Dan Carlin's Hardcore History - Show 72 - Mania for Subjugation II

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

Is it safe to hand control of the deadliest army in the world to a 20-year old? If you are Thracian, Triballian, Illyrian or Theban, the answer is definitely no. Alexander becomes king and fights off threats to his rule in all directions.

What you're about to hear is part two of a multi-part series on Alexander the Great. If you missed part one and need to catch that first, we recommend it. If you didn't hear part one but don't mind, you know, starting a story in the middle, well please, feel free to keep going. And for the rest of you, without further ado, part two of Mania for Subjugation. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. It's history. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The events. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

The drama. Marine Six, power two has an immediate explosion and what appears to be a complete collapse surrounding the entire area. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their presidents a crook. The deep questions. Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. But I'm a steel cup.

It's hardcore history. One of the things that I find terrifying about life is how fortune can just turn on a dime. And I think it's more of a cynical pessimist's way of looking at that sort of dynamic than an optimist. An optimist would say, thank goodness life can turn on a dime. You could hit the lottery tomorrow, change everything, wouldn't it? So that's a certain kind of personality maybe. But I'm more of the person who just says, okay, gosh, just protect me from a bolt

from the blue. What's a great term, a bolt from the blue? Protect me from something that just instantly changes my world and turns it upside down. Probably for the worse, right? And this bolt from the blue aspect of our existence is operating on every level, right? Your individual level, something can happen in your life. We are soft, squishy beings, and it doesn't take much for us to get hurt. I mean, so things happen all the time, right? Illnesses, things strike a bolt from the blue in your personal life. But this works on the giant super macro scale too.

Something happens and all of our worlds are thrown in a completely different direction as quickly as a billiard ball caroms off another billiard ball and changes its trajectory entirely. I mean, if you're old enough to have consciously lived through something like the 911 attacks, you you know what that's like. That's wake up in one world, go to bed that night in a completely different world and know it. And Pearl Harbor was that way too, just to take a couple of American things, but this is so common.

Every people on the planet can name historical bolts from the blue that had that same sort of an effect in their world. It's not uncommon at all right in your personal life all the way up to global affairs. And in a lot of cases, we should remember a bolt from the blue that impacts global affairs can still be a bolt from the blue at ground zero on an individual level too. I mean, to just go back to the 9-11 attacks.

We're all affected by the 9-11 attacks the minute it happens, right? Your sense of stability is upset. You don't know what's gonna happen next. We're all a bit traumatized, but the families of people who died in the 9-11 attacks, well, they get all of that that we get, and then they get the impact on ground zero in

their family where they've suffered, you know, a bolt from the blue, where the ripples of pain will continue to emanate in their individual world for a generation two or three, right? For 20-year-old Alexander III, right, the future Alexander the Great, as we will know him. Alexander the third right the future Alexander the great as we will know him It's very possible watching his dad get stabbed to death publicly in front of a crowd of for the most part important people To watch that from a few feet away Well that has the potential to be both those things, doesn't it? Because, obviously, you take out the most important person in the history of that region, if we're talking about sort of the Great Man theory of history,

or the just and the geopolitical kings' conquests, you know, politics, realpolitik and all that sort of stuff, you're taking out the most important figure potentially in the history of the region. If not, well, one of the top ones, certainly the most important during this time period, you take out this guy, you change the whole world. I mean, you try to find other people in history where it would have been this big. Well, what about Hitler in 1940? Not to compare the two in a moral sense. But I mean, you take out Adolf Hitler in 1940 or 1939, and you can't even fantasize on how

things are different. And you could say the same thing about someone like, you know, Franklin Roosevelt or Churchill too, and no question had those two died of a heart attack or something at the start of the Second World War, a bazillion things change in major ways. But those systems of diffused power and sorts of internal rules of succession and all that would have fared much better, right? The US is just going to plug a different president into the White House and it's going to be different. But in a lot of ways, it's not. You take Hitler from the leadership position of Germany right at the start of the Second World War.

And you can't even imagine what happens. And the situation in Macedonia when Philip II is murdered is much more similar to that It has to do with the fact that so much power is wrapped up in one person, right? And the system itself isn't really set up for what happens without that person They've created this intricate web That really relies on them being the spider in the middle of it for it to all work. And you take the spider out and then what do you have? So that is a 9-11 moment, right?

The minute it happens, everybody watching it knows that everything has changed. They don't know how it's changed. And I get this sense after Philip's murder that everyone's walking around the way we were walking around for the next week after the 9-11 attacks. We all had like little swirls in our eyes and we just couldn't believe or absorb what had happened and it was like everyone was experiencing this at the same time and I get the feeling that it must have been similar, especially in the area of the assassination, you know, with the people who saw this. And one of them of course being

Alexander and I keep trying to figure out, you know, because this is the side of the story where it's a 9-11 attack for Alexander also. Maybe even, again, more than for most people, because now he's in the spotlight in terms of the most likely person to succeed. But it's a personal one. It's dad. Dad just got shanked in front of me. Do you get PTSD from that? Just wondering.

And the reason I ask is because there's a couple of historians that have put forward the theory that maybe Alexander during his lifetime was suffering from PTSD. But most of the time they draw it back to the many horrific experiences he had in a career of personal combat. This would be at the very beginning basically. in the career of personal combat, this would be at the very beginning basically. But I mean, if I told you that some person on the other side of the room, you know, whispered into your ear, hey, you know, that poor guy, his dad was murdered in front of him,

wouldn't you expect that this would be a monumental, you know, milestone moment, negatively speaking for that person in their life? Wouldn't you think they'd be visiting and getting some psychiatric care maybe for the rest of their life? Tie any major problems they have to that? Certainly you could say PTSD, right? Watching your parents murdered.

I mean, that's a superhero origin story, isn't it? That's how you get Batman. But as psychologically dark as the comic book origin story of Batman is, right? Little boy sees his parents murdered in front of him by a criminal. As story of Batman is, right? Little boy sees his parents murdered in front of him by a criminal. As dark as that is, think about how much more sinister it gets. If the person who killed Bruce Wayne's parents,

leading to the creation of the, you know, avenging dark knight that sometimes is a little bit psychologically unbalanced, if the person that killed Bruce Wayne's parents was Bruce Wayne, if he killed his own parents and that led to the creation of Batman, that's an even more psychologically dark and twisted tale, isn't it? And in the Alexander story, the reason it matters is because Alexander is a pretty different person

in our eyes in the way you might see him, isn't he? If he killed his own father, right? Can you get PTSD witnessing your dad's murder if you orchestrated it? That just popped into my head. But I mean, think about the way you'd see this guy differently. One version of him is a victim,

sees his dad killed in front of him, had nothing to do with it, burns in anger against the people that did this, all that kind of thing, right? Legitimately inherits basically dad's Ferrari and everything else. The other versions seen through a more Menendez-like lens where Alexander is the kind of guy

who'd whack his own dad, right? And it leads us to a basic thing I think we should bear in mind throughout this entire story. I want to think of each of us as a filmmaker. I'd love it if you would make the definitive Alexander the Great movie, right? And if you did so, you're going to run into times in this guy's life where it's a blank spot,

or it's like a fork in the road. he can do this or he can do that. And you don't know which he did, or you don't know why. A person like yours truly has the freedom to say one historian says this or another person thinks that but if you're making the movie, you have to just decide you have to fill in the blank spots. And the way you do that leads at the end of your movie to a different Alexander, a different Alexander. A different Alexander than the person who's also making their movie but made different choices at the, you know,

10 or 15 crucial spots in this guy's story where you don't know what happened. In the introduction to the landmark Aryan, which we're just about to introduce as a source in this story, Cambridge classicist Paul Cartledge explains that everyone's got their own version of Alexander because they fill in the gaps their own way and have throughout history. And it may account for why there's so many different versions of this guy. As we said, it runs the gamut from on one extreme, you know, he's this philosopher king on the other extreme, he's a drunken, genocidal butcher, and you know everything in between.

Well, what accounts for that? Maybe how you fill in the blanks. Some people will come back to me and say, why even have a story like this if you don't know this much about the guy? But there's a lot you do know about the guy. So it's one of those deals where, and it's ancient history, where you just sort of have to piece together what you can and as we Said there can be different end results

In your movie, do you decide he killed Philip or do you decide he didn't that's a key difference right there And this is perhaps the first major moment in his life where we run into one of those things And this is perhaps the first major moment in his life where we run into one of those things. But the next stage of what happens is also unknown. The stage where he goes from watching his father bleeding out in his supposedly white tunic there on the ground to the time when he becomes acknowledged as king.

Because as we said in the first part of this show, that is not a given in the Macedonian royal world. And apparently anyone who's got a connection sort of to the royal family bloodline can somehow plausibly be inserted into the job. And it's always been something that outside powers used to keep Macedonia divided. They'd find an outsider branch of the Macedonian royal family and then back that person as a competing puppet sort of thing. So it's not a given that Alexander's going to get this gig. It would have been a given maybe a year or two before.

But remember, there was this breach in the royal family, right? Philip marries this super young bride, supposedly for love. Then we have that story, which I love because it brings in what I like to call potentially the most important cocktail party in world history when, you know, in a drunken Macedonian cocktail party, the uncle of the bride, Attalus, who will feature in this story momentarily, supposedly gives that toast, right? Where he says, hopefully this will bring a legitimate heir to the Macedonian throne, while Alexander, the legitimate heir, is in the room,

which leads to, are you calling me a bastard, throwing goblets at each other, and supposedly the moment where a drunken Philip gets up off his couch, you know, pulls his sword, and goes after Alexander, falls on his face, and Alexander utters that wonderful line, a variation of which is, look everybody, here's the guy that's about to cross from Europe into Asia, and he can't

get from one couch to another. Love that story. Who knows if that's true. But apparently, this moment where Alexander and his mother flee back to the mom's home country is people seem pretty sure about that. And of course, she comes from a place where the Macedonian sort of prejudice and bigotry, ironically the same sort of prejudice and bigotry some Greeks had toward Macedonia, sort of sees it as a land where there's, well not hicks for sure, people who are just sort of, you know, country bumpkins, but also sorceresses, magic, vampires, you know, all those kinds of

things. And sort of makes the case for what Attalus was saying when he said, you know, we need a legitimate heir who's Macedonian on both sides, who won't go fleeing back to the land of vampires and sorcerers, you know, when the going gets tough. But we know that Alexander did that, and that's a sign that there was some sort of breach in the family. This wedding where Philip dies was in part an attempt to sort of publicly heal that breach. So where do things stand when Philip's taken out, right? It's the unexpected moment.

It's the 9-11 day where people are walking around with stars in their eyes going, what now? Everybody's in shock. And that's where sort of, you know, how quickly you move in a situation like this. It's the last second of musical chairs games. When the music stops and everybody sort of scrambles and whoever can sort

of amass the public support the quickest Wins and the reason you want to win in a game like this is because the losers often are just liquidated But whatever Alexander's situation at that moment, it's clear He's still got the inside track and apparently he's got this relationship with an important Macedonian general named Antipater, which as we said in the last show, Antipater sort of, we don't have the real information, but sort of just like throws his arms around Alexander says, this is the guy, and some other people do too. Here's the way Alexander, historian, the late great A.B. Bosworth put it in Conquest and Empire. He said, quote, The first few days of Alexander's reign must have been among the most critical of his career.

Unfortunately, no connected account survives of them. There are scraps of epitome and random flashbacks from later history, but most of the crucial details are irretrievably lost. There is infinite scope for speculation and imaginative reconstruction, but the sources themselves allow very little to be said. We must be prepared to admit our ignorance, however galling that may be," he continues. At first there was turmoil. Alexander's friends gathered round him and occupied the palace, already armed for battle.

There was every reason to expect trouble, given the dynastic troubles of Philip's last year. The family and supporters of Attilus will certainly not have welcomed his accession, and there were other figures who might oppose him or form a focus for opposition." To me this whole moment in time sort of sounds like a coup vibe, doesn't it? Like if you've ever seen news footage or read stories or talked to people who've been in or maybe been in a military coup somewhere, there's a vibe for a while where no one knows who's in charge, where everybody's very like on pins and needles, where the various sides

that might have a chance at the power are sort of jockeying either openly or behind the scenes because the stakes are huge and everyone knows it because the losers in this game are going to be liquidated. So when AB Bosworth says that Alexander and his friends arm themselves run to the palace which is sort of the seat of legitimate authority so you're trying to sort of claim the ground around the throne, one gets a sort of a sense of an up in the air kind of moment. And then the ancient sources don't give us timelines. They don't say three hours later or the next day. So no one knows it.

One gets a sense that everything happens really quickly though. And I have a theory about this. And the theory is that there is so much invested right now in this expedition that's already started, right? We mentioned earlier, Philip and the Greeks have declared war on the Persians. They've sent 10,000 men there as an advanced force, which ironically is commanded by two guys, one of whom is Attalus, the other is his father-in-law, Parmenion. So this is going to get a little family-oriented in a second. But when you have to think of the... I had a professor who tried to get me to think

about this all the time. Think about the the stuff that's going on that you know is going on, but that no one has to tell you is going on, right? Think of the investment in something like this. You're gonna take an army of 30 or 40,000 people with animals and you're going to send it hundreds and hundreds, maybe a thousand, we don't know how far, you're going to send it far away, and you're going to feed it every day. Maybe you can live off the land here or there, maybe you can steal from the locals, maybe you've got to have supply dumps, you've got to have merchants,

you've got to have people who put their money, their reputation, their livelihoods on the line. There's a lot invested from the top levels in society down to the ground levels in society on this ongoing effort. And just because the top guy is gone, things kind of have to go on or a lot of people are going to really suffer. Now that doesn't mean a new leader can't make 180 degree turn and do something different. But it means if you're a general like Antipater, who's probably one of those guys who's got a lot riding on this, and you see Alexander, and you've already seen how gifted this guy is, you know, you've done a little work with

him, you've watched him growing up, Antipater's going to be a guy who stretches from the reign before Alexander to after Alexander, he's kind of an interesting dude in this whole story. If you see this moment in history up in the air, and you're in a position to sort of put the hammer down and stop it, right, we can stop this whole coup moment, we can stop this whole up in the air moment, I'm gonna put my arm around Alexander,

I'm gonna bring him to the troops, and I'm gonna say, this is the guy, which is kind of what the sources suggest he did. And before you know it, the sources have him out there as the king involving himself in affairs of state in that royal role. We don't exactly know how we get from one place to the other, but there you go. By the time he takes over, he's got all kinds of challenges because as you might imagine, the news that Philip the second has been assassinated, spreads like a shockwave. And I compare the difference between the way news

is today and the way information travels and is picked up on the receiving end to the way it traveled back then, it probably traveled more quickly than we assume right bad news, especially travels fast. But nowadays, if a major world leaders assassinated. The vast majority of people connected in any way shape or form to anything electronic are going to know about this within 24 hours probably going to know about it. You know within an hour or two after it happens no matter how far away from the event you are. But like in this time period any news would have had to have spread by horse or foot.

I think about it like a nuclear explosion where ground zero happens, where Philip is assassinated, and then emanating from that spot in the circular sort of pattern is the shockwave. And the shockwave is the news, and the news hits close to Macedonia first and radiates outward, and different places receive this news at different times and the minute they receive the news whatever damage or destabilization or good things is going to happen from that news happens then. So think about like a tsunami and how the tsunami will radiate outward from the earthquake and hit different beaches at different speeds and different times. So this news might reach Thebes before it reaches Athens but when

it reaches anywhere, you know, Persia for example, it has whatever destabilizing or you know, good effect it's going to have. In this case, what's bad news for Macedonia is great news for all of the people Macedonia dominates, and as soon as they get that news, they react to it. And generally, the reaction is one of joy and opportunity. I mean, take Athens, for instance, I love Athens, as everyone does, because they kind of remind us in some ways of ourselves, right, the best of them, and the worst of them are kind of the best and the worst of us. And,

you know, when it's philosophy and culture and learning and art, and all these kinds of things And you know, when it's philosophy and culture and learning and art and all these kinds of things, you know, you justifiably sit there and go, God, you know, this is great. Aren't we amazing, you know, height of society? Then you look at their cravenness and their corruption and their gluttony and their, their, I mean, they're just the best and the worst of us, right?

And you see it on display here because remember, these are a people who just told Philip II hours from his assassination in public, the emissary saying, if anybody were to try to hurt you, they couldn't get any sanctuary in Athens. Send them right back. And now when the news hits Athens, there's an entirely different reaction to that.

And by the way, Demosthenes, who if you're looking at this from an Athenian perspective is a little like a Jedi Knight fighting to keep the old Republic stable to the Darth Vader threat that he's been fighting against for more than a decade and now Darth Vader is dead. When the news hits Athens, Demosthenes has already heard about it. Sources from the ancient world say he had a spy in Macedonia. And the spy gets to Demosthenes before the news gets to Athens that Philip is dead. And he breaks his period of mourning over his dead daughter where you're supposed to sort

of dress down and sort of seclude yourself not take part in politics, Republic affairs and boom, he's out of the house dressed to party. It sounds like, you know, flamboyant clothes telling anyone who will listen that he has had a dream, that Athens is about to be blessed with something wonderful. And then the news hits that Philip is dead and Athens explodes. In a good way, if you're looking for something fun to do on an evening in Athens and you're a nice teenager, say what's going on in town? Well, the party starts as soon as the news hits, as soon as the shockwave from the nuclear explosion hits.

In Plutarch's lives when he's talking about the life of Demosthenes, he brings this moment up. And by the way, Plutarch is writing a book of sort of moral judgments so he'll weigh in and he doesn't think the way the Athenians reacted here reflects too Wonderfully on them because as he points out, you know, you just honored this guy I mean the Athenians lost to him at the Battle of Carinthia Philip killed a thousand of them And what did they do? Well, because he was rather lenient afterwards They put up a statue to

him right and like we said at the event where he dies they're saying don't worry you know we're on your side and the minute he's dead well Plutarch doesn't think it looks too good for the Athenians and writes quote. For my own part I cannot say that the behavior of the Athenians on this occasion was wise or honorable to crown themselves with garlands and to sacrifice to the gods

for the death of a prince who in the midst of his success and victories, when they were a conquered people, had used them with so much clemency and humanity. For besides provoking fortune, it was a base thing, an unworthy in itself, to make him a citizen of Athens and to pay him honors while he lived, and yet as soon itself, to make him a citizen of Athens, and to pay him honors while he lived, and yet as soon as he fell by another's hand, to set no bounds for their

jollity, to insult over him dead, and to sing triumphant songs of victory, as if by their own valour they had vanquished him." But Athens is only one of a bunch of places, both in the Greek world and out of the Greek world that sees Philip's death as soon as they get the news as the equivalent of a starting gun going off saying now is the time to throw off Macedonian domination. What's more, who can blame them for thinking that everything's going to go back to the way it was? I mean, they're after what did we say in part one, they're after the status quo

and to Philip, right? The way things were before Philip screwed up everything, right? The only people he was good for were the Macedonians, everybody else, you know, are under his thumb, and now they're not. And it's not that the Macedonians are so powerful. Most of these people think remember, they've got what we would call today bigotry and prejudice and all those sorts of things toward them, especially the Greeks. Can't even get a good slave from there. Remember that's what they used to say. And if you look at things like that, in your mind, the Macedonians were how they were for

so long because that's just who they are. And the variable that was weird here was Philip. And with Philip gone, everything's going to return back to normal, isn't it? This period when Alexander first takes over is sort of a great unknown for the rest of the Greek and Macedonian world. I mean, everyone knows how great the Macedonian army is and how great the generals are. But they don't know about this kid, this 20-year-old kid, and what he brings to the table. And his first stage in Alexander's career is about showing them.

And you can see that they don't think much of him because Demosthenes begins to work against him and the Macedonians the way he worked against his dad. Starts taking Persian money, allegedly, to start this process of returning Macedonia to the way it's supposed to be, right? Let's destabilize their government. Let's, you know, bring other royal factions to the fore. Let's make alliances with, you know, people that already don't like Alexander. And Demosthenes, an ancient source says Demosthenes was telling, I think it was the Persians, that Alexander's a boy. He's a child. He's a...

Simpleton is what my more than hundred year old Dryden translation calls him. I read a more recent accounting of that line and it translates the word instead of Simpleton to boob. So Demosthenes is out telling people don't worry. I mean, sure, Philip was this august guy, but his kids 20 years old, he's a child. He's a boob. Don't worry about him. And then Demosthenes starts reaching out or at least the sources say to, to some of the other big Macedonian generals and try to get them

involved too, right? Let's make it everybody against Alexander, including Macedonian power brokers, you know, in that state. So you have this inflection moment now in this guy's life in the Alexander the Great story, that if you're doing a movie and you want to make this guy a superhero instead of a historical figure, a superhero from history, you have this time now where it's really the first moment where he's been sort of forced to conceal under a secret identity his superpowers and hide them. This is the moment where he unleashes them for the first time because he has to to survive.

