Show 71 - Mania for Subjugation

Introduction to Infamy

0:00December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. It's history. It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The events. It's not quite the noise, man.

0:30Let the word your soul come from this time and place. I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Bielina. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this world. The drama. 8-6 to my half, urgent. Marine 6, tower 2 has had a major 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 are crook. The deep question comes.

1:01If we dig deep in our history and our doctrines. And remember that we are not descended from fearful men.

1:09It's hardcore history.

Ancient Mythology

1:16Like many of you, I am a fan of ancient mythology. The stories of creation or how human beings came to be or tales that involve gods and heroes and monsters. And sometimes just regular people who go through interesting sorts of events or travels or whatnot.

1:45And oftentimes these mythological stories are meant to impart lessons. We're supposed to learn something from them, what to do, what to do, what not to do. You're tempted to almost say at the end of all of them. And the moral of the story is, right, what are we supposed to learn from this? Hunter S. Thompson used to call it in his columns, the wisdom. And some of my favorite mythological stories are cautionary tales, examples of what can happen if we're not careful.

Daedalus and Icarus

2:18And one of my favorite versions of that kind of story, that kind of mythological teaching tool is the famous story of Daedalus and Icarus. If you know your ancient Greek philosophy, you will recall that Daedalus is a master craftsman, an inventor. He can seemingly make anything. He's the one who built the famous labyrinth that held the Minotaur. And it was the king of Minoah, the Cretian area on the island of Crete that had Daedalus build this for him.

2:54But at a certain point, he turns against Daedalus and imprisons Daedalus and Icarus. But of course, when you imprison one of the great inventors of all time, he's going to try to invent a way to get out. And in this case, he does. He creates wings for he and his son. Wings made of multiple different materials, including things like feathers and beeswax. And he and his son are going to be able to fly out of this prison. But Daedalus warns his son before doing so.

3:26He tells him not to get complacent and allow himself to fly too close to the water. Because if you're too low, the moisture, he says, from the sea will ruin the wings and you'll lose your power of flight and you'll crash. Conversely, he warns him about getting filled with hubris and forgetting how dangerous this is and allowing himself to fly too high. Because if he does that, the sun will melt the beeswax that hold these wings together and you'll plummet and fall.

3:59And of course, being an ancient Greek mythological tale, how would it work if everything just went fine? And of course, it doesn't. Icarus forgets his father's warnings, gets taken sort of over by the enthusiasm that happens when a human being gets a chance to fly like a bird, allows himself to fly too high, and the sun melts the beeswax, the wings fall apart, and Icarus plunges into the sea and dies.

Moral of the Story

4:29The moral of the story, the takeaway from all this, is supposed to be a warning about ambition and allowing oneself to get too ambitious, right? To forget that there is a middle ground that everyone should shoot for. In philosophy, this is sometimes called the golden mean, and it involves things that are considered to be virtues when you have them in the right amount.

5:02But if you have them in the wrong amount, it can turn into vices. And one of the examples that's often used in the ancient Greek philosophies is courage. The right amount of courage is a virtue. If you have too little of it, it's cowardice, and that's a vice. But if you have too much of it, it's recklessness, and that's a vice, too.

5:25The question of ambition is an equally interesting one. It's a very Goldilocks-type concept, this golden mean, right? This porridge is too hot. This porridge is too cold. This porridge is just right. Well, if you're dealing with ambition and not porridge, where is the just right point? It's not easy to pin down, is it?

Ambition Defined

5:49The dictionary defines ambition as an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power. It's described as a character trait that involves people who are driven to succeed at lofty goals, right? It involves drive, ambition, tenacity, the pursuit of excellence, the desire to be the best. The interesting thing about the desire to be the best, though, is that that's a competitive thing.

6:24It means you're competing with other people who also want to be the best. You're seeking distinction, right? Fame. You want to be seen as better than other people.

6:38There's an interesting line Edmund Burke once said, that fame is the passion which is the instinct of all great souls, right? They seek distinction. And to a certain degree, this is positive, unless it gets too intense. To steal a phrase that was originally used for something else, ambition, is a bit like fire. A dangerous servant and a cruel master. And you can see what happens when it gets out of control. In the case of a mythological figure like Icarus, his overambition or his hubris obviously cost him his life.

