Show notes
Attacking the largest empire the world had ever seen is a huge endeavor at any age, but try doing it at 21. Alexander, fusing the qualities of a Napoleon with a gladiator, aims for immortality. The Persians are just in his way.
Highlighted moments
“we can plainly say that a lot of this stuff from the Greek side is nonsense, but what we can't do is suggest that the way the Persians actually were is just a mere image of that.”
“But as a wonderful reminder to us all, that things don't have to be real to be affecting, you know, real-world events and to having an impact on reality, because after all, doesn't matter whether Achilles ever lived or not for real. Doesn't matter whether his mortal remains lie under that mound that Alexander's running naked, covered in oil around. All that has to matter is that Alexander has to believe that he does.”
“Alexander may have exterminated between 15,000 and 18,000 Greeks after the battle was essentially won, killing more Hellenes in a single day than the entire number that had fallen to the Persians at Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea combined.”
“Few enterprises have ever been so dependent on the survival of a single man. Yet Alexander's career was a continuing saga of heroic self-exposure.”
Transcript
0:00What you're about to hear is part three of a multi-part series on the life of Alexander the Great. If you missed the first two parts and you are, like I am, addicted to context, you might want to catch those first. If you don't care about anything like that, well, no worries. And if you already heard the first two parts, well, here we go. Part three of Mania for Subjugation.
0:21December 7th, 1941. It's history. A date which will live in infamy. That's one small step for man. The events. One giant leap for mankind.
0:47The figures. The figures. I take pride in the words. I'm a villain. A drama. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this world.
1:05Gate six to Manhattan, urgent. Marine six. Tower 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 presidency... The deep questions. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. It's hardcore history. The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born.
1:41Now is the time of monsters.
1:46I love that quote. Allegedly, and I only say that because every quote in my famous quotations book seems to have been debunked, but allegedly penned by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci from prison in Italy during the Mussolini years. And it obviously works so well for that era, but I think what gives it its enduring timelessness is the fact that it's one of those phrases, and of course he would have said it if he said it, in Italian, and there have been some questions about the translation, but it's a phrase that
2:19when translated into English anyway, works for a lot of different eras in human history, doesn't it? For the simple reason that we can all think of lots of times when, figuratively speaking, the old world was dying and the new world was struggling to be born, and it was fertile ground for the rise of monsters, right? No shortage of monsters in human history.
2:42We should recall, though, in the same way that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, one people's monster is another's founding father. So you have to be careful, some of these monsters are on the currencies of modern nations today. But how many of these, you know, in air quotes, monsters, was 21? I mean, what if, you know, Mao or George Washington or Hitler had been 21?
3:10Not, of course, to include Washington on the list of monsters, but had he lost the Revolutionary War, who knows what the British history books would have said about him. But Alexander, who certainly was living in a time period that, with hindsight, we can say, and it's been said for a long time, the old world was dying, a new world was struggling to be born, and it was, you know, a good possible time period for a monster. And Alexander has just done the functional equivalent of drop a nuclear bomb on the great Greek city of Thebes, as we recounted in the last part of this conversation.
3:42So, you know, possible monster territory there. But how many of these guys are, you know, 21 years old, just barely able to drink alcohol in a bunch of countries today?
3:56And I was trying to figure out how one might decide to weigh this. Because there's, you know, on one hand, we all understand 21. We can think of 21 now and go, can you imagine? You just think of all the holes in their game, so to speak, at 21, through no fault of their own. You just haven't lived long enough to accrue, you know, the experience. You're 21. And on one hand, you say, well, that's why he's Alexander, right? Because he doesn't fit the mold. You're not like any 21-year-old you've ever run into. Although, it's worth pointing out that if you think about it, a lot of the people doing
4:31some pretty heavy stuff in even relatively recent history, we're all younger than you think. I mean, look at the soldiers now, but look at the enlistment men in the Second World War. Those guys are all like 17 to 21.
4:45So, let's not forget that, you know, during difficult times, human beings tend to level up. Maybe tough times make monkeys eat red peppers, as boxing legend Ray Arcel once said, allegedly.
5:01But I gotta believe that the Alexander, had he lived to be a, you know, old man, think about what that life experience added on to the natural abilities we're seeing as a 21-year-old. What sort of an interesting character that would have made. I went and looked at some of the ages of people that we might call historical comparisons. And it's stark in most cases. I mean, look at some of the recent people. I mean, Stalin was in his mid-40s when he first came to the leadership.
