in  an invasion of the  Greek mainland.  And this is a really,  really, really, really,  really pivotal moment  in Greek history.  

And it is, I think,  I'll say something  controversial, a  fundamentally unimportant  moment in Persian  history, because  from a Persian  perspective, this is  a kind of military  campaign on the  fringes of the empire.  It's led by a new  king who just wants  to demonstrate that  there's a bit of  military success, get  some loot, get back  home, demonstrate that  he can be his father's  successor.  For the Greeks,  this seems like an  existential moment where  their very freedom  is under threat and  they're in danger of  being absorbed into  the Persian empire.  And this is where  you get the kind of  famous moments in  Greek history,  the battle of  Thermopylae and 300  and tonight we  dine in hell.  The kind of naval  battle at Salamis,  the victory at  Plataea.  The key point here  is that I get,  well, a couple  of key points.  First of all,  Athens was attacked  and besieged,  well, it wasn't  besieged, the  Athenians kind of  left Athens because  they needed to  cut and defend it.  Athens was sacked,  it was burned,  it was set on fire.  So that's a really  significant moment  in Athenian history.  And then crucially,  the Greeks won at Salamis,  Xerxes returns to Persia.  The Persians stay in  Greece until 479.  The Greeks win  the battle of Plataea  and that's the end  of the Persian invasion.  And the Greeks then  over the next 20  or 30 years start  to push back  against Persian control  in parts of Asia.  And there's this  simmering kind of  war going on,  but without the kind  of flash point of  the big invasion.  So in that sense,  by the time that  Alexander comes along,  150 years later,  the Persians are  the kind of archetypal  bad guys in Greek history  because of what had  happened in 480, 479.  

It's a long held grudge.  

Yeah, but it's,  you know,  it's not that surprising.  And I'm simply,  I'm simplifying it,  I'm simplifying it  a little bit.  But one of the reasons  that this is so important  for the Greeks is that  this is one of the first  moments where you get  a kind of unified  Greek force fighting together,  putting aside the  traditional kind of  regional differences.  And of course,  the regional differences  come out again.  And it's crucial to say  that not all Greeks  fought on the Greek side  against the Persians.  Places like Thebes  had joined the Persian side  and they were absolutely  condemned for it afterwards.  So it's a complex moment  in the kind of identity  of ancient Greece,  but it's a really  pivotal turning point.  Another reason  that's really important is  when the Persians  invade Greece,  democracy in Athens  was 25 years old,  something like that,  depending on how  you define democracy.  And that's a kind of  standard undergraduate  essay question.  But defeating the Persians,  the most powerful people  in the world,  gave democracy credit  as a form of government.   That helped sort of cement it  as part of the Athenian identity  was that we've been able  to defeat these people  because we're free  and our freedom is  symbolized by our democracy.  So that grudge is  the kind of longstanding  kind of reason for animosity.  But I guess the other way  of thinking about this  is just also to think about it  as a reflection of geopolitics.  

Now, Persia is an  absolute superpower.  It wants security  within its own empire.  The Greeks keep arguing  with each other.  Sparta and Athens,  the Peloponnesian War,  all of those things  during the Peloponnesian War.  You have Spartans and Athenians  looking to Persia for support.  The Peloponnesian War  is ultimately a Spartan victory  and the Spartans are only able  to win it when they get  support from Persia.  So Persia and Greece,  the nature of the geography  means that these places  roll up against each other.  So as Macedonia is  expanding in that period,  yes, the Persians  are the old enemy  and it's not surprising  that there's support  within Greece for a campaign  against Persia,  but also the geopolitics  of it means that if you're  looking to make money,  the obvious thing to do  is to go on to a giant  kind of booty raid  into Persia and historians  have sometimes seen  Alexander's campaign  as precisely that,  not a campaign of conquest,  but just a campaign  to get as much money  as you can.  

So if we're talking about  Alexander's ambitions  and his choices,  it sounds like there was really  only one choice  of where to lead an expedition.  It's got to be Persia  for the reasons that you said above.  It's always going to be  an invasion of Persia.  How does he prepare for this?  What do you need to do  to go up against the biggest  superpower in the ancient world?  

Yeah, so the first thing  that he does is he needs  to secure the home front.  So he comes to power 336.  He leads a campaign  north into what's now  the Balkans kind of  pacifying tribes there.  While he's there,  Thebes revolts against  the League of Corinth  and tries to throw off  the Macedonian yoke  of imperialism  and gain freedom again  and tries to urge  the other Greeks to rise up  against Macedonian control.  Alexander ends up  marching on Thebes  and ultimately besieges it  and destroys Thebes.  And there's debates about  why he did it.  Diodorus said that Alexander  wanted to destroy Thebes.  So he did.  Arrian says that Alexander  didn't want to destroy Thebes,  but one of his men,  a guy called Perdicus,  had launched an attack  on one of the walls  when they were kind of there.  Perdicus had launched  this attack without authorization.  He'd got himself into trouble.  And so Alexander  had to send the full army in.  And this is again,  we go back to the ancient history.  What are the sources?  Diodorus,  don't know what his source was.  Arrian, he's using Ptolemy here.  Ptolemy was an eyewitness.  He knows what happens.  So Perdicus launched an attack  on Thebes,  and that's why it was destroyed.  Source problem.  Ptolemy's first rival  during the Wars of the Successors  was Perdiccas.  Perdiccas was the regent  that takes power  after Alexander's death.  He tries to send Alexander's body  back to Macedonia to be buried.  Ptolemy hijacks the corpse,  buries it in Egypt.  Perdiccas leads an invasion of Egypt  to try to overthrow Ptolemy.  Ptolemy has Perdiccas killed.  Or, Perdiccas is assassinated  by his own men  in a kind of coup.  So again,  source problem alert.  But the point is that  Thebes is destroyed,  and this is a real warning to Greece  that Macedonian power  hasn't died with Philip.  And that's a really,  really important moment  because there's no point in  leading an invasion of Persia  only to lose your kingdom at home.  And again,  there were always going to be  challenges to Alexander  from the places that Philip  had conquered  because a transition of power  in a monarchy  is an incredibly dangerous  and unstable time.  And you want to test the new king.  So that's,  I think in terms of the preparation,  that's the main preparation.  And it means that obviously  the army's been  kind of trained and stuff. So then he crosses the Hellespont,  the kind of narrow bit of water  that separates Europe and Asia  in 334  and launches his invasion.  

So as far as the invasion goes,  does it sound like  it's the kind of thing  that was planned down  to the minute details?  Or is he making it up  as he goes along?  What does he do?  Can we work out  what his ambitions were?  

Yes, no, and maybe.  It's clear that the early part  of the campaign is planned  because there has been  this expositionary force  that has been preparing  the way in Asia Minor.  There were, I guess,  diplomatic overtures  and things like that happening.  But of course,  you can't plan everything  to the nth degree.  He can't choose  where the Persians are going to fight.  Right.  Necessarily.  So the first battle is the battle  of the River Granicus.  The River Granicus  is in northern Turkey.  The Persians choose  to make a stand there.  They could have fallen back  to a different river.  Alexander can't control that.  So in that sense, he has to fight  where he has to fight.  There's a significant  school of thought  or significant school of debate  Ammong modern historians  about what Alexander's  initial ambitions were  because he obviously ends up  getting to India  and some scholars think,  oh, well, Philip II  wouldn't have wanted to do that.  He knew that you couldn't control  that whole empire.  He was much more rational.  He just would have taken Asia Minor  and maybe the kind of seaboard  in what's now Syria and Phoenicia  and maybe stop there  and not gone inland.  And I think it's worth remembering  that Greek and Macedonian conception  of geography of the Persian Empire  probably wasn't very good.  The Greeks knew about India,  but Greeks hadn't been to India.  Right.  So they wouldn't have known.  So I think some of what happens  has to be adjustments  on the fly and things like that.  I think the most important decision  that Alexander makes is  so he wins the battle  of Granicus in 334  and that lets him essentially  gain control of Asia Minor.  

