The Art of Manliness - #588： The Audacious Command of Alexander the Great

00:00:00.000 I'll see you next time.

00:00:30.000 This is a very readable, yet academically authoritative biography of this legendary king, commander, and conqueror.

00:00:34.680 His name is Philip Freeman. He's a classics professor and the author of Alexander the Great.

00:00:38.440 Today 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.

00:00:45.560 Philip then explains the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of Macedonian politics and why Alexander's father was assassinated.

00:00:50.800 We 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.

00:00:57.680 Along the way, Philip shares the leadership lessons we can learn from Alexander.

00:01:01.200 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Alexander the Great.

00:01:04.940 All right. Philip Freeman, welcome to the show.

00:01:17.440 Thanks. Great to be here.

00:01:18.860 So you've got a biography out about Alexander the Great.

00:01:21.940 Now, there are a lot of books and biographies about Alexander the Great, ancient ones.

00:01:25.420 We've got Aryans, Campaigns of Alexander. 0.82

00:01:27.440 Why did you think that we need another Alexander the Great biography?

00:01:31.900 Well, there are. You're right. There are a lot, both ancient and modern.

00:01:36.040 Aryan, of course, I think is the very best of the ancient biographies.

00:01:39.420 And there's some very good modern biographies.

00:01:42.420 When I wrote this a few years back, there really weren't any that had been done recently.

00:01:48.120 There have been a couple that have been done since.

00:01:50.040 But my goal in writing this was really just to tell the story of Alexander for a modern audience.

00:01:55.680 I want to be accurate. I want to be academic and all of that.

00:01:59.280 But 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.

00:02:06.160 This is a book about more than just battles, although I do talk about the details of battles and such.

00:02:11.360 But 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.

00:02:20.300 Yeah, I love the way you wrote it, because it does read like this Game of Thrones or The Godfather, particularly in that early part.

00:02:28.540 And we'll talk about that, sort of the succession between Philip, Alexander's dad, and Alexander.

00:02:33.220 There's a lot of assassinations and killings going on.

00:02:35.540 Yes.

00:02:35.960 But I loved how you wrote that. It read like this really good murder mystery novel.

00:02:41.500 Oh, I had so much fun with it. Thank you.

00:02:43.140 So before we talk about Alexander the Great, let's talk about why we call him Alexander the Great.

00:02:50.000 How big of an empire did he mass? How long did it take him? Why are we still talking about him 2,000 years later?

00:02:56.480 Well, he's a fascinating character, because what he did was really amazing. It really was great.

00:03:01.560 He started off being a struggling king of a very small kingdom in northern Greece.

00:03:08.560 And 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.

00:03:19.260 No one had ever had an empire that big before.

00:03:22.820 He conquered the Persian Empire, which made up most of his realm, but he did more than that.

00:03:28.420 It was an enormous empire.

00:03:30.060 Imagine starting off in Seattle and conquering the United States all the way to New England and Florida 2,000 years ago.

00:03:37.260 That's what Alexander did.

00:03:38.660 It was an enormous geographical area, an area very populous, made up of incredibly diverse people, languages, cultures, many of them very warlike. 0.99

00:03:49.980 And Alexander was able to do this in a period of about 11 years when he was very young.

00:03:56.000 He started this when he was about 20 years old, and he finished just before his 33rd birthday when he died.

00:04:02.200 So, 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.

00:04:15.740 Yeah, when you realize how young he was, it makes you feel like a slacker.

00:04:18.980 Well, Julius Caesar, when he was in his early 30s, came across a statue of Alexander when he was in Spain.

00:04:26.900 Julius 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.

00:04:35.700 So, yeah, it made me wonder what I've done with my life.

00:04:38.340 So, 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.

00:04:50.680 So, let's talk about this first.

00:04:51.800 Let'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.

00:05:03.260 So, 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?

00:05:12.220 Right. Well, Macedonia had been a part of ancient Greek history for a long time.

00:05:17.620 They were on the northern fringes, though.

00:05:19.720 The Athenians, the Spartans, the Thebans, all of the civilized Greek people to the south saw them as their barbarians to the north. 0.95

00:05:27.900 And 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.

00:05:46.200 So, 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.

00:06:02.500 And 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.

00:06:17.680 And 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.

00:06:33.720 And 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.

00:06:55.200 And why did Philip want to take over Greece? What was his goal there?

00:06:59.900 Oh, I think he was like many kings and tyrants and rulers through the ages. He wanted power.

00:07:05.880 And 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.

00:07:16.700 And 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.

00:07:24.600 It was a military society, so it had to have some sort of a military purpose to it.

00:07:30.140 And I think that was a big part of it. I think he also wanted legitimacy.

00:07:34.320 He wanted to be recognized that he was Greek, and he wanted to be accepted by the Greeks to the south.

00:07:41.000 And he's also, he took advantage of sort of the tumult that was going on in a lot of the Greek city-states.

00:07:45.900 I 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.

00:07:57.340 There's this whole political intrigue and turmoil going on in Athens, and it sounds like Philip was able to take advantage of that.

00:08:04.500 He was.

00:08:04.880 What 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.

00:08:18.500 It was that level of devastation and death and destruction.

00:08:22.240 And so Greece was exhausted when Philip came to the throne, so that helped him.

00:08:26.260 He was able to step in.

00:08:27.580 They were exhausted, but they were down, but not out.

00:08:30.120 They were still very powerful warriors, especially the city of Thebes, which rose to power after Athens and Sparta had exhausted themselves.

00:08:37.960 So they were formidable enemies.

00:08:40.120 They really were.

00:08:41.140 But Philip was able to step into this power vacuum and take advantage of it.

00:08:46.200 All right, so let's talk about Alexander.

00:08:47.680 The birth of Alexander is sort of shrouded in legend.

00:08:50.640 It is.

00:08:51.020 Talk about that.