5:34Hitler was also in his mid-40s, 43, something like that. Franklin Roosevelt was in it. I think he was just 50 or somewhere right around 50. Churchill was in his mid-60s. Caesar, late 40s, I think.
5:50Napoleon now, he was only about 30 or something when he became first consul and like 33, 4, or 5, when he became emperor. And Napoleon, like Stalin, like Hitler, came from nothing. He had no, there was no nepotism going on in his situation. So when you get to the top job at 30, that's impressive. Alexander, as we had said earlier, I mean, he's sort of a military nepo baby that starts on third base and gets the greatest army of the age.
6:22A good comparison for him might be like Frederick the Great, who also inherited a fantastic army and military state. And he was like 28 or something, 7, 8, 9. But 21. And all you have to do to see the difference is look at the resumes of these older guys that I just mentioned. I mean, these people have often had extreme levels of experience and stress and storm and drying already in their life. So think of what they've been through that a Frederick the Great hasn't been through or
6:54an Alexander hasn't been through when they take over. It's a huge difference. I mean, if you've had 20 heavy-duty jobs in your life and some kid, no matter how much of a whiz kid they are, you know, comes in and it's their first gig, well, clearly there's going to be a difference, right?
7:12And I can't figure out how to weigh that. Like about, I'm going to say 97% of history fans in the world, I love playing around with counterfactuals to try to, you know, get a different look at a story. And so I wonder, in the Alexander the Great story, where we are right now, right? 335 BCE, he's just done the functional equivalent of dropping nuclear bomb on Thebes, resubjugated Greece, because his dad had already done that once, and now maybe for this sacrilege, the gods strike him down, right?
7:43Right outside of Thebes, drink some bad water or something, and it's the ancient world after all, and just dies.
7:51What happens when the next person takes over? First of all, who's the next person going to be? I mean, your choices are really Philip Aridaeus, and as we said, that's Alexander's half-brother, and there's something wrong with Philip Aridaeus, so that might be a little bit more like the story behind the movie Tommy Boy, if that happened. Or you get, you know, some dude, as yet unknown, right? King some dude. And either one of those guys, as my thought experiment sort of goes forward, is probably
8:23going to do the same thing Alexander's going to do. Because if you look at the constraints that were working on Alexander, they would have been working on anybody, right? Whoever takes over from Alexander, if he dies outside of Thebes, is going to be looking at the same balance sheet, for example, that Alexander's looking at. And this is part of how I can't figure out how to assess Alexander, because if somebody else is going to do the same thing Alexander's going to do, well, how much of this is Alexander, and how much of it is the forces and various elements at work, you know, in that time period?
8:53I mean, what is Alexander known for the most? He's a military guy, right? It's conquest and stuff like that. Well, I have a pretty good sense here that if I put you in charge of that army in this time period, you could win with it. All you have to do is sit back and let the army do everything. I mean, just the generals that run it alone, but the entire officer corps, the junior officer corps, it is, it's an amazing army and it operates almost on autopilot.
9:25At this time period, you could win with it. If, you know, King Tommy boy or King some dude took that army and did what Alexander did, I think it still wins. And then what does that mean? How much did Alexander the Great influence this story versus that place and that time? Now, here's where I think it's different. I think Alexander has no end to his appetites and whereas, and nobody knows, by the way,
9:58what the plan was originally under his dad, you know, how far they were going to conquer into the Persian Empire or what have you, what the goal was, nobody knows. But if all, all he did was take Turkey, modern day Turkey, that would be an enormous amount of land to hold and nail down and keep and absorb for, you know, a kingdom the size of Macedonia. So I think that's the difference here is that anybody maybe could win with that army, but nobody's going to keep using it to conquer farther and farther and farther forever until
10:31it's, you know, whittled down to the nub. And maybe that's what makes Alexander the real different figure here. He has a, you know, and this runs the story too, this Homeric idea, this desire to be the best and clearly his lane, as we said in the last installment, is the killing people lane.
10:59Now, he doesn't come across like a murderer, like somebody who wants to slit throat. I mean, he doesn't, he's not an orc or anything, but the end result of what he wants to do is going to require him to grind through peoples and kingdoms and empires in order to do it. But even if he didn't want to do it, even if he was King Tommy boy or King some dude, we find out at this point in the story, a little about Alexander the Great's finances.
11:30And he is at the point where he is borrowing money from friends.
