Philip Freeman is a classics professor and the author of Alexander the Great, a book that tells the story of a man who conquered the ancient world. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the life of the King of Macedon, and the man who made him the greatest conqueror of all time.
00:00:30.000This is a very readable, yet academically authoritative biography of this legendary king, commander, and conqueror.
00:00:34.680His name is Philip Freeman. He's a classics professor and the author of Alexander the Great.
00:00:38.440Today on the show, Philip takes on an engaging tour of Alexander's life, beginning with the myths surrounding his birth and his education under the great philosopher Aristotle.
00:00:45.560Philip then explains the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of Macedonian politics and why Alexander's father was assassinated.
00:00:50.800We then dig into Alexander's political reign and military command and highlight the most famous battles during his decade-long campaign to conquer the ancient world.
00:00:57.680Along the way, Philip shares the leadership lessons we can learn from Alexander.
00:01:01.200After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Alexander the Great.
00:01:04.940All right. Philip Freeman, welcome to the show.
00:01:18.860So you've got a biography out about Alexander the Great.
00:01:21.940Now, there are a lot of books and biographies about Alexander the Great, ancient ones.
00:01:25.420We've got Aryans, Campaigns of Alexander.
00:01:27.440Why did you think that we need another Alexander the Great biography?
00:01:31.900Well, there are. You're right. There are a lot, both ancient and modern.
00:01:36.040Aryan, of course, I think is the very best of the ancient biographies.
00:01:39.420And there's some very good modern biographies.
00:01:42.420When I wrote this a few years back, there really weren't any that had been done recently.
00:01:48.120There have been a couple that have been done since.
00:01:50.040But my goal in writing this was really just to tell the story of Alexander for a modern audience.
00:01:55.680I want to be accurate. I want to be academic and all of that.
00:01:59.280But I really wanted to put it in the form of a story that people could read and feel like they could really get to know this man.
00:02:06.160This is a book about more than just battles, although I do talk about the details of battles and such.
00:02:11.360But it's really much more of a book about the person of Alexander, who he was, what motivated him, as best that we can tell, looking back over 2,000 years.
00:02:20.300Yeah, I love the way you wrote it, because it does read like this Game of Thrones or The Godfather, particularly in that early part.
00:02:28.540And we'll talk about that, sort of the succession between Philip, Alexander's dad, and Alexander.
00:02:33.220There's a lot of assassinations and killings going on.
00:02:35.960But I loved how you wrote that. It read like this really good murder mystery novel.
00:02:41.500Oh, I had so much fun with it. Thank you.
00:02:43.140So before we talk about Alexander the Great, let's talk about why we call him Alexander the Great.
00:02:50.000How big of an empire did he mass? How long did it take him? Why are we still talking about him 2,000 years later?
00:02:56.480Well, he's a fascinating character, because what he did was really amazing. It really was great.
00:03:01.560He started off being a struggling king of a very small kingdom in northern Greece.
00:03:08.560And he conquered the world, basically, all the way from Greece to Egypt, across what's now Iraq and Iran, all the way to what's modern India.
00:03:19.260No one had ever had an empire that big before.
00:03:22.820He conquered the Persian Empire, which made up most of his realm, but he did more than that.
00:03:38.660It was an enormous geographical area, an area very populous, made up of incredibly diverse people, languages, cultures, many of them very warlike.
00:03:49.980And Alexander was able to do this in a period of about 11 years when he was very young.
00:03:56.000He started this when he was about 20 years old, and he finished just before his 33rd birthday when he died.
00:04:02.200So, he was able to conquer most of the known world of the Mediterranean, Eastern Mediterranean and Near East at a time when nobody had ever done anything like that before, and especially had never done it so fast.
00:04:15.740Yeah, when you realize how young he was, it makes you feel like a slacker.
00:04:18.980Well, Julius Caesar, when he was in his early 30s, came across a statue of Alexander when he was in Spain.