00:08:52.440 Yeah, when you read about heroes in the ancient world, things often get put in mythological terms.

00:08:58.220 And so there's all these legends that he was like born of a god or like there was like thunder and lightning.

00:09:03.960 It was like weird stuff going on.

00:09:05.960 Right, there was.

00:09:07.140 The night that he was born, there was supposedly a thunderstorm.

00:09:10.900 His 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.

00:09:20.920 That was a fairly standard sort of thing to do.

00:09:23.760 You wanted to have an ancestor who was a god.

00:09:27.240 If you could be the actual son of a god, that was great propaganda.

00:09:32.060 That was something maybe most people wouldn't believe it, but some people would.

00:09:36.600 And so I think Alexander himself really wasn't quite sure.

00:09:41.140 His mother told him that he was divine, that he was special.

00:09:44.760 His mother, Olympias, was a tremendous influence in his life.

00:09:48.600 Well, talk about the influence that Olympias had on him. 0.99

00:09:50.860 Yes, she came from, she was a princess in an ancient country called Epirus, which is basically modern Albania.

00:09:58.560 And she came into the court of Macedonia and became one of many of Philip's wives.

00:10:03.340 She was fairly young at the time.

00:10:05.220 She was a very smart, very determined woman.

00:10:08.120 And 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.

00:10:18.600 So she fought very hard.

00:10:20.580 She had some rather exotic ways. 1.00

00:10:22.940 There's a story that one night Philip came to crawl into bed with her and he found a giant snake wrapped around her.

00:10:29.240 She was doing some sort of strange, wild ritual with a snake.

00:10:33.780 And the sources say that after that, Philip really was a little bit intimidated and didn't go back to bed with her.

00:10:39.940 So she was exotic, certainly, but a very determined woman who lived all throughout.

00:10:45.780 She outlived her son, Alexander, and was there all the time pushing for him.

00:10:50.580 Well, that religiosity of Olympias, it seemed to rub off on Alexander as well.

00:10:54.080 Throughout his life, he was very pious or devout or religious.

00:10:57.260 He was, and it's very easy for us from a modern point of view to be cynical and say, oh, he was just manipulating religion.

00:11:05.060 He didn't really take it seriously.

00:11:06.920 And to a certain extent, he was manipulating it.

00:11:09.160 But I think he was also very serious and very devout.

00:11:12.340 The Greeks really tended to be quite serious about their religion.

00:11:16.040 They asked questions, philosophers did.

00:11:18.720 Some of them even questioned the existence of the gods.

00:11:21.620 But for the most part, the Greeks were really quite serious in their religion.

00:11:24.920 And I think Alexander certainly followed that model.

00:11:28.680 And we'll talk a bit about more of that experience he had in Egypt when he began his campaign.

00:11:32.760 But let's talk about Alexander as a child.

00:11:35.280 Were there signs when he was a boy that he would grow up to become Alexander the Great?

00:11:40.000 Well, there were.

00:11:41.120 And again, when you have stories about great people of the ancient world, you often have childhood stories of great things that they do.

00:11:48.320 But I think with Alexander, some of these were quite true.

00:11:51.700 When he was a young man, he wanted a horse.

00:11:54.860 And there was this great horse that was brought before Philip named Bucephalus.

00:11:58.680 And it was untamable.

00:12:00.180 Nobody could, this magnificent beast, nobody could control it.

00:12:03.900 But Alexander was smart enough to notice that what seemed to upset Bucephalus was seeing his own shadow.

00:12:09.760 So, Alexander very calmly went up to him and took Bucephalus and turned him to face the sun so that he couldn't see his own shadow.

00:12:17.760 And then after he calmed him down, he jumped up on top of him and rode Bucephalus across the plain.

00:12:23.000 And he came back and Philip said, you know, my son, you need to find new kingdoms.

00:12:27.520 Macedonia isn't going to be big enough for you.

00:12:30.260 So, there's some wonderful stories like that.

00:12:32.180 Some of them might not be true, but I think some of them are.

00:12:35.020 And then also, he had a unique education because his personal tutor was the great philosopher, the philosopher, the teacher, Aristotle.

00:12:43.520 Yes, I mean, what more could you want?

00:12:45.160 As a teenager for several years, first of all, Alexander was tutored by several excellent tutors who taught him Greek.

00:12:52.840 He knew Homer.

00:12:53.960 He knew mathematics.

00:12:54.880 He knew all the subjects a man should know.

00:12:57.400 But Aristotle was his tutor.

00:12:59.280 The great Aristotle, the one Dante called the master of all who know, he was certainly one of the most intelligent men ever.

00:13:07.260 And like Aristotle's own teacher, Plato, he explored a wide variety of subjects.

00:13:12.780 But Aristotle also was a great experimental scientist, really one of the first.

00:13:17.600 Whereas Plato would theorize about things, you know, what animals are like, Aristotle would be out waiting in the swamp collecting tadpoles to dissect.

00:13:25.580 So, he was a wonderful teacher and a great influence on Alexander.

00:13:31.540 Do we know why Aristotle decided to take that role?

00:13:34.260 I 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.

00:13:42.480 Yes.

00:13:42.920 I mean, Aristotle actually wasn't from Athens.

00:13:45.740 Aristotle grew up in Macedonia.

00:13:47.720 His father was the court physician in Macedonia.

00:13:50.340 So, he was very familiar with the wild and crazy ways of Macedonia, but also things were getting a little difficult in Athens. 0.99

00:13:58.420 And so, he, I think, left just to avoid problems and anti-Macedonian feelings.

00:14:04.320 And so, I'm sure he was also very well paid.

00:14:06.940 So, he went up and he taught Alexander and his small group of friends.

00:14:11.140 You can still visit the site.

00:14:12.540 It's on the side of a mountain.

00:14:14.740 And it's a beautiful place.

00:14:16.400 I can just imagine learning from Aristotle at that setting.

