Show 72 - Mania for Subjugation II

0:00What 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 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.

0:31It's history. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The events. The figures.

1:00The drama.

1:10The two 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 president is a crook. The deep questions. Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrines, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.

1:30But on the field call.

1:35It's hardcore history. One of the things that I find terrifying about life is how fortune can just turn on a dime.

1:52And 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, you know, 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. That's a great term, a bolt from the blue. Protect me from something that just instantly changes my world and turns it upside down.

2:29Probably for the worst, 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.

3:03Something 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 9-11 attacks, you know what that's like.

3:25That's wake up in one world, go to bed that night in a completely different world and know it. I mean, 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.

4:06I 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 going to 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?

4:37For 20-year-old Alexander III, 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 in the geopolitical king's conquest, you know, politics, realpolitik and all that sort of stuff.

5:18You'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.

5:53And 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 U.S. 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.

6:28And 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.

7:03We 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.

7:38But 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. 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.

8:13Wouldn'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.

8:38But 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 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.

9:08That's a 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, you know, burns in anger against the people that did this, all that kind of thing, right?

9:47Legitimately inherits, basically, dad's Ferrari and everything else. The other version's seen through a more Menendez-like lens where, you know, 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.

10:25He 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 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.

10:56In 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.

11:27And, you know, everything in between. Well, what accounts for that? Maybe how you fill in the blanks.

11:32Some 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.

12:05But 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.

12:35And 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, you know, 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.

13:07When, 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,

13:41look, 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,

14:15country 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?

14:47It'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,

15:21and apparently he's got this relationship with an important Macedonian general named Antipater, 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.

15:53There 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.

16:28The family and supporters of Attalus will certainly not have welcomed his accession, and there were other figures who might oppose him or form a focus for opposition, end quote. 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,

17:07because the stakes are huge and everyone knows it because the losers in this game are going to be liquidated. So when A.B. 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.

17:26One 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. 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 had 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.

17:58The 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 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 going to take an army of 30,000 or 40,000 people with animals, and you're going to send it hundreds and hundreds, maybe—we don't know how far.

18:30You'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 a 180-degree turn and do something different.

19:01But 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 is going to be a guy who stretches from the rain 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.

19:32I'm going to put my armor on Alexander. I'm going to bring him to the troops. I'm going to say, this is the guy, which is kind of what the sources suggest he did.

19:42And 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 II 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.

20:17It probably traveled more quickly than we assume, right? Bad news especially travels fast. But nowadays, if a major world leader is 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 a circular sort of pattern is the shockwave.

20:56And the shockwave is the news, and the news hits, you know, 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.

21:31In 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, you know, you justifiably sit there and go, God, you know, this is great.

22:09Aren't we an amazing, you know, height of society? Then you look at their cravenness and their corruption and their gluttony and 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.

22:40And 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, you know, 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.

23:13And 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 or public 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?

23:48Well, 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 judgment, 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 Carinia.

24:20Philip 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,

24:51when they were a conquered people, had used them with so much clemency and humanity. For besides provoking fortune, it was a base thing and unworthy in 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 valor they had vanquished him, end quote. 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

25:30as 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 ante 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.

26:01Remember, 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.

26:34I 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 this first stage in Alexander's career is about showing them.

26:52And 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. And he 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.

27:22And 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 100-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 kid's 20 years old. He's a child, he's a boob, don't worry about him.

27:53And 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,

28:26you 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,

28:57he's in Philip's position. And at that moment, because Philip's gone now, everybody decides it's a good time to, you know, rebel at the same time, even within his own circle of, you know, 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,

29:30which 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.

29:43One 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 2023,

30:15a 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, well, 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,

30:47you 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.

31:01It'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 Attalus. Attalus 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,

31:33and 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 Attalus 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?

32:04And 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 Diodorus Siculus' story of Demosthenes reaching out to Attalus and saying, you know, let's get rid of this kid, this simpleton, this boob. And Diodorus Siculus says that after Alexander becomes king, quote,

32:36immediately after Philip's death, Attalus embarked on a course of revolution and agreed to cooperate with the Athenians against Alexander, end quote. 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 in my Robin Waterfield translation,

33:08Diodorus says, quote, Attalus, however, was waiting in the wings to seize the throne, and Alexander decided to do away with him. Attalus 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

33:40and had become very popular in the army. Alexander had good reasons then, Diodorus 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 Hecatius, or Hecatius 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.

34:11So Hecatius sailed over to Asia, joined Parmenion and Attalus, and waited for a chance to carry out his mission. End quote. Well, at some point, if you believe the Diodorus story here, Attalus 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

34:43from Demosthenes write to Alexander. It's not going to 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 Hecatius, or Hecatius, but Hecatius murdered Attalus as ordered by the king, and then the restiveness and rebelliousness of the Macedonian expeditionary force

35:14in Asia came to an end. Though this was not just because of Attalus' murder, but also because Parmenian 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, godfather-ish type position to put other family members in.

35:45I 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 son-in-law be whacked, that's an interesting dynamic. That might have been the part of the deal that was non-negotiable, right?

36:16We'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 after Attalus 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.

36:49And Attalus 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

37:20one way or another with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, right? It's a little like that maybe. But Attalus 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 going to make it.

37:50In 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

38:21between Alexander taking control and Cleopatra and the newborn being killed seemed 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 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

38:52on 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.

39:22As 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.

39:54Now just to point this out because I didn't want to have it go unnoticed Alexander's been king all of 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 of 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.

40:25If 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 you know get your mind around your arms around it really happened and deciding Alexander's involvement is part

40:56of 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

41:26evil 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

41:56better 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 you know 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

42:27thousands of us are gonna die you know get tough and be the king that sort of 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 is going to

42:59go 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 you know this crisis moment in the superman film where lois lane's about to fall and off the building and he's got to just you know

43:30become 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 siegler translation says quote and so at the age of 20 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

44:01yearned 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 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

44:31macedonian 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 parks 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 there was no chest pounding if he could get something with money for example alexander's not going to be that way for alexander the way you do things is part of

45:02what matters and plutarch has him essentially waving off the advice remember a 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

45:32unrest 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 end quote 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

46:02chance 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 is your opponent on the other side of the war game table and you wonder what his tendencies are he's going to move on

46:33you and he's going to be where you don't expect him before you even think it'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 settled back you know in the capital and then head on down south and as you arrive at each of

47:04these 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