00:04:26.900Julius Caesar was really just starting off, and he wept because Alexander had conquered the world at a time when Julius Caesar was still a junior officer.
00:04:35.700So, yeah, it made me wonder what I've done with my life.
00:04:38.340So, in the beginning, you make the case, as well as a general of Alexander the Great, that Alexander wouldn't have been able to do what he did without the foundation that his father, King Philip of Macedonia, laid.
00:04:51.800Let's talk about the Macedonians, because as you said, there was sort of this northern city-state or, you know, I don't know what you would call it, just an area in Greece, sort of the backwoods, the backcountry, but somehow it managed to rise to power.
00:05:03.260So, kind of give us a background, what was Macedonia? What was their role in Greek culture at the time of Alexander, or before Alexander the Great?
00:05:12.220Right. Well, Macedonia had been a part of ancient Greek history for a long time.
00:05:17.620They were on the northern fringes, though.
00:05:19.720The Athenians, the Spartans, the Thebans, all of the civilized Greek people to the south saw them as their barbarians to the north.
00:05:27.900And at a time when the Athenians were inventing democracy, and you had the rule of the people spreading across Greece, the Macedonians were still a kingdom ruled by a king with pretty much absolute power, very much like a warlord, somebody from Game of Thrones, which you mentioned.
00:05:46.200So, the Greeks always looked at the Macedonians as their backcountry cousins, always looked down on them, but they were a powerful kingdom, but they really, until the time of Philip, they were always being threatened with war, always being threatened by being torn apart.
00:06:02.500And what Philip did was, Philip was able to take the Macedonians, take these wild people who were natural great warriors, but he was able to form them into an army using the techniques that he had learned from the Greek cities to the south.
00:06:17.680And when you combine that sort of natural talent and bravery and force of the Macedonians with the discipline that Philip learned, military discipline that he learned from the Greek city-states, they were an incredible force to be reckoned with.
00:06:33.720And Philip was able not only to survive when he rose to power in Macedonia, but he was able to take over really most of Greece, except for Sparta, and make it part of his own Macedonian empire with the aim, ultimately, as he always said, of invading the Persian empire, which everybody thought was a pretty ridiculous idea.
00:06:55.200And why did Philip want to take over Greece? What was his goal there?
00:06:59.900Oh, I think he was like many kings and tyrants and rulers through the ages. He wanted power.
00:07:05.880And also, he lived in a society that was like, think of the Middle Ages, and you had to conquer, you had to push forward, or you were falling back.
00:07:16.700And you always had to press forward, you always had to give your warriors something to fight for, you always had to give them loot from sacked cities.
00:07:24.600It was a military society, so it had to have some sort of a military purpose to it.
00:07:30.140And I think that was a big part of it. I think he also wanted legitimacy.
00:07:34.320He wanted to be recognized that he was Greek, and he wanted to be accepted by the Greeks to the south.
00:07:41.000And he's also, he took advantage of sort of the tumult that was going on in a lot of the Greek city-states.
00:07:45.900I think a lot of times we think of ancient Greece, we think of the white statues and the pillars and it's all, but it was a very chaotic time, particularly around this time, just a couple, a generation before Socrates was assassinated.
00:07:57.340There's this whole political intrigue and turmoil going on in Athens, and it sounds like Philip was able to take advantage of that.
00:08:04.880What happened in the generation before Philip, really, at the end of the 400s BC, was a great Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, a 30-year war, which was just, imagine World War II lasting for 30 years.
00:08:18.500It was that level of devastation and death and destruction.
00:08:22.240And so Greece was exhausted when Philip came to the throne, so that helped him.
00:08:27.580They were exhausted, but they were down, but not out.
00:08:30.120They were still very powerful warriors, especially the city of Thebes, which rose to power after Athens and Sparta had exhausted themselves.
00:09:07.140The night that he was born, there was supposedly a thunderstorm.