00:14:20.700 Well, 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.

00:14:28.940 Right.

00:14:29.620 Samples and things that he found.

00:14:32.280 Aristotle practically invented biology.

00:14:34.380 And so, Alexander was always sending back unique animals and plants and such things to his old teacher, Aristotle, all throughout his 11-year campaign.

00:14:43.520 Well, 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.

00:14:52.360 He was a captain in the military, like 16 years old.

00:14:55.240 Right.

00:14:55.680 16 years old, he was put in charge.

00:14:57.680 He was, Alexander learned a lot of wonderful theory in biology and mathematics and literature.

00:15:02.360 But he was also trained from the very beginning by Macedonian soldiers, some of the toughest soldiers in the world.

00:15:08.000 He was trained in the practical arts, the practical arts of fighting and leadership.

00:15:12.320 And so, from an early time, Alexander was put in charge of leading men in battle.

00:15:17.920 And 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.

00:15:29.440 So, the part in your book that started reading like a mafioso or like a dream of thrones is the succession between Philip and Alexander.

00:15:37.120 So, the interesting part first is that, at first, Philip, you know, he wasn't always sure that Alexander was his son.

00:15:45.140 And there was actually a moment where Philip says, no, yeah, you're not going to be my heir, Alexander.

00:15:48.460 Right. And this was when Alexander was in his late teens, and Philip was getting ready to go off on the invasion of Persia.

00:15:56.920 And there was a lot of pressure on Philip.

00:15:59.560 He 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.

00:16:10.800 And that bothered some of the Macedonian nobility because they saw Alexander as a half Macedonian, not really one of them.

00:16:20.440 And they really wanted Philip to marry and sire a son with an old Macedonian family.

00:16:26.440 And so, Philip listened to them, and he sent Olympias and Alexander away and removed Alexander, at least temporarily, from the line of succession.

00:16:35.860 But 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.

00:16:47.260 And so, he brought Alexander back and reinstated him as his heir, which I imagine made Alexander a bit resentful.

00:16:55.520 Yeah, I can see that being really awkward.

00:16:57.200 If you think Thanksgiving dinner is awkward, imagine being like, you're not going to be the heir.

00:17:01.140 Oh, yeah, you are going to be the heir again.

00:17:03.080 Exactly, exactly.

00:17:04.340 So, 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.

00:17:10.920 But there was also this inner intrigue going on.

00:17:15.020 People were wanting to assassinate Philip.

00:17:17.100 Why were there conspiracies to get rid of Philip?

00:17:20.700 What was going on in Macedonia?

00:17:22.520 Well, Macedonia, truly, reading about its history is reading the Game of Thrones.

00:17:28.100 There was plots, counterplots, murders, intrigue, treachery.

00:17:31.780 Most Macedonian kings were assassinated.

00:17:35.000 That's how most of them died.

00:17:36.800 And it was unusual for one to live and die in old age.

00:17:41.100 And so, there were always plots.

00:17:42.480 There were always factions.

00:17:43.800 And so, people from the Athenians to the Persians themselves, the Persians knew what was going on.

00:17:48.820 They were keeping a close eye on things.

00:17:51.360 There were factions within the Macedonian nobility.

00:17:53.980 So, there were plenty of people who might want to see Philip dead.

00:17:58.240 And so, in the end, one of them killed him.

00:18:01.100 And do we know who that guy was?

00:18:02.800 Well, we know something about the man who killed him, at least who was the assassin.

00:18:07.220 He was a very minor figure.

00:18:08.940 But the real question is, who was behind him?

00:18:11.940 That's what people have struggled with.

00:18:14.420 And nobody's really figured it out.

00:18:16.200 Was it the Athenians?

00:18:17.320 That's what some people say.

00:18:18.660 Was it the Persians? 0.99

00:18:19.740 Was it just an angry, jilted former lover of Philip who was behind it all?

00:18:25.460 So, nobody really knows.

00:18:27.300 But the upshot is that Philip was murdered just before he was getting ready to leave on his great Persian expedition.

00:18:34.780 And Alexander was there.

00:18:36.580 A lot of people, of course, in later years, thought that Olympias maybe was behind it or maybe Alexander himself.

00:18:42.840 So, 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.

00:18:54.520 There's all these people fighting for, you know, no, actually, he's not the heir.

00:18:58.180 I'm the heir.

00:18:59.340 Was Alexander able to galvanize the Macedonians and say, yes, I'm the guy.

00:19:04.500 Come follow me.

00:19:05.780 He was.

00:19:06.620 He had proven himself as a military leader already, but he was 20 years old.

00:19:11.200 A lot of them saw him as a half Macedonian kid who was trying to step into his father's very big shoes.

00:19:18.060 And so, there were a lot of people who were against him.

00:19:20.700 And 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.

00:19:31.260 But 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.

00:19:43.360 And he established himself and he, you know, showed the Greeks that he was, you know, he was serious.

00:19:48.740 He was not afraid to knock some heads together.

00:19:51.480 And so, he consolidated his power to the south in Greece.

00:19:55.300 And 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.

00:20:04.280 It showed his military skill, his leadership, and it secured his northern borders before he would head out east and invade Persia.

00:20:12.200 Well, what I was impressed during this time with Alexander was his political astuteness.

00:20:16.100 Like, he understood that there were people in his father's court or in his military leadership that were probably, like, against him.

00:20:23.780 But he kept them on anyways.

00:20:25.920 But then there were some people he knew he had to get rid of right away.

00:20:28.720 Like, he knew the right people to fire and the right people to quit or keep.

00:20:33.000 Right, yeah.

00:20:33.740 He was very smart.

00:20:34.900 I mean, plenty of people have looked at Alexander for lessons of business leadership.

00:20:39.680 And there are good lessons there.

00:20:42.380 Knowing who you have to get rid of.