7:20And in most cases where something like ambition is out of balance, right, where you have too much of it, it only burns the person who's trying to achieve the fame and distinction, right? If you're a runner and you want to be the fastest human being in the world, maybe you cut corners. Maybe you cheat. Maybe you take performance enhancing drugs. But at the end of the day, the person who paid the price for that is you. But what if when Icarus's hubris gets the best of him and the sun melts his beeswax,

7:56holding the wings together and he falls, what if he falls on a crowd of people?

8:03What if it isn't just about Icarus anymore? What if the area where you seek fame and success and distinction involves the lives and destinies of lots and lots of people? That's when this question of this virtue of ambition or desire to be the best can become ultimately at times genocidal.

Julius Caesar

8:37I mean, take, for example, a figure like Julius Caesar from the Roman Republican era, right? But there's a great story about Caesar, and it very well may not be true. It's recounted in a couple of different sources, which doesn't mean it's true. The Roman writer Suetonius recounts a version of this tale, as does the Greek author Plutarch. But they talk about when Julius Caesar was stationed in Spain. He was about 32 years old at the time. Suetonius says he's reading a history of Alexander the Great.

9:08Plutarch says he's sitting at the foot of a statue of Alexander the Great, who lived a couple of centuries before Caesar. Suetonius says he was sighing and had a vexing look on his face. Plutarch says he's out and out weeping. And when somebody says, why are you crying? Caesar is supposed to have replied, don't I have good reason to? At the age that I am now, Alexander the Great had conquered, you know, all these kingdoms. And what have I done of distinction?

9:39Showing that in Caesar's mind, he's not just competing with the other august figures of his own era, right? The other great human beings who are pushing the envelope of distinction and fame and notoriety and power in the ancient Roman Republic. Julius Caesar's competing on a celestial level. He wants to be the best that ever was. And when you're playing on that level of rarefied turf, you're up against people like Alexander the Great.

10:11But when your overambition sends you crashing to the ground, if you're Julius Caesar, you land on a lot of people. Well, as author Tom Holland said about Caesar, he said, Caesar's own ambitions were one day to consume the entire Republic. Well, clearly that never would have happened if Caesar's ambitions had been to become the best flute player in ancient Rome. But he wanted to be the great ruler, conqueror, empire builder.

10:47And when that's what you want to be famous for, it means you're going to have to kill a lot of people to win the gold medal. In fact, if you look at the way the Roman Republic is set up, it's set up to encourage distinction between its greatest figures. And that worked for Rome for a long time, was almost part of the plan, right? Get your greatest figures desiring to outdo one another. And when they do great deeds, they pull the Republic with them. There's also a built-in mechanism to keep it from getting out of control.

11:18It's sort of a crabs in a bucket dynamic where if any one figure starts to become too successful and almost climb out of the bucket, the other great figures, the other crabs, pull them back down. And that works until it doesn't. And eventually somebody barbecues the Republic, and that's Julius Caesar. And the number of people who die because of that is legion.

11:42The reasons for this are recognized by other people who try to compete in this same kind of celestial historical event.

Napoleon Bonaparte

11:53There's a very interesting line from Napoleon Bonaparte written in the 1790s where he talks about the danger of ambition. And remember, Bonaparte's one of the few people that you could call a peer of a guy like Alexander or Julius Caesar. If they were going to be tried in the celestial court of historical justice and you had to have a jury of your peers, Napoleon could be one of those people sitting on the jury. And he once said that ambition, which overthrows governments and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crimes, ambition is like all inordinate passions, he wrote,

12:29a violent and unthinking fever that ceases only when life ceases, like a conflagration which, fanned by a pitiless wind, ends only after all has been consumed. And the poster child for the dangers associated with outsize, out-of-control ambition, right? The geopolitical, real-life example of an Icarus in global affairs is Alexander the Great.

13:01Of course, Icarus clearly failed at what he was trying to do. If you're trying to fly across the water and instead you crash into the sea and die, that's not success. In Alexander's case, measuring how well he did depends on what he was trying to do in the first place, doesn't it? If he was trying to become eternally famous, achieve glory, conquer lots of places, and write his name in the sands of time more deeply and enduringly than anyone else ever,

13:34you might have to give the guy an A+. After all, he lived more than 2,300 years ago, and he's probably, I mean, biblical personages aside, the most famous early figure in history that most people, if you brought a microphone and started asking them on the street of any major city in the world, that most people would recognize, don't you think? The guy still has books coming out about him or some aspect of his life or career every year.