11:37Now, if you're examining the Alexander story from a screenwriter point of view, where we are in it now would be one of those places they'd be tempted to cut, save a little time here because, you know, we, there's not a lot of action going on in this next chunk, but this is where they get it wrong so often because we're at the part of the story where after Alexander nukes Thebes, resubjugates Greece, he, he goes back home northward to Macedonia. And it's this interlude in the story between, you know, the fighting in Greece and the invasion
12:10of the Persian empire, 335, 334 BCE, right over the winter. Just an interlude. But a bunch of things happened during that interlude and we get some information and it really helps me at least to visualize the story because a lot of the Alexander story is polluted as we all know, um, because it's been written about for thousands literally of years.
12:33But there were certain economic realities that would affect anybody at any time and worst, by the way, in a period before modern banking and everything. And that's the Alexander situation. So let's talk about how we know about it. So, so Alexander goes home to Macedonia. It's a little bit more poignant with our knowledge of how things turn out here because it's the last time he will ever see home.
12:57He may have had an inkling because if you're going to fight in the front rank and you're launching this endeavor, that's going to involve a lot of fighting. There's a good chance you might not make it home, but we know he doesn't. So it's the last time, for example, he will ever see his mother face to face, that woman he has that very interesting, intense relationship with. They will correspond for the rest of his life, but this is the last time they spend any time together. So while he's home, we're also told he murders a couple of his dad's last wife's relatives,
13:28just a little pruning of the family tree. His father was great at that too, but you don't want to leave people on the family tree with enough blue blood for one of Macedonia's arch foes to use as a potential puppet king, right? And divide Macedonia and everything while you're gone away fighting. So that's just common sense. Get rid of a few of those people. But then the ancient sources, Diodorus has a whole paragraph on it, says that Alexander calls what amounts to a staff meeting here where they're going to discuss this Persian
14:03expedition. He calls the person that you could probably call the chief of staff of the Macedonian army, his dad's famous general, Parmenio. He calls him back from Persia. Parmenio was the guy who's commanding the advanced force that his dad sent out before his dad was assassinated to establish the beachhead, right? Send Parmenio over there, eight to 10,000 guys with him, establish the beachhead, await the arrival of the main army, and then Philip dies. And the main army, you know, was never dispatched.
14:34And Parmenio has been sitting around in Turkey waiting. So Alexander calls him back over for this staff meeting.
14:43Probably gets some good intelligence from, you know, on the ground too from Parmenio. And we should remember how august a figure this is, by the way. I mean, he's won some of the greatest battles in Macedonian history. Philip II had that great line, we mentioned it in the last installment, where he was sarcastically referring to the fact that the Athenians yearly would elect 10 generals to command their military forces. And Philip is looking at this and marveling, wondering where they get all these good candidates
15:18from, sarcastically. He says, in my whole life, I've only ever found one good general. Parmenio.
15:27Parmenio, at this time in the story, I mean, first of all, his resume is incredible. He's won some of the biggest battles in Macedonian history. He is in his mid-60s. Winston Churchill age, basically, when Winston Churchill took over. And just like the other major general here was a force in helping Alexander nail down the succession in that chaotic coup-like period after his father was assassinated, the other big general who helped was Antipater, who's also at this staff meeting, who's also one of
16:01these amazing figures, and who's also in his mid-60s. And they've come to talk to a 21-year-old with very little on his resume about how to continue his father's plans, plans of which they were both intimately connected to and involved with. It's at this meeting that we find out some stuff about the economic situation, and it plays into how Alexander reacts to the general's advice we're told that he received.
16:33So he's basically, they talk for a while, and then the generals advise that he should get married, beget an heir, and then they should attack the Persian Empire. And this is where we can start to have some interesting conversations about all this. And we have to now talk about one of the major tropes that's going to be a part of Alexander's story, and it's concerning the relationship he has with these august generals.