The Persians at the River Granicus  are commanded by local,  regional governors,  and we call that rule a satrap.  So the local satraps,  they're leading the Persian army.  333, the Persian King Darius III  leads an army in person.  So they fight the Battle of Issus,  which is in the south  of modern day Turkey.  On the bit where I'm sort of  drawing this in the screen,  but no one's going to be able  to see that, are they?  In the bit as Turkey  goes down into Syria.  So on that strip of land,  they fight the Battle of Issus.  And the Macedonians  win the Battle of Issus  and Darius flees inland.  He abandons his kind of royal regalia  and crucially his family  who fall into Alexander's  hands at this point.  And that leaves Alexander a choice.  He could chase after Darius inland  into the interior of the Persian Empire,  try to capture Darius  or try to force another battle quickly,  capture or kill Darius,  knock him out of the war.  Right.  That's one option.  He chooses not to do that.  He chooses the second option,  which is to march south  through Phoenicia,  through Syria and into Egypt.  And the reason I think he does that  is that the Phoenician cities  were the home of the kind of Persian  navy, which is powerful.  And the danger, of course,  is that if Alexander goes steaming off  into the center of Iraq and Iran,  the Persian Navy can cut his supply  lines and his communications  back in Macedonia.  The Persian resistance  could be led out of those cities  and out of Egypt,  which could reclaim Asia Minor.  And that would leave Alexander  basically just trapped in Asia.  So he kind of has to weigh up  that choice between trying to force  a really quick victory  and thinking a little bit  more strategically long term.  And that's where he makes  that strategic decision.  

Which is interesting, isn't it?  Because some of the narratives  that we hear sometimes now  is that he went to Egypt  to become a god,  not to do something that sounds  really wonderfully logistically sensible,  but to become a god.  

Yeah, should we unpack that?  

Yeah, let's do it.  

So, yeah, I think the background  to this that's really important  to stress is that Alexander  was worshiped as a god  in the ancient world.  And he was worshiped as a god  in the ancient world  at a time when our sources  were writing.  So in the 300 years  between his death  and the earliest source writing,  Alexander is deified.  So the Roman period authors  are writing from the perspective  of this man was a god.  And I think sometimes for us  that I'm definitely,  definitely guilty of this,  as somebody who's not religious.  Sometimes I, there's a temptation  just to go, oh, yeah,  but nobody really believed that.  Nobody really thought that.  Nobody, do you know what I mean?  Nobody kind of thought  that that mattered.  But I think that underrates  the kind of complexity of belief  and religion in the ancient world.  So they're writing at a time  when Alexander,  at least to some people,  was a god.  So once you accept that,  the jump to Alexander  went there to become a god  is a much smaller jump  than it is for us.  Particularly those of us who,  you know, are brought up  in a Western world  that's influenced by Christianity  or even if even people  who are influenced by Islam  or religion to the book,  whatever it is,  it's a, it's a massive jump for us.   It's a smaller jump  in the ancient world.  

The Roman sources are writing  at a time when Roman emperors  are being deified in the East.  You have ruler cults  to living people  during the Hellenistic period  after Alexander's death.  One of the biggest impacts  of Alexander, I think,  is 30 years after Alexander dies,  the guy called  Demetrius Poliorcetes,  Demetrius, the Sacker of Cities,  who's one of the men  fighting to become  king of the world after Alexander.  He turns up in Athens  and they sing a sort of hymn  to him,  recognizing him as a god.  This is Athens. The democratic heartland  of the ancient world,  the place that prizes its freedom  more than anybody else,  at least according to themselves.  Within 30 years of Alexander,  they worship,  they're saying to a man,  you're so powerful.  Our only way to deal with you  is to say that you're a god.  So that background's important  for thinking about  why people in the ancient world  might say,  Oh, Alexander goes to Egypt  to become a god.  

What actually happens in Egypt  is Alexander found a city,  which he imaginatively  calls Alexandria.  And then he goes off  to an oracle  at a place called Siwa.  Siwa is kind of...  People sometimes talk about it  as being the kind of  western limit,  the traditional western limit  of Egypt.  And at Siwa,  there's an oracle to the god Ammon.  And Ammon is identified by Greeks  as being essentially  akin to Zeus.  And one of the things that  kind of Greeks,  and actually quite a lot of,  I guess, polytheistic religions  are good at is finding links  between different gods  and saying,  Well, our chief god is Zeus.  You've got a chief god  that you call Jupiter.  They must be the same thing.  So the Greeks,  it's really common  for Greeks to do that.  Well, there's, I guess,  two schools of thought  on why he goes to Siwa.  One school of thought  and we'll unpack this  is that Alexander wanted to go  and explore links with religion.  The other reason to go there  is to say he's going to  the limits of his empire,  that if Siwa is essentially  the western limit of Egypt,  the Persians had controlled Egypt.  He's marking a claim  to have controlled the edges  of the Persian Empire.  And there's a parallel with that  when he gets to India,  because we don't know much  about Achaemenid Persian control  of India.  But when Alexander gets to India,  he ends up marching down the Indus,  which kind of marks  the border of an empire.  So people have sometimes seen it  as this is about just  territorial delimitation.  And that might be true.  And of course,  two things can be true at once.  So then he goes to  the Oracle of Ammon.  And the ancient sources about this  are, broadly speaking,  tell the same story,  but they tell it in  such different ways  that it ends up  not being the same story.  Essentially, what they say is  Alexander goes to Ammon  and is told,  you are the son of Ammon.  You are the son of God,  son of Zeus.  And Alexander believes that  and he starts to  acknowledge this openly.  And what historians,  I think, do is  they connect this moment  with a couple of others.  And I'll talk about them in a second  to create this narrative  that Alexander was consistently  pursuing this divinizing agenda  where he wanted to become a god.  They take that example.  

I mentioned the proskinesis debate  where Alexander perhaps  attempted to introduce  this Persian court practice.  And they connect them together  and say, well, he went to Egypt  where they said he was  the son of Zeus.  And then with proskinesis,  he tried to impose it on everybody  so that they all thought  he was a god,  to show that they all  recognized he was a god.  Now with the proskinesis example,  if Alexander wanted people  to recognize him as a god,  there was no point in using  proskinesis to do that  because Persians used that  as a court practice,  like we talked about earlier on,  to recognize the authority  of the king.  So if Alexander was doing that,  saying, oh, everyone's  worshiping me now,  well, half the people  who were doing it  didn't think he had any  religious connotation at all.  So there's problems with  connecting these things together.  

The other reason that Ammon  and the religious angle  becomes really important  is what happens  after Alexander dies,  because Ptolemy,  when he's in Egypt,  and another of the successor generals,  a guy called Lysimachus,  produced a coin.  And you might have seen the coin.  The coin is Alexander's  head and face,  and it's got  ram's horns on it.   But the ram's horns  are the symbols of Ammon.  And they are basically ways  of saying Alexander is deified,  to deifying Alexander.  And the reason I think  it's important is  Ptolemy and Lysimachus,  both knew Alexander  personally and very, very well.  They also obviously knew  the context of the Macedonian court  in Alexander's reign.  They would not just randomly  stick those Ram's horns on a coin  if it had no meaning.  So I think what that means  is that by the end  of Alexander's reign,  there is a kind of association  building with Alexander and Ammon.  

But I think it's worth  remembering that this is,  oh yeah, does he get to Egypt?  332?  This is a decade later.  And views can change in a decade.  That's one element of it.  The other kind of interesting  angle on it is the key battle  is the Battle of Gaugamela,  331.  One of the sources says that  before the battle,  Alexander had prayed to Zeus  and said, if you're really my father,  like, let's win this battle.  And just after he said that,  an eagle flew over the army.  And that was kind of seen  as a sign from Zeus  that they were going to win.  And we might dismiss all of that  as kind of needless back projection.  But this is attributed  to Callisthenes and Callisthenes  is Alexander's official court historian.  I should probably have mentioned him  before when we were talking  about Alexander sources!  Alexander employed somebody  to write history.  And the reason that I didn't talk  more about him earlier  is because Callisthenes  ends up falling out with Alexander  and he's executed.  And he's executed probably  by about 327.  So if Callisthenes did write that  report on the Battle of Gaugamela  and have Alexander pray to Zeus,  it puts that association  you know, bang in the...  It's not saying that  Alexander this happened,  but it's saying that by about 327,  Alexander's official historian  is kind of building this image.   And then you've got that tension  between saying like, oh,  does Callisthenes  know exactly what Alexander wants?  Does he run this?  When you talk about official history,  is he writing something,  showing it to Alexander,  Alexander sitting there  with a big red pen,  crossing bits out and then saying,  right, you can publish that, you know?  Or is it a little bit more like  he's there, he's writing stuff,  it's going out and anything, you know?  It's hard to know  what that relationship's like.  But again, that would show  kind of association.  