I mean, let's recall that unless this guy was responsible for his father's death somehow, he was as caught by surprise as anybody. So all of a sudden in his 9-11 moment, unprepared, he didn't have time to sort of mentally gear himself up for this, he's in Philip's position. And at that moment, because Philip's gone now, everybody decides it's a good time to, And at that moment, because Philip's gone now, everybody decides it's a good time to rebel at the same time, even within his own circle of Macedonians, even within maybe his extended family. He's got people that are going to turn against him. So he's got a bunch of things he's got to do just to get back to where his father was

initially. Right? He's got to control his own people first. And he begins to do that by killing some of them. It starts at his dad's funeral, which seems to happen pretty darn soon after Alexander takes over. They'll drag a couple of people from, you know,

another side of the family and execute them right at Philip's tomb. One source also has them crucifying the corpse of the actual assassin Pausanias at the tomb. The tomb, as we had said in part one, was found in 1977. The actual complex where Philip is buried has the remains of six people, one of them a newborn. And we said in part one that tomb two is most probably where Philip is because I'd read a lot that said that. And then of course, in December of 2023, a Journal of Archaeological Science article

made a pretty darn good case that he's in tomb one. And the reason why it matters is because, you know, if you're analyzing the remains in these tombs to decide how tall someone was or Reconstruct their facial features or whatever if you're studying the wrong remains when you're getting the wrong information, aren't you so the fights over that continue There are certainly though the remains of six people in this tomb complex and to get an idea of just how murderous things are going to get you could make a decent case without a huge amount of undue speculation that Alexander's mother Olympias may have

been responsible for the deaths of five out of the six of them. It's just going to be that kind of a time period. As we said, the killing starts right at Philip's funeral with the people Alexander can get his hands on right away. And he's going to reach out and go after the people that are too far to get instantly by sending out contract killers to get them. One of those people is Attilus. Attilus would have had to have believed he was on the hit list anyway, don't you think?

I mean, when you insult the future king by essentially calling him a bastard at that cocktail party in front of everybody, and then that guy becomes the king, I would think you'd be thinking that your life was forfeit, and you might be looking for any way out, right? Put yourself in his shoes. The good news, if you're Attilus,

when Alexander becomes king, though, is you're not there. You're in modern-day Turkey, as we said, with the advanced force, and the only person, the only other general that could be a check on your power there happens to be your father-in-law, your wife's dad. So, you know, at least you're safe there, right? And you got 10,000 Macedonian soldiers with you. Good position to be in. The Greeks and Demosthenes are reaching out to you and want your help.

Well, if your life is forfeit anyway, if Alexander gets his hands on you, wouldn't you listen to some offers? And that's where Deodorus Siculus' story of Demosthenes reaching out to Athalus and saying, let's get rid of this kid, this simpleton, this boob. And Diodorus Siculus says that after Alexander becomes king, immediately after Philip's death, Attalus embarked on a course of revolution and

agreed to cooperate with the Athenians against Alexander." A little earlier, Diodorus explains what Alexander's response to this was going to be, and it's a typically Alexandrian, decisive and speedy sort of preemptive strike. and speedy sort of preemptive strike. And in my Robin Waterfield translation, Deodorus says, quote, Atlus, however, was waiting in the wings to seize the throne. And Alexander decided to do away with him. Atlus was the brother, uncle actually, of Philip's last wife, Cleopatra. And in fact, Cleopatra had produced a child for

Philip just days before the king's death. Attalus had been sent on ahead to Asia as joint commander with Parmenion of the expeditionary force. He had won the affection of the soldiers with his generosity and cordiality and had become very popular in the army. Alexander had good reasons then, Deodorus writes, to be concerned about the possibility that Attalus might link up with his opponents amongst the Greeks

and claim the throne. So he chose one of his friends, a man called Hecataeus, or Hecataeus if you prefer, and sent him to Asia with sufficient soldiers and instructions to bring Attalus back, alive preferably, but if this was impossible, to murder him at the earliest opportunity. So Hecatiah sailed over to Asia, joined Parmenion and Attalus, and waited for a chance to carry out his mission." Well, at some point, if you believe the Diodorus story here, Attilus maybe realizes that he's

been caught and tries his best to squirm out of this maybe. That's my interpretation of how one tries to figure out his change of heart and his turning over of the incriminating letters from Demosthenes write to Alexander, it's not gonna save his neck, but Diodorus writes, quote, "'He had in his keeping the letter he'd received from Demosthenes, and he sent it off to Alexander along with expressions of goodwill in an attempt to have the charges against him dropped.

But Hecateus,' or Hecataeus, but Hecataeus murdered Attalus as ordered by the king. And then the restiveness and rebelliousness of the Macedonian expeditionary force in Asia came to an end, though this was not just because of Attalus's murder, but also because Parmenion was squarely Alexander's man." End quote. So this is the part of the story here where if I'm making my Alexander film, I want Martin Scorsese directing it the way, by the way, he was supposed to have done. I heard before Oliver Stone's movie came out and squelched it. I mean, this is a mafia, godfatherish type position to put other family members in. I mean, I have multiple secondary sources,

modern historians who are suggesting that there's no way this Attalus assassination happens without Parmenian approving of it. The other general on the scene with the expeditionary force. But Parmenian is the father-in-law to Attalus, right? Attalus is married to his daughter. If you decide you're going to let your father-in-law to Attalus, right? Attalus is married to his daughter If you decide you're gonna let your son-in-law be whacked, that's an interesting dynamic That might have been the part of the deal that was

Non-negotiable right? We're taking Attalus. What do you want for the deal? What do you want to be quiet? What do you want to be happy? I mean as one of the historians I was reading said you can always get another son-in-law and want to be happy. I mean, as one of the historians I was reading said, you can always get another son-in-law. And after Atlas is taken out, some of Parmenian's family members do get some plum sort of promotions and positions. So if one is trying to make their own movie and this is part of that gray area you don't know enough about, you could conjure up all sorts of deals that might be made here to make a, you know, non-negotiable problem go away and everybody sort of walk away with

pretty good consolation prizes. And Atlas isn't the only one who gets whacked. Just one amongst an indeterminable but certainly significant number of people that are going to be wiped out as part of the succession purges that Alexander initiates. An indeterminate number of people will be killed, though, and they will often be killed on charges that they were somehow involved in Philip's assassination. I mean, it reminds you a little bit of the Soviet Union

great purge where everybody was being executed for having something to do one way or another with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, right? It's a little like that, maybe. But Attilus probably was a legitimate target. Several of the historians that I was reading were suggesting that he maybe even knew this was coming. The other person that would have known she was a dead queen walking was his niece Cleopatra. She must have known right away that as soon as Alexander takes over

and his mother has any say in it that she's not gonna make it. In fact, one of the people buried in that tomb complex with Philip that was found in 1977 is thought to be Cleopatra and her newborn child, probably Philip's daughter. Some would say son. It's unknown.

They found a few pieces of that newborn and did an analysis and it was killed so soon after birth that the old views that used to be out there that there had been a little bit of a time lag between Alexander taking control and Cleopatra and the newborn being killed seem to be wrong. She seems to maybe have been killed almost right away. That is traditionally blamed on Alexander's mother, Olympias. Elizabeth Carney in her wonderful book, Olympias, breaks down that whole point. Did she do it? Didn't she do it? If she did do it, what did they think about it? And it comes to the basic conclusion that it wouldn't have been considered

all that eyebrow raising. And the only weird part might have been that it was one woman inflicting violence on another woman, which wasn't so normal before that time period, but does become normal afterwards. She sort of normalizes it. And how it was done isn't known. But of course, there are some lurid tales

by later historians trying probably to milk the whole female angle. But one later historian has Olympias dragging her rival wife and the newborn over glowing coals. Probably didn't happen that way. Elizabeth Carney thinks what's likely is what had happened at another time period. As I believe we said, out of the six people buried

in the Philip Tomb compound, Olympias might have been responsible for five of their deaths. A later person's going to be a female who hangs herself. Elizabeth Carney thinks maybe the baby was killed, maybe in front of Cleopatra's eyes, and then Cleopatra was allowed to, with dignity, hang herself. Who knows? But Alexander, in one source, will reproach his mother for behaving savagely to Cleopatra.

Now, just to point this out, because I didn't want to have it go unnoticed, Alexander's been king all five seconds, and we already have one of those fork in the road moments where you kind of have to decide What you think happened and that's going to Influence the way you see this Alexander figure. I mean if he ordered the death His dad's last wife and the newborn. He's one kind of guy, right? if he Looked the other way knowingly and let his mom do it

It's another guy if he didn't want to kill them at all, let his mom do it, it's another guy. If he didn't want to kill them at all, but his mom got to them first and killed them, it's another guy. So as he has control or responsibility over some of these outcomes, right, history may be difficult to determine motives and reasons and exactly what happened, but you can say things like, well, all of a sudden they died and everybody talked about it. Okay, that's an outcome you can get your mind around, your arms around. It really happened.

And deciding Alexander's involvement is part of trying to come to grips with, you know, where he should fall on the biographical spectrum between a butcher on one end and a philosopher king on the other. We do understand, of course, right, that all of this needs to be assessed through a translation lens. What's that line that the past is like another country, they do things differently there. And what is considered okay, and right, and maybe even commendable in one time period can be considered evil and horrific in another.

There are people who complain that this is cultural relativism and it lets people from the past off the hook, but if they didn't know something was wrong, seems pretty difficult sometimes to hold them accountable for that. If you're not sure about that, just try to imagine people a thousand years from now

considering some of the things that we do routinely and don't even think about whether or not they're good or bad to do. Imagine being judged solely on the fact that we did that. You might say we didn't know any better. They might say that's no excuse. So be careful. There is a scenario I can imagine in my mind where the very people Alexander is responsible to, right? The average people in the kingdom of Macedonia would say, oh my God, we face the most existential

moment in the history of Macedonia as a state that matters. Forget whether some young woman or some newborn has been killed. You screw this up and tens of thousands of us are going to die. You know, get tough and be the king. That depends on how you want to view this situation. But in my mind, this is the moment where Alexander completely destroys this idea that he might be a child, a simpleton, a boob. And he does so by essentially,

in my superhero story of Alexander, pulling off the Clark Kent glasses and pulling open his shirt and revealing the S on his chest at this moment. And it has to be this moment because if Superman doesn't appear, everything's gonna go to hell in a handbasket. And my favorite description of the moment is in Plutarch. And I have a book that I'm enjoying quite a bit.

It's not really a book. It's a compilation of sources called Alexander the Great Historical Sources in Translation. And they have a newer version of a Plutarch translation that I don't have. Just passages in it. But one of the passages is this key one that describes this crisis moment in the Superman

film where Lois Lane's about to fall off the building and he's got to just become Superman at this moment to save the day. At least if you're looking at it from a Macedonian viewpoint, if you're looking at it from like an Athenian or Theban viewpoint, this is when he becomes Darth Vader. And Plutarch from the Ziegler translation says, quote, And so at the age of twenty, Alexander took over the realm, which was in every quarter fraught with bitter jealousies and deadly enmities and dangers, for the barbarian tribes who were his neighbors would not accept their subjugation and yearned for the independent kingdoms of their ancestors.

In addition, although Philip had defeated Greece in armed conflict, he had not had sufficient time to completely subdue and tame her. All he had done, in fact, was bring change and confusion, and then, with people unused to the new circumstances, leave behind him a state of restlessness and turmoil." leave behind him a state of restlessness and turmoil." End quote. Now this is where Plutarch sets up the moment. He has these, and who knows if it happened this way, he has these hard-bitten Macedonian generals,

the guys who were his dad's generals, who helped conquer all these people in the first place. Caution that he needs to be careful. There's a lot of moving parts, a lot going on. You know, maybe we need to be conciliatory over here, give a little over there. It's a strategy one could see Philip being okay with. What do we say about his sort of tactics? He was a kind of by any means necessary guy,

right? He didn't care. There was no chest pounding if he could get something with money, for example. Alexander's not gonna be that way. For Alexander, the way you do things is part of what matters, and Plutarch has him essentially waving off the advice. Remember, 20 year old kid been king for five seconds, waving off the advice of the professionals and saying, he's not going to do it that way. And Plutarch says, quote,

The Macedonians were fearful of this predicament and felt Alexander should completely abandon the Greek situation and apply no further pressure there. They thought he should use gentle means to bring back into line the barbarians who had defected and use conciliation to check unrest at its first appearance. Alexander, however, started from a position diametrically opposed to this. He set out to establish security and safeguards for his realm with action and a heroic spirit, assuming that all would descend upon him if he were to waver in his resolve."

Now remember, this is the first historical moment that we know of that Alexander is really in charge here, that he has agency, and this is where we get a chance to see him start to unveil some of the things that he's going to be known for, right? If there's superpowers, as we said, one of them is in Alexander's case, speed. Disorienting speed, speed that continually wrong-foots the people that he's up against, and speed at the tactical battlefield level, but also with the giant strategic level. If Alexander's your opponent on the other side of the wargame table,

and you wonder what his tendencies are, he's going to move on you. And he's going to be where you don't expect him before you even think he's capable of getting that far. And you'll see it here, because the first thing he does is get the army together and start marching south from Macedonia. He's pacified things back at home, right? If this is a triage sort of deal, the first step is quelling any sort of problems in your rear,

make sure everything's settled back in the capital, and then head on down south. And as you arrive at each of these locations bring them back into the fold peacefully hopefully if not well that's what the army's for the first group of people he encounters are the Thessalians who have a long-term relationship especially after this period with the Macedonians they're almost partners in Empire not fair to call them cousins of the Macedonians but they sometimes almost partners in empire. Not fair to call them cousins of the Macedonians, but they sometimes seem like that, if you will. And that's going to be something Alexander can exploit with a sort of a good cop, bad cop kind of attitude. You know,

talks about we descend from the same people. You know, we've had a good relationship with each other, mutually beneficial. And while he says that that he's managed to outflank the force of the saliens that were blocking a position that was intended to create a military disadvantage for Alexander. And when you can make all those good cases about a shared ancestry and all those sorts of things while you're outflanking the opponent, he's got at least two reasons why it's a good idea to just say, you know what, you make a good case, we're back in. And then Alexander heads down south and will show up outside Thebes,

for example, before the Thebans are ready to have him there. Like a bunch of other cities, the Thebans have expelled their Macedonian garrisons. There's sort of rethinking that earlier deal made with Alexander's dad, and when he shows up with the army in battle array, with their armor on, outside Thebes, the sources say, this is the equivalent of coming into the negotiations with Thebes. And just once again, there's a little mafia style to this whole thing. It's sort of an understated, murderous intimidation sort of an air, but you know,

done in a classy sort of way where you walk into the negotiations and you just place the handgun on the negotiating table. Look up, don't acknowledge its existence at all and just start talking Turkey about the deal. Everybody knows the gun is there. Everybody knows what it symbolizes, but nobody has to be as gauscious to draw attention to it. The Thebans get the message and they give in. The Athenians send a delegation to say, oh yeah, never mind the money that Demosthenes was providing to the Thebans to resist you. You know, we acknowledge you as the head of the organization again.

And in sort of a quick chain of events, Alexander will move on to the to current the actual you know, sort of the seat of this organization is dad created. And everybody who was in the original organization, the exception of Sparta, which wasn't in the original organization, will pledge that Alexander basically takes his dad's place. The original deal of going back and paying the Persians back for what the Persians did to the Greeks 150 years previously is still on. Everybody's in business as usual. It's during this time period when Alexander has two stories that fit into the timeline of his life that are

traditionally a part of the Alexander canon. The first one is that while he's down here, he goes up to the Oracle at Delphi to talk to the priestess and get a prophecy. So he goes up there only to find out that it's winter and the Oracle shuts down for winter. So it's closed. And he's not the kind of guy that's used to taking no for an answer.

So the sources have him going back into the inner sanctum, finding the priestess and sort of roughing her up might be too strong a word. But you know, shaking her and letting her know, you know, you don't get off that easy. And she's supposed to have remarked while he's shaking her or what have you. My son, you are invincible. And that's all Alexander have remarked while he's shaking her or what have you, my son,

you are invincible. And that's all Alexander wanted to hear anyway. And he left saying that basically that was the prophecy he was after. And the other story that happens while he's down here while he's in Corinth, specifically, is this alleged encounter with the famous cynic philosopher, Diogenes, the guy who was always in search of a good man, who believed in sort of the virtues of poverty and would sleep in a barrel naked.

Not the kind of guy you would expect an up-and-comer in the geopolitical glitterati like Alexander to be, you know, fascinated with, but again, this is maybe part, if we're going to do it this way, looking into trying to figure out who this guy might have been inside. If this is the kind of person he admires,

and the story is that he comes upon Diogenes with a few of his men, and he's just watching him laying in the sun expecting to be noticed and not being noticed, and finally getting a little antsy, he breaks the ice by saying to this philosopher that he admires, is there anything I can do for you? To which Diogenes replies, yes, you can move a little, you're blocking the light. Alexander's men were not thrilled with this answer and got agitated. To which Alexander responded, maybe telling Lee that he was good with it. If he

were not Alexander, he would be Diogenes. Interesting line for a guy to make when to switch places with the dude with no clothes living in a barrel. It's an interesting connection to the man when we start to try to find little clues as to what he might have thought, who he might have been. I'm reminded of a story that Mick Jagger, who went to the London School of Economics, had told an interviewer once. He imagines occasionally what his life might have been like had he gone into economics instead of rock and roll. Maybe it's a common thing to think about it.

Maybe Alexander was thinking, listen, if it wasn't for this global geopolitical conqueror sort of thing I've kind of been born into. Maybe I would have been a cynical philosopher like Diogenes, naked in the sun, not a care in the world, you know, little beatnik style, peaceman kind of alternative, no responsibility sort of way of looking at the world, but that's not to be for Alexander. He had a lot of things to do. And the next thing on the list is to take his army back up to Macedonia and prepare to go north. This is going to be triage task number three, right? Triage task number one is settle things at home. Triage task number two is, you know, reestablish this League of the Greeks that your father put together for this invasion of Persia. Triage list element number three is cow the various tribes to the north and

northwest of Macedonia so they don't get uppity while you take the army far away from home. And while it may not seem like a big deal, right, Alexander, taking this greatest army in the world, probably up north to deal with a bunch of tribal peoples. We should note that this is probably the first time Alexander is going to have ever commanded the army as the king in combat. So for a guy who's going to make his historical bones, being known as a person who belongs on the top ten list and a lot of people to have him at number one of greatest military commanders of all time. Noting the first time he does that as the king might be apropos, so we're doing it. Of course he's supposed to have commanded the army when his dad was gone and he was

the regent. He was also for sure commanding a wing at Carania under his dad in earlier battles, but this is the first time he's acting as the guy who's going to be the conqueror. This is conqueror, you know, battle number one I guess you could say, and this is where some histories kick in because it seems like a likely place to start the story if your main focus of the story is the military stuff, and that brings me to a source that we're gonna be able able to use now, that's really going to flesh out what we've had up until this time. From this point on, we get Arian, the Roman era

writer, another Greek like Plutarch writing in the Roman Empire. Arian is amongst a very small group of ancient historians that have come down to, you know, we in the modern world that deals with Alexander's life and times. And because of that, as we said in part one of this discussion, the rarity of the info out there means that what you have left is sort of exalted in importance. And Arian is a perfect example of that. His outsize influence probably has a lot to do with the fact that we sort of have always had and a lot of people before us to a sort of slightly positive default

position on how we feel about Alexander. Aryan is not the sort of source that the people from the Alexander was a butcher school of refandom like very much because well he's very upfront about who he uses as his sources and they're not the kind of people that are going to give you all the bad stuff they just aren't. I do love the little things that we can sort of maybe glean and full disclosure I'm not qualified to glean some of this stuff but I sure read a bunch of people who are and I was reading some of the introductions to some of my Arians and other books, and they're

diagramming a bunch of this sort of material for me. But Aryan feels the need at the beginning of his history to justify writing it, because the market is already saturated apparently with Alexander stuff, Which tells you some things. First of all, it tells you that there's still a huge demand for it 400 years later. Alexander's a star. This is where the era where he gets the title of the great. The Greeks didn't think of him as great necessarily, but the Romans, they like that stuff, man. Conquering an empire building and it plays well and the emperor always loves that stuff.