00:09:10.900His conception, Philip was never quite sure, according to the stories, if he was actually the father because there was a claim that Zeus was really the father.
00:09:20.920That was a fairly standard sort of thing to do.
00:09:23.760You wanted to have an ancestor who was a god.
00:09:27.240If you could be the actual son of a god, that was great propaganda.
00:09:32.060That was something maybe most people wouldn't believe it, but some people would.
00:09:36.600And so I think Alexander himself really wasn't quite sure.
00:09:41.140His mother told him that he was divine, that he was special.
00:09:44.760His mother, Olympias, was a tremendous influence in his life.
00:09:48.600Well, talk about the influence that Olympias had on him.
00:09:50.860Yes, she came from, she was a princess in an ancient country called Epirus, which is basically modern Albania.
00:09:58.560And she came into the court of Macedonia and became one of many of Philip's wives.
00:10:05.220She was a very smart, very determined woman.
00:10:08.120And her goal in life was to get her son, Alexander, on the throne because there were other contenders, both children of Philip and other members of the Macedonian nobility.
00:12:59.280The great Aristotle, the one Dante called the master of all who know, he was certainly one of the most intelligent men ever.
00:13:07.260And like Aristotle's own teacher, Plato, he explored a wide variety of subjects.
00:13:12.780But Aristotle also was a great experimental scientist, really one of the first.
00:13:17.600Whereas Plato would theorize about things, you know, what animals are like, Aristotle would be out waiting in the swamp collecting tadpoles to dissect.
00:13:25.580So, he was a wonderful teacher and a great influence on Alexander.
00:13:31.540Do we know why Aristotle decided to take that role?
00:13:34.260I mean, because he was like, you know, he was in Athens, you know, he's a student of Plato, but he decided to go to the backwoods of Macedonia to tutor this king's kid.
00:14:16.400I can just imagine learning from Aristotle at that setting.
00:14:20.700Well, according to lore, we don't know if this is true, but that Alexander, during his campaigns, supposedly sent stuff back to Aristotle, like animals and furs and things.
00:14:34.380And so, Alexander was always sending back unique animals and plants and such things to his old teacher, Aristotle, all throughout his 11-year campaign.
00:14:43.520Well, another interesting part of Alexander's childhood, what we'd call childhood now, is when he was a teenager, his dad actually put him in charge of military, of the military.
00:14:52.360He was a captain in the military, like 16 years old.
00:14:57.680He was, Alexander learned a lot of wonderful theory in biology and mathematics and literature.
00:15:02.360But he was also trained from the very beginning by Macedonian soldiers, some of the toughest soldiers in the world.
00:15:08.000He was trained in the practical arts, the practical arts of fighting and leadership.
00:15:12.320And so, from an early time, Alexander was put in charge of leading men in battle.
00:15:17.920And so, when he was 16 years old, he was serving as a captain in the army of Philip and getting very much on-the-ground training in military matters.
00:15:29.440So, the part in your book that started reading like a mafioso or like a dream of thrones is the succession between Philip and Alexander.
00:15:37.120So, the interesting part first is that, at first, Philip, you know, he wasn't always sure that Alexander was his son.
00:15:45.140And there was actually a moment where Philip says, no, yeah, you're not going to be my heir, Alexander.
00:15:48.460Right. And this was when Alexander was in his late teens, and Philip was getting ready to go off on the invasion of Persia.
00:15:56.920And there was a lot of pressure on Philip.
00:15:59.560He had had daughters, he had had one son who was mentally handicapped, but he didn't have a, aside from Alexander, he didn't have a healthy son who he could leave the throne to.
00:16:10.800And that bothered some of the Macedonian nobility because they saw Alexander as a half Macedonian, not really one of them.
00:16:20.440And they really wanted Philip to marry and sire a son with an old Macedonian family.
00:16:26.440And so, Philip listened to them, and he sent Olympias and Alexander away and removed Alexander, at least temporarily, from the line of succession.