14:07Regularly has movies and TV shows and all kinds of things like that coming out. Podcasts, too, it must be said. And he's fascinated people ever since his life. Yours truly, clearly also. There's a ton of reasons for this. First of all, we should notice that he's one of the better examples you can use to prove something that historians have understood for a very long time, which is that you interpret people through the lens and the morality and the standards and ethics of the time that you live in.

14:39So Alexander has been seen any number of different ways based on who's doing the viewing. In some eras, he's been seen as an almost philosopher king. In others, he's been seen as a great representative of the idea of the civilizing force. We've used the term historical arsonist before. In some eras, Alexander was seen as someone who had to come along to, you know, break the log jam that was keeping the world from moving forward.

15:10A great blender of civilizations, a great spreader of Hellenism, or a butcher.

15:17Depends on who's doing the viewing, right? Guys like Alexander are the equivalent of holding a mirror up to the society that's assessing them. Like so many great figures in history who did amazing things, Alexander benefited from nepotism. Nepotism, he is the son of a king, right? He's in a monarchy. That's the best kind of nepotism if you're trying to start your career off with a great advantage. I mean, what's the old line that, you know, they start off on third and think they hit a triple?

15:50I mean, don't you think a guy like Caesar or Napoleon or Genghis Khan would have loved that sort of a head start, right? When Caesar's crying, supposedly, at the foot of Alexander's statue because he hasn't achieved as much by the same age as Alexander did. Well, Alexander had a huge head start, didn't he? A lot of guys who have the words, the great, after their name fall into that category. I mean, you can look at a guy like Frederick the Great of Prussia. He had a father who did a lot of the heavy lifting of building all of the, you know, the edifice for conquest that would come later.

16:26He centralized a state, he organized a taxation system, he built a bureaucracy, and oh yeah, he created a Maserati of an army and then handed the keys to the sports car to his son to go off and do amazing things and then get the, you know, the title, the great, added to his name. Probably should have been his dad's title when you think about it. And you can say similar things for Alexander. Alexander's father was an amazing figure. He is such an incredible person that had Alexander not lived, we would probably know his dad's name instead, and maybe his dad would have been called the great.

17:05Instead, his dad was called Philip II of a place called Macedonia.

17:12Quick word on pronunciation here, or mispronunciation, as the case may be. I'm one of those people who've long been a heretic on the matter and pronounce Macedonia with the hard C sound instead of the more common in English soft C sound. I have a lot of reasons for that. If you'd like to read a long-winded account of my thinking, we will link to a written article in the show notes about it. But I've been a heretic since I first encountered some of the history writing in the 1980s, where some of those historians simply took the question out of the hands of the reader by substituting a K for a C in the words like Macedonian or Scythian.

17:48Once you follow the tumbling etymological dominoes on this question, you might find yourself a heretic too. But if I'm mispronouncing the word in your mind, just know that I'm doing it intentionally.

18:05Macedonia, though, is an area north of Greece.

Macedonia and Greece

18:08And whether or not it's composed of people you should call Greek has been an ongoing issue from Philip II's time until now. For different reasons, though, in Philip II's time, you couldn't participate, for example, in the Olympic Games unless you were considered Greek. And the Greeks during the time period had debates about this. And Philip II, amongst other Macedonian kings, worked hard to try to make sure he was and his people were considered meeting the criteria that would classify them as Greek.

18:38These days, the question is still an open one, but a lot of it revolves around all of the DNA that has moved into the region north of Greece over all the centuries since Alexander the Great's time, right? Twenty-three centuries or more. A lot of different peoples move into that area. How does that affect the ethnic makeup? Well, people still talk about it. One thing you can say, though, is that this area north of Greece in classical Greek times wasn't very much like classical Greece.

19:13Classical Greece, of course, is the Greece of the Greek and Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars. So think 500 BC, BCE, 400, 300, that whole range, populated, of course, by city-states. The famous ones, right? Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Argos, Thebes.