But crucially, let's go back to  where I'm telling the story  in reverse order for a reason.  What I've essentially done  is built a narrative so far  in which it sounds like  I'm going to say Alexander  did indeed go to Egypt  to become a god.   Because there's these  later associations.  But if we look at the evidence  for why he went to Egypt  and why he went to the Oracle at Ammon,  I don't think we see that at all  in the official explanation.  So Arrian talks about how  Alexander goes to the Oracle at Ammon  because he was engaged  in a rivalry with Perseus  and Heracles.  And Heracles has for hundreds of years  been claimed to be  an ancestor of the Macedonian king.  So Alexander's family had claimed  to be descended from Heracles  for over 100 years.  And that story is in Herodotus.  So this isn't just back projection.  Herodotus had made that link.  So Heracles had been on coins  from the Macedonian kings  before Alexander.  And so Arrian says, like,  this is his rivalry with people  he identified as kinspeople.  So he's basically going there  to demonstrate that he's  getting to be on a par with  with Heracles and Perseus, right?  

And crucially,  Strabo, who's famous  for writing a geography  of the ancient world,  also tells this story.  And he explicitly says  that the source for that is Callisthenes.  So Callisthenes,  the official historian,  is saying that the reason  that Alexander went to Siwa  is rivalry with his kind of  heroic ancestors.  So I think what happens  is that he goes to Siwa  and I think there's probably  a mix of motivations for going there.  I think it's given  this official explanation  that it don't get us wrong.  This is certainly  bigging Alexander up.  It is mythologizing him.  It is writing him  into these grand traditions.  But then I think it gradually  during the course of Alexander's reign  becomes more important.  

And then I think the other thing  with deification  that's really worth talking about is  what that means  and where it comes from.  Because I think the question  that people ask  and I think it's kind of  a little bit implicit  in the way you asked me  because you were reflecting  the kind of popular belief is  Alexander went there  wanting to become a god.  Well, first of all,  what's the precedent  for men becoming gods?  And there isn't much, actually.  The two examples  that predate Alexander  are to do with  with Spartan generals  during the  during the kind of Peloponnesian war  where they had performed  a kind of service  for a community or a town  and in return had been granted  divine honours.  So it's not them saying  you need to worship me as a god.  It's town, it's people,  community saying  thank you.  And in return for your service,  we're voting you  these divine honours.  And divine honours  are essentially about  like a practice.  It's you will have a cult statue,  for example,  you will have  a sanctuary dedicated to you.  You might have games named after you,  a religious festival named  in your honour,  those kinds of things, right?  I think we tend to think about  what it means to be a god  in, I guess,  Judeo-Christian  Islamic terms  in which we're talking about  an omnipotent,  omniscient person.  Yeah.  And also the element of it  is of course immortal, right?  And it's obviously a little bit different.  So there's that.  The other crucial part of this,  of course, is that we're in Egypt.  And in Egypt,  the pharaoh is divine.  The pharaoh is the son of God.  And that is a traditional part  of Egyptian monarchical ideology.  And it's a reflection of the way  that ancient Egyptians  thought about the cosmos,  that they're thinking about the cosmos  as the gods have created  the earth, the world.  I'm going to sound very ignorant  on Egyptian cosmology here.  But essentially,  the gods have created this world.  The pharaoh is a divine being,  even if they are immortal.  And they're responsible for  ensuring maths, ensuring kind of,  yeah, kind of cosmic peace, right?  So Alexander's got that  influence on him as well,  which probably affects some of how  we need to think about this.  I talked a little bit earlier about  how you do start to get  deified kings and things.  

And I mentioned that example  of Demetrius.  It's really important to think  about the direction  this is coming from.  It's coming from the ground up,  not the top down.  Demetrius was not turning up  at Athens saying,  right lads, worship me as a god.  This is coming from the bottom up.  And the reason it's coming  from the bottom up is about the way  in which Alexander's campaign  fundamentally transforms  the balance of power  between city states and empires.  Alexander, after his campaign,  when Alexander's on his deathbed,  he has more money  than is conceivable  in the Greek world  before the invasion of Persia.  And the resource balance  just completely tips.  And so in that him to Demetrius,  the Athenians say like, you know,  you, we see, you know,  unlike the other gods,  you're not far away.  You're here.  You're not made of wood or stone.  You're real.  And you've got power.  And what we want you to do  is go and attack Thebes.  And so it's an extension  of the way in which city states  in the Greek world  would traditionally negotiate  or reward benefactors.  So like in Athens, for example,  you pay a really good tax.  They'll give you  a nice seat at the theater.  Yeah.  Well, what use is that  for somebody who could build  the theater or who could just build it,  who could build a bigger theater?  You know, so you get to a point  where the ability of these people,  these kings in the early  Hellenistic period,  so the period after Alexander's death,  their resource base  so exceeds the power of the city.  And I'm talking about power here  literally as a coercive force,  the ability to do things.  It so exceeds anything  that's gone before  that the traditional honor system  that just doesn't exist anymore.  So what's left  when a person's got everything,  what's left is to become a god.  And that's a famous line  associated with Alexander's period.  

So I think that the question of  going to Egypt to become a god  is a really interesting question.  I'm not convinced  that that's why that happens,  but that's because I'm  cynical about this stuff.  I think you can write an argument  as to why that is  why that is a legitimate argument.  I think the problem  with that as an argument  is I think it underrates  the complexity of all of the influences  that are going going on.  As I say, you've got,  I think summarize it really clearly  for people because I've sort of  talked in circles about this.  You might have got a sense.  Sometimes when I talk about this,  I'm more persuaded by the argument  that he was trying to become  divine than I am at other points.  I think my key arguments are  we can trace to Callisthene's official historian  an explanation for why  he went to the Oracle of Siwa  and it wasn't about divinity.  It was about mythologizing.  I think that this is something  that develops over time,  but certainly by the time he dies,  I think there's an association  with Ammon, which is borne out  by the coins of Lysimachus and Ptolemy.  But even then that underrates  the complexity of the ways in which  humans were engaging with notions  of divinizing in this period.  

I want to connect this idea of divination  to the idea of becoming "too Eastern."  You've spoken about the point  where people have started  pointing at him saying you're  becoming too decadent to this  is an awful term, Oriental,  a desire for luxury,  spoiling yourself,  getting rid of that Greek aesthetic  of being a strong masculine man.  Are we looking at this the wrong way?  Should we actually be seeing  Alexander as someone who is  spreading out past the Greek world  and is actually trying to meet  locals on their terms  and positive cultural exchange  instead of trying to force  Greekness upon his new empire?  He's instead thinking carefully about,  well, these people think  different things and I should probably  not try to tell them  that they're all wrong.  

Yeah, absolutely.  We're going to reiterate two things.  Thing the first, this empire is massive  and this is a pre-industrial empire.  So suppose Alexander had lived  longer than he did  and he had this empire  and it lasted for 30 years  and he ruled it for 30 years.  Supposedly he was in Egypt  and while he was in Egypt,  there was a rebellion in Bactria.  Now Bactria is Afghanistan  and Alexander was going to have  to put that rebellion down.  He'd have to walk there.  He had to walk from Egypt to Afghanistan.  That is not a quick thing to do.  So there's that point,  which leads towards kind of pragmatism.  The second point, of course, is that  Alexander had conquered the Persian Empire,  which was an empire led by Persians,  but which was a multi-ethnic,  multi-religious,  multi-cultural empire.  And the Persians themselves  had celebrated that in their artwork.  They had respected that.  The administrative language  of the Persian Empire was not Persian.  It was Aramaic.  The Persian kings had learned a language  that other people found easier  as a kind of lingua franca, right?  So they had been tolerant of different cultures and stuff.  That doesn't mean that the Persian Empire  was not torturing people  or exploiting people or whatever.  But the point is that they weren't  trying to convert people.  And that brings me to the third point,  which is there's not really any sense  in the ancient world  that people would want to do that.  That when we talk about the kind of,  oh, you know, like,  convert them to their religion or whatever,  we're often doing that  with the kind of reflection  on the way in which  early modern Christian empires went out,  in which they went to places  like what is now Peru.  And they said,  we are going to make you become Christians.  And that's a reflection,  I think, of the difference  in worldview about religion.  I know, you know,  this is a big topic.  And I'm going to, again,  I'm going to show my ignorance of some of it.  But I think if you boil it down a little bit,  one of the obligations  of Christian kingship in this period  was to save the souls of other people.  So going at, you know,  and that's a reflection  of the worldview belief  that Christianity is a kind of  the religion in which  you're going to live forever in heaven.  Your soul is going to live forever.  And one of the ways to do that  is to protect other people  and to convert people.  So that gives Christian empires  an evangelizing force.  