00:16:35.860But then, after he was unable to have another son, and he was just getting ready to leave on the military expedition, he realized he couldn't just leave without nobody as an heir.
00:16:47.260And so, he brought Alexander back and reinstated him as his heir, which I imagine made Alexander a bit resentful.
00:16:55.520Yeah, I can see that being really awkward.
00:16:57.200If you think Thanksgiving dinner is awkward, imagine being like, you're not going to be the heir.
00:17:01.140Oh, yeah, you are going to be the heir again.
00:17:04.340So, and then all during this time, before Philip was going to go off to Persia, he was worried about having a successor in case he died out there.
00:17:10.920But there was also this inner intrigue going on.
00:17:15.020People were wanting to assassinate Philip.
00:17:17.100Why were there conspiracies to get rid of Philip?
00:18:36.580A lot of people, of course, in later years, thought that Olympias maybe was behind it or maybe Alexander himself.
00:18:42.840So, that period when Alexander became the king, that's a really, in any moment there's succession, there's always a possibility that the succession won't go as planned.
00:18:54.520There's all these people fighting for, you know, no, actually, he's not the heir.
00:19:06.620He had proven himself as a military leader already, but he was 20 years old.
00:19:11.200A lot of them saw him as a half Macedonian kid who was trying to step into his father's very big shoes.
00:19:18.060And so, there were a lot of people who were against him.
00:19:20.700And certainly, whether or not the Athenians or other Greeks or Persians were behind it, they certainly took advantage of the assassination of Philip and tried to thwart Alexander at the very beginning.
00:19:31.260But through matters of persuasion, through proof of his military and organizational ability, Alexander showed them that he really was worthy to take over the Macedonian throne.
00:19:43.360And he established himself and he, you know, showed the Greeks that he was, you know, he was serious.
00:19:48.740He was not afraid to knock some heads together.
00:19:51.480And so, he consolidated his power to the south in Greece.
00:19:55.300And then he launched a campaign in the north, up in the Danube River Valley, which was a great training session for his invasion of the Persian Empire.
00:20:04.280It showed his military skill, his leadership, and it secured his northern borders before he would head out east and invade Persia.
00:20:12.200Well, what I was impressed during this time with Alexander was his political astuteness.
00:20:16.100Like, he understood that there were people in his father's court or in his military leadership that were probably, like, against him.
00:21:05.780But he really preferred to try to win them over and to try to make good use of their talents if he could.
00:21:13.180So, he did that initial, like, training ground, securing his northern borders and the Danube River Valley.
00:21:17.380But then he started turning his attention towards Greece and some of these city-states that have been belligerent and kind of getting in the way.
00:21:24.700And one of his initial campaigns was against the Thebans.
00:21:28.440Tell us about these guys and why were they such a formidable foe?
00:21:31.280And why did Alexander feel he had to put them in check?
00:21:33.600Well, the Thebans had filled the power vacuum in Greece just after the Peloponnesian War when Athens and Sparta were downed but not out.
00:22:44.380The Thebans said, no, we're not going to surrender to a kid.
00:22:47.220And so, Alexander, by using his skill and siege warfare and other things, he took the city of Thebes and destroyed it.
00:22:55.180And he gave a very specific object lesson to the rest of Greece by basically killing or enslaving everybody in Thebes so that the Athenians, the Spartans, and the rest would think twice before rebelling.
00:23:09.800While he was off in Persia, he would simply send back a message and say, remember Thebes.
00:23:14.740And so, he used violence on a grand scale, but a very selective scale in order to impress the people of Greece.
00:23:24.160Yeah, that was sort of his modus operandi.
00:23:25.540If there was a city that just didn't give up or didn't surrender right away, he would make sure that he would teach a lesson to them but to everyone else.
00:23:35.200So, you mentioned he used siege warfare during this time, and he made some innovations there.