19:32All these places could almost be likened to small-scale countries, you know, where the people were patriotic towards their cities, where the cities went to war with one another. They usually controlled a decent chunk of the surrounding territory, and the people who lived there were considered to be sort of the members of a country, but the countries were small-scale places. All of these places tended to have thriving middle classes.

20:03The citizens, up until a certain time period, usually made up the militaries of these places, and these city-states fought each other. These armies were often militia armies in terms of their organization. So if you were a farmer in Thebes, and all of a sudden you guys were going to go to war against Corinth, well, you were going to go grab your armor from over the fireplace, and it might have been the same armor your dad and your granddad used. Grab your sword, grab your sword, put your sword in your belt, get your six to nine-foot-long long spear, and run down the hill to join your neighbors in the local phalanx, right?

20:45The closed body of troops who stood shoulder to shoulder, five or eight ranks deep, and, you know, met the other citizens of the other city-state, and when the fighting was done, and the decision had, you'd go back home, put the armor back over the fireplace, grab the plow, and get back to the farm. Things were very different, though, north of Greece and Macedonia, where they really didn't have a thriving middle class, and they didn't have any city-states. They had villages and towns and hamlets.

21:18Instead of a thriving middle class, they sort of had a group that tilled the land. I'm not sure if you called them peasants. That would be exactly right. But you definitely had a nobility that was often referred to by a Greek word that's often translated to knights or barons. And these people owed their allegiance to a king. Now, even the idea of having a king to the Greeks of this time period was a sign, a mark of barbarism. Kings were what the Egyptians had with the pharaoh.

21:52Kings were what the Persians had with their great king of kings. In the Greek city-state, you often had all kinds of different governments, but kings weren't usually a part of it. And one of the states that had kings, Sparta, famously, had two of them. Kind of takes the whole, you know, absolute ruler side of the question out of the equation, doesn't it, if you have two of them? Reminds me a little of the Roman Republic's concept of having not one consul, but two consuls, right?

22:22Divides the power and authority a little bit. But if you had a king, that was a sure sign that you probably weren't Greek. And if your king was polygamous, well, that was another sure sign it probably wasn't a Greek place. Because in, you know, Greece of the time period we're talking about, polygamy was another sure sign of barbarism. Add to that the fact that these Macedonians lived a much more sort of a rustic existence than your average cosmopolitan Greek city-state.

22:52Cosmopolitan by comparison.

Macedonian Royal Society

22:55You look at Macedonian royal society, and it looks more like a mafia crime family than anything you can think of. A mafia crime family if you combined it with a daytime soap opera. A mafia crime family with some more homosexuality and sorcery than most mafia crime families are known for. I wrote down some of the adjectives used by historians to describe, you know, the Macedonian royal family situation. And they talked about assassinations, executions, civil wars, hostage taking, incest, drunken murders, adultery, witchcraft.

23:28Makes for great reading, but you might not want to live there. It does mean that the kings of Macedonia who came of age and managed to rule were in a sort of a Darwinian sense, pretty tough survivors. In fact, Philip II had two older brothers. It's interesting to note that Philip II's mother gave birth to three sons. All three became kings, and all three died violently.

23:58One was killed in wars fighting Macedonia's enemies. Another was assassinated, which is a pretty normal thing to happen. Actually, two of them were assassinated.

24:09Macedonia was a territory with powerful enemies all around them. They had the Illyrian tribes in one direction, which, again, the Greeks considered to be barbarians. They had the Thracian tribes, and there were like 40 different Thracian tribes, also to the north in the other direction. What this meant was twofold. One, they were always fighting these people, but two, they were often intermarrying their royal families to try to cement deals. And there is strong strains of Thracian, Illyrian, and Epirid blood that runs through the royal families of the Macedonians.

24:47Traditionally, Philip II is seen as a guy who brings Macedonia to power from nothing. That is probably not true, considering the newfangled histories about him, because one of the great things that revisionist historians have figured out in a lot of these cases is that any time the history sort of portrays someone as, you know, creating something from nothing, it probably wasn't true. That there were probably foundational things bubbling up under the surface

25:21that didn't make their appearance felt in the history books until someone was able to reach a critical mass. And that's probably the case with Philip II, who was probably building upon, you know, state formation and development that his ancestors had been able to sort of lay down, right? Lay down a few levels of solidity that a guy like Philip II could finally, you know, run with in the same way that he laid down the Maserati-type situation that his son got to run with. And one of the reasons that Philip is so able to exploit these maneuvers done by some of his predecessors

26:00is the stability he brings to the leadership question. I mean, that's the key issue, if you look at it in hindsight, that's keeping Macedonia from doing better. They can't keep competent leaders on the throne for very long. At one point before Philip takes over, Macedonia is going to have five kings in six years. And most of them die violently. That's a difficult situation to overcome, even with a lot of advantages. And what sort of advantages are we talking about? Well, one is that Macedonia has got quite a bit of arable land.