00:20:44.560 But if you do just a general purge and get rid of everybody, then you remove all the talent that you need.

00:20:50.180 And that's certainly not a way to develop loyalty to you in the future.

00:20:54.180 And so, Alexander was sparing.

00:20:56.700 And he used violence like a surgeon's knife rather than like a club to hit people with.

00:21:02.400 Sometimes he did have people killed. 0.73

00:21:04.320 Sometimes he had them executed.

00:21:05.780 But he really preferred to try to win them over and to try to make good use of their talents if he could.

00:21:13.180 So, he did that initial, like, training ground, securing his northern borders and the Danube River Valley.

00:21:17.380 But 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.

00:21:24.700 And one of his initial campaigns was against the Thebans. 0.97

00:21:28.440 Tell us about these guys and why were they such a formidable foe?

00:21:31.280 And why did Alexander feel he had to put them in check?

00:21:33.600 Well, the Thebans had filled the power vacuum in Greece just after the Peloponnesian War when Athens and Sparta were downed but not out.

00:21:43.800 They were weakened.

00:21:44.840 And the Thebans were a tremendous military force. 0.93

00:21:47.760 They were the very first ones to beat the Spartans.

00:21:51.100 The Spartans really had never been seriously defeated in battle until after the Peloponnesian War.

00:21:56.480 The Thebans were able to meet them on the field of battle and beat them. 1.00

00:21:59.980 They were incredible, incredibly trained, professional soldiers.

00:22:04.700 Philip had learned so much.

00:22:05.920 He was a hostage, a young man among the Thebans, and that's where he learned a lot of his military skills. 0.99

00:22:11.820 The Thebans had something called the Sacred Band, which I've never seen anything like it in history.

00:22:17.660 It was a group of 150 male couples who were same-sex couples who were lovers who fought together.

00:22:25.700 So, you had 300 men who were superbly trained, probably one of the best military forces ever.

00:22:32.160 And they fought all the harder because they were fighting beside people that they loved.

00:22:37.020 And so, Alexander was able to, he marched on Thebes and he said, surrender.

00:22:42.000 I'm the boss now.

00:22:43.160 My father's gone.

00:22:44.380 The Thebans said, no, we're not going to surrender to a kid. 0.96

00:22:47.220 And so, Alexander, by using his skill and siege warfare and other things, he took the city of Thebes and destroyed it.

00:22:55.180 And 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.

00:23:09.800 While he was off in Persia, he would simply send back a message and say, remember Thebes.

00:23:14.740 And so, he used violence on a grand scale, but a very selective scale in order to impress the people of Greece.

00:23:24.160 Yeah, that was sort of his modus operandi.

00:23:25.540 If 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.

00:23:34.700 Absolutely.

00:23:35.200 So, you mentioned he used siege warfare during this time, and he made some innovations there.

00:23:41.780 Besides that, what sort of other innovations did Alexander introduce strategically, tactically, that made him such a formidable military leader?

00:23:52.880 Well, really, organization on the battlefield and off the battlefield.

00:23:58.020 One 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.

00:24:12.280 And they had these spears.

00:24:14.660 In the ancient world, you really didn't throw your spear.

00:24:17.420 That was a last resort.

00:24:19.820 So, they would have spears that were maybe eight feet long that they would use to poke and stab their enemy.

00:24:25.680 Well, what Alexander came up with was the idea of what he called a sarissa.

00:24:30.620 He and his father came up with it.

00:24:32.160 It was an 18-foot-long spear.

00:24:35.220 And you can imagine a spear that's 18 feet long can reach through just about any military line.

00:24:41.320 The 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.

00:24:50.800 But 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.

00:25:02.160 That was just one of the innovations of Alexander.

00:25:05.060 But he had a great many others.

00:25:06.560 And really, one of his main ones was speed.

00:25:09.100 Nobody ever moved as fast as Alexander.

00:25:12.140 You'd be getting ready for a battle in three days with him and then find out he was right there on your doorstep.

00:25:18.220 And 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.

00:25:29.860 So, speed in all of its different aspects was a major factor of Alexander.

00:25:35.040 We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:25:37.060 And now back to the show.

00:25:40.820 So, he gets Greece under control, the Peloponnesian Peninsula under control.

00:25:45.280 Then he moves over to Persia.

00:25:47.780 And it seemed like initially he was just focusing on Greek cities that were under Persian control, correct?

00:25:53.300 Right. The Greek cities on the western coast of what's now Turkey, they had been Greek for a thousand years.

00:26:00.200 The Greek settlers all on both sides of the Aegean.

00:26:03.040 And they, the ones on what's now the Turkish coast, had been a part of the Persian Empire for a couple of hundred years.

00:26:09.600 And they were generally fairly happy.

00:26:11.440 Sometimes they weren't.

00:26:12.340 Sometimes they were.

00:26:13.160 But 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.

00:26:26.360 And he did.

00:26:27.160 And when he finished, they thought that probably he would stop.

00:26:30.880 But that's the thing about Alexander.

00:26:32.360 He never stopped.

00:26:33.380 He always kept going.

00:26:34.880 So, yeah.

00:26:35.220 Why did he keep going?

00:26:36.200 After he got that under control, why did he keep going after Persia? 0.94

00:26:38.860 It's funny.

00:26:39.800 I think he, I don't think it was that he wanted money, that he wanted to sack cities or anything like that.

00:26:45.960 I think he wanted power, like many people through history.

00:26:50.660 So, I think it was certainly about power.

00:26:52.480 I think it was about reputation.

00:26:54.680 His hero was Achilles from the Trojan War.

00:26:57.720 And Achilles gloried in the fact that he was the greatest warrior ever.

00:27:01.380 And Alexander, I think, aspired to be like that.

00:27:03.820 He slept with Homer's Iliad underneath his pillow every night with the stories of Achilles.

00:27:09.100 And so, I think it was, a lot of it was that.