A lot of emperors liked Alexander and it's easy to see why. But that's partly what makes Aryan so useful to us is he's focused on the military stuff, which the sources we've been using up till now really aren't. So he gives us a different side of things. We get a chance to see why, in a military sense, Alexander's supposed to be so good. Give us some specifics. Arian does. He is a good person to be doing this for us because he has a military background himself, commanded troops in battle. He's a man of some distinction during his era. And let's be honest, the way technology in the ancient world and military affairs worked, a commander like Arian in the Roman imperial period

would be subjected to most of the same physics of the ancient battlefield, limitations and constraints that a guy like Alexander would have been. In other words, they would have understood each other's warfare pretty well. And we don't have the sources that Arian 400 years later was able to get his hands on to get his information from but he sort of acts as a sort of a spiritual channeler, bringing back information from a time period that we've lost access to. Arian says the two people he used for most of his information was a guy named Aristobulus, son of Aristobulus. I think today we would just call him Aristobulus

Jr. I had another guy named Ptolemies, son of Lagos. Both of these men wrote histories of Alexander and both of them seem to have done so. I was reading later in life, so quite a bit of time after the events because they both lived to be pretty old I guess. Ptolemy for sure. They're wildly different sources though in terms of quality. Aristobulus, I had to look a bunch of stuff up because he's a harder guy to figure out how close he was to Alexander. I've read everything from the idea that he was a botanist which seems pretty likely to an interior designer, to an architect, to a military engineer, all

kinds of things. Certainly, Alexander gave him orders and said, go refurbish the tomb of Cyrus, the great stuff like that. But again, how well he knew Alexander, tough to know. In one of my translations of Arian, the historian writing about Aristobulus said he's known to be part of a group of people around Alexander called the Flatterers. And another thing that I read about him compared him to sort of like a courtier, like a person around the king or the queen. And you know, you think about like someone around Princess Diana, who was her tailor or something,

and those people go one of two ways after the sovereign's dead. Either they chase the, you know, gossipy National Enquirer book market and spill all the beans, or they become this figure that's revered by people for sort of keeping the faith and not turning on their former, you know, master and that sort of thing. And it seems like Aristobulus is in that camp. And historians who point out that he's a reliably

positive source, even when compared with other accounts of certain events, and he always gives the most positive spin, there was a specific account of him downplaying Alexander's alcohol use at one point, and all I could think of was someone who had the job of being like the, you know, sort of the media representative or the publicity agent for the king and he's found dead drunk in an alley by the ancient version of the local media and he has to basically say, what do you mean

drunk? I mean, it's jet lag, he's tired, that kind of thing. So Aristobulus is going to be a reliably positive source. Ptolemy is a much more complicated figure, although you're going to get a good portrayal of Alexander from him as well. He's one of a bunch of people that sort of bask in the reflected glory of Alexander and who made up eventually a very large entourage of people around, you know, the king. I feel like I'm talking about Elvis when I say that, but it is interesting that, you know, powerful, charismatic people, whether geopolitical or entertainment or what have

you, tend to create these entourages around them. But Ptolemy would be an original member, like an OG member of the Alexandrian entourage, because he was around when Alexander was in school being tutored by Aristotle, right? It was a small classroom of people and Ptolemy was one of them. Ptolemy may have started the rumor that he and Alexander were illegitimately related. So you don't know how early they knew each other, but middle school at least basically we would say interestingly enough, another one of Aryan sources for later in the Alexandrian story, another guy who was in that small

classroom of Aristotle. So as we had said in part one, a rather distinguished class of people. Ptolemy's career, like a lot of the entourage sort of parallels Alexander, and as Alexander gets bigger, Ptolemy does. He becomes his bodyguard at one point, he becomes his general, and then sort of like one of his great marshals after a while. The marshals, the military sort of super generals of Alexander the Great, I would compare to any great group of marshals anywhere in history.

Obviously Napoleon is the gold standard, but I put Alexander up against that. And all of the major marshals, Ptolemy included, ripped up the empire after Alexander's demise. And Ptolemy, maybe this is a sign of something, he took probably the best part. He took Egypt, made himself king, eventually made himself pharaoh, started a multi-generational dynasty of rulers in that place that didn't end until one of his descendants, Cleopatra, yes, the Hollywood Cleopatra who had the affair with Julius Caesar, who was, you know, Mark Antony's girlfriend, that one, that's how long it lasted. And near the end of Ptolemy's long life, he either wrote his own version of something that passes for a memoir or dictated it to somebody

or somebody else got it out of him because it's a primary source that you run into in the history, not just with Arian, but in my copy of Strabo, the Geographer, he references it too. So clearly an important source and who wouldn't want it, right? I mean, of all the people whose memoirs you could get your hands on, wouldn't Ptolemy be right there at the top? I mean, obviously, Alexander Trump's that,

you'd like to have his, you'd like to have his dad's or his mom's or maybe some of the generals and other leaders he fought, but otherwise, you know, Talim is right there at the top of the list For any number of reasons one he's an eyewitness to a ton of this stuff. So all of a sudden you have an eyewitness account Even if it's through an intermediary like Aryan, you know when people sometimes ask me How do we know anything about history? Especially how do we know anything about ancient history? These are the little breadcrumbs of knowledge that go back to an original source of someone who was there once upon a time a long time ago, right? Now, it's not perfect. Historians think Ptolemy emphasized and exalted and exaggerated his own contributions and denigrated the contributions of other generals

that he sort of competed with. And certainly he's got his own political reasons during his lifetime for writing this stuff. But Ptolemy also knew Alexander and knew him very very well so this all helps. Also it's a double-edged sword because he knows Alexander because he basks in his reflected glory all that stuff he's not likely to give you the the dirt the bad stuff but the good stuff he gives you makes a huge difference right away right in this Thracian campaign that Alexander starts, you can see it. Because whereas Plutarch, one of the sources we've been using, devotes a couple of sentences to this whole campaign, and Deodorus Siculus, another source we've been using, gives you

just a couple more sentences than Plutarch, Arrian dives into this for pages. I mean, a quick comparison to someone like Plutarch shows you why Aryan is so important. From the Dryden translation, and I love Plutarch, you know that, but what he says about this expedition, shall we call it, this murderous expedition to the North Alexander is going to be involved in, Plutarch says this, quote, He reduced the barbarians to tranquility and put an end to all fear of war from them by a rapid expedition into their territory as far as the river Danube, where he gave Sirmus, king of the Treballians, an entire overthrow. End quote. You might not know how much that leaves unsaid unless you had Aryan to compare him to, where we're going to get a riproar in an account that involves battles and adrenaline and let's

remember Aryan's trying to tell a good story here. He is a great literary figure in his own right. You could spend a lifetime as a classicist disassembling everything involved in the guy way above my pay grade, but how he's trying to imitate his hero Xenophon, how he's writing in a certain archaic style, how his stoicism gets involved in the whole thing, as I said, way above my pay grade, but you don't have to be an expert to appreciate his writing. He didn't expect you to.

And he's already working with a story that's hard to screw up in terms of its entertainment value. He's trying to compete with other offerings during his time period that are trying to tell a rip-roaring yarn. So when you get into Arian, you start to feel the story a little bit. It doesn't sound like a chronological entry. It sounds like a movie. a movie. And one of the real useful elements for we non experts with Arian is you can follow along now in Alexander's life, like a dot to dot timeline that takes you from place to place, you can sort of figure out where he is from now on at any given time now he'll go to far flung places sometimes and all of a sudden his cell service won't be working anymore and you can't track him for a little bit, but then he'll come back into it. And so from about this point in the story, you kind of have a pretty good idea where Alexander is. In the spring of 335 BC BCE, Alexander is in the strategically vital

northern city of amphip, preparing to launch a strike northward. He's got several different targets, it looks like, including the people that put a spear through his father's leg and left him limping for the rest of his life, the Treballians. But this is Thracian country, and we have to sort of reorient our minds to what the ancient peoples like Alexander's, Macedonians would have known about the territory around them. I mean,

we're all familiar with the old historical idea of there being maps sort of in the age of discovery, where you didn't know what laid beyond a certain point, you put dragons and monsters in the edge to represent the unknown. Well think about how less known things were in the 330s BCE, right? Herodotus, who wrote his famous histories, they're not exactly sure when, but it's about 130, let's say 130 years before Alexander's time period.

Herodotus, who went everywhere and who talked to everyone about what lay beyond the horizon when he couldn't get there, he doesn't know what lays beyond the Danube. And the Danube is sort of Alexander's goal here. A lot of historians think he was trying to conquer to the Danube, which is about 100 or so miles, it sounds like from beyond his his current. They're not really borders, but

let's call it area of influence or domination even. But in Herodotus's time, he didn't know what lays beyond the Danube, and he wonders if there's any people there at all. He thinks it may be depopulated. He only knows of one tribe there, and he mentions them, and then he talks about their customs, and they sound like a steppe tribe, a Central Asian, you know, horse archer people, which that area actually had anyway, so chalk another one up to Herodotus probably being right about something.

He did talk to Thracians and asked them what lay beyond the Danube, So chalk another one up to Herodotus probably being right about something. He did talk to Thracians and asked them what lay beyond the Danube. And he says they told him you can't live there because it's absolutely infested with dangerous bees, which Herodotus did not believe, he said. But when you think about the fact that it was infested with horse archer peoples and tons of swarms of these horse archers, maybe the Thracian was speaking in sort of metaphorical terms, right? Swarms of dangerous human beings on horseback with endless arrows, right? Herodotus doesn't believe the bee story because he thinks they'd freeze. And he thinks frost and cold is probably the reason that past the Danube, there are no more human habitations as he says.

Herodotus does know a bit about the Thracians though and in my Andrea L Purvis translation of Herodotus' histories, this is what he says. Quote, the Thracians are the largest nation in all the world, at least after the Indians. If they could all be united under one ruler and think the same way, they would, in my opinion, be the most invincible and strongest of all nations. But that is impossible. It will never happen, since their weakness is that they are incapable of uniting and agreeing." The way I've heard it sometimes phrased is that the Thracians would have conquered the world, but they enjoyed fighting each other too much.

The books that you can find on the Thracians have compiled all sorts of adjectives and things from the ancient sources that describe them. And of course, they get the typical bigotry and prejudice that all so-called barbarians get from the, you know, sophisticated sniffy writers in the places like Athens and whatnot. But let's be honest, if you actually are headhunting, they're going to make some noise about how that's not a very civilized behavior, although they do it themselves when they want to. The Thracians are supposed to have red hair and green eyes, but that's from a very limited

number of sources, so take that with a grain of salt. They are supposed to be high-spirunken not too smart headhunters tattooed Most dangerous I think it was through kiddities that said most dangerous. He said like all barbarians When things are going their way on the battlefield They are famous warriors that were used and in high demand as mercenaries for centuries. I think it was Xenophon that said they were best used for executions and massacres and things like that and actually during the Peloponnesian War did massacre a whole town. No one knows how many Thracians there were but some people have estimated up to a

million as a population and it's interesting to try to figure out what we even mean when we say Thracian because I looked the other day and saw that currently there's thought to be some 200 or so Thracian tribes. I have a book from 25 years ago that thought there were only 40 back then so it shows you how many tribes are being classified as Thracian but what are these people? You know 150 years ago that thought there were only 40 back then so it shows you how many tribes are being classified As Thracian, but what are these people? You know 150 years ago? They would have called it racial or an ethnic group Maybe ethno-cultural would be a more modern term because some of these people maybe aren't related by

DNA at all, but are using the same sort of pottery or tools or fighting styles or weaving styles The Thracians are one of the great big cultural groups north of Greece and by the way if you look at a modern map of Greece and you look at every territory that touches it in the northern sort of circle all those areas during this time period are occupied by hundreds and hundreds of tribes which makes it extremely difficult to forge relationships with and peaceful coexistence, because it's like dealing with all these different governments. I mean, modern Alexander historian, the great Voldemort Heckel,

was talking about the Illyrians, which are in modern day Albania, one of these people that Alexander is going to strike out against on this Balkan campaign. He says, because they comprised strong tribal units, I'm quoting here, with individual rulers, they were unpredictable by the very fact of their disunity. End quote. So as some historians would point out, maybe you have to punch them in the mouth here to make sure that they respect you. Or as many modern day historians think, Alexander is trying to expand his borders to clear logical endpoints. And guess what? The Danube is such a clear logical endpoint that

it's the border between Bulgaria and Romania now. But that entire area is Thracian in this time period. To the west and north of the Thracians in this time period, you have the great ethnocultural group that is the Celts. And they're moving down during this period. Next couple hundred years, they're gonna go even farther south. And then to the west of them, as we said, in modern day Albania are all these tribes that would be classified as Illyrian.

And then there are some tribes that are, you know, in the same way that gravitational pull can affect people that are actually a blend of the cultural influences. And one of them is the one that Alexander's gonna to strike first. He's going after the Treballi, the people who speared his father as we said, but their cultural influence they don't really fit easily anywhere. Usually they'll be classified as Thracian, but I was reading history that says you know you can actually see them as a blend of all the influences from the area Celtic, Thracian, Illyrian and Scythian.

the influences from the area, Celtic, Thracian, Illyrian, and Scythian. But Alexander moving northward here is moving into kind of, if not undiscovered country, then little-known country. Traders, I always try to remember, go everywhere. You know, they get their their nook and their crannies and they take stuff into the undiscovered room. They're the great Lewis and Clark types in the ancient world, but it sounds like other than his dad's campaigns into these areas, he's not going to know a lot of things. And he's going to probably have Thracian guides from the friendly Thracians the way that, you know, Americans were using Native American guides to help guide them into places like

deep Apache country. And part of the reason you need guides like this is because when you're fighting the indigenous people in their territory who are close to the land, their style of fighting is often exquisitely adapted to the conditions. Now modern technology has somewhat diminished the advantage that this gives, but the Apache were still benefiting from it. You know, in relatively recent history, the Thracians have an entire troop type in the ancient world that is named after the way they fight.

And the way they fight is the way they fight because of the geography and the terrain. Alexander's known for using phalanxes of really closely densely packed, drilled troops, right, who fight in formation. He's going up into country where there are streams and forests and mountains and broken country, all kinds of terrain that makes it as one historian was pointing out, this is some of the toughest fighting country in Europe.

If you're a partisan in the 20th century, you know, this is wonderful territory for you to fight in. Go look at the Balkan Mountains on Google Earth now It's bad enough looking now Imagine what it looked like 2,000 years ago and you're going up to fight the people who fight in such an interesting effective style that every major power for a couple hundred years is going to have troops in their army called Peltasts. A Peltast is traditionally an intermediary infantry style between the two extremes, right? One extreme being like Alexander's troops who fight shoulder to shoulder, drilled in

formation and are kind of useless by themselves. You take a guy with a 17, 18, 19 foot long pike, and you take him away from his brethren armed the same way, and then you try to have him fight some tribesmen armed with, you know, a cutting weapon on a stick, that's not going to go well. So they tend to stay in formation as a rule. And the other extreme are these skirmishers,

these people who act like sharpshooters, who duck and move and dodge and, you know and use a little dip in the land for coverage, who have no intention of coming to blows with anyone, who are armed with a sling or a bow and arrow or a javelin. The peltist is capable of doing both. They can skirmish or they can charge in a warrior kind of sense. Now they're not as good as either one of the specialists. Not as good at skirmishing generally as a skirmisher. Not as good at you know melee in general as these close-order troops in discipline and drill. But the fact that they can do both makes them very difficult sometimes to deal with. The Greeks associated this style

of fighting specifically with the Thracians, but you can run into it all over the world, not just in this period either in the Napoleonic era. Go look at all the different light infantry's that the countries use. And if countries have access to sort of tribal irregularities in the colonial period in Africa, for example, they would call them native irregularities in the colonial period in Africa for example they would call them native irregularities if you had access to those people you use them if you didn't you try to create your own generally from people who lived as close to the land as possible like the Prussians really didn't have access in that period any sort of tribal irregularities so they

hired like their foresters and their hunters to be the Yeagers to perform this same sort of light infantry role. But if you're going into the country where the native peoples live and you're going to fight the native peoples, there's really no direct substitution than the native sort of light infantry in this period, the native Peltas themselves. And when the Greeks first encountered them them they had big trouble with them because they didn't have a good troop type to counter them with. Eventually they learned what every society in this situation learns eventually, which is if you can't beat them,

hire them, put them on the payroll, hire a lot of Thracian peltists. Alexander had troops in his army that are famous. One of his most famous units are his Agranian javelinmen and they are themselves people who fight this way, especially necessary because if you're going to fight people who fight as peltists in that kind of country, you're going to need peltists of your own and Alexander has them. We are told by A.B. Bosworth that he probably goes north here into this campaign with less than 15,000 men, which is a small number. That's not a large force at all. It is, if you're in the Middle Ages, if this is Norman and Saxon times at Hastings, this is a sizable force. But 15,000 in this time period with these people is a picked force, and Alexander's taking some of his best Macedonian units with him.

He's also taking a ton of light troops because he knows where he's fighting. He has his father's army as we said earlier and his father's army is a combined arms army, one that has whatever troop type you need at any given moment. Arion says Alexander proceeds from Amphipolis with this force northward. He has organized, this is very typical Alexander also, he has organized a fleet which is going to move up along the coast to the Danube River and then we'll move up the Danube and the fleet's job is to meet him at the destination with supplies. So as we said

earlier, this is not some willy-nilly endeavor. This is something that would take the Persian Empire during this period, I imagine, two years of planning to pull off. And Alexander first moves through Thracian territory pacified by his father, and then we are told by Aion after a nine or a ten day march, he comes to a pass in what was called the Hemos mountains. Hemos is a minor Greek deity that the Thracians considered sort of their God who guarded them. And these Balkan mountains being called the Hemos mountains back then,

you might as well have called them the Thracian mountains. And when Alexander gets there, we're told by Arion in a narrow sort of pass at some of the very heights in this range. So some of the heights are like 5,000 feet. He runs into some of the locals waiting for him sort of on the heights, and they brought lots and lots of wagons with them. From my landmark, Arian, the campaigns of Alexander, translated by Pamela Mensch, Arian says, quote, in the spring he, Alexander, marched on thrace against the Treballi and the Illyrians. He had learned that they were contemplating revolt, and he'd also considered it unwise

when embarking on a campaign far from home to leave neighboring tribes behind without first humbling their spirits. Setting out from Amphipolis, he invaded the region of Thrace inhabited by the so-called Free Thracians, keeping Philippi and Mount Orbalus on his left. Ten days after crossing the river Nestus, he is said to have reached Mount Hemos,

and there, at the narrow path leading up the mountain, he was met by many armed and free Thracians standing ready to bar his way. They had occupied the height of Hemos at the very point where the army had to march past. The tribesmen had brought a number of wagons together to form a barricade from which they could defend themselves if they were pressed hard. They also planned to send the wagons down against the ascending Macedonian phalanx at the steepest part of the mountain, thinking that the more tightly Macedonian phalanx at the steepest part of the mountain, thinking that the more tightly packed the phalanx,

the more forcibly the wagons as they hurled down would disperse it. End quote. So Peter Green, the great ancient historian writing in around 1970, says that this is the first time you get to see Alexander's genius demonstrated. Like what's he gonna do about this? And Green in his famous Alexander of Macedon biography writes, quote, one of the qualities which most clearly distinguishes Alexander from the common run of competent field commanders is his almost uncanny ability

to divine enemy tactics in advance. Some of this may have been due to his first-class intelligence service, but at times it looks more like sheer brilliant psychological intuition. Anyone else, he writes, would have assumed very reasonably on the face of it that the Thracians intended to use their wagons as a stockade and fight behind them. Alexander, however, knew that their favorite battle maneuver was a wild broadsword charge

and instantly deduced what they planned to do. As soon as he and his men were into the narrow section of the gorge, these wagons would be sent rolling down the slope, shattering the Macedonian phalanx, and before its demoralized ranks could close again, the Thracians would charge through the broken spear line, slashing and stabbing at close quarters where the unwieldy Sarissa, the long pike, was worse than useless." End quote. Well, what was that line? The kiddies said, right there at their most bloodthirsty when things are going their way.

That's when I'd be most scared of them too, wouldn't you? Coming through your broken ranks, slitting the throats of people and falling upon, you know, your terrified Macedonians with their barbarian, you know, intensity and frenzy. I mean, barbarians are scary. Tribal peoples to settled society peoples always seem kind of scary. Probably wearing war paint, the tattoos, the red hair, the green eyes, maybe drunken, maybe wild.

All the good barbarian stereotypes in play here. But what Alexander tells his troops to do here, you know, as Peter Green says, divining what they're gonna do, forces us to think very long and hard about, you know, what I mentioned earlier, the physics of ancient warfare, what people do and what they're capable of doing. And this is where having Arian as a military commander himself, operating in an era where the physics of ancient warfare aren't that different from Alexander's time is key. Because he's going to tell us Alexander does something that I wouldn't believe possible. But if it were fiction, Aryan would have known it was fiction because he would know people can't do this.

This is impractical. This is impossible. This is unlikely. And he would say this in a way that made us understand it. Aryan says that Alexander's answer to this tactical dilemma he runs into is to tell his men that when the wagons come tumbling down the hill, if you can get out of the way, just break formation and hide, you know, get get undercover, avoid the the wagons. And they're more like light carts, I think. So we should think of them that way. But there may have been hundreds of them. The next thing Alexander says is if you're caught in the path of these things, he wants

them to lie down. Or it sounds more like he wants them to almost create if you ever had a bike when you were a kid and you created a jump ramp, a sort of a ramp so that these carts would then hit the shields of troops lying down in front. The troops behind them would be at a little bit more of an angle. The troops behind them, if you've ever seen them, the tortoise formation, the testudo that the Roman legionaries would do in the imperial times, a version of that, if you will, But to lie down and create these ramps so that the carts would hit the first row of shields and just so to get airborne and not really hurt anybody. This sounds crazy. Now Green says that Alexander did some specific training before

going up here into Thrace. Winter training for his troops, some other things. So it's possible if he knew that this, you know, the intelligence service, if he knew that something like this might happen, maybe this is a practiced maneuver, but it forces us to think a little bit more about what ancient armies were capable of, because according to Arrian, the Thracians did indeed launch the wagons downhill. Alexander's troops did indeed lie down with their shields over them, and no one was hurt. And remember, Arrian's trying to write an Alexander history specifically to cut through all the romance and the myth-making and the crap from his time period, so he doesn't want to deliberately lie.