26:34Compare that to the powerful Greek city-states in the south who are, you know, splitting up the land between all the different city-states, right? So no city-state controls at all. Well, they've been cutting down trees for hundreds of years in Greece proper, which isn't fantastic tree-growing territory to begin with. Well, Macedonia's got a lot of trees. In fact, the ancient sources record that the best and most important timber in this period, and remember, timber is used for everything, including the building of navies,

27:06very important in ancient Greece. The best timber comes from Macedonia. They've got wonderful areas to farm and to graze cattle and horses. They control important mineral and precious metal mines and will get more of them. And they've also got a population that will prove to be very culturally and maybe lifestyle-wise good at fighting.

27:36This is sort of an interesting thing to examine compared to our modern era when people can kill other people with a push of a button from drones halfway around the world. But in an era where you actually have to kill people by shoving a knife into their throat or something like that, the way you're brought up can influence how well you're able to do that. I mean, there's a big difference, isn't there, between somebody raised on a ranch,

28:08like a cow hand who slaughters and drives cattle, for example, and a kid growing up in Los Angeles playing Dungeons & Dragons. Now, the Dungeons & Dragons kid, with his video games and all that, might be very good at the drone strikes from the other side of the globe. But one's going to think that when it comes to killing an animal or a person by hand, there might be some advantages to the one who's doing that on the farm. And in his book, By the Spear, Philip II, Alexander the Great,

28:41and the Rise and Fall of the Macedonian Empire, historian Ian Worthington sort of draws this distinction. He compares an Athenian to a Macedonian and compares their cultures and the way they grow up and the carrots and sticks in their societies and how something like that might actually have an effect on the battlefield when you don't get to shoot somebody from 100 yards away, but you actually have to walk up and shove a spear into them. And Worthington talks about the Athenian lifestyle,

29:16you know, probably the most like the Los Angeles Dungeons & Dragons kids of this era, and he says, quote, The whole fabric of Macedonian society was alien to Greeks and so abhorred by them. A Macedonian male was an entirely different animal from his Athenian counterpart, for example, who came of age at 18, was then eligible to attend the assembly, which is the body that debates and votes on domestic and foreign policy, he says, served in the army as and when required,

29:48was eligible for jury service when he turned 30, and if he came from a well-to-do family, attended symposia to engage in intellectual discussions before letting his hair down and swapping talk for sex with the ever-present courtesans, end quote. He then says, quote, Macedonia was utterly different. No one was allowed to wash in warm water, except women who had just given birth. No man could recline at a banquet

30:19until he had speared and killed one of the ferocious wild boars without using a net to trap it. A soldier had to wear a rope or sash around his waist until he had killed his first man in battle. To achieve these expectations, he writes, boys from an early age were taught to fight, ride a horse, and hunt wild boar, foxes, birds, and even lions, end quote. He then says that Macedonian society was rugged and had more in common with the tough love of Homeric heroes

30:53or even Viking society than classical Greece.

30:58According to the ancient writers, there are all sorts of other things that the Macedonians have as part of their lifestyle that make them seem a little like Vikings. They're supposed to wear animal skins or bear pelts, drink their alcohol out of big drinking horns, right? Reminds you of Vikings right there, doesn't it?

31:18The Athenians, who in a very cultured way, at their symposia where they're going to talk politics and all these sorts of things, they would always take their wine and mix it with water, cut the strength down, you know, to make sure people weren't just passing out at their parties. They could continue to have a nice, high-minded conversation. The Macedonians wanted their wine straight and unmixed, and they weren't going to have polite little sober conversations. They were going to have drinking parties where they were going to have competitions

31:48to see who could drink the most wine the fastest, right? You get two guys standing up there with giant terrines of unmixed wine, and they both go at it to try to see who can last the longest without just passing out at their feet. Different kind of culture entirely, and this is the kind of culture that Philip is born into, right around 383, 382 B.C. B.C.E.