That just isn't true in the ancient world,  partly because of what I said earlier  about polytheism,  where you can just say,  oh, well, that God's like that God,  that God's like that God.  Oh, yeah, you know,  we're all polytheistic.  It's all fine.  You know, so it's a bit easier  to make some of those  to make some of those cultural links.  I think when we asked that question,  like, I guess your question was,  was he he was being accused  of becoming kind of too Persian  and not kind of imposing Greek rule?  There is a strand of scholarship  which talks about the Hellenization  of the Persian Empire.  Hellenization just means  making things more Hellen,  making things more Greek.  My perspective  is the starting point would be  why would we expect Alexander  to try to change  the culture of other people?  And then that leads  much more naturally into your point,  which is essentially say,  should we be looking at this  from the ground of him  engaging positively,  proactively with local culture?  And I think, yeah, that's right.  And I'll give  I'll give one example of it.  

Best example of it is that  Alexander starts to wear  elements of Persian clothing.  Historians talk about this as mixed dress  because what he does is  he takes some elements  of Persian clothing  that he starts to wear  and he continues to wear some  elements of Macedonian  and Greek clothing.  And that's obviously  quite controversial.  And the things that he  doesn't adopt, for example,  he doesn't adopt trousers  because for the Greeks,  trousers was just  the sign of the Medes,  the sign of the Persian.  It was completely foreign to them.  So he kind of avoids  the stuff that Greeks  and Macedonians might  most associate with  the kind of excesses  of Persian kingship of,  as you put it,  like Oriental kingship.  It's also striking  what he starts to wear.  So he starts to wear  a chiton, a kind of top  that was purple  with a white stripe.  That was an item  that was reserved  for the Persian king.  So when he's wearing that,  he's wearing that  to show people  that he's the king.  And again, some of that is  you can read it  in different ways.  You can read that  in a positive way  as him showing people  that he accepts  their traditions  and embraces them.  Or you can read it  in a negative way and say,  well, he's reading that  as a defensive mechanism,  because if he doesn't wear that,  somebody else might.  And if he doesn't wear that,  Persians are going to walk in  and go, well, who's the king?  Where's the king?  Does he want to be king?  And the best example  probably to do with his headwear.  So Persian kings,  Persian kings had worn a thing  that is translated into English  usually as a upright tiara.  OK, which is  makes it sound like  Disney princesses and things.  It's probably more like  a kind of a hood  that was like stuffed  that make it stand up.  It's got various names  in Greek.  That was the same  something that only  the Persian king could wear.  Alexander doesn't adopt that  and instead he adopts  a diadem and the diadem becomes  the diadem is basically  like a headband.  A diadem becomes  the symbol of kingship  in the Hellenistic world  and taking the diadem,  putting the diadem on  becomes a way of you saying  I should be a king now.  Alexander starts to wear that.  

Now that there's lots of debate  about the origins of this,  whether it's in Greek  athletics or whatever,  but it's you know,  he puts this on not long  after Darius III,  the Persian king's been murdered  in a palace coup  and he's in northern Iran  where he does it.  So I think the Iranian  Persian context is really important  and the diadem is something  that was worn by the Persian nobility.  So he's taking an item  of Persian clothing.  The question that I have  that I think is quite interesting  and I don't know  the answer to this  and I put it in a book  and I hope somebody's  going to answer the question for me.  So Xenophon,  who's a kind of classical  Greek author from Athens,  he had served in  the mercenary army of a pretender  to the Persian throne,  a guy called Cyrus the Unger  who tried to overthrow  his brother Artaxerxes.  So he's somebody  who knew about Persians,  had been around Persians.  He talks about how the Persian  nobleman wore this diadem  and it was a kind of symbol  of their status.  Alexander starts wearing that  and then the diadem becomes  a symbol of kingship  in the Hellenistic world.  If it became a symbol  of Hellenistic kingship,  surely only one person  was wearing it,  as in the king.  If only the king was wearing it,  what happened to the diadems  that the Persians were wearing?  Was it a different color?  Was it different somehow  or were the Persians  told to stop wearing their diadems?  Because I don't understand  how it becomes a symbol  of kingship, if not.  So then you've got all those  complexities.  

And again, I think we some… you  used a really good word,  good phrase,  a phrase I think is really  relevant to Alexander.  You talk about gray areas.  And I think with dress  and cultural interaction,  gray areas are really important  because when we think about  processes of colonization,  historians traditionally  have grouped together  the conquered and the conquerors  and assume that they all have  the same reaction to everything.  So conquerors have this view,  conquered have this view.  But when it comes to something  like Persian clothing,  I actually think things  are a bit more complex.  Some people might see that  as a sign that Alexander  is prepared to engage with them,  to tolerate them.  They might see it as a positive,  but other people might see it  as a sign of appropriation.  We talk about cultural appropriation  in the modern world all the time.  So there's different ways  for some of these actions  to be read, I think.  

So we're jumping from one gray area  to another now  because we've used the word Greek.  We've used the word Macedonian.  Macedonia, as you've mentioned  before, Philip was backwater,  particularly in comparison  to the cities of the peninsula itself.  The Greeks of the peninsula,  are they looking up at Macedon  and Philip and Alexander  by extension and thinking,  yeah, these are Greeks.  These are guys like us.  Or are they saying  these guys are barely Greek?  

I think it's a really  this is a really complex debate.  And part of the reason  it's a really complex debate  is that it has a very significant  impact on modern  contemporary discussions  of nationality and statehood  in the Balkans.  And there has been for decades  since the breakup of Yugoslavia  debate between Greece  and what is now North Macedonia  about what North Macedonia  can and should be called  and whether North Macedonians  have a right to be called Macedonians.  We won't get into that now  because I think it's a separate issue  and it's a kind of long lived  debate that's more about  kind of modern politics.  But I think what we can say  is that Macedonians spoke Greek.  The names are Greek.  Religion is Greek.  In that sense, ancient Macedonians  are, I think, Greek.  At the same time,  I think there are elements  of practices that people  in places like Athens  would find unusual or different  and would therefore  sometimes lead them to question  whether or not the Macedonians  would be. The best example of this  and the hardest evidence for it  is a speech by a guy called Demosthenes.  So Demosthenes is  an Athenian politician  and the Athenians are in  a really interesting position  in the 350s and the 340s  because they have traditionally  been a really big power.  They are still, I guess,  in lots of ways,  the most prestigious city in Greece.  But their power in the 350s  and the 340s is not as big  as it once was.  Places like Thebes  have become really important  in the 370s and the 360s.  And within Athens,  they've then got to make a choice.  Like, Philip is this rising power.  How are you going to deal with him?  And inevitably, you get this kind  of factionalism.  And Demosthenes is very firmly  in the camp of Philip  is a threat to Greek freedom.  But then you have other politicians  like his rival, Aeschines,  who is a little bit more open  to negotiating with the Macedonians.  And the two of them go on,  you know, embassies to Philip.  They've met Philip  and then they report back  to the Athenian assembly.  And in one speech,  Demosthenes says about Philip,  he's not even a proper Greek.  In fact, maybe he doesn't  even use that word.  He says he's not even  a proper barbarian.  He's from a place  where you can't even  get a good slave.  