This is a very interesting thing though, if you're a fan of ancient warfare, trying to figure out how it worked, that something like this was possible. From my Arrian, from the Aubrey de Selicore translation, this by the way is where Alexander has to try to consider how to handle this threat that the Thracians pose, quote, Alexander had now to consider how to cross the ridge with least loss, for cross it he must as there was no way round. His orders were that those sections of the heavy infantry which had room enough were to break formation when the carts came tearing down the slope, and so let them through.

Any sections, on the other hand, which were caught in the narrow pass, were to form in the closest possible order. Such men as were able, lying prone on the ground with shields locked together above their bodies, so as to give the heavy wagons, as they careened down the hill, a chance to bounce over the top of them without doing any harm. Alexander accordingly gave his orders, and the result was what he expected. Those that had room left a space between their ranks, and as for the rest, the carts passed harmlessly over their locked shields. There were no casualties." Now think of how disheartening this moment must be. I keep trying to think about it like cinematically.

What's it look like when all those carts rumble down the steep mountain and they start falling amongst themselves and they turn into a giant jumble and they smash down into this narrow area and people are ducking and dodging, trying to imagine what would have happened had Alexander not had them do the lay down shield thing. But when the Thracians see that this doesn't work, it's like a double problem for them,

because their strategy of attacking with them didn't work, and now they've lost these things they were going to hide behind if the Phalanx and the rest of Alexander's troops came up to get them, so now they're sort of naked up there. I mean, they do have the height advantage, but that's it. And now, just like maybe they're disheartened, Aryan says straight up Alexander's troops look at this and their morale jumps. And we all understand, right? That morale is probably the preeminent aspect of warfare. I mean, Napoleon gave

ratios for how important it was. And it matters even today, of course, but when you're on these, relatively speaking, tiny battlefields, which involved, you know, if you were looking at it from a giant balloon, I mean, these look like just crowds of people where you can see things. I mean, there must have been, I would think, a kind of almost sporting event type ability to sense the shift in momentum sometimes when it comes. Like when you're watching a football game and all of a sudden the momentum visibly shifts the crowd knows it the players on both teams know it I get the feeling maybe it's like this an

Aryan says that when the wagon thing doesn't work the momentum shifts and Alexander's now gonna come and get these Thracians and from my Pamela Mensch translation in the landmark Arian, which of course is called the Anabasis originally, Arian says, quote, Finding themselves unhurt by the wagons they had most dreaded, the Macedonians now took courage, raised a shout and charged the Thracians. Alexander ordered the archers to move from their post on the right wing to the front of the phalanx, where the ground was better, and to shoot at the Thracians wherever they attacked. He himself collected the Aegima, the shield-bearers, and the Aganians to form his left wing, with himself in command. The

archers, shooting at the Thracians who sallied forth from the ranks, succeeded in driving them back. The phalanx now joined battle and had no difficulty dislodging the barbarians, who were lightly or poorly armed. The Thracians no longer attempted to engage Alexander, who was advancing from the left, but threw away their weapons and fled as best they could down the mountain. Nearly fifteen hundred of them perished.

Few of those who fled were taken alive, on account of the speed and the knowledge of the country, though all the women who had accompanied them were captured with their young children and all the property they were carrying." end quote. This is a fantastic translation by the way of Arian by Pamela Mensch here in the landmark area. It captures all of the flair, you get a real sense of being able to see what Alexander's trying to do here. He's clearly setting up some sort of left hook, where you're gonna smash these people after sort of pinning them from the front, which is sort of the classic Macedonian hammer and anvil sort of tactic anyway. But it sounds like before the hook can even land,

the Thracians have had enough and they run down the mountainside, leaving their women and children behind them. I do like the little part Arian throws in about how you can't really catch them in their own climate. Once again, they're like Apaches. Can't find them. Once they get into the hills, they're gone. Disappear, invisible.

But their women and children aren't. They get sent back to Macedonia's booty, probably to become slaves. And starting the tally that the Alexander as the butcher sort of school will start to compile of people whose lives are negatively influenced and pain inflicted maybe needlessly Because of the goals of Alexander and at this point in the story the goals of Alexander are pretty defensible From an ancient geopolitical standpoint. I mean he's just sort of rounding out

His territory and making sure that you know, these people don't swoop down on his people I mean you can always talk about the same sorts of defense needs that we still talk about today. There's a sort of an evergreen quality to those sorts of threats. And up until this point, one would see Alexander's actions as being thoroughly supported by all. And if the shoe had been on the other foot, the Thracians would do it to them. But it should be noted these people who just suffered 1500 dead to the Macedonians

were not the people that Alexander wanted to inflict pain and suffering on. They were just people standing in the way. And once he brushes these people aside, he heads for the Tribali. Now he's in Tribali country, and it's hard for me personally to not create some sort of mental analogy between this and sort of the Native American experience in North America. But it's so flawed to use that one because the power relationships are so different. I mean, to me, we've been talking about things like the Apache, this people who were a guerrilla people, hard to find, hide in their own native habitat. But there were Native American tribes that were big and strong and like, you know, powerful nations in their own right, like the Comanche, for example.

And Alexander going against the Tribali here is not like going against Apache gorillas or whatnot. It's like going up against the Comanche. People who, as I said, defeated his father a generation ago. The difference here though is, is that Alexander's not fighting them with some sort of garrison force or some sort of outpost in the way that the American West situation was. This would be akin to taking like Grant's army from the Civil War and lining up on one side of the battlefield and fighting the Comanche on the other. That sort of thing never happened, but of course the Tribali and

all the tribal peoples of Europe have all sorts of advantages that the Comanche didn't have, like not being wiped out by disease, you know, ahead of time, and you know, not having to face guns and horrible technological one-sided situations. It's going to be bad enough, believe me, that the Tribali fighting the Macedonians is one-sided enough from a military technology standpoint. But it's not, you know not machine guns against tribesmen. At the same time, you get this sort of sense that it seems to be a little like all those encounters with these settled societies

and their armies come into the tribal territory and push the tribes to the edge. In this case, the edge is the Danube, and that's where the King of the Tribali sends his women and children of his tribe In this case, the edge is the Danube, and that's where the king of the Tribali sends his women and children of his tribe for hopefully safety and sanctuary. It sounds like there's a very big island in the Danube, because it's not only the Tribali that will take refuge there, but Arian says the surrounding peoples are the equivalent

of war refugees fleeing the fighting and heading to this island. The king himself and his entourage were told to join them. Meanwhile, the warriors have moved straight toward Alexander and they've somehow gotten behind him, Arian says. This will not be the only time in Alexander's career where the enemy somehow gets behind him, which normally would be a big deal, but in no case in Alexander's life is it ever a big deal. He turns around and he goes and gets them. He encounters them while they're making a camp. They're in a territory near a river

with woods. The different translations translated differently. Sometimes a glen is the name they use, sometimes a wood, but it sounds like it's broken country regardless. Not the kind of territory Alexander can just sort of charge them in. Both sides find each other, they form up, but the Tribali warriors are in this wood and Alexander can't deal with that. But as we've said before, Alexander has his father's army. It's a combined arms army. But as we've said before, Alexander has his father's army. It's a combined arms army. He has whatever troop type he may need to get the job done, whatever he encounters.

In this case, Arion says he sends in the skirmishers and the marksmen and the slingers and the archers to go shoot at the Treballi in whatever this terrain is that's keeping Alexander off him. It sounds sort of wooded, but what happens is the Treballi are in a position where they have to just sit there and suck up the arrows and well that'll make you crazy. And after you, it's like being under, you know, attack by gunfire or artillery fire or whatever and not being able to respond. After a while, you just, you know, decide I don't care what the risks are. I'm getting shot up here or you lose

your mind or you get angry. You just see them there, you know close by and you think you can you know charge out and get one of them But they do manage to get their trevally to come out of the woods to go get these skirmishers that are just the term They used to use was galling them and when they do that's when Alexander falls on them the cavalry from both sides Aryan says he's also got cavalry in the center, followed up by an extra dense version of the phalanx. This is nothing that the Trebali can handle. This is, you know, Grant's army at Gettysburg falling on the Comanche. Of course, it wouldn't have been Grant at Gettysburg. He was at Vicksburg. It would have been mead, but in any case.

And Arians says that as long as they were involved in the skirmishing, the Treballi held their own, but as soon as Alexander's army hit them full tilt in good terrain, right, good terrain, meaning they pulled them out of the woods into a place where the phalanx can form up in dense formation, you can't handle that, very few armies in the world could, much less a tribal force used to fighting in different circumstances. They'd beaten Alexander's dad before, as we said, but this would not have been the circumstance they would have chosen to fight in. There's a line from this part of Aryan's commentary

that also has prompted all sorts of speculation about those of us trying to figure out what the heck ancient battle looked like, because one of the variables, what are the elements in the physics of the ancient battlefield that has all sorts of unanswered questions about it are horses, what they would and wouldn't do how they functioned. There's a whole school of thought amongst some military historians that the Macedonians were the first people in this period to use true shock cavalry again that's up in the air. But there's a line in especially clear in Pamela mentions translation of Aryan, where she

talks about how even the horses themselves are, it makes it sound like she's using she didn't use the exact word, it makes it sound like pushing. So in the Middle Ages, there's a whole school of thought to that horses were used sometimes to push to sort of shove the formation jost it, if you will, into disorder. And she'll mention something to this effect when she says, quote, so long as the two sides assailed each other from a distance, the Treballi held their own.

But when the tightly arrayed phalanx attacked them with force, and Alexander's cavalry, thrusting the enemy this way and that, no longer with javelins, but with the horses themselves, assailed them from every side, the Trebali were routed, and fled through the glen to the river. Three thousand died while fleeing, only a few were taken alive, as the woods beside the river were dense, and the gathering darkness robbed the Macedonian pursuit of its precision.

Eleven Macedonian horsemen died, according to Ptolemy, and about 40 foot soldiers." Interesting that Arion says this information comes from Ptolemy. A direct breadcrumb connection all the way back to a guy who was probably an eyewitness there a long time ago, once upon a time. I love that, sends a shiver down my spine to think of Arian, a Roman-era historian, sort of informationally and storytelling-wise, spiritually transmitting that stuff like a Chandler to us now. emotionally and storytelling-wise, spiritually transmitting that stuff like a channeler to us now.

If the casualties sound suspiciously one-sided to you, I don't blame you. We should recall, and I'm going to make this disclaimer for the rest of the program, you can't believe ancient warfare numbers at all. You can't believe the army strengths, you can't believe the casualties, you can't believe the casualty ratios, none of it. Some would say you never can in warfare. Others would make the argument, and I think I fall into this camp,

that there comes a time period, and it's relatively recently where you can kind of start to trust those numbers. Let's call it part of a record-keeping revolution, but certainly I would say somewhere in the 20th century they become more believable. to trust those numbers. Let's call it part of a record-keeping revolution, but certainly I would say somewhere in the 20th century they become more believable. But certainly in the ancient world you can't believe them at all. But if you think that this is wrong just because they are so one-sided, I would have said

that by the way a long time ago myself, but I read a book I wish I could remember the title or the historian, but it was one of those books where they give you information that you already know, but they put it in a sort of a context, you know, tip it slightly, if you will, that allows the light bulb to all of a sudden go on and you kind of smack yourself in the head and you go, of course, this historian said that those sorts of one sided casually ratios aren't just true, they're common throughout military history. This isn't an ancient history thing, it's an unequal sides facing off against each other thing. When you have more equal forces you tend to have more equally

distributed casualties, but when one side outclasses the other the ratios are often horribly one-sided. Case in point, by the way, go look up the casualty ratios for something like the Gulf War. This is a recent conflict. Coalition deaths caused by Iraqi military action is something like 150 people. Iraqi deaths are still not known to this day. The site I looked at ranged it from, and this is military casualties, KIA actually, 20,000 to 50,000. Take the low one, 20,000. If you have 20,000 on one side, if you saw an ancient report from a historian like Arion

who said that one side the Thracians lost 20,000 men, Alexander lost 147. You would say, you know, you'd laugh, Balderdash, and yet there we go. So that historian turned a light on for us that just made me go, hmm, well, when one side outclasses the other, and Alexander certainly outclassed the Trevally, those numbers may be closer than we think.

3,000 deaths on the Tre Tribali side is not unbelievable. The ancient source Arian did not give us even an attempt at army strength. All we know is that Alexander took a pick, sort of smaller than normal force. Don't know how many Tribali were there. After Alexander defeats them, we're told he's about a three-day march from the Danube. He heads right for it. The Danube is the second longest river in Europe, but as far as these people are concerned, it's the longest river. It's the longest river they know about. The Volga, which is the longest river in Europe, is deeper into what would the Thracians say, it's deep into bee country. Swarms of bees out there, can't live out there.

They don't even know the Volga exists. and what they do know about the Danube is That it's this big dividing line between Civilized people on one side and very very very scary uncivilized people in air quotes on the other Running the length by the way, and the tribes are just ever more you know one more nasty than the next up and down the river. And as far as the Greeks and the Macedonian world is concerned, they don't know too far

up the river. I mean, they don't know that there are Germans, you know, farther along the Danube. The Romans are going to know that. They'll still make the Danube their border between, you know, where the civilized people are and where the very scary, scary people are on the other side Alexander's dad did not cross the Danube right there that kind of makes Alexander want to do it He heads up towards this island that we told you the Tribali king The King's entourage the women the children other war refugees from the area have sort of taken

Refuge on this island in the Danube and the Danube has a bunch of these islands, by the way, and some are huge. I looked them up. One of them is like more than 30 miles long. So you get this idea of what amounts to nature's kind of creation of a sort of a moat around this island that protects it. And if you've got the people on the island, think about what they're fighting for. You have your wives, you have your children, you have all of your movable wealth, you have your neighbors.

You're gonna fight tooth and nail. The current on the river is, we are told, fast. This is not the same Danube that exists today, right? This is, you know, think of all the canals and all the things that have been built by man up and down the stretch of this river over history. This is pre all that. This is one of the great rivers of the world in a period where it is wild and untamed.

Alexander has to figure out a way to get across it if he wants to deal with these people on an island in the middle of it. Well, as I was going to say, fate would have it, but it's really just wonderful planning. There is a fleet there ready to be used by Alexander. He set this up either. He ordered it or he paid for it to leave the city of Byzantium, Arian says, and meet him here. Might've had supplies, might've had troops, but maybe the most important thing that it has is it has Arian says and meet him here. Might have had supplies, might have had troops, but

maybe the most important thing that it has is it has seaborne capacity, right? He can use these ships to go after that island. Now, to be honest, it makes it sound like there's not that many of them, but he tries anyway and he's defeated, Arian says, by the swiftness of the current. The sides of this island seem to be very steep and rocky and difficult to land. And you can only imagine thousands of people on this island fighting for everything, trying to repel Alexander doggedly. It's a combination that makes the prize, well, maybe not worth what it's going to take to get the prize, right? Not worth the cost. Meanwhile, a completely new and different threat is manifesting on the far side of the

Danube. Tribal peoples from the, you know, barbarian, in air quotes, areas are massing on the far side of the Danube and basically offering a challenge to Alexander. The people who are doing this are seemingly one of the innumerable tribes from ancient history. Will you go? Whatever became of them. I've seen the name pronounced several different ways. I'm not even consistent the way I do it myself. G-T, G-Tay, G-Tay, G-Tay. It's the same root word for other peoples like the Masighite or the Masighiti. I've chosen to go with Giti myself, but you know, individual results may vary on the pronunciation

front. And while many of us around the world may think this is just one of the many innumerable tribes we've never heard of that seemingly fill ancient history, there are Romanian peoples today who considered these groups of people to be their ancestors. So there is a connection in the region to these Giti people. The jury is out and knowing the circumstances, probably this is a divisive topic, but whether or not the Giti should be classified as Thracian or not is an open question. Arien says that they believe in immortality, which would make them, I guess,

different from most Thracian tribes. But that's one of the interesting points about them. They are numerous. Arion puts the numbers that we, you know, of course can't believe because they're ancient history numbers, but he says there's like 4,000 horsemen and eight to 10,000 infantry, a significant force especially up against Alexander's smaller than normal picked force. There's a number of reasons why they could be there.

They could be supporting their next door neighbors, the Treballi, right, helping them out a little bit. They could be showing up as a way to say, you don't want to get to go any farther, right? We have our military forces here. That's as far as you go. Don't cross the river. I was reading one historian had a great line

who was explaining, and we said this in earlier shows too. I think we said it about the Mongols, but there's something that can happen in ancient history that doesn't happen now, which is that all of a sudden an armed army, an armed force of people can show up in your lands that you don't even know exists. And all of a sudden you can have a war with somebody you didn't even know about. That's when the people can show up in your lands that you don't even know exists and all of a sudden you can have a War with somebody you didn't even know about that's when the Mongols show up your war with this people

You didn't know they existed and this historian was saying that in a time period where that was not uncommon Simply getting everybody together armed and showing up at the edge of your land was a prudent precaution They don't know who this Alexander is and they're gonna to send a message which is, we're ready, so stay there. If this move by the Geeti was meant to be a challenge that would deter Alexander, it had the opposite effect. Historian A.B. Bosworth says it was a mistake. But it's at this moment in time that Arian introduces a concept to the Alexandrian story that's going to run through it as one historian I was reading says. It's a light motif that runs through the entire Alexander legend. But is it real? We're going to put on our suspicion caps

to begin with and ask ourselves, you know, whether we believe any of it, but if we do believe some of it, what do we do with it? And how interesting is it that something that might be part of Alexander's psychological makeup might have made it through the spiritual, historical storytelling channeler that is Aryan to us now? It could be possibly know something about this man who lived 2300, 2400 years ago. At this moment that Alexander is dealing with the Tribali on this island, and these tribal peoples are now massing on the far bank.

We are told that Alexander gets hit with a sort of longing. The Greek word that's used by Arian is pothos and it like so many of these philosophical Greek ideas you can use 12-15 different English words to try to describe what it means and still not hit the bullseye with it. All of my translations of Arian have a footnote or an asterisk right by the first time that this is mentioned to try to explain it. In the Martin Hammond translation he describes it and translates the word Pothos to a yen. Alexander gets a yen. In the Aubrey de Selencourt translation he says that the idea of landing on the

far bank of the Danube quote, suddenly seemed attractive, end quote to Alexander, and Pamela Mensch says that a longing seized him to pass beyond the Danube, a longing. So I looked it up, tried to understand it as best I could. Normally it's like a sexual thing, like the way some teenage boy, for example, would feel about some unattainable girl and that sort of aching and yearning, but in the way it's used for Alexander, Peter Green says it's not used that way for any other person in history. In 1970, he tried to explain this Pothos thing that appears for the first time in the writings

when these Gite tribesmen appear on the far bank of the Danube, and Peter Green in Alexander of Macedonia writes, Meanwhile, a vast horde of Gite nomads, some four thousand horsemen in between two and three times that number on foot, had appeared on the far side of the Danube. Yet it was now, despite their presence, that Alexander found himself seized by a quote end quote irresistible urge to cross the river. If balked by the difficult, he means taking that island in the middle of the Danube from the Tribali, try the impossible. The Greek word for this urge is pothos.

It recurs throughout Alexander's life as a quote, longing for things not yet within reach, for the unknown, far, distant, unattained, Green continues, and it is so used of no other person in the ancient world. Pothos, in this sense, is an individual characteristic peculiar to Alexander." In my Aubrey de Selencourt translation, the note for Pothos when it appears in this part of the story has another sort of description and it says, quote, this is the first occurrence in Arian of the word Pothos, longing, yearning, which he and other Alexander historians use to describe the desire to penetrate into the unknown and investigate the mysterious.

Victor Ehrenberg in Alexander and the Greeks argues that the word was used by Alexander himself. The present passage, however, he regards as an exception." Wouldn't that be interesting if this is a word Alexander used himself about his own longings and yearnings to continually go farther, and where those longings and yearnings in some other young male his age might have referred to some unattainable young lady he couldn't marry or whatnot, in this case it's about that river and what's beyond it that his dad never managed to cross.