32:11The murderous soap opera of Macedonian royal life is in full swing during his birth, and you don't know what to believe. The ancient sources are really hard on women, especially women of some power and authority. The Romans and the Greek historians always treat them as kind of uppity. You're evil or borderline malicious just by being powerful and assertive. Adrienne Goldsworthy, the modern historian, suggests we not treat these stories specifically as though they're 100% true.

32:43But Philip's mom, a woman named Eurydice, is obviously married to Philip's dad, but supposedly is in a sexual relationship with her son-in-law, Philip's sister's husband, and they both plot against Philip's dad. The plot fails, and Philip's dad forgives them, and they maybe go on to continue to maneuver behind his back, and then when Philip's dad dies,

33:15the guy who's shacking up with Philip's mom is continually, you know, inserting his hands and trying to manipulate the kingship, may have been involved by hook or by crook in the assassination of Philip's brother when he's a king. So it's an interesting family dynamic, to say the least, but nothing unusual given Macedonian history.

33:40Around the year 368,

Philip II's Early Life

33:43Philip is sent as a hostage to the Greek city-state of Thebes. Now the reason you send a royal family member to another city-state or place like Thebes is as part of a peace agreement, right? It sort of seals the deal. You don't want to go back on the peace agreement when we have a bunch of your royal family members with us. Think about the phenomenon of pages in the Middle Ages. It's not that dissimilar, and Philip would have been treated nicely. It wasn't like they threw them in a dungeon.

34:13But it's in Thebes that supposedly Philip learns a lot of important things about warfare because he's in Thebes at a very specific time in history, the time in history where Thebes is, for a short period, sort of the kings of the Greek scene because they've recently, in 371 BCE, defeated and broken Spartan power at a famous battle called Leuctra.

34:43Maybe the greatest Greek general up until this time period, a guy named Epaminondas was the guy in charge, and he was doing really interesting things militarily, and Philip is housed with one of his generals, and so he's learning things, things that he will, well, at least the tradition holds, build off of. He's going to create an army that builds on the foundation that he's taught when he's in Thebes. The other thing that happens in Thebes is Philip is exposed

35:13to all sorts of high-minded things. I mean, the guy he stays with is a follower of the Pythagorean sort of lifestyle. I mean, vegetarianism, self-sacrifice, a whole bunch of things that Philip really wasn't personality-wise, but he's getting a chance to really see how city-states operate, how their government works, and to be exposed to these sorts of philosophical ideas that maybe wouldn't have been too common for a bare-skin-wearing, drinking horn-using,

35:45you know, barbarian.

35:49Meanwhile, Philip's oldest brother is assassinated during a war dance. His next oldest brother recalls Philip from Thebes, and he's killed in a fight with the Illyrians and another 4,000 Macedonian troops with him, and this is the scene that Philip finds himself in once he sort of reaches the kingship. Now, the first thing to say about Philip is you just don't know much about him

36:21that you can depend on because like his son Alexander, he is the subject of an immense propaganda campaign, and the Athenians in this time period who were his enemies are the best propagandists in Greece. They have some of the best orators and speakers going. One of them is named Demosthenes, and Demosthenes, I mean, he'll write a bunch of arguments against Philip, known as the Philippics, and much of what we know about Philip comes from the Philippics, but the entire design and approach

36:51of the Philippics is to make Philip sound like he's Darth Vader or Sauron breathing down Athens' neck, so maybe not exactly a realistic or fair account of the guy. I've always loved the way historian Will Durant, gosh, I mean, I want to say it's almost 100 years ago now, writing about Philip describes him, and it may not be a fair description either because some of the modern-day historians are much kinder to Philip

37:21in terms of treating him as a more cultured man, a more well-spoken man than the old-style historians, but Will Durant gives a quick rundown that just describes how amazing the guy is, both in pro and cons, and this is what he has to say about the personality of Philip the Great or the man who maybe should be named Philip the Great in his book, The Life of Greece, and he says, quote, He had all the virtues