You can see there that,  I think you can see  a couple of things there.  First of all, he is talking to  in the Macedonians,  he's talking in the Athenian assembly  to other free Athenian citizens.  And he's clearly wanting them  to agree with him about what  the policy towards Philip should be.  And so when he's making that remark,  he's clearly speaking to  an existing prejudice  within Athens against Macedonians.  Otherwise, why would you make that remark?  It doesn't work.  The other side of it is  he's doing this  in a polemical speech.  He's reaching for the exaggeration.  He's reaching for the offensive thing to say.  So it's hard to know if that's  exactly what he believed or not.  We were joking before.  I might reveal  hidden secrets of the podcast  before we started recording.  We were having a chat, weren't we?  And the example on this  that I use in my class,  and I think is a good one,  is it probably only applies  to your British listeners.  But Andy Murray,  the Scottish or British tennis player,  you go did a poll.  I think it was like 2016 or 2017.  It was right when I first started teaching  because I was trying to talk about this  in one of the first classes  I ever taught about Alexander.  And I was trying to explain  exactly this issue.  And I showed the students this poll  from YouGov, which said  they'd asked people in Britain,  I think probably in England,  do you think of Andy Murray,  the tennis player,  as being more British or more Scottish?  And essentially,  every time Andy Murray won something,  people were more likely  to say he was more British.  Every time he went for a while  without winning something,  he became more Scottish.  And it was tied in also  with the kind of referendum  on Scottish independence.  And so what that tells you  is that people love to be  associated with a winner.  And I think the question  of Alexander's Greek-ness  or his Macedonian-ness  actually disappears  after he starts winning battles  and winning things,  because once you get  into the Hellenistic period,  so the period after Alexander's death,  I don't think you see evidence  of Greeks saying,  oh, he's not Greek.  Part of it might be to do with success.  

But the other reason for this  is also about  how we build ideas around identity.  One of the theories  about how we build identity  is that you can identify  internally by saying,  let me think about my values,  let me think about who I am,  let me think about that.  Alternatively, you can think  about your identity  in terms of opposition.  And you can say, I'm from Swansea.  I'm not from Cardiff.  I'm from England.  I'm not from Wales.  And so as you kind of find  people from different backgrounds  or different things  to identify against,  it can make you identify  with other people.  And it's like, you know,  the classical joke of saying,  like, in this country,  you're English and you're Welsh  and you're Scottish,  but then you go on holiday  and suddenly you're all British  and they're Germans  and they're French.  And then then you go to America  and you're all Europeans  and then, you know,  you're all human  and then they're all aliens.  You know, I think an element of it  is that the Macedonians,  you know, as I sort of said,  some elements of Macedonian  practice, culture, religion  might have seemed different  from the mainstream  Greek orthodoxy.  Once you're in Bactria,  things probably look a little bit  more a little bit more similar.  So, yeah, I think that would be  that would be my take.  And I think people before  Alexander's reign certainly  could look at the Macedonians  and did look at them  and could say,  yeah, you're not proper Greeks.  But I think it was generally  in quite specific context  for quite specific reasons,  I would say.  

I wrote about Greekness  and identity for my own book.  And if there's one thing  that I learned,  it was that Greekness is fuzzy  and it's fluid  and it's something that you do  as much as something that you are.  

So, yeah, I'm with you on that.  I think, Alexander,  it's possibly he was an aspect  of his identity  that wasn't necessarily the only one.  And I think just on that  really quickly, when you say  that it's what you do,  that's where something like religion  is really important,  because, you know,  the notion of sacrifice,  blood on the altar,  those kind of things,  that might be a little bit different  to, for example,  encountering fire altars in Persia.  So if your way of sacrificing  involves particular animals,  particular kinds of rituals,  it doesn't really matter  what God you're doing it to.  Compared to a group of religion  where it's done differently.  So, yeah.  Just a slightly different  way of doing things.  

Yeah.  So he's conquering this huge,  huge area of the Near East,  the Mediterranean.  How is he keeping control of it  when he's moving from place to place?  

I mean, the cynical view  that some scholars have put forward  is that he's not  and he doesn't care about that.  You know, while there's  a strand in scholarship,  which is Alexander cared  only about conquest,  doesn't care about keeping  control of things.  And I think that's, personally,  I think that's a bit,  a bit short-sighted.  

It sounds a bit Boy's Own  kind of adventure-y.  

Yeah, exactly.  So I think there are  a couple of different ways  in which you can keep control  and which you did.  One option is to  leave a garrison.  So a garrison would be  a group of soldiers  who are left behind to  control your interests  and to keep people in order.  And you're using the threat of force.  The challenge, of course,  is that Alexander goes out  with 35,000 men,  and then there are reinforcements.  If every time you take a town,  you leave 100 men,  pretty soon  you run out of men.  So you can't garrison people.  So the bigger picture strategy,  and this is the strategy  that the Persians had used.  It's a strategy  that the Romans will use,  is essentially to  form relationships  with local elites  and find kind of things  in common with local elites  and get the local elites  to do your work for you.  And I think there's a couple  of different reasons  why that works.  First of all,  the Greek nobleman  and the Persian nobleman  had more in common  with one another  than the Greek nobleman  had with the Greek peasant  and the Persian nobleman  had with the Persian peasant  in terms of how they saw the world.  That sounds like it makes sense.  Yeah, kind of class.  Class is a difficult word to use  in an ancient world context,  but status kind of matters.  So these people could speak  one another's language.  The other reason,  the other thing to think about,  of course, is that  Alexander was  not actually creating  something new.  For most of the people  that Alexander ended up conquering,  what he was doing was  replacing one foreign ruler  with another.  

So in Babylon, for example,  the Babylonian elites,  some of them had ties  with the Persians.  They were married  into Persian families.  They owned land that  or they managed land  on behalf of Persian landholders  and things like that.  But those are things that can be  overlooked quite quickly  once self-preservation kicks in.  Other things that Alexander  would do would be to  essentially intervene  in local power struggles  so that he could back somebody  who then owed their position  to him. So in Caria,  so Caria, again,  south of modern-day Turkey,  Halicarnassus,  the kind of one of the great cities,  you have a dynasty there  called the Hecatomnids.  And the Hecatomnids  had basically been ruling  this area in the fourth century  for the Persians.  And just before  Alexander came along,  there had been a bit  of a power struggle  within the Hecatomnid dynasty.  And a woman called Ada  had been kind of forced out  by her brother.  When Alexander comes along,  he backs Ada,  gets rid of the brother,  puts Ada in charge.  So there, allegedly,  she adopts him as her son.  Two things there.  First of all,  that's very similar  to the Philip marriage alliance.  It's just she's too old  for him to marry.  And what we've got there is  it's like we call it  fictive kinship.  So pretend kinship,  pretend families.  And of course, it means  that when she dies, he's dear.  So he controls it from there.  But there is a good example of him  using a local power struggle  to ensure that somebody there  is going to have his back  because Ada owes position there.  

Elsewhere, what you might see is  you get rid of the guy  who's too close to the Persian  at the top,  and you take the number two  and you promote the number two.  And they now owe their position to you.  So those are the kind of like  mid-level management  things that you do,  because what you can't do  is you can't go in and restructure  the entire administration  of the empire.  You can't put Macedonians  and Greeks in every single position.  There were some documents  found in Bactria  that kind of like tax receipts  and letters and stuff.  And they give you the names  of some of the people  who are involved in this  and they're all local people.  And that's because, again,  first of all, the Macedonians  can't spare the manpower.  

But the other thing about this  is they don't have the skills.  

Macedonia is really small.  The empire is really big.  They don't have people trained  in how to do all of this stuff.  So they need to tap  into the local knowledge.  So, yeah, in terms  of maintaining control,  I guess the message is  people instinctively think of  how do you rule by force?  The point is you can't.  So you have to find ways  to work with people.  And that leads you to working  with the local elite.  And again, it goes back  to that point about changing things.  Empires in the ancient world  need to be laissez faire,  quite light touch,  precisely because it's impossible  to do all of those things.  

So for the average Persian, then,  their life is probably  staying around the same?  They're still paying the taxes.  It's just the tax  collector has changed? 

 The Persians are possibly  the exception to this.  

Oh, OK! 