00:23:41.780Besides that, what sort of other innovations did Alexander introduce strategically, tactically, that made him such a formidable military leader?
00:23:52.880Well, really, organization on the battlefield and off the battlefield.
00:23:58.020One thing that he was able to do, which is something I share with my students in class, the Greek hoplite army, the heavily armed infantrymen who were in Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Macedonia, they were a very tough bunch.
00:24:35.220And you can imagine a spear that's 18 feet long can reach through just about any military line.
00:24:41.320The problem is, if you have 100 men carrying 18-foot spears, they have to be superbly trained so they don't get entangled with each other.
00:24:50.800But if you can get 100 men who can move like a machine with 18-foot spears, then you can press your way through just about any heavily armed infantry line.
00:25:02.160That was just one of the innovations of Alexander.
00:25:06.560And really, one of his main ones was speed.
00:25:09.100Nobody ever moved as fast as Alexander.
00:25:12.140You'd be getting ready for a battle in three days with him and then find out he was right there on your doorstep.
00:25:18.220And in battle, one of his tricks was to rush in very fast with his horsemen before anybody could even get their arrows ready to get underneath the range of the archers.
00:25:29.860So, speed in all of its different aspects was a major factor of Alexander.
00:25:35.040We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
00:26:13.160But people thought that Alexander was going to restrict his invasion of Persia to just trying to take the Greek cities of Asia Minor, Ephesus, and all of the rest along the coast.
00:26:54.680His hero was Achilles from the Trojan War.
00:26:57.720And Achilles gloried in the fact that he was the greatest warrior ever.
00:27:01.380And Alexander, I think, aspired to be like that.
00:27:03.820He slept with Homer's Iliad underneath his pillow every night with the stories of Achilles.
00:27:09.100And so, I think it was, a lot of it was that.
00:27:11.820I think a lot of it was just wanting to prove that he could do it, that this kid from Macedonia could actually do it.
00:27:18.640And so, he kept pushing farther and farther along the coast, the Mediterranean coast, and then eventually inland.
00:27:24.820Well, speaking of his admiration of Achilles, one of the first things he does when he gets to what's now Turkey, he goes to Troy and visits the grave of Achilles.
00:27:35.960It's a beautiful sight that the Turkish government takes very good care of.
00:27:39.640And he went there and he sacrificed to Achilles and to the gods.
00:27:43.900And he and his friend Hephaestan stripped off their clothes and raced three times around the city of Troy, an imitation of Achilles and Hector in Homer's Iliad.
00:27:52.940So, he takes back control of the Greek city-states in Persia, starts turning inland.
00:27:58.680The king of Persia this time was Darius.
00:28:00.660So, Darius, when did he realize that Alexander posed a threat and that he had to do something about this guy?
00:28:06.040Well, Alexander fought a battle on the Granicus River near Troy the first few weeks that he invaded.
00:28:12.740And the Persians thought, and that was just fighting a little local Persian army.
00:28:17.200The Persians thought that that would take care of things.
00:28:19.700They would kill Alexander and that would be it.
00:28:42.340It took a long time to gather together the force of the Persian army.
00:28:46.260And so, Darius let Alexander basically take the rest of Asia Minor and go down the coast of what's now Syria and Israel, Palestine, into Egypt.
00:28:56.780But he was waiting for him after he came into the area of what's now Iraq.
00:29:45.120And one thing I tell my students is if you're ever in a situation where you're fighting a battle with an army that outnumbers you, especially one that outnumbers you greatly, try to restrict them to a small area because it negates somewhat their power.
00:30:00.680He fought the Battle of Issus on a narrow coastal plain so that Darius wasn't able to spread out his whole army and envelop Alexander.
00:30:09.840And so, there at the Issus River, Alexander struck against Darius very fast and used the speed and used his flanking maneuvers and all of his different tricks and routed Darius.
00:30:31.700That was one thing about Alexander is that he – it was, I think, an act of chivalry, but it was also a very practical act that he treated them very well and sent them back to Persia unharmed and untouched.