00:27:11.820 I think a lot of it was just wanting to prove that he could do it, that this kid from Macedonia could actually do it.

00:27:18.640 And so, he kept pushing farther and farther along the coast, the Mediterranean coast, and then eventually inland.

00:27:24.820 Well, 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.

00:27:33.780 Right.

00:27:34.600 You can still visit it today.

00:27:35.960 It's a beautiful sight that the Turkish government takes very good care of.

00:27:39.640 And he went there and he sacrificed to Achilles and to the gods.

00:27:43.900 And 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.

00:27:52.940 So, he takes back control of the Greek city-states in Persia, starts turning inland.

00:27:58.680 The king of Persia this time was Darius.

00:28:00.660 So, Darius, when did he realize that Alexander posed a threat and that he had to do something about this guy?

00:28:06.040 Well, Alexander fought a battle on the Granicus River near Troy the first few weeks that he invaded.

00:28:12.740 And the Persians thought, and that was just fighting a little local Persian army.

00:28:17.200 The Persians thought that that would take care of things.

00:28:19.700 They would kill Alexander and that would be it. 0.50

00:28:21.920 And they almost did kill Alexander.

00:28:23.660 It was a very tough battle.

00:28:24.700 But I think after Alexander took the Greek cities of Asia Minor, that's when Darius knew that this was something different.

00:28:33.340 And that's when he began to gather his army.

00:28:36.120 He didn't invade Asia Minor.

00:28:38.340 Darius didn't with the Persian army.

00:28:40.380 But he was waiting for him there.

00:28:42.340 It took a long time to gather together the force of the Persian army.

00:28:46.260 And 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.

00:28:56.780 But he was waiting for him after he came into the area of what's now Iraq.

00:29:02.300 So, let's talk about his before.

00:29:03.760 So, he met Darius twice.

00:29:05.360 The first time.

00:29:06.100 He did.

00:29:06.480 There was a rally.

00:29:07.160 He basically routed Darius.

00:29:08.520 And Darius had to flee.

00:29:09.280 Right.

00:29:09.880 Yes.

00:29:10.200 The first time he fought him at a place called the Issus, which is now just on the border of Turkey and Syria.

00:29:17.880 It was a great battle.

00:29:20.380 Darius didn't even bring his entire army to this battle.

00:29:23.400 But it was huge.

00:29:24.880 And Alexander was certainly outnumbered.

00:29:27.660 And so, Darius is heading towards Alexander.

00:29:30.420 Alexander's heading toward Darius.

00:29:31.820 They end up actually missing each other in the fog of war.

00:29:35.640 They get lost in different valleys.

00:29:37.280 And so, it turns out that Darius ends up on the north of Alexander.

00:29:41.360 Alexander's to the south.

00:29:42.880 And so, they're in a narrow valley.

00:29:45.120 And 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.

00:29:59.100 And this is what Alexander did.

00:30:00.680 He 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.

00:30:09.840 And 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.

00:30:21.340 He drove Darius away.

00:30:23.100 He was able to capture the tent of Darius where all of his wives were, where his mother was.

00:30:28.480 And he treated them very, very well.

00:30:31.700 That 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.

00:30:43.480 And he was able to win the first great battle at Issus and then eventually go forward from there down into Syria and Egypt.

00:30:51.800 Well, that's kind of an interesting thing you mentioned throughout the book about Alexander's relationship with women.

00:30:55.880 It seemed to have like a soft spot for them.

00:30:57.460 Like, he wasn't interested in them romantically, it seemed like.

00:31:00.200 Not to a great extent, not really.

00:31:03.660 And 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.

00:31:12.360 But Alexander, he did get married eventually.

00:31:15.300 He did have a child.

00:31:16.820 He married more than once, actually.

00:31:18.080 But 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.

00:31:27.520 But Alexander was more restrained, certainly.

00:31:30.620 But yeah, he had like a respect for him.

00:31:31.780 He was like very respectful, particularly to older women.

00:31:33.880 Yes, he was, very much so.

00:31:35.480 So, he continues down.

00:31:36.500 So, he routes Darius.

00:31:37.600 Darius flees.

00:31:38.740 And he's like, oh, I'll take care of you later.

00:31:40.360 I got other stuff to take care of.

00:31:41.580 So, he continues down the coast.

00:31:43.260 And he gets to where like modern Lebanon's at. 0.65

00:31:45.120 And there's this island, Tyre, which is one of the craziest campaigns probably ever in like world military history.

00:31:52.280 Tell us about what happened at Tyre.

00:31:54.040 Well, Tyre was an island about a mile off the coast of what's now Lebanon.

00:31:59.700 It had been a commercial center of the Phoenicians, the great trading people, the Phoenicians.

00:32:06.260 They were an important part of the Persian Empire.

00:32:09.100 They were the main naval base of the Persians in the Mediterranean.

00:32:12.880 They had this walled island, as I said, about a mile off the coast.

00:32:17.480 And it had never been conquered.

00:32:19.060 You could not take something like this.

00:32:21.780 It had never been done before.

00:32:23.240 So, Alexander sends an embassy to them.

00:32:26.580 He's standing on the shore, basically says, you know, I want to come over and worship in the Temple of Hercules.

00:32:31.760 And, you know, by the way, I want you to surrender.

00:32:33.560 And they say, nope, sorry, not going to do that.

00:32:36.980 Because they are pretty sure that Darius is going to come back and crush Alexander with his entire army.

00:32:43.240 So, they say, no, we're not going to surrender.

00:32:45.600 And if Alexander, you know, maybe he should have just moved on and left them there.

00:32:49.640 But the problem is that they still controlled a very powerful navy.

00:32:53.320 And so, he would be heading south into Egypt with a powerful Persian navy still in force.

00:32:59.020 And he couldn't do that.

00:33:00.340 He had to take Tyre.

00:33:01.600 He had to find some way to subdue this island city.