If you say average person  within the Persian Empire,  I would be more tempted to say yes,  because I think for Babylonians,  for Egyptians,  for people in Asia Minor,  for Bactrians,  I'm not sure how much stuff  would change,  providing there was no fighting  in your territory.  If there's fighting  in your territory,  then it's significantly bad news,  particularly if you end up  in a city that resists  Alexandria's sacked.  I think for the Persians,  there is a significant change.  OK, because maybe right  on the lower,  right on the lower ends of it,  it's hard to know what life was like  for the kind of average Persian.  But I think that there are two things  that are significant.  The first thing is the Persian elite  have to deal with the loss of an empire.  And that is a significant change.  Yeah, that is a significant change  to have to change,  to have to understand,  to process, to deal with  and to survive the loss of your empire  and your relegation  to second class status  within that empire is significant.  Instead of the money  being directed  towards your heartland,  it's going to be directed  towards somewhere else.  That is a real challenge.  And of course,  thousands of Persians were killed  and that has a massive impact  on family.  You know, we don't get wrong.  We don't have evidence for this.  We have to kind of imagine  the effect a little bit,  but that's going to have impact  on family.  It has impact on land holding.  It has impact on all of the things  that would be associated  with the significant loss of manpower.  Of course, I'll do two examples  of where I think life changed  potentially quite significantly  for Persians.  

One is to do purely with the elite.  So in 324,  Alexander gets married  and he marries the daughter  of Darius III.  This is his second marriage.  He's been married to Roxanne  for a few years.  He does this at a place called Susa.  And this is not the only marriage.  There's a mass wedding.  And he marries members  of his army,  the leading Macedonians  and a few of the Greeks,  to leading Persian women.  And people have talked about this  as fusion.  The idea that Alexander is trying  and this is the kind of romantic  tradition of Alexander.  He's trying to establish  this universal brotherhood of man.  That's what a phrase  that William  Woodthorpe Tarn,  a kind of early  20th century historian used.  He's trying to establish this  by creating this fusion  of Macedonians and Persians  to create this kind of elite  ruling class.  The problems with this view  is it's Macedonian men  marrying Persian women.  Persian men don't marry  Macedonian women. It's entirely one sided, right?  The other side to this is  it seems like Alexander  decided who married who.  

So there's no agency  for the girls?  

No.  Oh, God, no.  Of course not.  

Why am I surprised?  

Of course not.  Of course not.  One of my favorite  women from antiquity,  I shouldn't get sidetracked.  One of my favorite  women from antiquity  ends up marrying  a guy called Seleucus.  And that's a woman  called Apama.  And I think her life story  is phenomenal.  She's the daughter  of a resistance leader  called Spitamenes in Sogdia.  There's two stories about him.  One is that he ends up  being killed by a tribe of allies  who go back on the alliance  due to threats from Alexander.  The other story is that  he is beheaded by his own wife,  who then delivers his head  to Alexander in a bag,  who is so appalled by this  that he casts her out  into the wilds in the night.  She ends up in Macedonian control  and then she's married to Seleucus.  And it sounds like  this awful story,  but then Seleucus  becomes the most important  or Seleucus becomes the guy  who controls the largest empire  after Alexander's death.  And so she's got this incredible story  where she's born into  one imperial apparatus.  That is then completely overturned  and then she ends up helping  to rebuild another one  and her son Antiochus becomes king.  And she's the founder.  It's a phenomenal story.  Anyway, that's that's  the side point completely  because she has no say  in all of that,  but it ends up being  a phenomenal story.  Usually fathers would be able  to choose the husband  for their daughter.  So Alexander's  arrogated that from them.  He's taken that away.  That's an attack on their status.  He's picked out  the leading women of the kingdom.  So what's what's happened  to Persia's next top bachelor?  Persia's best bachelor,  324.  Who does he marry?  He's going to have to settle  for like a second class  kind of marriage,  which is an attack on his status.  So those are some of the  in terms of dealing  with the fallout  of losing the empire.  Those are kind of  some of the longer term things  that people might have  had to grapple with.  

But I guess the big stuff  I mentioned, you know,  lots of Persians died  on the battlefield.  The most significant thing is  Persepolis,  the capital city of the empire,  was brutally, brutally sacked.  And the sources that talk about this  are horrendous.  And we tend to focus  on one element of this,  which is the Macedonians  capture the city  and ransack it  for a couple of days.  Alexander then calls a halt  to the violence.  He stays in the city  for several months.  And then he burns  the royal palaces  in the city down  and then he leaves  and he goes after Darius III.  And historians usually focus on  why Alexander  burnt the palaces down.  Again, because there's two stories.  Arrian says this was  a deliberate act of policy  to punish the Persians  for what they'd done to Greece.  Curtius and others say  that Alexander got smashed  and a prostitute told him  it would be good to burn down  the palaces.  And then he went,  yeah, that would be a good idea  because he was drunk  and they set the palaces on fire.  And so historians have kind of  been unpicking that.  And that's again the source problem.  So Arrian sources Ptolemy.  So yeah, I believe Ptolemy  act of policy.  But Curtius says  Curtius, Diodorus, Plutarch,  when they're talking about this,  they say that the courtesan  kind of prostitute  who encouraged Alexander  to burn the palace down  is a woman called Thaïs. Thaïs had a sexual relationship  with Ptolemy and had children  with Ptolemy.  So Ptolemy is writing his history  whilst in a relationship  with a woman who has a history  of leading kings astray.  He's not going to admit.  Oh, yeah, it was Thaïs  who did this.  So you can unpack that  in lots of different ways.  And so historians have been  talking about that.  There's other things  that are happening  around this time.  

They just assert  the Spartan king has led  a kind of war in Greece.  That's sometimes called a revolt,  but it's not really a revolt  because he was never subject  to the Macedonians.  He's led an attack on Greece  and Macedonia in this period.  So sometimes historians  have talked about like,  is this a message back to Greece  to kind of say, look,  I am fighting for you.  This has got this pan-Hellenic  agenda is the word  that people use.  So historians focus on that.  We quite often skip over  the first two days,  which is when the Macedonians  just go berserk in the city.  And, you know, the sources talk  about trigger warning  for some distress and stuff here.  They talk about Persians  locking themselves in their house  and setting the house on fire,  burning themselves alive  with their families  and their possessions  to top the possessions  falling into the Macedonian hands  or going to the top of their houses  and throwing themselves to their death  because the Macedonians  were massacring people,  snatching women and children  and taking them into captivity,  sexually assaulting women.  That kind of thing was rife  in the sack of a city.  They talk about how Macedonians  were fighting with themselves  for the best loot,  that they were cutting up  precious things,  that hands were being cut off  in the struggle  that people, Macedonians,  were killing each other  to get the best stuff.  You know, there's a bit  of exaggeration there, probably. 

 But the point is that this is  an incredibly violent rupture.  And, you know, we were talking about  how much things changed  for the average Persian.  Moments like this  do fundamentally scar you  and they do fundamentally  change things,  even if within 10 years  you're working on the land again.  Like, I think they do fundamentally  change the way that you engage  with the world.  

Part of the narrative  that is always peddled  in these adventure stories  about Alexander,  and they're all written  in a period of British imperialism  and colonialism, where  our soldiers were going out  and having adventures.  It's an adventure.  But we're talking about  the real impact  of the people that they're attacking.  The events at Persepolis,  are we saying that this is a one-off  or is violence inflicted?  Because we talk about, don't we?  War is always presented as soldiers  versus soldiers on a battlefield  and it's an adventure  and they sign up for it.  So it's fine.  This isn't what you're telling me here.  So is Persepolis a one-off?  Is this happening often?  And is that entirely something  that Alexander would be expected to do?  Or is this something that he is  particularly saying,  violent, be violent, go for it?  

I think nothing that I said  is out of the ordinary  for the ancient rules.  

Yeah, OK.  