And it's weird because there's three sort of psychological aspects to Alexander's life that are often talked about. And I sat down and I drew a circle for each one and in a Venn diagram like way with three of them, they sort of overlap. One of them is ambition, which I'm fully qualified in understanding, because we can all understand that. The other is Pothos, which I'm not qualified to understand. And the third is something called Erite, which I'm also not qualified to understand. But when you do a little work just to learn the basics, you realize, okay, these three things

are overlapping with each other and sort of energizing each other. The ambition, let's take that out for a second. Just look at Pothos and Erite. Pothos, this desire to always go farther, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. And yes, a few of you will know

there's one degree of separation between Captain Kirk and Alexander the Great because William Shatner played Alexander in a TV movie. It was horrifying. What might be better is to have Alexander the Great come back and play James Kirk. But if you're making your Alexander movie and the star that you cast in the Alexander role turns to you and gives you that famous comedic actor question trope and says to the director, you, hey what's my motivation here? You know up what's Alexander doing this for well he's got this Pothos to continue to explore strange new worlds and he's got this need to be excellent this arete

this arete thing is seen a sort of a resurgence lately among some people but in the writings that I was reading, basically if we're going to simplify and encapsulate it, it's trying to figure out what your purpose is, what you were born to do. If this was a Christian version of this, you would say, what did the good Lord make you and set out your purpose and give you the qualities to succeed at? Find out what you're good at and then do it excellently, right? Become the best at doing it. If you're a gardener, be the best gardener ever, right? If you're born to dance, be the best dancer ever, right? Figure out what you're supposed to do and then just be the best at it.

But if you boil down what it is Alexander's born to do and what he's good at, it can become a little troubling. Not if you think about it in the sort of the zoom out sense, greatest conqueror in history. That sounds like something you get an award for. But when you look at what that means in the Alexandrian sense, right, factor it down to the lowest common denominator. What is Alexander really good at? There is a story, and I maybe I invented it, that's a good way to be able to tell this story without having to find out where I first read it. I think it was in Military History magazine. I tried to search for it. I could not find it. So take it with a grain of salt.

And it may be a press relations thing to begin with, but there was a story involving British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. And he was meeting with some boy. Like I said, maybe a press relations thing, a young seven, eight year old boy, whatever it was. And long story short, the boy had said to the field marshal at one point, you know, to an American looks like a very civilized, typical, you know, British officer, unlike the American type, much more, you know, sort of reserved, genteel quality maybe to him, which might maybe belies the true character or nature of the guy

But the kid says this field marshal, you know What his dad does tells him all about his father and then this is the field marshal And what is it you do and the field marshal replied something to the effect of I kill people When I think the boy said something like you kill people do you kill a lot of people? Oh, yes, lots and lots of people and The reason it sticks with you is because it's so off-brand, at least the way an American would see the brand. Now, if ivory-handled, pistol-wearing American General George Patton had said that it's fully on-brand,

it's contrived almost if Patton says it, right? Whereas in Montgomery, it's a little shocking. But I remember it stuck in my head because the truth of the matter is, as we said, if we boil this down to the lowest common denominator, that's a little shocking but I remember it stuck in my head because the truth of the matter is as we said If we boil this down to the lowest common denominator, that's what this guy does and everything else that he's given credit for flows from there Right. What do you do? I conquer nations. Well, how does that work? Boom. Boom. Boom factor it down Well, I have the best army utilized the best way And I know exactly how to make people run away on the battlefield and then how to kill as many of them as I can while they're running, and that has great

geopolitical impact, importance, and effects. I kill people, and I believe I was born to do it, and my philosophical beliefs handed down to me, if not by the Iliad, which has been called the Bible of the ancient Greeks, then by Aristotle himself, who talked about things like Aretea would have been bred into him, his Homeric values at Philip II's court would have bred it into him. I mean, this guy is going to believe in being excellent at what you're born to do, and what this guy is born to do, clearly, because many of you will have him ranked as the best to

ever do it, is to kill people and then reap the many geopolitical and historical benefits that comes from that. And if this is kind of Alexander's superpower, if you will, like other superpowers, it's sort of value neutral. Depends on how you use it, right? Whether it's good or evil, which I think leads to so many of the questions about Alexander. I mean, this is all part of maybe a search to answer the all elusive question of why. Why is Alexander doing this?

What is my motivation, as we said? And maybe inventing Pothos and Erite and all this sort of stuff is an attempt to explain something that's very hard to understand otherwise. It really influences the guy because, I mean, the ability to be a super killer in a battlefield general sense is something that's the kind of superpower you might want to have on your side at one time or another. It doesn't have to be some global conqueror that enslaves people and rolls over villages and towns and destroys the livelihoods of lots of people. It can be the thing that prevents that. You can be on the other side, some small little nation out there about to be trampled by some

giant power and all of a sudden you have somebody with Alexander the Great's generalship qualities as their superpower, right? And they have a philosophy of what would the marine commercial, or the army commercials from when I was growing up, be all you can be? Sort of an airy-tay idea, right? Like to have that guy on your side if you're about to be swallowed up by some giant nation state, right? So it just depends. And everyone understands that, which is why so much of a focus is on the question of why. Right? If Alexander's all of a sudden about to unleash his superpower on somebody, why is he doing it? What's the reason? Because if he's about to do what he's

about to do to these Geety tribesmen on the opposite side of the Danube because he has a yen or a longing for the unattainable or he has an adolescent-like crush on the idea of getting across a river his dad never crossed, that's a pretty flimsy reason to kill a lot of people and take their stuff, especially in their territory. A.B. Bosworth will call it terroristic. On the other hand, there are some military reasons for doing what he's about to do, and

those who would defend the action even today would point out that what happens afterwards proves this fact conclusively. But what we're told Alexander does is something that the Giti tribesmen on the opposite side of the Danu probably thought impossible. He transports thousands of men and horses across the river in a single night, and seemingly without the Giti even noticing that it's happening. According to Arian, Alexander uses the boats that he brought from Byzantium. That's probably how the horses get across, but he also has his people scour the river

bank and we're told that there are dugout type canoes all around that the locals use and those are all scoured. And then Alexander tells his troops to take the tents that they sleep under, fill them with straw and use them to float across the river, which seems terrifying and deadly to me. Yet I have seen, and many of you have too probably, the reliefs showing Assyrian troops doing this exact same thing hundreds of years before this time period, and again,

Aryan knows what he's talking about in military affairs, he would have said something maybe. Instead, what Aryan says happens is that Alexander, in the course of a single evening utilizing all these methods, manages to get 1500 cavalry and 4000 infantry across this mightiest of rivers. And to do so, apparently, without alerting any of the thousands of Giti tribesmen that are on the lookout for him, that he's doing it. We are told by Arian that Alexander lands in a spit of land that's sort of concealed by a grain field ready to be harvested.

So imagine the wheat or whatever it is taller than a man, able to conceal the army. Arian says Alexander forms his troops up basically in formation, including cavalry. But the main group being the phalanx shoulder to shoulder and Alexander orders that his troops hold their 17, 18, 19 foot long pikes, whatever it is, diagonally, you know, at an angle so that as they march, they are scything and knocking down the harvest. Hunger in military affairs is an age old weapon, isn't it? And extra effective against tribal peoples operating so close to the edge of starvation, right?

One bad thing happens to the harvest and you could be screwed. Alexander marching through your harvest is as bad as it gets. And Aryan makes it sound like the first moment that the Gheeti noticed that Alexander has crossed is when his army emerges from the grain field like some horrific version of Field of Dreams, right, but instead of baseball players it's the nastiest army of the age, emerge from this grain field and basically come at you. I mean that's

shock and awe ancient history style, right? And those of us who like ancient medieval history, there are so many psychological aspects that are interesting. And these psychological aspects still exist in modern warfare. Don't get me wrong. But they're so enhanced when everyone is so close together. It's why you have so many of the same aspects

in like the Iliad or that level of warfare that one might have seen in caveman warfare or animal kingdom type encounters where you have these animals that have evolved to make themselves look bigger or puff themselves out or make some scary noise or whatever as a way to sort of psychologically scare their opponents, right? Intimidate their opponents. It's why even in the Napoleonic era you have this head gear that makes you look taller. Why would you want that? It's more intimidating. You have that kind of headgear in this era also. War paint. You have animal skins and animal heads that people wear. Battle cries are ever-present. And it makes sense when you think about the

fact that ancient warfare in this period is like taking a football stadium or soccer arena and taking that crowd, dividing it in half and then putting it on opposite sides of a football field or two or three. So they're not hurting each other currently, but they can see each other and they can scream and chant and yell things like football fans might. The ancient authors talk about battle cries that are specifically associated with certain cities or certain peoples, right? They have their own and they pass it down through generations. It's like a football team having, you know, chants that they've done since their grandfather's day or whatever they're known for.

And some of the ancient authors actually try to phonetically in their text, you know, sound it out for you. So you could sort of imagine what it was like to hear the Thracians or the German tribesmen of a certain tribe do their famous war chant, whatever it might be. But a lot of this is intended to intimidate and when you understand, as the Greeks used to say, Phobos, the god of fear, is ever present on the battlefield, a lot of people here are just barely holding it together psychologically. And you know that this is true because things happen in the ancient era that you don't often see in the more modern era to the same degree.

I mean, there are units that just run before anybody touches them. Xenophon in the original Anabasis, which Arian is such a huge fan of, Xenophon was a general who fought with Greek troops in a Persian civil War. He talks about you know when the enemy first approaches and you see the giant dust clouds and the innumerable number of people

and a giant unit is coming towards them and all of a sudden you know sees their spears from a distance and turns around and runs. Never even comes into contact. It's sort of the dirty little secret of ancient medieval warfare, right? A lot of units just didn't wait around and that's because the psychological state of people in this sorts of situation is fragile And part of that is the yin and yang of the situation the yin which sort of compels you to move forward, right?

Doing your duty fighting for your homeland not wanting to be punished by your superiors, all those things that make you capable of going toe to toe against the enemy. But then there's the yang side of things, certain realities. Reality number one is if the unit decides to run and you don't trust these bastards on either side of you not to run, but if they run, the people that get it in the back first are the bravest who stay the longest, right?

So you sort of have a psychological encouragement to neither be the first one to run, nor the last one to run. But what can happen is you can be psychologically knocked off balance. And I would think that this would be a tool in the toolbox of a legendary commander. And you see it with other commanders too. Hannibal did this to the Romans constantly in the Punic Wars, right? Where you awe them, and then you follow up by shocking them. There's a term in warfare, in war games, for example,

a unit that faces a psychological moment like this can be said to be shaken. That's the term, the unit is shaken. And when Alexander bursts through the cornfields, Arian makes it sound like the Geeti are shaken, and then before they get a chance to pull it together, Alexander attacks. So maybe this entire way you approach the Geeti is intended to gain a psychological edge on them. It seemed to have the desired effect because Arian says they have the same sort of deflation seeing

that the river didn't protect them here that the Thracians earlier had when they saw that all the wagons they threw down the mountainside did nothing to Alexander's forces right there the morale shift what do we say the momentum shift like a football game happens and Arien says the Giti don't last long from my my Desellenkor translation Aryan says quote, the very first cavalry charge was too much for the Geeti. The crossing of the Danube, greatest of rivers, so easily accomplished by Alexander in a single night without even a bridge, was an act

of daring which had shaken them profoundly. And added to this, there was the violence of the attack itself and the fearful sight of the phalanx advancing upon them in a solid mass. They turned and fled to their town, which was about four miles from the river. But as soon as they saw that Alexander, with his mounted troops ahead, was pressing on along the riverbank to avoid ambush or encirclement, they abandoned the town, which had few defenses, and taking with them as many women and children as their horses could carry, continued their flight into uninhabited country as far from the river as they could go. Alexander took the town

together with anything of value which the Geety had left behind." Alexander historian A.B. Bosworth, who's always been pretty good at putting himself in the position of Alexander's victims, called it a gratuitous act of terrorism on a helpless people. But after Alexander does that, all of a sudden the wind goes out of everyone's sails nearby. The king of the Tribali on that island sends people to negotiate with Alexander and a bunch of surrounding representatives from surrounding tribes do too. So you know, one could make an argument here that this demonstration of strength and how good his army was and how devastating the results would be you know if you messed with him

Saved a bunch of future encounters, maybe Let's be honest though the main lesson that these northern people learn from this encounter with Alexander Is that he's not a boob He's not a simpleton. He's not a child all All those things that Demosthenes had said about him. Not true. You can't blame these tribes for testing the 20-year-old, though. After all, the Treballi would fight against his father, the greatest military man of the age. If they'll test that guy, they'll certainly test his 20-year-old son, who with the vagaries of monarchy might be an idiot. Might be a simpleton. Might be boob turns out he's not and the

northern peoples in this part of this territory will remain nice and friendly throughout Alexander's reign and actually, and this was probably not optional, it was probably part of the deal, they'll contribute a lot of troops to the army that he'll take over to fight with in Asia. From Alexander's standpoint, I'm sure that the Treballi envoys coming to settle up with him was the most important part of this time period because after all that's why he launched the campaign in that area to begin with. But from our standpoint, thousands of years later the most interesting

envoys that show up to Alexander during this time period are Celtic. Now as a Celtaholic, as many of you are, trying to figure out who a Celt is or isn't during this period, well it'll occupy the rest of my life trying to nail this down, but it's like all these giant confederations of tribes. We spoke about this earlier Illyrians, Thracians, Celtic, whatever they may be, ethno, cultural, linguistic. I mean all these confederations are made up of lots and lots of other tribes, and then they're broken down into clans, and the connection they have with each other is hard to determine sometimes. But people identified as Celtic about a half century before this time period

defeated a very young, it must be said, Roman army in the field. And again, dirty little secret, as we mentioned earlier, a lot of that Roman army supposedly fled before ever actually clashing spears with the enemy in front of them, right? Saw them, got close to them, said nope, and left. So those people, identified as Celtic, sacked Rome, and that sacking famously left sort of a psychological scar that Rome never got over. Arian writing when he's writing knows of Celts very well but in Alexander's time period encounters were rare in the 330s especially amongst people like him he'd probably never seen anyone like this before and Arian

probably working from Ptolemy as a regional source describes sort of their reaction to it and it's the describes sort of their reaction to it and it's the same sort of reaction you might have if you're James T. Kirk, you know, seeking out new worlds and new life and new civilizations. I mean these Celts look to Alexander the same way Romulans would look to Kirk. And that's kind of the way Alexander sort of reacts. Arian gives you, probably coming from Ptolemy, a sort of a report you might send back to headquarters about this new group of people you just discovered. I mean, the first thing that the Macedonians notice about these guys right away is they're

huge, physically. Men of enormous stature. Pamela Mensch translates Arion saying, but there's other versions of them, but it's clear that the Macedonians who probably were seen as kind of tall compared to your average southern Greek, they noticed these guys' size. And they're also sort of haughty is maybe the way to put it out. You actually have a comment from Alexander after his encounter with them. And the funny part about it is Alexander and historian, Voldemort Heckel in his book, In the Path of Conquest Resistance to Alexander the Great points out that this

whole encounter as transmitted by Arian shows how arrogant the young 20 year old King is. But the criticism on the part of the Macedonians about these Celtic people is that they themselves are arrogant." In my Martin Hammond translation of Arian, he describes the moment ambassadors start arriving to Alexander after he defeats the Geeti and says, "...ambassadors now arrive to see Alexander from the independent tribes bordering the Danube, including envoys from Siramus, the king of the Treballians,

and envoys came also from the Celts, who lived by the Ionian Gulf. These Celts were big in body and had a big opinion of themselves. All the envoys professed to have come in a desire for friendship with Alexander, and withal he exchanged reciprocal assurances. He did ask the Celts what they feared most in the world, hoping that his own great name had reached as far as the Celts, and yet further, and that they would say that they feared him more than anything else. Their answer came as a disappointment.

Living as they did in inaccessible country far away from Alexander, and seeing that his ambition lay elsewhere, they replied that their greatest fear was of the sky falling on them. Their embassy to Alexander was prompted by admiration for him, but with no element of fear or self-interest. Even so, he declared friendship with the Celts, too, simply remarking that the Celts were a pretentious lot." Dasellenkor translates Alexander's words into that they thought too much of themselves.

Pamela Mensch has him saying in a more colloquial term, Big talkers, these Celts! And one wonders whether he actually said that. It's wonderful to think about Ptolemy maybe being in the room as Alexander comments after the Celts just walk out. Big talkers these Celts. But as Waldemar Heckel says the entire affair just shows how arrogant Alexander is. This is his first campaign ever and he expects these people a long way from him, these Romulans that he's never seen before to know all about him and be scared of him already? No, not going to happen. In fact, while they'll be good during Alexander's reign, it'll only be about a half century after this time where they're going to

go on a rampage in southern Greece. They'll actually sack the very tomb that Alexander's father is buried in. Some historians think that this entire Celtic diplomatic mission may be more of a sort of dual purpose affair. I mean, in the same way ambassadors can play sort of a dual role. They're sort of part diplomat, but they're also part intelligence agents, right? They gather data about, you know, foreign leaders and the situation in the country and the foreign capitals and the mood and the climate and the army and how they fight and all this kind of stuff. And it would make sense, wouldn't it, that if you were thinking you might someday have to fight this guy, that you'd get a little intelligence on what you're potentially dealing with here.

Guy comes up from the South, 20 years old, defeats, you know, three different groups of locals in a short period of time easily might want to know about a guy like that In any case Alexander deals with all these envoys these diplomats these ambassadors these Submissions are cataloged these peace deals these friendship arrangements. Whatever it might be Alexander has managed to sort of pacify Macedonian if not borders as we said then territory under its sort of control all the way to the Danube. Alexander Arrian says now takes his troops to the south and west of where they are here near the modern Romanian and Bulgarian border, to an area that is controlled by the king of the Agranans, who is an ally of the Macedonians. He's gonna rest. His troops have gone like 500 miles, remember, marching on foot basically through terrible country, on bad roads, fought several battles. I mean, after a while, you know, things need maintenance, right?

The footwear needs to be mended. Whatever it is, the army could use arrest. And then, according to Arrian, a crisis breaks out on the borders between Macedonia and Illyria. So modern day Eastern Albania, kind of. Now the news is that three major groupings of Illyrians, the age old arch enemy of the Macedonians and let's not avoid the elephant in the living room married into the royal family. I mean, Alexander's got a half sister who's half Illyrian. Well, they're on the war path again, gonna invade Macedonia or something like that in rebellion,

Aryan says, and you never know if that's to cover something or not. But three major groupings of people so dangerous that they killed Alexander's uncle, the king of Macedonia at that time, on the battlefield with 4,000 Macedonian soldiers left dead for the ravens. So obviously the Illyrian threat is real. Put me in the camp of people that thinks that this wasn't some unplanned encounter with the Illyrians though, because we had, was it Plutarch who said they couldn't leave the Thracians in his rear and take his army and go to Asia far away from home because they're too dangerous. Well magnify any threat the Thracians were to the Macedonians by ten when you're talking

about the Illyrians. The Illyrians really are the boogeymen of the nightmares of Macedonian little children. You could understand why some of these Illyrian rulers could be mad though, the guy who's sort of leading the whole thing. Well you know Alexander's dad defeated him in battle, may have killed him, so you know there's some grudges. Arion says that Alexander's host the king of the Aganians, the guy who provides Alexander's you know maybe his favorite unit, certainly one of his favorite units is Jack of all trades, Ranger Commando, Gurkha Special Forces unit, the Ukrainian javelinman. He says, Don't worry, I'm going to take one of these people off

your plate, I'll go ravage the territory of this one major tribal grouping, and they'll have to deal with me. So you'll just have the other two to deal with now. Ian Worthington in by the spear says that Alexander ordered him to do this, which may be the case. No matter what happens though, Alexander's three-headed hydra problem just became a two-headed one. And with customary speed, he races towards the fortress that he finds out the major ringleader

here, a guy named Cletus, that he's taken refuge in. And Alexander heads over to this with his smaller than normal army, right? It's still this picked force and he heads into country that I struggle to describe. It's difficult to know how to differentiate one area with really poor military terrain from another area where if anything, it's worse terrain. I mean, do we have a bad terrain scale where if you score a one anything it's worse terrain. I mean do we have a bad terrain scale where if you score a one it's bad terrain if you score a two it's worse terrain if you score a seven it's trace where we just were you know in the hemis mountains in modern-day bulgaria a nine

is where alexander's heading here into Illyria, modern day Albania. To use a phrase I use all too often, Illyria is like Thrace, only more so. And in a way, what we get a chance to see here is the true measure of Alexander the Great as a great military commander. Because to be honest, when you have the greatest military of the age, you want the giant cinematic battles that everybody ooze and aahs about,

and no one more than yours truly, right? We're all entranced by the great field battles with tens of thousands of guys on each side, these incredible history determining afternoons, right? But those things in comparison to the day-to-day grunt work of fighting are rare in even a conqueror's life, the great field battles, the day-to-day stuff that you have to endure. First of all, the day-to-day stuff probably wipes out a lot of people,

snuffs out their conquering career early on. They might have been great, but they died in some unnamed, you know, Germanic forest, perhaps when their legion was ambushed by a bunch of barbarians in the deep dark middle of nowhere. Happens all the time. And that could have happened to Alexander too. And in a way, going in and fighting in a place where the terrain negates all of the great advantages that you bring to the table, right?