37:51except those of civilization. He was strong in body and will, athletic and handsome, a magnificent animal trying now and then to be an Athenian gentleman. Like his famous son, he was a man of violent temper and abounding generosity, loving battle as much, strong drink more. Unlike Alexander, he was a jovial laugher and raised to high office a slave who amused him. He liked boys, but liked women better, and married as many of them

38:23as he could. He continues a little farther. Most of all, he liked stalwart men who could risk their lives all day and gamble and carouse with him half the night. He was literally, before Alexander, the bravest of the brave and left a part of himself on every battlefield. End quote. Durant continues, quote, He had a subtle intelligence, capable of patiently awaiting his chance and of moving resolutely through difficult means

38:53to distant ends. In diplomacy, he was affable and treacherous. He broke a promise with a light heart and was always ready to make another. He recognized no morals for governments and looked upon lies and bribes as humane substitutes for slaughter. But he was lenient in victory and usually gave the defeated Greeks better terms than they gave one another. All who met him except the obstinate Demosthenes liked him and ranked him as the strongest

39:24and most interesting character of his time. End quote. And Demosthenes, who really didn't like him, still had to say, quoting Demosthenes, What a man! For the sake of power and dominion, he had an eye struck out, a shoulder broken, an arm and leg paralyzed. End quote. So, personality-wise, we're not sure what can be said about Philip. Here's what you can say for a fact, though. This is a guy

39:54who took the field with his army every single year of his 23-year reign except one. And the one where he didn't, it was because he was recovering from wounds, of which he got several. As Demosthenes said, he's a guy who sacrificed multiple body parts, and that was not any sort of a lie. I mean, the man, by the end of his reign, is crippled. He loses an eye. He has a collarbone broken.

40:26His hand is supposedly completely mangled. He takes a spear through his thigh, his lower leg, both bones broken at the same time.

40:37He walked by the end of his life with a pronounced limp. But he took part in 28 campaigns, 11 sieges. Demosthenes says he captured 45 cities. This is how you build an empire, right? Or something that's going to be an empire. And like his son and like Macedonian commanders before him, he fought in the front. These are not Napoleonic-style commanders who sit behind the army

41:07and command the troops as the battle's going on in real time and move forces around and send in reserves and counter-march your forces to match what the enemy is doing. These are people who set things up in advance. They build the military forces. They pick the commanders. They position them on the field before the battle starts. And then before the fighting actually commences, they put themselves in the front rank in a Homeric kind of style, right? A hero king. And they command. And when you do that and you fight,

41:39you know, 28 campaigns, you're going to get wounded. And the number of times that Philip's troops thought he was dead on the battlefield is numerous. In 1977, to just take a little break from all these, he said, she said, kind of historical accounts from the past and all the propaganda, an archaeologist found a tomb in northern Greece or the area where Macedonia was during this time period,

42:09the traditional Macedonian heartland. It was under a mound, a hill, a man-created hill, a tell. And in the tomb, they found multiple bodies, but in one specific tomb, around a bunch of armor and magnificent materials, they found a golden box with a Macedonian star etched into the top and purple cloth, purple being the royal color. Inside the box were bones.

42:41The way that Macedonian royalty was often treated after death was what we might call today a partial cremation. Because unlike today's cremations where you're left with ashes and bone chips, very small bone chips, in a lot of the funerals during the time around Philip's lifespan, it was common to have a fire that was only hot enough to burn the skin off. And then the bones would be taken, washed in wine, and put in a container

43:12of the sort that in 1977 was found in this tomb. So you can still look at the bones and analyze the bones. And in addition to the bones, there were things like armor. For example, a specific sign that maybe we're dealing with Philip II's bones in this tomb are greaves that were found. Greaves are the armor that goes on the shins. And these greaves were shaped differently. One in particular, shorter than the other, shaped for a person

43:43who'd suffered a bad leg injury. And in 77, they thought it might be Philip II. Now, I think about 90% of the people that are the experts in the field would say, it's pretty close to unanimous, but maybe not quite, would say that this is Philip II. And what that means is you can get some hard, concrete stuff about the guy. He was between 5'6 and 5'8", for example. Which might seem a little short to us today, but historians often say that that's not that uncommon