00:33:05.800 And so, what he did was something just astounding.

00:33:08.740 He built a causeway between the mainland and Tyre.

00:33:12.160 And this is not some shallow sort of tidal bottom land between the mainland and the island.

00:33:17.440 It was deep.

00:33:18.440 And so, he spent months, his men spent months pouring rocks into this channel.

00:33:23.520 And the Tyrians, the people of Tyre, would just stand up on their walls and laugh at him for this.

00:33:28.360 But as the months went by and the causeway got closer and closer, they stopped laughing.

00:33:33.220 And eventually, Alexander was able to complete the causeway and roll his machines of war right across it along with all his soldiers and ladders.

00:33:41.540 And they took the city of Tyre.

00:33:43.480 And because the Tyrians had resisted, he did the usual thing where he ended up killing or enslaving most of them. 0.85

00:33:50.400 And it's no longer an island.

00:33:51.580 Like, you can still see the causeway there that Alexander built.

00:33:54.080 Right.

00:33:54.280 There'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.

00:34:04.580 It's a physical feature in the geography of the Middle East that Alexander created.

00:34:09.300 So, talking about this spiritual aspect of Alexander, an important part of his campaign was when he went to Egypt.

00:34:16.320 Now, Egypt today is like, you know, we think of Egypt as sort of this land of mystery.

00:34:19.640 It was the same thing in Alexander's time.

00:34:22.220 Egypt was seen as this land of mystery and magic and spirituality.

00:34:26.780 And 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.

00:34:34.540 Right. He conquered Egypt without any resistance.

00:34:38.520 The Egyptians never particularly liked the Persians, so they were happy to proclaim Alexander as pharaoh and to show him around.

00:34:46.120 And like everybody, Alexander was very impressed with Egypt.

00:34:49.620 He went to the pyramids, and we have to realize that the pyramids were older to Alexander than he is to us.

00:34:57.000 So, there's an enormous antiquity to Egypt and mystery to it.

00:35:01.440 So, 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.

00:35:15.160 And so, he went there on this dangerous journey that I think only a young man and his buddies would do, crossing the Sahara Desert.

00:35:23.420 And he went there, though, to consult the oracle, and we don't know exactly what happened when he went into the oracle's temple.

00:35:31.320 The story seems to be that Alexander wanted to know if Philip was his real father.

00:35:35.920 And when he came out, people say that he seemed changed.

00:35:39.700 And so, the supposition is that the oracle told him that you were actually the son of Zeus.

00:35:44.820 And 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.

00:35:53.860 And so, he went back to Egypt and then headed inland to invade the heart of the Persian Empire. 0.95

00:35:58.600 Well, supposedly, he asked also if he would conquer the Persian Empire.

00:36:02.500 Yes, yes.

00:36:03.560 And the oracle said, yes, indeed, you will.

00:36:06.280 Yeah, and that seemed to change him.

00:36:07.480 He left that profoundly affected, and it gave him more goose to keep doing what he had started to do.

00:36:13.800 Right, because Alexander had gotten a message from Darius, the king of Persia, saying, let's work out a deal.

00:36:19.960 You 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.

00:36:31.600 I think Darius probably intended to still conquer Alexander, but he wanted to buy some time.

00:36:37.900 And Alexander, a lot of people said, Alexander, this is incredible.

00:36:41.140 This is more than any of us could ever have hoped for.

00:36:44.260 You've conquered Asia Minor.

00:36:45.520 You've conquered Syria. 0.88

00:36:46.700 You've conquered Egypt. 0.86

00:36:48.000 Stop.

00:36:48.760 This is enough.

00:36:49.900 And Alexander said, no, I am going forward.

00:36:53.120 And so, his army, who were very loyal, followed him inland to the heart of Mesopotamia, to the Tigris and Euphrates Valley.

00:37:00.800 Yeah, 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.

00:37:11.220 They had a very powerful sense of purpose and identity.

00:37:15.280 Right.

00:37:15.440 And they use that for good or evil, right?

00:37:17.860 It could just depend on how you look at it.

00:37:19.880 Right.

00:37:20.340 I mean, there's the modern theory, the great man theory of history, which is many historians sort of poopah.

00:37:26.080 They say, no, it's not individuals who change history.

00:37:29.120 It's economic and social forces.

00:37:30.880 And, of course, there's a lot of truth to that.

00:37:32.740 But I disagree, I think, with them to a certain extent.

00:37:36.040 I think that there are certain men and women who really do change history, that really make, that change everything.

00:37:44.940 Julius Caesar was certainly one of these.

00:37:47.160 Alexander was one of them.

00:37:48.680 Napoleon was one of them.

00:37:50.560 Certainly religious leaders, Muhammad, Jesus, the Buddha.

00:37:54.200 These are individuals who changed history.

00:37:57.260 And so, Alexander was one of those.

00:37:59.560 So, as he was conquering these Persian cities, his empire was growing.

00:38:04.640 Taking over things is easy.

00:38:06.760 Managing is a lot harder.

00:38:09.000 So, how did Alexander start managing his growing empire?

00:38:12.620 What did he do?

00:38:13.560 It's a part of Alexander's life that really isn't focused on very much.

00:38:16.940 But he was a great administrator.

00:38:19.000 What he did, first of all, was he kept most of the Persian apparatus for administering the empire intact.

00:38:25.740 So, the taxation, the administration of the individual provinces.

00:38:30.200 He kept the Persian civil servants and the other natives there. 0.93

00:38:34.280 So, he didn't disrupt things.

00:38:35.960 He didn't come in and try to make everything Macedonian.

00:38:39.600 He adapted it, very happily adapted it.

00:38:42.440 And he also kept a constant flow of correspondence.

00:38:45.560 So, 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.

00:38:59.940 So, he was able to dispatch and rule and administer the empire very effectively.

00:39:05.220 And that was really the key.