If your army is so much better than some of the armies you fight later and you get them out in the open, it's like the US in the Vietnam War. It's exactly what the US always wanted in the Vietnam War. They want a World War Two style battle. Come on out here and fight. The terrain made it very difficult to do that. And a lot of the locals thought that there were other ways to go about winning a war than confronting the best army of the age head on. You have a similar sort of dynamic at work here because Alexander's walking into territory where it is absolutely covered by forest in mountains. It's completely impossible to operate the way Alexander's going to be operating in the wide open plains in places like Asia later or even in a place like Thrace where once you got past the Hemis Mountains, it seems like there was some open country to deploy in. There are going to be paths here, the Aryan says, where

you can't get four guys to walk side by side. You have a sheer cliff on one side and a tumble into a river down a steep slope on the other. That's going to negate some of the best things you bring to the table. You may have a combined arms army, but the army is designed to do sort of a hammer and anvil deal, right? Line up those deep blocks of shoulder to shoulder lined up guys with 18 whatever foot pikes and they pin and hold the enemy in front of them, right?

Engage them and then while that enemy's busy. Send the cavalry around the flanks, try to hit them in the flanks and rear and roll them up. And I mean, it's a great tactic, but it doesn't work in the forest. It doesn't work in the mountains where Alexander's heading. So watching him conduct operations with all of his best, most dominating tools taken out of his toolbox is a chance to see the guy in an equalizer situation.

And certain things are gonna become clear. The first thing is that even though these Macedonian kings are expected to behave like figures out of the Iliad and sort of lead the charge and all that. I mean, his dad lost an eye, right? He was a crippled man from fighting. Alexander, if anything, even graded on the Macedonian curve is going to be more aggressive and famously seek out battle even more.

He's probably already killed people back when he was commanding one wing of the army at places like the Battle of Carania and whatnot. But Arian is going to inject the adrenaline into his account now that we told you earlier is part of what makes him special. He writes, it's a movie account at some points,

and Alexander is the star, and he is often in situations where normally you wouldn't want your king getting anywhere near those kinds of encounters that could so easily go wrong. Alexander's going to almost come off. It's a movie trope, right? You have to go to like a 1950s John Wayne movie where, you know, they head up into the country where the natives live and you can hear drums in the hills all around in this sense of menace and being

Swallowed up by the country and then when night falls, it's terrifying I mean it has that kind of a feel to it and remember there's a difference in the way militaries operated in this period compared to say Napoleon's time onward although there are examples of differences I mean one of the things the Mongols did was operate this way But nowadays if you're gonna invade a country country, you're going to invade along many roads on a wide front so that as you move, it's like ink spilling and just sort of absorbing the areas as the army moves forward.

In this era, it's an army sort of marching like a little entity encased all by itself. They'll have flankers and people out, you know, on cavalry scouting and maybe scouring for food and all those kinds of things, get a few informers. But by and large, it's this little group of human beings, relatively speaking, just marching into a territory. And if you could zoom out with a drone shot, you would just see it swallowed up by forest everywhere. It literally like American patrols, you know, in Vietnam, once they got too far away from bases. It's just the jungle swallows you. Well, this isn't a jungle in Southeast Asia. It's the European ancient equivalent. And Alexander's marching into it. And he knows that

there's at least two armies out there trying to converge to destroy him. And his mission is to get to one of them and destroy it before it can link up with the other. That's a very Napoleonic problem, by the way. Alexander moves with his trademark speed, gets to the fortified city where one of these ringleaders, a king named Cletus, is holed up before his ally shows up with the other army, which of course was the goal, but he sort of inadvertently traps himself while doing so. And as we've already said once and as we'll say again, there's something about Alexander's career where he will do this and you think to yourself, well, for such a great commander to continually put

yourself in these situations, you want to say is a demerit. But that's like saying that Muhammad Ali, because he breaks the rules of pulling straight back from an opponent, right? You don't do that. No one teaches that. Yeah, but because of his superior reflexes, he gets out of trouble with it all the time. I mean, when Alexander's able to emerge unscathed from these situations, you're not supposed to put yourself in, it makes it difficult to know how to grade it. It's a mistake, but a mistake that somehow didn't hurt him. In this case, he arrives at this city

with this king that he wants to get his hands on, and the entire area is dominated, it sounds like, in an almost 360 degree Maybe bowl like fashion or almost 360 degree fashion by either really high hills or low mountains that look down on the city and They are heavily wooded and if they aren't already infested with tons of Illyrian warriors as soon as Alexander shows up they quickly are and He has to try to figure out what to do. Now he knows another army's on the way, so he does what Alexander's pretty darn good

at, and he attacks. There is a quick, short, sharp encounter, we're told, and then the people inside the city that he was fighting go back inside the city, lock themselves up. And Alexander's troops area and says find the grisly remains of the sacrifice that had taken place before his little clash. Three boys, three girls, three black rams all slaughtered. Sacrifice seems to have been interrupted in progress maybe. But what Alexander's got to deal with now is he's on this plane, he's still got an undefeated enemy in front of him and the hills have eyes. We're in this

mode where you're in scary enemy country. I mean, it brings up a certain question, right? We've mentioned that Alexander probably has about 15,000 or so men with him right now. Can you be frightened if you're surrounded by 15,000 of your own guys? Maybe because Alexander finds out the very next day after he's already started to implement a plan of walling the city off, right? We're just going to wall it off. Julius Caesar did that at Elysia. I mean, it's a typical sort of thing to try to do, but they've hardly started before the army that the King Cletus guy has been waiting for shows up, which ruins all of Alexander's plans and traps him even worse. Now he really is surrounded in

native country and he can't hardly move. And this is an era, remember again, we'd mentioned how armies move differently, but they're also supplied differently. Alexander has no line of supply going back to some base. They're sort of on their own, whatever they can carry and of course, you know, scrape up. So Alexander sends out a foraging mission. They take all the pack animals.

He sends out a particular commander. They go out there to try to find food and they get surrounded in their area. The hills around where they go get surrounded by the natives, and they're told that when nightfall happens, they're in grave danger. So Alexander has to put a crack force together, including our wonderful Lagranian javelinman, the archers he likes, a few elite guys, and they go with Alexander leading, see he's involved firsthand in this, and they have a rescue leading. See, he's involved firsthand in this

and they have a rescue mission to go get them out of this area where they've been foraging before the natives can wipe them out. But Alexander's problem now is he's stuck. He can't assault the city without being assaulted from the surrounding heights, from the people on the other side of him. He can't go after the people on the surrounding heights

without the city sallying forth and getting him. Adrian Goldsworthy, in his book, Philip and Alexander, sort of lays out the situation, pointing out that trying to disengage from an enemy you're in contact with is one of the most difficult things in all military maneuvers. And Goldsworthy writes, quote, The situation was dangerous. Alexander did not have enough men to attack the city and simultaneously fight off Glaucius, who is the other Illyrian commander, and could not stay for long where he was, because finding

food and forage would only leave detachments open to ambush. Yet escape would not be easy, for there was only a narrow route, broken by patches of woodland and enclosed by higher ground held by Glaucius on one side and the river on the other. Arian claimed that at times the track was barely wide enough for four men to march abreast. And then he continues by saying, Withdrawal in the face of the enemy is rarely an easy thing to do, especially in mountainous terrain against highly mobile bands of warriors accustomed to the country and inclined to see retreat as a sign of cowardice."

This is where Aryan's story becomes adrenaline-fueled, because he gives us sort of a movie-like account of Alexander being here, there, and everywhere and rescuing troops in trouble and trying to get this entire affair of his army extricated from a problem that maybe you could get some demerits for having gotten in in the first place. But what he does is masterful. And he starts off by using the same sort of psychology that we mentioned when he was dealing with the

Geety coming through the cornfields. Well, that's what they called it in the ancient ways of wheat fields, whatever you want to say. And the emergence all of a sudden of the troops they are providing the awe followed by the shock. Ian Worthington basically lays it out. And so when we said earlier, you wonder if something like this is a tool in Alexander's toolbox, well, that question gets answered. Worthington says, quote, To gain the upper hand over his foes, Alexander turned to psychological pressure, something for which he would become famous.

He decided to put on what appeared to be military maneuvers, arranging his entire phalanx into a single block 150 ranks deep with cavalry squadrons of 200 or so on either side of it. The men were ordered to march back and forth with their sarissas, those are their pikes, up, lowered as if for a charge, and then pointing to the right and left before forming into their standard wedge formation. All of these moves, Worthington writes, were carried out in total silence, except for the sharp commands to the men to change the directions and angle of their weapons. Thinking that Alexander was simply drilling his troops, Glaucius and his men began to move forward, more to get a better look at the rigorous

and disciplined training of the Macedonian infantry than anything else. In doing so, Worthington writes, they played into Alexander's hands. The king waited till they were close enough and then gave a pre-arranged signal. At once the men turned to face the enemy and shattered the silence as they clashed their swords against their armor and at the top of their voices roared out their battle cry. Alalalalalalai, I don't know how to pronounce the battle cry, over and over again. The tribesmen, the Toulantii practically jumped out of their skins and in panic turned tail and fled."

That's what we were talking about earlier, the fact that so many people can be spooked into running or turning tail because the momentum when some people run for the rest of the people to run is contagious, right? Phobos, the god of fear. And Alexander and all the great commanders, right, understand this. And that was simply a display of military drill that so intimidated the tribesmen. Adrian Goldsworthy says, who couldn't have fought this way and wouldn't have wanted to in a way that made them back off of Alexander and give him room to sort of, if you will, make a run for it with his troops.

It's interesting to note that the level of drill here, assuming all of this is true, although I can see it happening with the Romans, for example, so I don't know why it couldn't have happened with Alexander, the level of drill freaked out the Illyrians. I mean, it's a little like Alexander, and I'm reminded of the animal kingdom again, where you just can see, you know, warfare when,

you know, we haven't started fighting yet, but I can look at you, and there's an intimidation thing. It's Mike Tyson on one side of the ring, and the other guy on the other side. I haven't started punching you yet, but I'm already working on you psychologically. He's got his troops drilling in front of him as a way to say, look at what I can do here, do you really want a piece of this?

And it freaks them out. And then when he yells at them, it's like, okay, you're getting a piece of it whether you want it or not. And the crowd backs off. I've always described crowds of people like herds of horses. And when the first horses spook, the whole crowd kind of spooks. It's worth taking a second and just acknowledging here what Aryan says the capabilities of Alexander's forces were in terms of movement and drill because this is an often debated subject

in ancient and medieval warfare, right? How much drill was normal? What were the capabilities like? ancient and medieval warfare, right? How much drill was normal? What were the capabilities like? Some people think, you know, and sometimes they're right, that these military forces in the ancient world are little more than mobs of people. But then you see the Romans or Alexander here or the Chinese and all of a sudden it's as regimented as anything you'd see later. What Arian talks about here is Alexander's forces being able to do things like moving in a zigzag manner at high speed, forming wedges out of... I mean, it's exactly the sort of thing you would see on a parade ground with people graduating from a military boot camp today.

And you're not always going to get a lot of insight into how these people moved and were drilled. So this is an interesting clue that will allow us to understand later when Alexander's forces are doing things, exactly how they're moving, for example. Now how long these formations stay in good shape once they're fighting the enemies, another one of those things people argue about. The truth of the matter is though, a lot of this is just for show, as we said, for the psychological impact,

because Alexander knows darn well he's not in the kind of terrain where being able to form up like this makes much of a difference. He's gonna be in something closer to like an individual knife fight amongst the rocks in the hills rather than something where you can deploy this whole phalanx and fight the way you want to. But for a second he's got a little respite. He's scared the natives away a little bit so he

turns with the forces he has and they sort of run. And the next vibe you get from Arion here is sort of the great escape Right we're gonna get away with the natives nipping at his heels the whole way right show any sign of weakness slow down They're gonna get you Then all of a sudden in front of them is a hill right so you can feel the adrenaline right now the hill is occupied by the enemy So Alexander puts a strike force together. They're gonna go up and take this hill But the enemy deserts the hill they don't want to have anything to do with Alexander. This is a sign by the way, of the kind of terrain we're talking about in Illyria, because to escape the hill, they run uphill, right?

There's apparently either bigger hills or mountains on both sides of this hill. So they escaped the hill by on both sides going up. But apparently the hill is now available. Alexander gets to the hill and now they have to cross some river. Alexander tells his forces to cross the river. And when you get to the other side, start forming up immediately. So that if they cross the river on our heels, they'll face a fully formed army when they get there, but somebody has to be the rear guard and protect

the rest of the army so they can get across and form up. Normally you'd leave that probably to some underling, not this time, Alexander's out there with his like a Granean javelin man and his 2000 archer, I mean the same guys and his little guard and they're going to hold the river basically. And it is, well, there's no other way to put it, exciting, death-defying. And my brain instantly tries to follow the breadcrumbs back to that moment and ask how close is this to anything that really happened once upon a time? Cuz when you read your Aryan, you sure want it to be true. And from the Pamela Mensch translation in the wonderful landmark Arian, she has Arian

translated saying this, quote, When the enemy troops saw Alexander's forces crossing the river, they rushed down the mountains to attack the column's rear as it withdrew. As they drew near, Alexander and the men with him sallied out, and the phalanx raised its war cry as though to move back through the river and attack. The enemy troops, with all of Alexander's forces charging them, gave way and fled, at which point Alexander led the agranians and archers on the double to the river. He was the first to get across, and when he saw the enemy attacking his rearguard, he

had the siege engines set up on the bank and ordered that they fire every possible kind of missile at the farthest range. He also ordered the archers to fire a volley from the middle of the river, for they too had started to cross. The men with Glaucius did not dare to come within range of this barrage, and so the Macedonians crossed the river safely. None of them died in the retreat." End quote. So Alexander masterfully gets himself out of the trap that he himself fell into. How do you grade that?

Well, before you answer, as they used to say in the TV sales pitch videos, hold on. There's more. Don't grade quite yet, because how do we provide a little extra credit to this assignment when we realize that Alexander then goes back and kills everybody? Let me elaborate. Apparently the Illyrians figure that they've won here. They've driven Alexander off. He's this, you know, this big bad 20 year old with this killer army is running away and they nipped at the teals and good riddance to you and stay out, right? But Alexander's apparently staying in contact with them enough to get intelligence back

that they're not being very careful. They think he's gone. They're not putting out guards. They're not safely fortifying their camps. They're vulnerable, in other words. And so he sends his forces back. He's preparing a full-on attack, but when he gets close by, once again, leading it himself,

he sees that they're completely unready for anything. So he just goes after them. Here's the way my translation from Aubrey de Selencor puts it, Aryan says, quote, the moment was ripe for attack. So without waiting for the entire force to concentrate, he, Alexander, sent into action the agranians and the archers, who made a surprise assault on a narrow front, a formation likely to fall with greatest effect upon the enemy at his weakest point.

Some they killed in their beds, others they took without difficulty as they tried to escape. Many were caught and killed on the spot, many more as they fled in panic and disorder. Not a few were captured alive. The pursuit was pressed as far as the mountains. In, they were talking about the tribe that they were fighting territory, he says none escaped except at the cost of throwing away their weapons. Cletus's first move was to the town. Later he set fire to it and made his way to the Talangians, where he sought refuge with Glaucius."

So Alexander and his strike force, his agranians and his two thousand archers and his little elite group go in there at night. They're supposed to be like a reconnaissance force, but when they get there everything is so perfectly right they don't wait for the rest of the army. They fall on these guys, kill them in their beds, drive them out, his foe runs into his fortified city that Alexander had been camped out in front of, decides that he has no hope, lights the entire city on fire, flees to his allies. So how do you grade a guy that gets himself in a position like that and then turns it around into that kind of a victory.

What's more, when you look at what's going on here, Alexander leading essentially a group of commandos in at night to go destroy an enemy army by hand. I mean, it's just so different than what you think about him being known for as a general. As we said, these great field battles of thousands of people in Brawndale, and here he is basically acting, you know, as a Force 10 from Navarone sort of leader, albeit a very large force from Navarone, but nonetheless, it's not the kind of generalship.

I mean, this is a guy who's like knife fighting amongst the rocks. It's a weird sort of thing. You can't imagine Napoleon doing that, right? And yet it puts you in a weird position, right? If you're knife fighting amongst the rocks, you could easily get killed, which is exactly the rumor that is going around Greece right around this time. Alexander has no time to enjoy this victory. He has no time to follow up on it. If that was his plan, and no one knows what his plan was.

He has no time to rest and refit an army that was tired when it got to Illyria, because he gets a 911 call from down south nearer to Greece that all Greece is in rebellion, and it's getting worse by the day. It's like a fire. It spreads, it intensifies, and if he doesn't get down there fast, there will be no stopping it. The worry is that the alliance of Carania that his father defeated could be reforged. And just like it was back then, the city of Thebes is ground zero for it all. There is Persian money at work here? And was it Cicero that said, the sinews of war are endless money well

anyone who knows this period knows that when you look at the Achaemenid Persian Empire it seems like they are the equivalent of the dragon smog from the hobbit sitting on a giant pile of gold that no matter how much they spend never seems to get any smaller and they'd had a leadership crisis over the last little bit. The leadership crisis is settled. They have a new king on the throne. They've examined the situation here, realized that Alexander is not a simpleton, a child, or a boob. And they better start spending some money,

or they're gonna be facing him, you know, in person. They already have a 10,000-man force of Macedonians in their territory, causing trouble. So all of a sudden, the spigots are open, money's being distributed. And somehow our old friend in Athens, Demosthenes, is the conduit. He's the money launderer. He's the arms trader here. And there are all sorts of accusations, by the way, from some of the ancients. Most of the stuff I read from the modern secondary sources and historians say

almost certainly not true, but that De Bosnia is taking these enormous sums of money, truly arms dealer type money even today and keeping it. But ancient sources like Diodorus Siculus say he's paying for weapons and the weapons are being sent to the Thebans to support what's going on in Thebes, and the weapons are being sent to the Thebans to support what's going on in Thebes, which is talked about by a couple of different sources, and yet the sources begin to diverge with this story. This is an important story. It is one of the most significant blights

on Alexander's career coming up here. And so people who want to paint Alexander in a positive light have to figure out ways to spin some of this story. Deodorus Siculus is not one of those people as we told you before. He spends all of two sentences on all the stuff we just covered. The Thracians, the Treballi, the Celts, the Illyrians, all that stuff. That's two sentences. He's going to go into depth in what's about to happen here. In Thebes, depth in what's about to happen here. In Thebes, Arian does the same thing, but Arian's sources, guys like Ptolemy, have every incentive here to try to absolve Alexander from some responsibility, which is tough to do when you're the king. My favorite account of what happens in Thebes,

to spark this whole rebellion, comes from Conquest and Empire by A.B. Bosworth. Basically it involves some of the people that Philip, Alexander's dad, threw out of Thebes because they were anti-him, right? Anti-Philip elements. Throw them out of Thebes, get the hell out, you're banished. They come back when Alexander's gone and they are part of a rumor spreading that Alexander is dead. Now there's a lot to this Alexander is dead thing you have to kind of unpack to know from a legal standpoint, because some of this stuff is all going to be argued in legalese over what the contract was where we had this

agreement where you're going to follow me and if Alexander is actually dead, there's an argument to be made that any deal that all these places like Thebes and Athens and everywhere any deal They made with Alexander's null and void right if you're dead, and you have no air. You know there is no deal We're not rebelling against you the deal was off the minute you died And that's what I heard happened and when you are like Alexander doing the equivalent of having knife fights amongst the rocks up in Elyria It's not that hard to make a case that you might be dead. When you don't have continual supply lines, like we talked about, bearing constant messages back and forth so you're in touch with the army in the field. It's easy to just say,

we haven't heard anything for a long time, they're probably gone. Some of these rumors are suggest that the army itself was lost. Can you imagine if Alexander and the army was lost, how hard it would be to keep a bunch of people who only recently were subjected to Macedonian rule, how hard it would be to keep them down? Here's the way A.B. Bosworth describes what happens, and to understand when he says the word cadmia, this is the sort of the, we would call it a garrison, it's in the Acropolis, I guess, of Thebes, and it's where the garrison that Philip put in there of Macedonian troops is sort of headquartered, and when

this rebellion is going to start, the Thebans are going to sort of put that under siege, and A.B. Bosworth says, quote, As the campaign in the north continued, and no word of its progress reached the south, the rumor circulated that he, Alexander, had been killed. In the Athenian assembly, Demosthenes produced an eyewitness of his death, and speculation was rife over the whole of southern Greece. At Thebes, there was an insurrection.

A group of exiles wishing to repeat the glorious revolution of 379 entered the city by night, murdered two members of the Macedonian garrison, who were surprised outside the Cadmia, and pressed for revolution in the assembly. The Thebans rose to the appeal and laid siege to the cadmium. They abolished the oligarchic government imposed by Philip. It was as a democracy that they passed legislation to resist Alexander. The sovereign assembly ratifying a formal, it means proclamation, by the leaders of the revolt who met in council.