I think the ancient rules of war  are essentially that if a city  offers resistance and then falls,  then people can do  whatever they want.  And that does mean that women  knew what to expect.  Children knew what would happen  in terms of enslavement  and things like that.  I guess traditionally in the Greek world,  Greeks would not necessarily  enslave other Greeks  apart from the Spartans  and the Helots,  which had happened,  you know, hundreds of years earlier.  You know, like if Spartans  were capturing Athenians,  theoretically they weren't  enslaving them.  But it's quite complex.  But, you know, Philip II  had captured a city called Olynthus in, I think it's 348,  and he had destroyed that city.  Alexander had, you know,  what happened in Persepolis  is not very different  to what happened  with Alexander in Thebes.  There are other attacks.  Oh, you know, I wrote a biography  about this and I was writing about Gaza.  I found that quite hard to write about  because of all the things  that we see in the news.  And I think,  yeah, you know, Alexander again,  you know, destroyed places.  So I think it's not,  you know, the destruction  is not surprising.  It's certainly not unprecedented.  You go back into the kind of annals  of Near Eastern history  and the Assyrians were plenty  keen on destroying things,  you know, so I think it was  to be expected.  The Romans certainly did  the same kind of things.  It's no different to what  the Mongols did, you know.  Where I think you do see  a little bit of a difference  with Alexander, perhaps,  is in India.  

The narrative around India  is quite interesting because  Alexander tries to cross a river  called the Hydaspes  and his men mutiny.  And they basically say,  look, mate, like,  can we just go home?  We've got all this money.  We've won all these battles.  We're knackered, we're wounded.  We've lost friends.  Also, it's monsoon season.  It's been chucking it down.  Like, we just want to go home.  Come back in the future  with fresh recruits  and you can carry on.  And Alexander is supposedly  furious about about this  and decides to kind of  to turn to turn back.  But he doesn't turn back  the way he has kind of come,  which is through Afghanistan.  He marches down the Indus  and along the way he throws  his men into kind of quite  vicious fighting.  And some cynical historians  or historians who are  critical of Alexander  kind of suggest that he  basically is punishing his men  for refusing to keep  to keep going further.  And he's also taking out  his frustration on local people.  

And the best example,  probably of the violence.  Two examples.  Against a kind of tribe  called the Malloi,  they retreat into a city.  Alexander is besieging the city.  He thinks that his men  are not trying hard enough  so he runs to the front line  again, warrior king,  like we talked about,  grabs the ladder,  runs up the ladder,  gets onto the wall.  This inspires his men  to follow him.  They all rush up the ladder,  but too many of them  try to rush up  and once and all the ladders break  and Alexander  stuck on top of the wall  with a couple of a couple  with like two other people.  And so the Indians are firing  up at him from the town  and they're just firing  on him from all angles.  And so everyone thinks,  oh, Alexander, you know,  he's got to jump back down  to safety and instead,  because he's Alexander.  I think I used the phrase  Alexander Alexandered  as in he lived up to his  heroic name by Alexandering  and he jumps down into the  into the city,  backs himself up against the wall  and starts kind of swinging.  Yeah, because that's what  that's the heroic Alexander  that we all expect.  But Alexander ends up  being seriously wounded.  And when his men  get into the town,  they just ransack that town  and kind of destroy everything.  That's a level  where the violence is extreme.  But again,  it's probably explicable  given the context.  

And again, you know,  when we talk about  the violence of Persepolis,  if you've been told  for 150 years,  these people are evil incarnate.  They are the worst people  in the world.  It's not surprising.  The Macedonians have been  conditioned to hate the Persians.  It's not surprising  that that's how they behave  in Persepolis.  But I think the other thing  that happens in India  and I think which maybe  maybe stands out as  potentially being a bit different  is that Alexander sends out  this allegedly sends out  this message,  basically saying,  if you capture people  and they don't immediately  drop any weapons  or immediately follow  in your instructions or whatever,  kill them.  And he divides his army  into three groups  as he's marching  through part of India.  And one army group  goes out in front  of the main army  to kind of flush people out.  Then there's the main army group  and then there's a group  following a couple of days  march behind to pick up  any stragglers.  And this is in some sense  a campaign of just killing people.  And there's a real question  about whether there's like  a military necessity for that.  Because some of some  of the other examples  you could talk about,  you know, Alexander  besieges Tyre  for like nine months.  And the reason he's doing that  goes Tyre is a kind  of Phoenician city.  It's really important  part of the Persian Navy.  It chooses to kind of try  to hold out.  He feels like he needs  to take the city  for the strategic reasons  we talked about before.  Once Tyre falls,  what happens there  is within the kind of  regular parameters of things.  But I think the campaign in India,  we start, I think that's  when you can start to say like,  is this militarily necessary?  And that's where  it might be a bit different.  

I mean, eventually  we're going to have  an entire episode on  the aftermath of his death  and Hellenistic kingdoms  springing up.  So I don't want to talk  about that too much now.  Let's talk about Alexander's death.  Because there's a lot of competing  stories about illnesses  or murder plots.  Can we say how he died?  Are we ever going to know for sure?  

No.  Alexander falls ill.  He's in his 30s, he dies.  Every time an important person  dies, there's conspiracy  theories, right?  Even in the modern world.  So it's not surprising  that there are conspiracy theories.  The fact that he's  in his early 30s when he dies  again adds to that.  He dies after a short illness,  which inevitably means  people think that he's been poisoned  or make allegations  about poisoning.  The best one is that  he's been making  administrative changes  and he's been getting rid  of some of the people  who'd been acting as  sat traps for him,  including getting rid of some  of the Macedonian people.  And one of the things  he had apparently tried to do  just before he died,  is he had told a guy  called Antipater to come to court.  Antipater was the man  he'd left as regent in Macedonia.  He was essentially Philip's  chief political advisor.  And Antipater refused to go  to Babylon, where Alexander was,  and instead sent his son,  the most extreme version  of the kind of conspiracies.  Aristotle has fallen out  with Alexander because  Alexander has turned  from the path of rationality.  So Aristotle has got  a poisonous plant  and he's given it to Antipater  and Antipater has given it  to his son and his son  takes it to Babylon  and gives it to Iollas,  another one of Antipater's sons,  who happens to be  Alexander's cup bearer.  And he slips it into  Alexander's drink and Alexander dies.  That's the extreme version.  You know, there's other versions  of him drinking himself to death.  

I said, no, as a very short answer.  We do get a description  of the symptoms that Alexander  allegedly experienced and,  you know, modern medical journals  have published things  kind of saying this is what  the symptoms might indicate.  There's a long list  of different things like,  you know, malaria,  Guillain-Barr syndrome,  a whole host of different  infectious diseases.  The problem with all  of those explanations  that they're based on sources  that I just don't trust.  So we're not going to,  we're not going to know,  we're not going to know  what killed him.  But we do know when he died  because it's recorded  in a Babylonian cuneiform documents  that we can date.  Although there's arguments  about whether he died  on the 9th or the 10th of June.  So either the 9th or the 10th  or the 10th or 11th of June.  But we at least know that.  

So we've spoken about his childhood,  a lot about his career.  I mean, we can talk about campaigns  in another episode on the show,  specifically in individual battles.  And we've talked about  briefly his death.  So I'm going to ask  this one question.  It's about all of it, really.  Are we ever going to really be able  to say that we know Alexander?  

What do you mean by know Alexander?  

Know about his personality  and his thought processes  and his ambitions  and what he wanted.  

No, but I don't think we can  for any historical figure.  

Okay, that's the answer  that I thought you were going to say.  

Just, I don't know,  it's sort of a cynical answer, isn't it?  It's a kind of,  here's some pop psychology.  You know, ultimately  only we ourselves know  what we want  and we can tell people what we want,  but no one can know  whether that's true or not.  And I think when we go  kind of right back into the ancient world,  those questions about motivation are  almost impossible to answer.  And then I think it gets us  to the question of like,  for me, like what questions  should we be asking about  about Alexander's reign?  Because for me,  I think that the focus  on Alexander and his personality,  put it this way,  we talked in detail about the topic  of Alexander in deification.  I think that's a much more  interesting conversation  for all of the complexities  than just the question of  did Alexander think he was the God?    Did Alexander want to be a God?  You know, the question,  suppose the question was,  did Alexander want to be a God?  And we can answer it  definitively as yes or no.  Either way,  it's not particularly surprising.   You know, did he want to be a God?  Yes.  Well, who wouldn't want to be a God?  Did he want to be a God?  No.  Well, it seems blasphemous.  Of course, you know,  I think there's more  interesting questions a little bit  where we, for me,  the more interesting questions  where we just like  move the gaze a little bit.  You know, Alexander's  such an interesting figure.  You know, I spent the vast majority,  you know, I did my undergrad thesis,  my master's thesis, my PhD thesis,  all had Alexander in the title.  The two books I published,  they both got Alexander in the title.  Most of the papers I published,  you know, like I teach Alexander.  I'm not saying don't study Alexander  because it's obviously something  that I'm interested in,  I've been really interested in.  But I think that the interesting  questions aren't about  what drove him.  But what he left behind.  And instead of it  being the black and white.  Thinking about the gray areas  or I think maybe where there's  produces and I think, you know,  hopefully there's people  listening to this who.  Want to become historians.  And if you want to become  a historian, one of the things  that you've got to do.  Like genuinely, my job is to have  a thought that no one  of human history has had before.  Do you know how hard that is?  I shouldn't be moan that.  People have been  people have been writing about this  for two and a half thousand years, right?  The easiest way for me to say  something original about Alexander  is to ask a question  that people haven't asked before.  Because some of those questions  have been done to death  a little bit, and  there's only so many  possible answers.  And even if we can prove it  one way or another,  I'm just not sure how interesting it is.  