17:04The ancient historian Justin had a great line about the Macedonian general staff, and he said that it was like being in a room with all these august senators of some ancient republic, meaning these old, hard-bitten guys who've seen it all and done it all. You know, you think of these scarred figures who just have known Alexander. I think they've known him since he was a babe in the cradle. Certainly known him since he was, I mean, Napoleon didn't have to deal with Marshall Ney
17:40knowing him when he was a toddler, or being twice or three times his age. So there's a dynamic there that if, you know, the freedom of a screenwriter in my movie would be able to play that up in some interesting ways. And because Alexander is the Michael Jackson of history, and everybody's had a crack at this theory or that theory, I mean, there's a historian here or there who suggests that Alexander is the equivalent of like some, you know, talented artist or musician or something or boy band member that's really controlled by the puppet master managers in the background,
18:15right? And he gets to be sort of the face of the regime, go off there, be charismatic, lead the cavalry on the decisive charge and all that, while guys like Parmenio and Antipater just count the money in the background. Alexander the puppet king. I don't buy that, by the way. But it's interesting that that's out there. And what it shows is, it's not that hard to believe that guys as dominant and powerful and august as these mid-60s-year-old generals of Alexander's dad who knew him when he was
18:48a little kid that they might be dominating. I mean, can you imagine the relationship they would have with King Tommy Boy or King Some Dude? You might have to be Alexander the Great and have everything that makes that 21-year-old so unusual to push back against these guys. So the trope might be true, but we're told these generals give him some very good conservative advice. And the trope is that they continually give him some very good conservative advice. And every time Alexander says, to hell with that, overrules their good conservative advice
19:22and is proven to be right about it every time. So that's the trope. And this is the first time I can remember this happening. Maybe happened at earlier times in his career. This is what is on display openly, because they say that you should marry, beget an heir, and then attack the Persian Empire, as we said. And Alexander says, no. He's going to attack ASAP. And this has been dissected over 2,300 years every way you can.
19:54Without going into every possibility, there are some good reasons why he said this. I mean, how long is it going to take to marry and beget an heir? And if the heir has to be male, well, it's a gamble anyway. You could do everything, wait the nine months at least to do it, and then end up with someone who wasn't an heir anyway. I read some historians that pointed out that both Antipater and Parmenio had eligible women in their family that they would have liked to have seen marry Alexander.
20:26It's always nice to be married to the king's family, but that would have maybe pissed off the other guy, so good reason to say no.
20:34Alexander's sexuality has been brought up also at this point, although there are some parts in the story where it's relevant. Here, I mean, some historians would say that this demonstrates his tepid, that's the word you see often, interest in sex. Or that he's just not interested in women, so he doesn't want to get married. I mean, none of that stuff makes sense when you're talking about royal weddings and beginning, you know, heirs to the kingdom. I mean, that happened. Look at Alexander's dad. Nothing constrained him. And the modern tilt anyway is more towards Alexander being more like his dad, sexuality-wise, and
21:09not having any problem with it at all, liking it. The point is, is that in this part of the story, even though it's brought up here, that's why he doesn't want to get married, because he doesn't like girls. Not really relevant. What sticks right out like a sore thumb are the finances. And the biggest drain on those finances is the army. So this is where, and we should say this, because we've been extolling how great this army is. Any chance we get a little bit of army fetish going on here about the Macedonian professional
21:39army and how dominant it's been this whole time? Remember what it did to the Illyrian tribesmen that shook them to their boots? All they had to do was perform some drill in front of them. Turn left, turn right, spears up, spears down, you know, yell on command, scared the pants off them. They ran away. It's not that armies didn't do that kind of stuff. There are armies throughout history that did. And in this case, the great city-states of the time period, the Athens, the Spartans, and the Thebeses before Thebes was destroyed, they all had professional units that they built
22:13the rest of the army around. But most states didn't want to pay the piper, literally, when it comes to what it takes to maintain these kind of armies.
22:22They almost have to pay for themselves. I mean, they almost drive your foreign policy because of the need to have them do something. Because when other powers aren't at war, most of their troops go home to job one, right? We would think of militia armies. A lot of those people were farmers, and when there's no war, they're on the farm. That's really good for your economic situation. But what you lose is the institutional memory. You lose the ability to act as a well-oiled machine.
22:55All that stuff has to sort of be relearned and reacquired every time a war happens. Whereas Alexander's dad created an army that never goes home. That's training all the time when they're not fighting. And they're fighting a lot because they're very expensive, and that's the best way to pay for them. The idea that you could sit around for like nine months, you know, marry, be getting there and the whole thing, and let this army continue to cost you money while it's just sitting around, that doesn't seem like a likely option.