00:30:43.480And he was able to win the first great battle at Issus and then eventually go forward from there down into Syria and Egypt.
00:30:51.800Well, that's kind of an interesting thing you mentioned throughout the book about Alexander's relationship with women.
00:30:55.880It seemed to have like a soft spot for them.
00:30:57.460Like, he wasn't interested in them romantically, it seemed like.
00:31:03.660And sexual orientation in the ancient world is always a difficult thing to try because we look at it and try to look at because we look at it in modern categories.
00:31:12.360But Alexander, he did get married eventually.
00:31:18.080But women were – I don't think women were his obsession, certainly, like they were with his father, Philip, who would pretty much sleep with anything wearing a skirt.
00:31:27.520But Alexander was more restrained, certainly.
00:31:30.620But yeah, he had like a respect for him.
00:31:31.780He was like very respectful, particularly to older women.
00:33:18.440And so, he spent months, his men spent months pouring rocks into this channel.
00:33:23.520And the Tyrians, the people of Tyre, would just stand up on their walls and laugh at him for this.
00:33:28.360But as the months went by and the causeway got closer and closer, they stopped laughing.
00:33:33.220And eventually, Alexander was able to complete the causeway and roll his machines of war right across it along with all his soldiers and ladders.
00:33:54.280There's a picture, you can look at it online, and you can see that Tyre is now connected to the mainland, as it has been for the last 2300 years, because of Alexander.
00:34:04.580It's a physical feature in the geography of the Middle East that Alexander created.
00:34:09.300So, talking about this spiritual aspect of Alexander, an important part of his campaign was when he went to Egypt.
00:34:16.320Now, Egypt today is like, you know, we think of Egypt as sort of this land of mystery.
00:34:19.640It was the same thing in Alexander's time.
00:34:22.220Egypt was seen as this land of mystery and magic and spirituality.
00:34:26.780And he gets to Egypt, and he decides to go, like, on this month-long detour in the middle of the desert, so he can go talk to an oracle.
00:34:34.540Right. He conquered Egypt without any resistance.
00:34:38.520The Egyptians never particularly liked the Persians, so they were happy to proclaim Alexander as pharaoh and to show him around.
00:34:46.120And like everybody, Alexander was very impressed with Egypt.
00:34:49.620He went to the pyramids, and we have to realize that the pyramids were older to Alexander than he is to us.
00:34:57.000So, there's an enormous antiquity to Egypt and mystery to it.
00:35:01.440So, he left the Nile Valley, and he went far to the west to the oasis of Siwa, which is now on the border of Libya, where there was a great oracle of Amon-Ra, which the Greeks called Zeus.
00:35:15.160And so, he went there on this dangerous journey that I think only a young man and his buddies would do, crossing the Sahara Desert.
00:35:23.420And he went there, though, to consult the oracle, and we don't know exactly what happened when he went into the oracle's temple.
00:35:31.320The story seems to be that Alexander wanted to know if Philip was his real father.
00:35:35.920And when he came out, people say that he seemed changed.
00:35:39.700And so, the supposition is that the oracle told him that you were actually the son of Zeus.
00:35:44.820And so, he went forth at that point, believing maybe that there was some actual truth to the story, that he was the son of a god.
00:35:53.860And so, he went back to Egypt and then headed inland to invade the heart of the Persian Empire.
00:35:58.600Well, supposedly, he asked also if he would conquer the Persian Empire.
00:36:07.480He left that profoundly affected, and it gave him more goose to keep doing what he had started to do.
00:36:13.800Right, because Alexander had gotten a message from Darius, the king of Persia, saying, let's work out a deal.
00:36:19.960You can keep the Mediterranean parts of my empire, which were really quite small and not particularly wealthy, and just stay there, and I will recognize you as king of the Mediterranean coast, and that's it.