These actions, Bosworth writes, had challenged every aspect of the common peace, an existing constitution had been subverted by exiles, and the city was openly at war with Macedon." The Thebans can put about 7,000 really good troops in the field. That's nowhere near enough to take on the Macedonians of course but the Greeks usually fight outsiders by forming alliances between city-states or leagues and in this case the Thebans put out a 911 call asking for help. They take the money Demosthenes gives them and they arm all their slaves and they press into service anybody who's in their city just happen to be traveling

from elsewhere. I mean imagine you're going to sell medical supplies in some foreign country and then while you're there working the country you're in gets into a war with its neighbors and they hand you a weapon and say sorry we have to everybody who's capable of carrying arms we need you. So the Thebans are desperate and they expect help and help is on the way but then the help that is on the way stops, and this becomes a pattern. The Arcadian League, for example, raises an army, sends it to the Isthmus, which is what divides the south of Greece and the rest of Greece, and they just sit there.

Demosthenes is able to get the Athenians to say, yeah, we're with the Thebans, but they don't do anything more than that. Everybody's kind of waiting. I mean, what's gonna happen here? Is Alexander dead? And if he's not, what's gonna happen to Thebes? And besides, these signs are terrible. Remember, this is a people that believe in what their oracles tell them.

If you can ever make sense of the opaque magic eight ball style answers that these oracles often give. But the signs have not looked good for months. Deodorus Siculus says that a giant spider's web appeared outside a very important shrine and it was iridescent and rainbow. They're seeing blood on the water in certain important places. Certain other shrines are having issues, and the statues in thieves begin to sweat.

In my Robin Waterfield translation of Diodorus, he explains what all this is. And remember, Diodorus believes it. And he says, quote, in the first place, a fine spider's web appeared in the sanctuary of Demeter, which was not just as big as a, and then he describes a very big thing, but was also surrounded by an iridescent sheen like a rainbow in the sky. When they consulted the Delphic Oracle about it, they received the following reply. The Oracle says, this sign is intended by the gods for all men, but especially for the

Beoceans and their neighbors. The Beo for the Boeotians and their neighbors. The Boeotians being the Thebans and their neighbors. So the Thebans then take this question to a local shrine, because you know, if it's for the Boeotians and their neighbors, why not consult our own shrine? And Diodorus says, quote, and the national oracle of Thebes gave them this reply. The woven web is bad for one, but good for another. This sign says Diodorus appeared about three months before Alexander came to Thebes. And then at the time of his arrival, the statues in the Agora visibly dripped sweat and were

covered with great gouts of it. He then says that there were reports of a sound very like a bellow, he says, coming from certain important marshes. A blood-colored ripple was running down the surface of the water in another location. At Delphi, he says, there was blood on the roof of a temple that involved the Thebans. Deodorus says the message that was being sent is clear. The professional interpreters of signs said that the meaning of the web was that the gods were departing from the city, while its many hues meant that there would be a storm of various troubles, that the sweating statues meant overwhelming disaster,

and that the appearance of blood in several places meant that a great slaughter would take place in the city. Since the gods were clearly predicting catastrophe for the city, the advice of the experts was that the Thebans should not commit themselves to deciding the war on the battlefield, but should rely on negotiation as an alternative, safer way to settle matters." The Theban response seems to be something along the lines of, screw that, we're fighting. Now as we said earlier, the accounts of Arian and Diodorus start to differ quite a bit here. Diodorus sounds like he's writing about the American Revolution from the American side, and Aryan

sounds like he's writing it from the British side, and yet the story of the American Revolution that they're writing about in that story, the American Revolution is crushed by the British, and it's hundreds of years later, and Aryan's basically trying to explain all this freedom and independence stuff that was being thrown around Thebes, and he basically treats it like a kind of a delusion, or that the people are preyed upon by these slick guys using the cute old words, right? Using freedom and liberty as a way to sort of arouse the people into a fever that would lead to terrible things.

And by the way, this is from my Martin Hammond translation and Arian is explaining the story from the start here. He says, quote, meanwhile, some of the translation and Arian is explaining the story from the start here. He says, quote, Meanwhile, some of the Theban exiles who had been expelled from the city made a covert return to Thebes at night, invited back by a group in the city with revolutionary intent. These exiles captured and killed Amintas and Timalais, two officers of the garrison occupying the Cadmia, who were outside their base, quite unsuspecting of any enemy action. They then came before the assembly and incited the Thebans to revolt from Alexander, making

play with the fine old slogans of freedom and independence, and urging that now at last was the time to be rid of the heavy hand of Macedonian rule." Aryan then kind of provides an out here for the common people that maybe they didn't believe all this liberty stuff necessarily, but the revolutionaries were telling them that Alexander was dead and that seemed to be the better argument from their point of view. Aryan says, quote, What told more with the general people was their assertion that Alexander had died in Illyria.

There was indeed a strong and widespread rumor to this effect, since he had been away long, and no word had come from him. So that as tends to happen at such times, in ignorance of the facts, people assumed what they wanted to believe." End quote. So dismissive of the people, treating things like freedom and independence as slogans that politicians would use to sort of move the dull masses. But I've always found it a fascinating sort of way to approach it. Remember, Arian lives at a time when he's subject to an emperor, and he likes it.

But he kind of makes it sound like these revolutionaries, as he calls them, are leading the people by the nose here, and they've got to keep these lies. There's a Jim Jones aspect to this in the way Arian does it. Got to keep these lies alive. Unfortunately for them, Alexander is on the way to show that they are lies. And he's coming at a truly Alexandrian pace. As we pointed out, this is one of his great qualities. Peter Green says the pace of Alexander's advance here outpaces the news of his arrival.

Diodorus Siculus just says, all of a sudden Alexander's army just appeared outside the gates of Thebes. Ian Worthington breaks it down more than that though. Alexander turns his army south from Illyria and marches it. Remember it's tired already 250 miles in 13 days with one day off to rest. Remember most of these guys are on foot. Crazily enough I read in a couple of different sources, because it's shocking, the army seem to make the same 18 to 20 miles per day rate, whether they're on flat easy ground or going through crazy mountain passes. The revolutionaries as Aryan would call them in the city find out that Alexander is on

the way when he's like three or four hours March distant. And of course the people that are buying the revolutionaries you know jive, Aryan would say, look to them and say what about this and so they say that's not Alexander. He could never be here that fast. That's Antipater, his general that was in Macedonia. This isn't the full Macedonian army and that's not Alexander. But Alexander had sent a message to Antipater basically saying, get the rest of the army together that's not with me on this northern strike force and meet me outside the walls of Thebes.

He tells the other cities around Thebes that have been sort of bullied by Thebes for a while, hey, you know, something bad might happen to the bully you don't like. You want to be there? Meet me there too and by the time the Thebans see an army basically appearing nearby them it's 30,000 foot and 3,000 horse ah with siege weapons Alexander and the army just sort of camp out in front of Thebes for a couple of days the sources sources say, and negotiations start. The sources make it sound like Alexander tries to be cool here, mainly because he

doesn't want this problem at all. Certainly doesn't want to damage his army. He's planning on going over and attacking the Persians and all this is just upsetting his timeline. He wants it to go away. All he asks for is a couple of ringleaders to be turned over. Really cool terms. The Thebans are having none of it.

Diodorus sort of writing from the position of the American revolutionaries in the Revolutionary War that got crushed, um, that it's a give-me-liberty or give-me-death moment. And if not, they're pumping themselves up, he says, by reminding themselves how badass they used to be. And now they still are, actually, but there's only like 7,000 of them, and

Alexander can't believe that 7,000 of them are ready to face 30,000 Macedonian infantry and 3,000 Macedonian horse that is so experienced, veteran, and nasty that they're gonna go take over the biggest empire in the world. I mean, just seems ludicrous. And Aryan, portraying it from the upper-class British side of British side of things after we destroyed those colonial several hundred years ago, tries to have some sort of sympathy with the people suggesting that they're just deluded again by these revolutionaries, as he points out, who have everything to lose because no matter what happens, they're not going to fare well. So why not, you know, take the whole city down with them? And Alexander's

hip to that because he actually says at one point in the, you know, take the whole city down with them and Alexander's hip to that because he actually says at one point in the You know with the negotiations between the two he's sending Harold's out They're sending Harold's out and they're yelling to each other the terms He actually says hey anybody in the city that doesn't want to go along with that, right? How'd you like to be on the losing end of a 60-40 vote on do we you know take on Alexander or not? He's basically says to the 40% that were on the losing end or whatever it was Hey, if you didn't agree with that, you can come over and you'll be spared just come out of the city But instead, you know, he gets attacked by a light infantry and cavalry sort of

Quick strike force that kills a couple of Macedonians not necessarily in the order. I just portrayed it This is all kind of happening at once. These are the negotiations to try to figure out whether this battle really has to happen But then the Thebans do something that in hindsight, but they must have known it in a way to looks like taunting the lion here and when Alexander basically says Portraying himself by the way Peter Green says is sort of the lawful representative of the League of Corinth, right? He's not a butcher or a conqueror. He's coming here to enforce the rules. We all agreed on I'm not some you know bad guys So that's that's he's sort of portraying himself that way Peter Green says though that the response of the Thebans here in the face of potential obliteration

puts the lie to Alexander's framing of himself here and Green writes, quote, The Thebans, of course, knew this as well as anyone. And their next move deliberately blew Alexander's polite fiction sky high in the most public possible manner. By doing so, they sealed their own fate. From the highest tower of Thebes, their herald made a counterdemand and a counteroffer. They would, he announced, be willing to negotiate with Alexander if the Macedonian first surrendered

Antipater and Philotus." Let me stop you there. It's like asking for two of their top guys. Yeah, why don't you give us your two tough guys and we all won't go after you. Green continues, quote. After this little pleasantry, he went on to proclaim, now quoting the Herald, that anyone who wished to join the great king of Persia and Thebes in freeing the Greeks and destroying the tyrant of Greece should come over to them. Green says, quote, The venomous conciseness of this indictment was calculated to flick Alexander on the jaw.

And the reference to a Persian Entente, which might just conceivably be true, could hardly help striking home. If the Theban's main object was to provoke the king into discarding his holier than thou mask. They succeeded all too well. The word tyrant stung Alexander. No one likes hearing unwelcome home truths about themselves, least of all a general whose men are within earshot, and he flew into one of his famous rages."

Alexander is famous for his rages, and this is really the first time we bring it up, because it's the first time it really comes into play. At the same time, there are power politics reasons for doing what he's about to do also. So it is tough to know where one leaves off and the other begins. Plutarch, the ancient, also Greek, but in the Roman era historian Plutarch, mentions this early on. And Waldemar Heckel, in his book In the Path of Conquest, points it out when he says, quote.

For the first of many times, Alexander meant to use the terror of destruction and annihilation to make an example of those who dared to defy him, thinking that, now quoting Plutarch, the Greeks would be shocked by a disaster of such proportions, and thus frightened into inaction." End quote. So maybe when it comes to the anger versus the power politics move, maybe a little of column A, a little of column B. Now I can't help but think about this divide for a minute because if Alexander doing this purely for geopolitical reasons, power politics reasons, well, shoot, that's just par for the course, right?

How many leaders and generals and conquerors in history do things for that reason? But if this guy's really doing a lot of what he's doing because he loses it sometimes, regrets it later, wish it didn't happen, but of course you can't really turn back time. If some of what happens in this story is based on this guy getting pissed off and not being able to control himself, think about what a personality trait that is and how it sort of intersects with some key moments in history here, like this one. Diodorus says Alexander shows up, he's going to be cool, he wants to make a deal, just

wants to get on with this because remember the last time he showed up with an army outside of Thebes, the Thebans just sort of rolled over right away and maybe he had this idea that they could do it again. Green basically says Alexander was gonna let him get off the hook with the we thought you were dead thing, right? So how cool can you be? And the Thebans, in their Waterfield translation, Deodorus says Alexander thought the Thebans treated him with contempt. In the Loeb classical translation, it says that Alexander figured out essentially

that the Thebans despised him. And so he decided to destroy the city utterly. And then Deodorus says he made that call and said, anybody who wanted to surrender could and the Thebans essentially flipped him off, which made him go crazy. And that's when he decided, Diodorus says, to destroy the city even worse than he decided to destroy the city before, and to teach the rest of Grisa lessons. So sort of a side benefit there. So there's a actual order that, okay, you pissed me off finally enough, and it's on.

And Plutarch makes it sound sort of more mechanical too, you know, are you going to give me what I want? No? Okay, we're attacking. Arian though, remember what I said, if you're trying to explain away something that is a famous blight on Alexander the Great's reputation, you got to jump through some hoops now here and if your main source is Ptolemy, who was probably there and who had people he hated commanding other parts of the army, and it's your account we're going from, and you also want to try to absolve Alexander as much as you can from responsibility, because, well, it reflects on you.

He was your friend. There's a whole lot of things involved here. Well, Arian has Alexander, the complete opposite of a rage machine. Alexander is the absolute soul of, you know, sort of rationality. He's reluctant to do anything. Both he and Deodorus say that he just sort of camps out in front of Thebes for a little while. And can you imagine, you know, you could do a whole movie on what it must have been like inside the city in terms of the percolating arguments between people. Remember, all these Greek cities are divided

into different factions and these revolutionaries, they come in and now they have Alexander outside their gates and it's only like two or three weeks since the so-called revolution, right? Actually, as I do the math here, it's probably closer to a month, but you get the point. I mean, people must be boiling over, some wanna surrender, and Alexander says,

you know, you can surrender. Some wanna fight on, especially the guys who are gonna get executed no matter what. I mean, it's always dangerous. All real historians will tell you, it's crazy dangerous to play with analogies here. But the way the translations all phrase it from the primary sources is this is a freedom thing, even if what the Thebans think of as freedom doesn't match what we think of as

freedom at all. And we should also point out that, you know, before we side to wholeheartedly with the Thebans here as people who like freedom ourselves, the neighbors of Thebes who were often at the receiving end of Thebes bullying and whatnot, they might say, why are you siding with the bad guys here? And when they side with Alexander, they're finally getting a chance to punch the bully in the nose, maybe. But in this case, the rhetoric of Thebes in the translations appeals to us because it sounds like, well if you're an American

especially, but the funny thing about the Americans against the British is once upon a time you know the British are having their own revolutions. I mean people all over the world can understand this idea of being in a sort of a war to preserve or regain one's freedom and independence and maybe having it be a war against all odds and that's the way that they've been sort of see this thing. And so when Alexander says just give me those two guys and we'll call it good that also means and we'll go back to the way things were when I was running the show and you didn't have your freedom.

That's the real deal he's asking for. And a lot of us can understand being unwilling to take a deal like that. The difference here though, when it starts getting really dark and you can just feel it is the thievens, first of all, arming your slaves and arming the merchants and the people who are just visiting the city with weapons gives you a sense of the Level of the danger but it's also the taking of your wives and your children and all of the old people and Running them into the sanctuaries and religious temples Hoping that if something bad happens and you know, the odds are probably 80 20

I mean you can puff yourself up all you want and you can say that the defenses and being on the defensive of the city here is a force multiplier and it is, but this is an army that is just about to go overseas and take on the biggest empire in the world. They're veterans, they've never lost under Alexander, rarely lost under his father. This doesn't look good. So you hope when you take your vulnerable parts of the population to the temples that they'll be safe there, and there's a pretty good chance they won't, and you know that. Off the top of my head, I find it hard to think of anything more likely to create a sense of crushing pressure and desperation on the part of everyone in this story. I mean, the mother looking down at their child in one of these temples, thinking about what

the next 24 hours might look like, the soldier on the front line thinking about his family back in these temples and knowing what happens in the sacking of cities in the ancient world normally. Thinking about that happening to the peo... I can't think of anything more likely to make me fight with unbelievable ferocity than that. And it still blows my mind that when the Thebans apparently had a get out of jail free card here, and none of this had to happen, they didn't use it.

Right? They were offered the chance to get out of this with just handing over a couple of ringleaders, you know, a couple of these revolutionary thugs who came into the city, maybe Arian would say, and hoodwinked the people and they turned it down. All they had to do was give up their freedom and none of this has to happen. And if this turns out the way it's likely to turn out, they're not going to have any freedom anyway. That's the real irony of the whole deal. And this is what they chose and they thought they were going to have help.

But interestingly enough, the other Greek states who also want their own freedom, autonomy, liberty, and all that sort of stuff, whatever it means to them, they think that maybe the Thebans are getting what they deserve here because after all, nobody told you to be that thick-necked about it, right? You could have negotiated. That's what the oracles and signs were all saying and the prophecies, nobody told you to be that thick-necked about it, right? You could have negotiated. That's what the oracles and the signs were all saying and the prophecies. But you had to go be all thick-necked about it. Had to take that give me liberty or give me death thing a little bit too literally.

Well, I can't help you this time. And the Thebans, knowing this, go through with this anyway. It's a very interesting situation. Diodorus looks at it as positively heroic. Arian says Alexander marches his army around to the side of one of Thebes's walls at a certain point. You have to imagine the city surrounded by a nice stout wall all the way around, but on one part of it, it butts right up to that area where Alexander's Macedonian garrison is trapped and has been under siege

since this little revolution began, right? The Thebans built a couple of palisades out there to sort of wall it off from any sort of help. But it's right up against the wall. Those palisades, I had to look it up to get a real good idea. What they mean when they say that is that, and there can be variations, or imagine those sorts of walls that you've seen that are essentially a bunch of tree trunks sharpened at

the top and then placed in the ground one right next to another so there's no gaps between them. And there's a couple of those, a couple of lines of them with space for troops to fight in between that now is sort of, if you think about it this way, the weak spot in the defenses. Because instead of the stout regular wall of Thebes, they have this, you know, double sort of temporary wall and that's where Alexander takes his troops over to that side. Because if he can punch through there, he's also right by, you know, where all his other soldiers are trapped and the garrison can link up with his forces and then it's all over. The Thebans know this too, so that's where they've placed their troops and this whole battle is going to be fought over these barricades. It's a barricade battle if you will. It's good for the

Thebans, it nullifies some of what the Macedonians do best. Sort of is a great equalizer, didn't we say a force multiplier earlier, but they're still outnumbered four or five to one. And while they're regular soldiers, they're 7000 infantry and cavalry are very good. You can't count on the slaves to do well against the Macedonians, or you're traveling salesman, or your guy just vacationing in Thebes or to visit his mother or whatever it is that you've just armed. This is a bit of a last stand sort of deal. It reminds you of all the great last stands in history, from Thermopylae to the Alamo and

all those kinds of things. With a small chance of success, Deodorus makes it even a little bit more of a close run thing. Deodorus and Plutarch both have Alexander sort of preparing his forces for the assault and then when he's ready, when the artillery is assembled, launching it essentially, pretty straightforward. Arian, on the other hand, as we've already alluded to, using Ptolemy as a source and Ptolemy having every reason to absolve Alexander for as much of this responsibility

as possible, says that the fighting started when one of Alexander's subordinates, named Perticus, attacked with his forces without orders, an unauthorized assault. The leader of the unauthorized assault just happens to be the arch enemy of Ptolemy. So I mean, think about how elegant this is, he gets to write his history, gets to laud and sort of defend his boss and friend and the person he owes his legitimacy to, while at the same time,

turning around and shifting the blame for all these terrible things Alexander's critics say about how he handled all this Theban stuff and blame it all on his worst enemy. It's a two for one deal. It's wonderful. But we have to notice it. Doesn't mean it didn't happen. Adrian Goldsworthy, in his Philip and Alexander, he talks about how when you station troops so close together, maybe with that barricade in between them, but think about the things that are said to one another.

It's not uncommon for troops to sort of, in an unauthorized way, just lose it in assault. When that happens though, no matter what the reason, Alexander is forced to throw in more troops to protect the flank so that Perticus and his forces don't get cut off and surrounded. That sucks in eventually the rest of Alexander's army, and the Aryan account is one where Alexander never even really launched the assault on Thebes, he just got dragged into it. Plausible deniability. For whatever happens next, it's all Perdicus's fault. Perdicus, though, in the Diodorus version is like the hero, the guy who leads sort of a commando assault when Alexander is somewhere in the midst of the fighting, sees an unguarded gate or door.

But before that happens, things break out over the Palisade and Diodorus says everybody starts throwing everything they can over sort of the divide. It's easier for me to envision this kind of a battle than a more open ancient battle because you can see this sometimes in riots And go look at riot footage where you have a barricade Essentially of shields or a wall in there and the fight it breaks up the fighting and turns it into something that is pretty predictable So these large groups of people sort of throwing things over the barricade and and pushing and shoving No specific word on whether the artillery was used to punch a hole in one of these palisades,

but somehow a hole is punched. And no one says, of course, how wide it is, but Perticus and his forces streamed through and are able to get to the second palisade. Remember, there's one, an open space, and then another, but he and his troops get trapped there and stopped and the fighting's going on. Alexander sends the Agranians and the archers, you know, his famous quick strike force,

into the breach, tells them to fan out. They start apparently trapping a Theban unit. Again, hard to imagine the sizes of the forces we're talking about here. But I love the way in Arian, he specifically says over by the sunken road near the Temple of Heracles as though it's still there you can go see it. That's right where they got all trapped and the archers are sort of keeping them at bay. And then at a certain point Arian says the Thebans who are kept at bay run away, the light troops chase them, and then at almost like a pre-arranged signal, the Thebans who are running away with a shout turnaround in formation.