23:28But this is where the downside comes in. And here's the best way to think about it. Ancient sources are all different in the way that they explain Alexander's problems. And the modern-day historians who have tried to recraft this into almost like a balance sheet or an Excel-type spreadsheet format, everybody may have different numbers and different ways of expressing the problem. But the problem is clear. And that's that Alexander has a ton of debt, and that the ongoing burn rate for his expenses
23:58is incredible. And the ongoing burn rate for his expenses is mostly because of this army that he has to pay. But we are told, and this is important, that he inherits a ton of debt from his father. Sources differ on how much, but it's a ton. And that's totally on brand for Philip, to be honest. It's on brand for Alexander, too. When Philip needed money, he went and took it from somebody who had it. And he had that army to do it with, and that's how it paid for itself. Philip was no doubt planning on paying off this debt.
24:30Philip reminds you of a guy who had pyramid credit cards, right? And he'll just go and take it from the Persian Empire. And that was, you know, he'd already started that, right? The beachhead was over there, as we said, with Parmenio. So he was getting ready to pay that debt off, and then he died. So Alexander inherits that debt. We're told he pays the majority of that off by selling the 30,000-plus Theban citizens into slavery before he nuked that city.
24:56That shows you, once again, how Alexander plans to pay for things, right? He's going to do it through, you know, taking everything of value in these places that he conquers and turning it into ready cash. But it's hardly enough. When you think about what goes into something like an invasion of the Persian Empire, we can all conceptually understand that we're talking about a vast, complex endeavor, but maybe not think of exactly what all goes into it.
25:26And I toyed with the idea of running down the list, because if nothing else, it's an amazing reminder of exactly how complicated these things are and how hard it would be for us to do it without modern-day computers and transportation and industrial abilities and everything that we bring to the table. These ancient people had none of it and yet still had to put it together, have it work, be synchronized time-wise. Everybody had to get paid, I mean, but rather than that, I just thought I would sum up from
25:57one historian's rundown. And a bunch of historians have taken a crack at this. The bottom line is their numbers don't matter as much as what they're all saying, which is Alexander has all this debt he inherited. Remember, he also exempted the population mostly from taxation when he took over, makes you popular, also makes you poor, and then has to hold all these lavish celebrations, we're told, and sacrifices. So he's spending like a drunken sailor, and he's broke. He's actually showing off, if you want to believe, some of the ancient sources and being
26:27ostentatious about it when he's broke. So historian F.S. Niden in his book, Soldier, Priest, and God, you know, added up the cost as he saw them and the burn rate for this army and put it into some sort of perspective. And he wrote, quote, Now the arithmetic, a base of 225 talents a month for the 45,000 soldiers and up to 300 talents a month for ships, plus the costs of fodder to feed the animals and everything
26:59from horsehair to spear points, the grand total might be 7,000 to 10,000 talents a year. He now puts this in perspective. This sum was 80 or 100 times what Athens spent to build the fleet that defeated the Persians in 480. It far exceeded Philip's annual revenue, end quote.
27:25So it costs more than everything Philip paid for in his kingdom, army included. That was just his dad? That was just the guy who came right before him a year or two ago? 80 to 100 times what Athens paid to build the fleet that defeated the Persians. I mean, those are incredible numbers. That's your burn rate right there. So if you're a king, some dude, and you come to the throne and you say, you know what? I do not want to invade the Persian empire. I do not share that optimism in the plan that Philip and Alexander both had.
27:58I want to go 180 degrees different. Could he?
28:03I mean, first of all, would he, I mean, he might get a knife in the back by a guy like Parmenio if he changed plans like that. There's a lot of people who have a lot invested in this, which brings us to that part. I said earlier that Alexander was borrowing money from friends. The reason all this stuff, all this financial stuff is so important is because with so much fiction surrounding the few facts that are available about Alexander, when you can get your hands on something that at least seems to be the truth and that you can plug in for
28:34X, you know, in the equation that gives us some sort of sense of answers to a bunch of questions we have about Alexander, you don't turn your nose up at that. And this financial thing seems real. And you can even, I've read several historians who talk about how Alexander's very campaign decisions against the Persian empire are dictated by which route to take has more cities that we can sack because we need the money. I mean, it's, so this is a prime motivator here. And at this point in the story, Plutarch tells a tale about Alexander borrowing money from his
29:05friends because he needs it. Now, Plutarch makes it sound like it's some sort of thing Alexander's doing to, as a benefactor, making sure they're all okay before we hear, you need some royal land before we go take over Persia. But all the secondary sources portray this as, at best, like Alexander pawning the royal lands, right? And when he makes it big against the Persians, he'll come back and get his stuff out of hock or maybe just straight up selling, right? Give me some money. You can have the royal land here. And there's a wonderful story Plutarch has that you should not avoid if you're doing the
29:39Alexander movie. And I hope that you do, uh, where he has Alexander giving away all the stuff. And then one of his friends in air quotes, these companions, a guy named Perticus, he's famous, um, is going to say to Alexander, if you give away all this stuff, what are you going to be left with? And he famously, I mean, your movie, he's going to turn to Perticus, something like that. And he's going to say, my hopes, right? And then Perticus says, well, we will be your partners in those. And the reason this is good is because you get a sense now that this is a deal.