00:36:31.600I think Darius probably intended to still conquer Alexander, but he wanted to buy some time.
00:36:37.900And Alexander, a lot of people said, Alexander, this is incredible.
00:36:41.140This is more than any of us could ever have hoped for.
00:36:49.900And Alexander said, no, I am going forward.
00:36:53.120And so, his army, who were very loyal, followed him inland to the heart of Mesopotamia, to the Tigris and Euphrates Valley.
00:37:00.800Yeah, as I read about that experience with Alexander, it made me think of like, if you look back in history, a lot of what we'd call great individuals, individuals that had a great impact on history, they had that in common with Alexander.
00:37:11.220They had a very powerful sense of purpose and identity.
00:38:35.960He didn't come in and try to make everything Macedonian.
00:38:39.600He adapted it, very happily adapted it.
00:38:42.440And he also kept a constant flow of correspondence.
00:38:45.560So, all of the time, all of these 11 years when Alexander was tromping across the mountains of Afghanistan, he was getting constant reports about what kind of crops are growing in Phrygia or how things are going back in Macedonia.
00:38:59.940So, he was able to dispatch and rule and administer the empire very effectively.
00:39:07.480Conquering an empire is hard enough, but keeping it can be impossible.
00:39:11.080We've seen many examples in history of people who do that and just you watch their empires fall apart when they die.
00:39:19.120Charlemagne, for example, he leaves his empire to three sons and then it just sort of collapses gradually after he dies.
00:39:25.940So, Alexander was a great administrator.
00:39:28.920But another thing that Alexander did besides maintaining the sort of current Persian apparatus, you know, political and religious and things like that, he also started adapting Persian customs and clothing.
00:39:52.100But also, a part of it was that the people of the Persian empire that he conquered wanted a king who looked like a Persian king.
00:40:00.120And so, he started dressing, at least in public displays, like a Persian king, which got some of his Macedonians, who were very much a rough and ready bunch of cowboys sort of people, thinking, you know, why is Alexander starting to act like a Persian?
00:40:17.160Yeah. So, the Macedonians, they were a kingdom, but they were a lot more democratic than, say, the Persians.
00:40:21.340They were. I mean, you think, when I think of the Macedonians, I think about, think about Vikings.
00:40:27.960Think about a hall full of Vikings with a king up front and all the warriors gathered around him, proudly fighting for him, but doing it by their own will.
00:40:37.500And so, it was a more democratic kind of institution than the Persian empire, which was very much a hierarchical, top-down sort of administration.
00:40:48.040So, he continues just steamrolling through Persia.
00:40:55.960But after the great battle at Galgamela in what's now northern Iraq, where Alexander faced the entire Persian army, vastly outnumbered, and was able to defeat them by, again, by just sheer daring and speed, then the army collapsed.
00:41:12.480And after that, Darius was a king on the run with just a few men with him, one of which eventually killed him.
00:42:25.340And so, Alexander, when he hears this speech, he goes into his tent and sulks for three days and then finally says, okay, boys, you're right.
00:42:56.360And he's not giving up his ambitions at all, but he is heading back at least for a while to Babylon.
00:43:04.360And what's interesting on his quest back, like instead of going back the way he went, he decided to go this like hard route because he heard that no one else had done it before.
00:44:28.800But it's also very possible that Alexander, there was a lot of sickness in the ancient world.
00:44:33.180And it's very possible that Alexander was just weakened after all of these years of campaigning and just simply died of disease there in Babylon.
00:44:42.540Now, just like there's legends around his birth, there are also legends around his death, particularly about who would succeed Alexander.
00:44:49.540Right. That's the great story, which I think is probably true.
00:44:53.620Alexander had married a princess from the area of Afghanistan and eventually had a young son.
00:45:50.960And then his old friend, his best and oldest friend, Ptolemy, took Egypt, which was probably the smartest move of all because it was a very wealthy and very contained and easy to defend a kingdom.