There's a lot of talk about  parasocial relationships  with celebrities and about how people  feel that they know these people well.  They feel that there's a connection  despite the fact that they've never met.  About how they project their own  desires and ideals  onto these people that they've  created a picture of.  Do you think people have been  doing that to Alexander?  

I'm sure, I'm sure people have done that.  Yeah, and I think some of the  debates about his legacy  reflect the way in which people  project different ideals  onto him.  I'll give an example.  At Opus in 324,  Alexander faces a mutiny,  Macedonian army mutiny.  And he puts the mutiny down  and essentially  the way he does it is he goes back  to his tent for three days  because that's what he does.  And when the Macedonians  kind of don't come around,  he calls the Persians in,  he promotes the Persians  to major positions.  And by promoting the Persians,  the Macedonians are like,  oh my God,  he's actually going to go on without us.  And they come and beg him  for forgiveness.  And then Alexander holds a banquet.  And the banquet is called sometimes  the banquet of reconciliation.  And it became the kind of centerpiece  for historical debate  in the 20th century  because William Woodthorpe Tarn,  who I mentioned earlier on,  looks at what Arrian says.  And Arrian says that Alexander  prayed for concord,  so peace and harmony in empire,  partnership in empire  between Macedonians and Persians.  And the way the Greek's written,  you can read it as he prayed for  concord between  Macedonians and Persians  and partnership in empire  between Macedonians and Persians.  That's the usual way it's interpreted.  Tarn said, no,  what Alexander did was  he prayed for concord  and he prayed for partnership  in empire between Macedonians  and Persians.  And so by saying  he prayed for concord,  he prayed for peace.  He's essentially saying  Alexander prayed for will peace.  Tarn's thinking about Alexander  particularly in the interwar period.  It's a period when the League of Nations  is in its formative stages.  Tarn is, you know,  he's born in the 1860s.  He's educated at Eton and Cambridge.  He is rich.  He is an independent scholar.  He is, in some ways,  quite typical of the late  Victorian Edwardian upper class.  That's that generation  that's scarred by World War One  that is promising never again.  League of Nations is thinking about  getting countries to work together  in new ways and things like that.  And so Tarn's got this image of Alexander  as this universal philosopher, right?  And what's interesting,  his biography of Alexander  is published in 1948.  And he's got a passage in there  when he talked about Opus  and he says, you know,  Alexander inspired this ideal  that affected the stoic philosopher Zeno,  that influenced Christian thinking,  that ran right through  the French Revolution  about, you know, the universal Concord.  And he said, this is a flame  that can never be put out.  And then there's a footnote.  And I think the footnote  is one of the most emotional things  that I've read  because the footnote says,  I've left this passage  as it was written in 1927.  Since then, we've seen new  and monstrous births  and I can't work out how to rewrite it.  And he's basically saying,  I don't know how to read it.  I had this view of Alexander  that has been shattered by World War II,  which is a really interesting way  of thinking about how people  are projecting those ideas  onto the past.  His argument about Alexander  and his interpretation of that banquet  that I talked about  is demolished by a guy called Ernst Badian.  

Ernst Badian was an Austrian Jew  who escaped from Austria in 1939.  So you can see how he  has a fundamentally different  youth experience, world view to Tarn.  And so he sees Alexander  in a very different way.  And Badian's writing is still in 2000  and he writes an article  about conspiracies against Alexander.  And he says basically,  Alexander sees conspiracies everywhere  because Alexander was always conspiring  against the people around him.  And if you think that that's far fetched,  well, those of us who lived  through the age of Hitler and Stalin  will find plenty of examples of this.  So people, historians  ask the questions that they do  and interpret the evidence  in the way that they do  because of who they are.  And I know you were kind of thinking  like about, I guess your question  was about people  and I guess a little bit more  on the popular lens  about how they're projecting themselves  and their own ideals onto Alexander.  But I think my point is that,  historians do this too?  And it's something that I do.  You know, I've talked about,  essentially I've kind of said,  I'm not interested  in the Great Man School of History.  I don't think it's right.  I don't think it works.  

It's striking that we've been chatting  for a couple of hours  and we have barely mentioned battles at all.  And I know, you know,  and that's a reflection  of how we've both led the conversation,  but it's every time you've asked me a question,  if I wanted to talk about battles,  I could have talked about battles  and I've chosen not to.  And that's a reflection of my kind of interest, right?  You know, I'm in my 30s,  I am 38.  I, you know,  the first kind of thing that I remember,  like geopolitical thing happening  is 9-11.  And I think, you know,  I grew up in that,  you know, my teenage years  were shaped by the post-9-11 world.  I first started doing Alexander properly  and I did an essay on Alexander in 2008  as part of my undergrad.  Then I wrote my dissertation in 2009 on him.  Then I was writing my PhD thesis  in the 2011 to 2016,  I was doing my PhD.  So that's bang in that period  where you've kind of seeing  the fallout of a military invasion of Iraq  in which people failed to build for a world  after the toppling of the figure  that you were trying to topple.  And, you know,  the power vacuum,  the emergence of ISIS,  the divisions that came out as a failure  to kind of communicate cross-culturally and stuff.  So all of the kind of things  that I've talked about as being interested in,  really essentially,  and I only realized this a few years ago,  I only really realized  that the questions that I was asking of Alexander  were deeply informed by  what I'd seen in the world around me  because there are so many obvious parallels  between the campaigns of Alexander  and what happened in the world  between 2001 and not quite the present day,  but essentially the present day, you know.  So even I,  we're all projected.  

So I think that's a wonderful illustrative point  for every listener to really get to grips with  is that every historian looks at every event  and figure slightly differently.  We always will.  We're not always gonna agree with each other's conclusions.  I think perhaps people expect for historians  to deal with absolutes more than we do.  So I think this is a really good example.  

Yeah, and I think the other thing I say  to people who listen who want to be historians  is once I had that realization,  it made me think a bit more about who I was  and what I was interested in.  And that helped me identify  some of the blind spots that I have.  And I touched on it earlier  when I was talking about religion.  Instinctively as a historian,  when I was, I guess, doing my PhD,  I wasn't taking religion as seriously  as I should have done because I'm not religious.  And so I think I've kind of,  it's, you know, I understood the rich.  I understood it.  I thought about it,  but I struggled to think,  take it seriously as a motivation.  So I think, yeah,  thinking about why you're interested in particular things  helps you identify what you're not interested in.  It helps you think about your own kind of,  because we all have these, you know,  I don't let my students use the word bias,  but we all have these unconscious biases,  these kind of worldviews that affect the way we see things.  

I mean, Alexander is, as I said at the beginning,  someone that we think that we know.  I think after this discussion, everyone will agree.  Maybe we don't.  So thank you so much for coming  and giving us a nuanced view on Alexander.  It has been fantastic.  Thank you so much. 

 Thanks for having me.  It's been a lot of fun.  

So for anyone who wants to know more about Alexander,  where can they find you?  Yeah, well, hopefully we've not put people off!  You can find me on Instagram and on YouTube.  Both handles are at Stephen Harrison History.  Stephen Harrison, Stephens with a pH.  And if you want to find out a little bit more  about Alexander the Great and what I think about him,  I published a biography last year.  It's called Alexander the Great Lives and Legacies,  which you can get all over the place.