30:09This isn't one nation state going against another in the modern day sense. These are a bunch of guys who are going, Hey, you know what? You let me, uh, get my share of the profits, uh, in this Persian expedition of yours. And, uh, you know, I'll give you some money and I'll give you some investment. I'll be an angel investor. I'm going to start with a sort of a startup company here. And these guys are going to put in these companions, these guys who are going to fight in all the battles, they're going to put in the sweat equity. And later in the story, Alexander is going to go so far as to basically say, you know,
30:42I paid you all off. In other words, this whole thing has a feel of more of a business thing. And that's why we've been focusing on the finances so much because Alexander might as well be a company here, this might as well be a father and son operation, you know, that has disruptive technology, this Macedonian army, and they are ready to make a play at the big boys. We'd said in this show, we did a long time ago on the Persian empire in this period, they resemble a company. We called them Persia core, right?
31:14At this point, Persia core is a monopoly. They've been going for more than two centuries. No real challengers. Sure. It's rough around the edges, but who cares? What are you going to do? We're the only game in town. And all of a sudden you have this disruptive technology, McAdana tech. I almost called it McAdana interactive because it's going to be a lot of interactivity, you know, McAdana interactive operation, I had all these ideas, but, but it is a little like what we have here is a straight up force deal. I mean, if you, you could put all sorts of different lenses over it sort of to change the
31:47complexity, right? That's, that's, it's almost like brutal, um, you know, dog eat dog capitalism. If you view through that lens, if I was back in like my international relations class, they would talk about a geopolitical power and wealth imbalance here. Uh, Alexander's got the superior army. This hasn't been proven by the way, on the field against the great Persian empire, but, but it's, we know now he's got the superior army by far, but he doesn't have the cash. And yet right nearby is a giant empire that has all the cash you could ever want.
32:19And an army that can't contend with yours. There's an osmosis kind of force at work here that almost draws these two places together, right? But while it's easy to imagine most any Macedonian ruler from this era attacking and invading the Persian empire, it seems pretty clear if we could believe any of the stuff that's come down to us, you know, through more than 2000 years of historical strata building and lying and everything else, romancing, seems pretty clear to us though, Alexander's motivation
32:50was different and he would have done this even if he didn't have to. And even when he's successful later on in his career and all of the reasons that would have motivated any Macedonian King at this point in the story, go away, right? When he has all the money he wants, when he can pay his troops, no problem at all. He's still going. So his motivation is different and it's a key part of the story, although I feel like we're going to miss the financial math and the surety of what we just talked about as we start to speculate about what makes this guy tick, right?
33:23What makes him get up in the morning? I had a friend who was into sales many years ago and he told me that when he was learning how to do sales that they would teach him all the different things that motivated a potential clients, and I don't remember all of them, but some of them were like greed, fear, heart strings, right? All these kinds of things where one way or another, everybody's got some, you know, little chink in their armor that can be exploited by the salesperson and you just have to find out what that is, but it's all based on motivation, right? What matters to you? Why do you do what you do?
33:55And when you're looking at these great conquerors in history, it's a fascinating question because at some point, most of these great conquerors get any of the material rewards that might have motivated them in their younger and poorer days, right? And once you achieve that, do you just stop? And if you don't, why don't you stop? What are you trying to do?