00:46:02.180And so Ptolemy and his descendants ruled Egypt for several hundred years until his very last descendant, Cleopatra, was taken over, surrendered to Rome.
00:46:12.800And what happened to Macedonia itself?
00:46:30.720And it wasn't that long afterwards until Rome was a rising power in the west.
00:46:35.900And they certainly did their best to bring down Macedonia if they could.
00:46:40.780And so Macedonia itself reverts to being what it had been before, which is a fairly small kingdom.
00:46:47.700And all the rest of Alexander's empire is divided up into among different generals who found dynasties.
00:46:53.640But the thing is, Alexander's influence continued.
00:46:57.540Alexander not only conquered, but he established cities, he established libraries, he settled his veteran soldiers in colonies all the way to Afghanistan and India.
00:47:07.600So these little centers of Greek civilization, all in these cities, basically named Alexandria after himself, he founds all across his former empire.
00:47:17.560And they become a great center for Hellenic, for Greek culture that greatly influenced the area for centuries thereafter.
00:47:26.680Yeah, how did it set the stage for Western civilization after that point, do you think?
00:47:30.120Well, what Alexander did, before Alexander, Greek civilization was pretty much contained in Greece.
00:47:39.680But Alexander spread Greek civilization, the stories of Homer, the philosophy of Plato, across the ancient world to Egypt, to Mesopotamia, to India.
00:47:51.880And so when we think about the golden age of Greece and the wonderful plays and books and histories and all, Alexander is really responsible for spreading that.
00:48:02.500And then the Romans took it up and they helped spread it even more.
00:48:07.280But Alexander founded these cities, the greatest of which was the Alexandria of Egypt, which became the intellectual center of the ancient world, where people from all over the place came, where this great library for the collection and dissemination of knowledge was founded.
00:48:24.000And so Alexander spread civilization, really, Greek civilization, at least, all across the ancient world.
00:48:33.700And so the people spoke Greek, not everybody.
00:48:36.420They still spoke their native languages.
00:48:38.280But we look at the New Testament, for example, written in the first century of our era.
00:48:46.280It's not written in the Aramaic of Jesus.
00:48:48.300It's written in Greek, the Greek of Alexander.
00:48:51.080So you mentioned that people often look to Alexander for leadership lessons for business or for military.
00:48:57.620And so Alexander the Great, he's an interesting character, because as I was reading your biography of him, I'd be like, wow, this is really cool.
00:49:03.900And then he would just basically commit genocide.
00:49:05.840And you're like, ooh, that's not good.
00:49:08.860So you kind of walk away ambivalent about him.
00:49:12.360But what do you think are the lessons that people can take from Alexander the Great on leadership?
00:49:18.920It's a question we deal with in college courses all the time when we study people from the past and then we find out something terrible about them, that they own slaves, for example.
00:49:29.580What do we do with somebody like that?
00:49:31.220What do we do with George Washington, who did all these amazing things and yet owned and oppressed individual people?
00:49:39.460So what I try to do is I say, try to look at the context of the times, because otherwise we're going to end up ignoring everybody from history.
00:49:47.520We're going to end up canceling everybody.
00:49:49.860So look at Alexander in his own times and what he did.
00:49:52.840He did some pretty horrible stuff, but he did some amazing stuff, too.
00:49:56.620And learning leadership lessons from him, watch how he fought.
00:50:07.080He was the first one over the wall into this hostile city.
00:50:11.040So he always was in front, always facing physical dangers, always taking care of his men before himself, always very well organized, but also very daring.
00:50:22.120So I think those are some lessons that all of us can apply to our lives.
00:50:26.540And his overlooked idea of he was a good administrator, there's probably lessons from that as well.
00:51:04.280He's the author of the book, Alexander the Great.
00:51:06.400It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:51:08.720You can find out more information about his work at his website, philipfreemanbooks.com.
00:51:12.500Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash alexanderthegreat, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:51:18.280Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
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