44:13for the people of the time period in this area. Although, if he were a little shorter than the average Macedonian, that would sort of jibe with his son's height, too, who was also shorter than the average Macedonian, so maybe Alexander got it from his dad. The skeleton also shows the wounds, including the most obvious during his lifetime that no one would have been able to avoid, the fact that an arrow had struck him in the face

44:43and took out an eye. Actually, it's worse than that. It didn't take out the eye because a physician had to scoop out the eye with what amounted to a spoon, and when you think of someone doing that to you without any sort of real anesthesia or anesthetic, it boggles the mind to consider the amount of pain we're talking about here. I got that rundown of Philip's campaign record from historian Richard A. Gabriel, who wrote a book called Philip II of Macazon, Greater Than Alexander,

45:15and he ran down how Philip's statecraft was much more oriented towards results than perhaps Homeric glory and sword play, and he writes, quote, In a very important way, however, Philip's view of war as distinct from personal bravery was decidedly un-Homeric. Unlike the Iliad's heroes, this great warrior king who took the field every year of his

45:47twenty-three-year reign, save one when he was recovering from wounds, who took part in twenty-eight campaigns and eleven sieges, who captured forty-five cities if one can trust Demosthenes, and who was seriously wounded at least five times, never went to war for its own sake or only for personal glory. For Philip, war was first and foremost an instrument of state policy with which to achieve specific strategic objectives. It was always the continuation of policy by other means,

46:18in the genuine Clausewitzian sense. The rhetorician, Polyanius, observed that, quote, Philip achieved no less through conversation than through battle, and by Zeus he prided himself more on what he acquired through words than on what he acquired through arms. End quote. And then, Gabriel says, this Clausewitzian view of war led Philip to become the greatest strategist of his time.

46:46Clausewitz, of course, is famous for saying that war is a continuation of politics or policies by other means, but for Philip II, this applied to all sorts of things, including marriage. Marriage for Philip was Clausewitzian. In this, he is far from alone. After all, royal marriages for diplomatic reasons, right, to cement alliances or connections between powerful families or to wed states

47:18or kingdoms or locations more closely together isn't just common, it's almost the norm. But the Macedonian ruler has a huge advantage over a lot of these other royal families that do the same thing. I mean, after all, if you're, you know, Henry VIII of England and you're marrying for diplomatic reasons, it's kind of a limitation, isn't it, if you can just marry one wife? Philip didn't have any sort of limitation like that at all. One of the things the Greeks used as evidence that the Macedonians were barbarians

47:48is that they were polygamous. And Philip could marry as many wives as he wanted to to cement his diplomatic and political goals. I mean, he's going to have seven or eight wives during his lifetime and have multiple of them at the same time. And the women that he married are interesting characters if the ancient sources are to be believed. I mean, for example, he will marry an Illyrian wife or two,

48:19and the Illyrians are the problem children of that whole part of the world, exceedingly dangerous, responsible for the death of Philip's older brother and 4,000 Macedonian soldiers right before Philip, you know, takes the throne. So it makes sense to marry an Illyrian princess, but they seem to be, if the ancient sources can be believed, quite the handful.

48:43Supposedly, Illyrian women could be trained to fight in combat as men with swords, spears, shield, armor, and on horseback. And there will be a strain of the Illyrian DNA running through the Macedonian royal line where mother is supposed to continue the tradition of teaching the daughters how to fight like this. And it is a fascinating thing to consider. There's a very Wonder Woman, Amazonian element to the whole thing. And it's interesting to think of Philip marrying a woman

49:15who could kill him in combat. But that's hardly the extent of Philip marrying interesting and potentially dangerous women. I mean, he marries magical women, if you believe the sources. I'm going to say if you believe the sources many times here because one's not sure what to make of them. And remember, especially when dealing with women, they are far from fair. I use the term magical. Some of them might say witches instead. And Philip is supposed

49:45to have married at least one of these magical princesses, maybe two.

49:52One thing you can say is that by the time Philip marries the woman who will be Alexander the Great's mother, one wonders whether or not as a young couple, Philip would have been in his 20s and Alexander the Great's mother, a woman named Olympias would have been in her teens. One imagines that you could have looked at them at a party and said, I wonder what kind of children those two people will produce because one has to look at a teenage

50:23Olympias and say that you can sort of divine how formidable a person she was because as a teenage girl, she can handle this guy, right? the most formidable person of his time,