00:39:07.480 Conquering an empire is hard enough, but keeping it can be impossible.

00:39:11.080 We've seen many examples in history of people who do that and just you watch their empires fall apart when they die.

00:39:19.120 Charlemagne, for example, he leaves his empire to three sons and then it just sort of collapses gradually after he dies.

00:39:25.940 So, Alexander was a great administrator.

00:39:28.920 But 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.

00:39:38.660 He did.

00:39:39.220 He started wearing Persian clothing, which I think in one sense was practical because it's really hot in Persia.

00:39:45.540 So, he started wearing pants, which Macedonians wouldn't do. 1.00

00:39:49.620 Greeks would never do that.

00:39:50.700 So, it was practical.

00:39:52.100 But 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.

00:40:00.120 And 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?

00:40:14.840 So, that's created some tension.

00:40:17.160 Yeah. So, the Macedonians, they were a kingdom, but they were a lot more democratic than, say, the Persians.

00:40:21.340 They were. I mean, you think, when I think of the Macedonians, I think about, think about Vikings.

00:40:27.960 Think 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.

00:40:37.500 And so, it was a more democratic kind of institution than the Persian empire, which was very much a hierarchical, top-down sort of administration.

00:40:48.040 So, he continues just steamrolling through Persia.

00:40:50.860 Does he eventually kill Darius?

00:40:52.740 Well, he doesn't eventually kill Darius.

00:40:55.160 Somebody else does.

00:40:55.960 But 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.

00:41:12.480 And after that, Darius was a king on the run with just a few men with him, one of which eventually killed him.

00:41:19.940 Alexander didn't want to kill Darius.

00:41:21.640 He wanted Darius to surrender to him.

00:41:24.380 So, he was very disappointed when he found the body of Darius somewhere in Iran at an oasis at a caravan stop.

00:41:32.860 And so, eventually, somebody else killed Darius.

00:41:36.440 And eventually, then, Alexander was the undisputed king of his new empire.

00:41:42.760 All right.

00:41:42.820 So, he's taken over the Persian empire.

00:41:45.420 What did his men think?

00:41:46.240 He's like, all right, let's go home.

00:41:47.200 We've been gone probably, what, how have they been along?

00:41:49.440 Seven, eight years at this point?

00:41:50.840 Yeah.

00:41:51.080 At this point, they've gone through what's now Iran.

00:41:54.200 They got stuck in Afghanistan, like pretty much every army does in history. 0.97

00:41:58.800 That was the toughest time that Alexander had was in Afghanistan.

00:42:02.500 And then he goes down into what's now Pakistan and just across the border into modern India.

00:42:08.020 And he's going to keep going.

00:42:09.800 He says, all right, boys, let's go.

00:42:11.560 We're going down the Indus River all the way to Cathay to China if we can.

00:42:15.940 And they say, no, it's just, you know, it's been almost 10 years.

00:42:20.740 We want to go home.

00:42:21.880 This is far enough.

00:42:23.320 Make an end to your ambition.

00:42:25.340 And 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.

00:42:33.080 It's time to go home.

00:42:34.120 So, he heads back to his new capital at Babylon in what's now southern Iraq. 0.69

00:42:41.140 Yeah, the sulking thing.

00:42:42.200 He's done that before and it worked.

00:42:43.740 This time it didn't work.

00:42:45.060 This time it didn't work.

00:42:46.420 This time he goes, the men are just not going to follow him any farther.

00:42:50.640 And so, there's really not a whole lot Alexander can do at this point.

00:42:53.720 He just, he has to turn around.

00:42:55.680 And so, he does.

00:42:56.360 And he's not giving up his ambitions at all, but he is heading back at least for a while to Babylon. 0.57

00:43:04.360 And 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.

00:43:13.240 Yeah.

00:43:13.380 And he was going to be, there was that whole idea of Alexander, I'm going to do something that no one else has done before.

00:43:17.860 Even if it might kill me, I'm going to do it.

00:43:19.660 Yeah, he did.

00:43:20.380 He went across this great Gadrosian desert, which is a really kind of like death valley. 0.78

00:43:25.140 He led his men across and some of them didn't make it.

00:43:28.800 But I think Alexander did it.

00:43:30.160 Some people have said Alexander did this to punish his army.

00:43:32.920 I don't think so.

00:43:33.920 I think he did it because, like you said, it hadn't been done before.

00:43:37.400 And most of them made it.

00:43:39.040 He made it back across the desert, back to Persepolis, and then back eventually to Babylon. 0.93

00:43:45.380 And that's where his story ends.

00:43:47.120 Like, how did Alexander die?

00:43:48.320 Did he meet the fate of like other previous Macedonian kings and get assassinated?

00:43:52.820 Well, that's the question.

00:43:53.860 Alexander had been sick before with what, nobody really certain exactly what it was, maybe malaria.

00:44:00.440 But he had been sick a number of times and recovered.

00:44:03.380 He was also injured many times.

00:44:05.860 He said, look at my body, I'm covered with scars.

00:44:08.480 He was stabbed with swords and spears and always managed to pull out of it.

00:44:12.640 So he's 32 years old and he's in Babylon.

00:44:15.780 And all of a sudden he comes down with a great fever and doesn't last all that long.

00:44:20.740 And people ever since then have said, oh, he was poisoned or something happened.

00:44:25.740 Somebody killed him.

00:44:27.060 Maybe it's possible.

00:44:28.800 But it's also very possible that Alexander, there was a lot of sickness in the ancient world.

00:44:33.180 And 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.

00:44:42.540 Now, just like there's legends around his birth, there are also legends around his death, particularly about who would succeed Alexander.

00:44:49.540 Right. That's the great story, which I think is probably true.

00:44:53.620 Alexander had married a princess from the area of Afghanistan and eventually had a young son.

00:45:01.720 But he was just an infant.

00:45:04.020 He wasn't able to take over the empire.