You can almost see it's like a movie where the archers and everybody who are chasing them and so confident all of a sudden are at the point of the spears. And Arian says about 70 archers were killed along with their leader. The rest of them run back towards Alexander supposedly for the protection of the heavier troops and while the Thebans who just killed those archers and just turned around and yelled and had this temporary victory, while they're chasing now the people that used to be chasing them, they get all strung out, they lose formation and then they run into Alexander and the close-order troops. Diodorus has an account that is much more last-standish with the Thebans doing so well they almost win. He says they take on Alexander's

first forces and they wear them down. He says that the Macedonians have the numbers and the depth of the formation, but the Thebans, because they go to the gym, are in better shape, and that the two sort of balance each other out for a while. And then after the Thebans, Diodorus says, send the first unit back to go rest and refit. Alexander throws in the reserves, which normally would do the trick according to Diodorus. When the reserves come in, that's normally when it's over,

but not this time, the Thebans fighting for all that they had, you know, for freedom, for their families, back in the temples, everything. They're holding their own now against the reserves, and sort of... Diodorus has them like yelling slurs at each other, and you know, you know, who's superior now? All these kinds of things.

But in a very like, Persians getting around the path of Thermopylae and attacking the Spartans in the rear way, as we said, Alexander specifically maybe, according to these accounts, spies an unguarded gate or door or something in the walls. He sends Perticus, the hero of the Deodorus story, I guess you could say, the villain of the Aryan story, to go with some troops and... take it. That gets him sort of behind the Theban defenses. And both Deodorus and Aryan sort of have this moment. It's the same moment where everything sort of falls apart.

And it's when the Thebans, in Aryan's account, they sort of get, uh, they panic. But in, uh, Diodorus' account, they realize that they've been compromised, and that the only way to not be surrounded is to back up into the walls of the city. So his is a more organized effort to continue the fight and just sort of retire to a better defensive position, whereas Arian makes it sound more like, uh, at a certain point, everybody just sort of retire to a better defensive position. Whereas Aryan makes it sound more like at a certain point, everybody just sort of panics. Diodorus explains what happens though.

And Aryan through his own lens talks about the same incident. So this is clearly the key moment in the battle. And Diodorus from the Loeb classical translation, and I think originally that was translated by C. Bradford Wells. Diodorus says, quote, So the Theban spirit proved unshakable here, but the king, meaning Alexander, took note of a postern gate that had been deserted by its guards, and hurried Perticus with a large detachment of troops to seize it and penetrate into the city.

He quickly carried out the order, and the Macedonians slipped through the gate into the city, while the Thebans, having worn down the first assault wave of Macedonians, stoutly faced the second and still had high hopes of victory. When they knew that a section of the city had been taken, however, they began immediately to withdraw within its walls. But in this operation, their cavalry galloped along with the infantry into the city, and trampled upon and killed many of their own men. They themselves rode into the city in disorder, and, encountering a maze of narrow alleys

and trenches, lost their footing and fell and were killed by their own weapons. At the same time, the Macedonian garrison in the Cadmium burst out of the citadel, engaged the Thebans, and attacking them in their confusion made great slaughter among them." As Diodorus says there, very quickly the Macedonians, when they broke through the city walls and got into the city, they ran up to where the Macedonian garrison was under siege, you know, unseized them, for lack of a better word, and had them join the fight too.

So it's all over, except for the killing. The last stand, if you will, is made over by a particular temple, which makes you wonder if it was sort of the fallback point, maybe the agreed upon place where everybody meets if all, you know, the worst happens. And maybe there's a lot of invalids and vulnerable population members holed up there. Who knows? Bring the army back there and defend everybody as best you can.

Eventually, the defenders are surrounded on all sides. They will break. Arion has the cavalry running out of the city at high speed and over the plain and getting away, and the infantry trying to save their skins, as he says, as best they can. But at a certain point, it's hard to know when that moment specifically happens,

but the vibe changes from one of fighting and battle, where both sides are equally at risk to sacking and killing and pillaging and looting. Diodorus talks about all of the Theban fighters who were still scattered in little pockets all over the city. Remember, this is a big city, and they had these narrow little Greek streets with sometimes buildings two, three, four stories tall on either side. So these are little bottleneck killing zones where Diodorus has soldiers who are so wounded from the fighting that they're essentially bleeding out slowly, supporting themselves on the haft of their broken spears, just waiting for some Macedonian to come down this little alley thinking he's

looting and enjoying himself and that all the danger is over. And then boom, you can still take one with you is what Churchill said, right? And that's how these Thebans and Diodorus' accounters looking at things, but otherwise it's pure murder, rape, and slaughter. This is the way in his book, Philip and Alexander, historian Adrian Goldsworthy puts it, quote. The Macedonians sacked the city.

They had done this before when cities had failed to surrender to Philip and forced him to take them by assault. But never before had they taken a Greek city as large and as famous as Thebes. Storming fortifications, Goldsworthy writes, was dangerous. And they had lost 500 dead, as well as no doubt many others wounded, including Perticus. The survivors, their blood up, anger at the enemy still fresh, and in the narrow streets and dark houses of the city, able to do what they wished, judged only by the opinions of

their comrades, killed, raped, and plundered at will." He then continues later, "'Murder and rape were accepted as inevitable when a city was stormed. While it is doubtful that Alexander and his officers could have controlled the army fully and entirely prevented such things, it is equally unlikely that they even thought to try, beyond protecting some households and individuals who were considered important or otherwise favored. This, Goldsworthy writes, was just part of war, and from a pragmatic point of view, Philip

and Alexander both recognized the power of terror." It wasn't just in terms of the atrocities, which again, if we're using modern terms here, made headlines everywhere, the Macedonians, especially in Aryan's account, get off a little easy here, because the worst of the atrocities are blamed not on the Macedonians, but on the Greeks who are fighting with Alexander, right? The ones he called up and said,

hey, we're gonna be taking on your bully, you wanna come? Those guys have an axe to grind, long, long standing problems and wounds and things that they could be angry at the Thebans about. And they're finally getting a chance to take revenge and they are taking revenge. As one historian said, though, while some of the worst atrocities might have been done by these Greek allies of Alexander's, the majority of what was done was done by the Macedonian soldiers. It didn't matter. It leaves an unbelievably bloody,

horrific taste in the mouth of a guy like Diodorus, who you can just hear. You know, we would say today he was a patriotic Greek, thinking of these ancestors of his from a couple hundred years previously. And it just hurts him to admit that the other Greeks were doing a lot of the terrible things, right? Fellow Greeks shouldn't be fighting fellow Greeks.

Arian is almost happy to blame it on them because it means it's not Alexander's fault. Diodorus from the Loeb Classical Translation says, quote. All the city was pillaged. Everywhere boys and girls were dragged into captivity as they wailed piteously the names of their mothers. In some, meaning in total, households were seized with all their members, and the city's enslavement was complete.

Of the men who remained, he writes, some, wounded and dying, grappled with the foe and were slain themselves as they destroyed their enemy. Others, supported only by a shattered spear, went to meet their assailants and in the supreme struggle held freedom dearer than life. As the slaughter mounted, Deodorus said, and every corner of the city was piled high with corpses, no one could have failed to pity the plight of the unfortunates."

Now the part that hurts this guy. We would call him a patriotic Greek today, and Greeks should not be doing this to other Greeks, but it must have gone on so much that even he has to admit it. And he says that these people who hated the Thracians got into the city with Alexander and did horrible things, he writes, quote. For even Greeks, thespians, Plataeans, and Orchaminians, and some others hostile to Thebes, who had joined the king in the campaign, meaning Alexander, invaded the city along with him, and now demonstrated their own hatred amid the calamities of the unfortunate victims.

So it was that many terrible things befell the city, he writes. Greeks were mercilessly slain by Greeks. Relatives were butchered by their own relatives, and even a common dialect induced no pity. In the end, he writes, when night finally intervened, the houses had been plundered, and the children and women and aged persons who had fled into the temples were torn from sanctuary and subjected to outrage without limit. Over 6,000 Thebans perished, more than 30,000 were captured, and the amount of property plundered was unbelievable.

End quote. But what to do, what to do, what to do with all this stuff? Alexander famously holds a sort of ad hoc spur of the moment, made up of what we have around us, kind of legal counsel to sort of represent the league of Corinth in miniature. They're gonna have a sort of a hearing. What do we do here with our slaves and this city and what's left? What we didn't kill, what's gonna happen to all of this? Now, this is another one of these things where half the time Alexander sounds like a barbarian

stomping around doing whatever he wants to do, no rules apply, and whatever. And the other half of the time he sounds like everything is strictly legal, all the arguments he makes with other Greek city-states could be made by lawyers. In this case, he's turning it over to someone else and he says to these other Greeks, well, listen, I'm just the representative, I'm the hegemon of this organization, but we're going to vote on what happens to the Thebans. Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of the people who could be scraped up on the spur of the moment, either accidentally or on purpose, are all these little city-states around Thebes that have been victims of its bullying forever. And somehow the deal is, if they vote the worst

possible penalty, the land that Thebes had will be parceled out amongst them. So what should we do to the Thebans? And if this was a gladiatorial contest, they give it the thumbs down. Now, Alexander, as so many historians have pointed out, will just basically do what they tell him to do, but as everyone says, but if he didn't want to do this, it wouldn't have happened. So this is cover. The thing is, is nobody can really believe anything like this will happen. I mean, if you want to use a modern term for what Thebes is in terms of how important a

Greek city-state it is, it is a city-state too big to fail. You just can't believe anybody would destroy it. I mean, Greek city-states have been destroyed before, but not like this. I mean, you know, if Athens is New York and Sparta was Chicago, then Thebes is Los Angeles, right? Once upon a time, Chicago was bigger than Los Angeles. but this time Los Angeles has eclipsed it, and I mean, you wouldn't want to destroy Los Angeles, which I mean, you know, some of you might, but the whole point being that you can't imagine the waste involved in taking out something that large

and important and meaningful. Well, interestingly enough, I was reading, it might have been Volomar Heckel, but it was somebody making a point I hadn't thought about really, which was that the logical play here for the arguments being made, because it's almost like a hearing, right? The other Theban bully victims would have every right to talk about all the things Thebes had done to them, right? We're gonna pay them back, cuz look at all these things. It's only fair, justice, but that's not what they do. They bring up the fact that the Thebans sided with the Persians 150 years ago. That's the angle they push, which happens to be

perfectly lined up with Alexander's propaganda angle here for this war. We're paying back these Persians for what they did to us 150 years ago, and oh yeah, the Thebans were on their side. And did you hear what they said to me? Alexander would have probably had somebody say for him. When we were all standing there, we all heard it, come and join the great king. Thebans and the great king working together again, wiping out Thebes is like saying, these guys were betraying us, the rest of Greece to the cause, they went against the League of Corinth, they violated the rules, they're like an enemy in our midst, they're working with the Great King, they're taking money, all these weapons that killed 500 of

my troops in this encounter representing you, the League of Corinth, were paid for by the Great King's money. Oh yeah, and it wasn't my decision anyway, and all these other people from around the region decide it's thumbs down for Thebes. And the city will end up being so totally destroyed that I read one historian once that said it might as well have been done by an atomic weapon. In typical Greek fashion, he exempts the temples from destruction, that's normal. In typically Alexandrian fashion, he exempts the descendants of a particular poet that

praised the Macedonians in the past, but otherwise it's 30,000 people sold into slavery and a rule put into place that says that after we destroy the city where these people live and scatter them to the winds, anyone who takes them in is guilty of a crime. A.B. Bosworth sums the whole affair up when he says in Conquest and Empire, quote, The Greek world now had a shocking example of the consequences of resistance. One of the leading cities of the Greek world had been destroyed in a single day, as though by visitation of the gods. So Eskenes lamented in 330. And the litany of shock and sorrow was to be repeated through the centuries.

There was a groundswell of sympathy for the victims. Despite the prohibition, Bosworth writes, against giving succor to the refugees, they were received into neighboring cities, notably Athens and Acrofinium. And nearly twenty years later, when Cassander proclaimed the restoration of Thebes, there was enthusiastic support from as far afield as Italy and Sicily. Though, Bosworth writes, the immediate reaction was panic." The Greeks start bowing and scraping in a toady-like fashion. Not the Spartans, but they've never been a part of this League of Corinth.

But like the Arcadiansians who got an army together, sent it to the isthmus and waited, they vote to execute the people who'd proposed sending that army up there and the ones who led it. Yeah, those guys, they were way out of line. Athens says representatives along with everyone else, but at the same time they're preparing for a siege they figure they're next Meanwhile, they're sending representatives. This is so Athenian like isn't it? They're the same ones remember who said that nobody could find any Sanctuary if they assassinated Philip II They said that right at his games and then he was killed five minutes later, and they were celebrating it

Well, they're doing it again as soon as Alexander. as Alexander is available, they send their representative saying, oh my goodness, thank goodness you've made it safe back from Illyria and from fighting those tribalis and God, we thought you were dead and we're so glad you're not. We thoroughly approve of that punishment that you handed out to Thebes. Peter Green said Alexander was probably amused by this, but he didn't take it seriously. He demanded they hand over the most vociferous anti-Macadonian demagogues among them, including our friend Demosthenes. What do you think is going to happen to these guys? It puts Athens in the most agonizing position you can imagine.

It's a little like imagining the Germans in the Second World War after France is defeated and the British decide to give in and they're beaten and they're gonna be completely destroyed and blood will run in the streets of London and everything unless the deal is that Hitler wants Churchill. Give me Churchill and those friends of Churchill who've all been saying bad things about me,

and we'll call it okay. Demosthenes is horrified and says it's a little like turning over the sheepdog who's been protecting the flock to the wolves, who's been warning you of the dangers of Darth Vader all this time, and now it's Darth Vader's son, and I've been right the whole time, and sure I've had to trick us into doing the right things sometimes and sure I brought out that guy in bandages who was limping around saying he saw Alexander dead but it was all to do the right thing to preserve our liberty and I realize it's come to this right now and he's in a real boat and he's got adversaries up there who must have been smiling to themselves at

the opportunity to watch him squirm. Some of the orators get up and say that if Demosthenes was any kind of real patriot, he'd willingly and proudly go to his death, right? He'd be proud to walk up there and die as a sacrifice to his city. And it really puts you on sort of a horns of a dilemma situation, right? You don't wanna look like a coward, you don't wanna look like someone who wouldn't die for his city at the same time. I mean, my goodness, I didn't do all this fighting to have the stupid

sheep turn me over to the wolf. It's an interesting sort of thing to wonder about and the way he gets out of this is in the most Athenian like way. Someone talks Alexander out of it. The Athenians are the great diplomats, the great talkers, and a particular Athenian diplomat, some stories have him getting a lot of money from Demosthenes to do this, is able to go to Alexander and have his demands cut down to just one guy, who's only going to be banished and who immediately runs to the king of Persia for sanctuary.

Somehow Demosthenes is slippery enough to get out again, almost literally by the skin of his teeth. But Alexander, as we had said, he felt outside the walls of Thebes, has bigger fish to fry. He figures he's made his point with the destruction of Thebes. The sources say that he feels so bad now about what happened to Thebes, that if he ever got a request from a Theban in the future, he would grant it. But we should also point out that he will not be during his lifetime that that ban on taking in any Theban refugees will be lifted.

But it's a sign of how the Greeks feel about Alexander forever afterwards that they violated that law regularly. And as Peter Green said, what Alexander did to Thebes was one of the worst decisions he ever made, and the Greeks hated him forever for it. t-shirts or other merchandise, go to dancarlin.com. Want to get your hands on all the older, hardcore history shows? Just go to dancarlin.com and click on the Merchandise tab and catch up on what you've missed. The fact that I'm doing this just reminds me it's past due

time to get some more liners cut. But some social media addresses to share with you. The gold standard is the dancarlin.substack.com account, because with that that one we'll send you an email when we have something important to tell you so if that sounds like a good idea sign up for that. We now have a blue sky account for those of you who use that my attempts to try to stay with a balkanized audience wherever you all go so I can reach you is why there's so many more of these accounts dancarlin.bsky.social for that one. At Dan Carlin Hardcore History on Instagram, of course at Hardcore History on X.

I'm everywhere man I'm worldwide global. What was the old line wasn't it Dallas Cowboy who said I'm wall to wall and tree top tall. Well if I am I'm standing on the shoulders of giants and that's you folks and I appreciate all you do for me and my family. Thank you. I hope you have a wonderful upcoming year. Stay safe. There's an old saying that I told you that story to tell you this one. Because now, you know, the first show we did was about Alexander, the context of his life, his upbringing, the army that he was going to use, the tactics, I mean, all the things that set the stage for Alexander.

And then the story we just finished is about Alexander taking over and his early challenges. And let's be honest, those early challenges could have finished him very easily. A lot of great conquerors in history, as I believe we said earlier, And let's be honest, those early challenges could have finished him very easily. A lot of great conquerors in history, as I believe we said earlier, kind of never make it past their knife fights amongst the rocks in Illyria's stage. They were a little like the sea turtles that get born on the beach and have to run the gauntlet of predators to make it to the safety of the ocean just to have an opportunity at

life. A lot of the potential great conquerors lose their lives along the way. Alexander, 21, 22 years old, now at this time in the story, is just at this moment with Greece subdued behind him, with the barbarians cowed and all this, and the army ready to go. And he's drawing men from all these places that he's sort of subdued again. He's at the point now where he's facing his destiny, and he's one of these guys,

at least the traditional stories always say, who can feel the hand of destiny when it's on him. Winston Churchill's another one of those guys. He wrote that when he was given the prime ministership, which, of course, the war had been going on a bit now, and Britain's already at a low point, and when he becomes prime minister, he wrote that he had one of those moments which of course the war had been going on a bit now, and Britain's already at a low point, and when he becomes Prime Minister, he wrote that he had one of those moments where he could just feel the hand of destiny. He wrote, quote,

I felt as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial. End quote. One wonders now with all of the roadblocks out of the way and everything he had to handle to get his house in order, one wonders if Alexander's feeling the hand of destiny on his shoulders as he proceeds to cross his own version of the Rubicon, if you will, and test against the greatest land empire that had ever been. The richest, the biggest geographical territory, and almost mythically old in terms of the way the Greeks would have seen it, right?

But dating back to a tradition that goes to Assyria and Babylonia and, you know, once upon a time, all the way to Sumeria, I mean, this is, this is the great Middle Eastern inheritor of all that history from that region and here were these upstart people that had to fight to even be considered Greek led by a guy who even though half of him is that people that's had to fight to be considered Greek the other half of him straight-up separate you know from which country in sorceryville that's the guy that's had to fight to be considered Greek, the other half of him straight up Epirote, you know, from which country in sorcery-ville. That's the guy that's gonna

lead this and try to carry out his father's plan, which has not come down to us and maybe Alexander didn't even know it. I gotta believe he did but maybe he didn't because no one knows what Philip was gonna do. Right? Do you just fight the Persians and see how it goes? Take your chances and grab what you can? Or do you have a plan to attack and take a certain amount of territory? What is the limits of this idea? Right, where are the natural boundaries that you're trying to establish here?

Well, that's where Alexander's psychology once again is gonna come into play. The man who can feel the hand of destiny on his shoulders, who was infused both by the environment in which he grew up in, but also by the teachings of Aristotle on the subject of heritay, to try to be the best at whatever you try to do. And then he's got this Icarus and the sun potential relationship with the idea of ambition, and he may already be entertaining the idea that he might be the son of a god.

It's all a very interesting mixture of stuff that's going to lead us into some of the greatest battles in all history. All that and more in part three of mania for subjugation. I have some sad news to pass along if you hadn't heard it already through one of our other informational channels. In September, we unexpectedly and tragically lost our artist of 18 some years the fabulous Nick Lay. He was only in his early 40s. And so it was a complete shock to us. And

obviously, hit us on so many levels, right personal business, everything you can think of. When we lost the fabulous Bill Barrett, we did an audio program on the hardcore history addendum feed where we showcased his work, right? This he was an audio guy. So the work was audio. Nick is a visual guy or was a visual guy.

And so we did a substack post highlighting some of his work and how, you know, some of the more noted covers came to be and whatnot. You can go over to substack.dancarlin.com for free of course and check out that story if you like and see some of the wonderful things Nick added to our work. We said if I was the Hunter S. Thompson character in this relationship, Nick was Ralph Stedman and his art became associated with what we did. We love him, we miss him, we're still in shock.

And we had to pivot quickly and thank goodness goodness, we ran into Eric Sayers, who has taken on the unenviable task of following a legend in somebody whose work is very closely associated with us. I told Eric, I compare it to having your favorite comic book losing its artist, and having to now have another artist come and pick up the book from where the last artist left off.

And it's hard to get used to initially, but over time you look back and you just refer to the first era as associated with that, as the Nicolet era. And now a new era begins. And, you know, we think of Nick Fonley, we miss him, and we send our love to his family.