00:45:06.120 So people wanted to know, his generals wanted to know, who are you leaving in charge of your empire, this vast empire you've created?

00:45:13.520 And so they're all gathered around his deathbed and Alexander whispers to them his last words.

00:45:19.440 When they say, who are you going to leave it to?

00:45:21.240 He says, to the strongest.

00:45:23.200 And then he dies.

00:45:24.360 That's the story, which may be a little dramatic, but I think is probably true.

00:45:28.640 And so after that, as you can imagine, there was chaos about who was going to take over Alexander's empire.

00:45:36.800 So what happened at the empire?

00:45:38.660 Well, his generals divided it up.

00:45:41.100 What happened was one of them took the eastern part, the parts of India and Persia.

00:45:47.000 Another took Asia Minor area.

00:45:49.220 Another took Macedonia. 0.54

00:45:50.960 And 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.

00:46:02.180 And so Ptolemy and his descendants ruled Egypt for several hundred years until his very last descendant, Cleopatra, was taken over, surrendered to Rome.

00:46:12.800 And what happened to Macedonia itself?

00:46:14.920 Macedonia itself sort of fell back.

00:46:17.160 It remained, it was given to one of Alexander's generals, but it continued to exert a lot of influence.

00:46:24.580 It was still powerful, but it really, it started to fall apart at that point.

00:46:29.220 Certainly the empire part did.

00:46:30.720 And it wasn't that long afterwards until Rome was a rising power in the west.

00:46:35.900 And they certainly did their best to bring down Macedonia if they could. 1.00

00:46:40.780 And so Macedonia itself reverts to being what it had been before, which is a fairly small kingdom.

00:46:47.700 And all the rest of Alexander's empire is divided up into among different generals who found dynasties.

00:46:53.640 But the thing is, Alexander's influence continued.

00:46:57.540 Alexander not only conquered, but he established cities, he established libraries, he settled his veteran soldiers in colonies all the way to Afghanistan and India.

00:47:07.600 So these little centers of Greek civilization, all in these cities, basically named Alexandria after himself, he founds all across his former empire.

00:47:17.560 And they become a great center for Hellenic, for Greek culture that greatly influenced the area for centuries thereafter.

00:47:26.680 Yeah, how did it set the stage for Western civilization after that point, do you think?

00:47:30.120 Well, what Alexander did, before Alexander, Greek civilization was pretty much contained in Greece.

00:47:37.140 So the Aegean area.

00:47:39.680 But Alexander spread Greek civilization, the stories of Homer, the philosophy of Plato, across the ancient world to Egypt, to Mesopotamia, to India.

00:47:51.880 And 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.

00:48:02.500 And then the Romans took it up and they helped spread it even more. 0.57

00:48:07.280 But 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.

00:48:24.000 And so Alexander spread civilization, really, Greek civilization, at least, all across the ancient world.

00:48:33.700 And so the people spoke Greek, not everybody.

00:48:36.420 They still spoke their native languages.

00:48:38.280 But we look at the New Testament, for example, written in the first century of our era.

00:48:45.120 It's written in Greek.

00:48:46.280 It's not written in the Aramaic of Jesus.

00:48:48.300 It's written in Greek, the Greek of Alexander.

00:48:51.080 So you mentioned that people often look to Alexander for leadership lessons for business or for military.

00:48:57.620 And 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.

00:49:03.900 And then he would just basically commit genocide.

00:49:05.840 And you're like, ooh, that's not good.

00:49:08.860 So you kind of walk away ambivalent about him.

00:49:12.360 But what do you think are the lessons that people can take from Alexander the Great on leadership?

00:49:17.440 Well, I mean, it's a tough question.

00:49:18.920 It'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.

00:49:29.580 What do we do with somebody like that?

00:49:31.220 What do we do with George Washington, who did all these amazing things and yet owned and oppressed individual people?

00:49:38.420 It's a tough question.

00:49:39.460 So 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.

00:49:47.520 We're going to end up canceling everybody.

00:49:49.860 So look at Alexander in his own times and what he did.

00:49:52.840 He did some pretty horrible stuff, but he did some amazing stuff, too.

00:49:56.620 And learning leadership lessons from him, watch how he fought.

00:50:01.100 He was never an armchair general.

00:50:02.920 He was always there in the front.

00:50:04.560 There was a city he invaded in India.

00:50:07.080 He was the first one over the wall into this hostile city.

00:50:11.040 So 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.

00:50:22.120 So I think those are some lessons that all of us can apply to our lives.

00:50:26.540 And his overlooked idea of he was a good administrator, there's probably lessons from that as well.

00:50:32.560 Right.

00:50:33.100 Absolutely.

00:50:33.540 Well, Phil, this has been a great conversation.

00:50:36.180 Where can people go to learn more about the book and the rest of your work?

00:50:38.900 Well, they can go to philipfreemanbooks.com.

00:50:41.940 I have a nice little website that some very kind people put together, and that talks about all my different books.

00:50:48.100 I've got books on Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Sappho, St. Patrick, and some other things, too.

00:50:53.660 So I would welcome people to go there.

00:50:56.120 I'm also on Facebook under Philip Freeman Books.

00:50:58.900 All right.

00:50:59.320 Philip Freeman, thanks so much for your time.

00:51:00.380 It's been a pleasure.

00:51:01.280 My pleasure.

00:51:01.740 Thanks very much.

00:51:02.540 My guest, it was Philip Freeman.

00:51:04.280 He's the author of the book, Alexander the Great.

00:51:06.400 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:51:08.720 You can find out more information about his work at his website, philipfreemanbooks.com.

00:51:12.500 Also 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.

00:51:18.280 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.

00:51:27.960 Check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles we've written over the years.

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00:51:57.980 Until next time, this is Brett McKay.

00:51:59.380 Remind you not only to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - February 26, 2020

#588： The Audacious Command of Alexander the Great

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