34:17And the stories of Alexander, all this anecdotal stuff and all the famous incidents passed down, but tend to show a guy who's not just concerned about being great, but looks at greatness as almost a zero-sum game. Remember the stories told about how he was, you know, when he was just the prince, he was upset that his dad was conquering everything because there wasn't going to be any glory left for anyone else, right? A zero-sum game of glory. But if any of that is indicative of the guy's real personality, then he's essentially trying
34:51to get in the Guinness Book of World Records here. He's trying to be the best, as we talked about earlier, that Greek concept of erite, which by the way is seeing a resurgence these days, right? Be the best. Find out what you're born to do and then do it better than anyone else. That is a very simplistic Dan Carlin way of looking at what is obviously like all of Greek philosophy and paganism and everything else very complex. But as we said earlier, I mean, if you're a person who makes pottery or a singer or something
35:23like that, I mean, there doesn't seem to be as many downsides to this erite question, but if what you do better than anyone else is conquering people, then you simply trying to be the best, right, to live your best life, to do what you were born to do means you grind up a lot of people just as a byproduct, right, of you achieving your goals. I just want to be great. I don't want to hurt anybody. They're just in the way. They stand between me and greatness. And this has always provided Alexander a little bit more moral cover than other people who,
35:57if we're just trying to match things like body counts and places conquered and all that, seem a lot more nefarious. I mean, look at a guy like Tamerlane with the stories of the pyramids of human skulls and all this kind of stuff. Tamerlane doesn't have that same, not in the West, anyway, that same sort of overlay of somebody who's a philosopher king here. Remember some of the historians from 50 to 100 years ago, they try to find these very high-minded reasons to explain Alexander's motivation, right?
36:29He's going to create, he's going to get rid of, we would say today, get rid of racism, get rid of people, seeing each other as different. We're all going to be the same because we're all going to live under one king and he's going to fuse all these peoples. I mean, you know, there's a guy named Tarn back in the old days who would look at something like this as a motivation or at least a goal.
36:48Plutarch does the same thing where you're trying to find these reasons that justify and make right and sort of explain the upside of conquest and empire. People have been doing that for a long time because if you take that justification away, what are you left with? And it's interesting to think about that because if you take the high-minded terms away, it might be something as sort of banal as fame.
37:19I mean, if my sales friend with his various human motivations, you know, greed, fear, heartstrings, I mean, if he could say to somebody he was trying to make a sale to, hey, what if I could make you famous?
37:36It sounds like that might work on Alexander.
37:40Historian Edward M. Anson in his book Alexander the Great Themes and Issues was talking about Alexander's motivation and his desire for, and the words used were honor and recognition.
37:53Well, isn't that another way of saying fame? I mean, infamy would be dishonor and recognition, but I mean, it's honor and recognition. He wants to be famous.
38:04Anson clarified and said, glorious fame and a desire to be remembered for all time for one's achievements. Okay, well, Alexander's going to do all these things and it's going to make him famous. And what's also interesting to me about what it is that he's doing is it's not really exactly what other people you would think belong on the same top 10 list as Alexander were doing. I mean, if I said, you know, Alexander belongs on some top 10 list, you'd think to yourself,
38:37okay, well, the other people who would belong on a list with Alexander might be someone like Napoleon, for example. Let's just throw Napoleon in there. And Alexander does do the things that Napoleon does. Both men were actually running their kingdoms or their countries, so they were making the decisions over things like, do we go to war or not? The foreign policy decisions. Both men were the leaders of their army, so they were making all of the decisions on that front too.
39:04The night before the battle, they would both be in their tents with their maps and their generals organizing tomorrow's strategy and putting into place how they're going to maneuver and how, all the same. But then the morning of the battle, Napoleon is going to leave his tent, line up in the back of his army, take out his spyglass and look through it to see where the people are fighting and have runners next to him so that when he has orders for those troops in the distance that are fighting,
39:35he can send a runner to go give his orders to them to execute what he wants done. And the morning of the battle that he's engaged in, Alexander's going to leave his tent, go to his cavalry, which almost always is the strike force in his battles. And he's going to take most of the time, the tip of the spear position and fight in the front rank.
40:00Napoleon doesn't do that.
40:04Alexander's life is a combination of Napoleon mixed with like an MMA fighter who, you know, practices Charles Manson like killings. I can't imagine Napoleon doing something like, you know, karate, kata maneuvers, you know, and practicing his knife moves to feint an opponent out of position, grapple with him, slit his throat. You know, those are the kind of things Alexander has to do, too. So it's everything Napoleon does with vicious hand-to-hand combat type stuff.
40:37And when Alexander wants the honor and recognition for what he's doing, he wants to be recognized for both things, the Napoleon stuff and the hand-to-hand combat. His hero here is Achilles, right? The badass warrior of the Iliad. Go read the Iliad, by the way, if you want to see the sort of stuff that Alexander was so enamored with. It was supposed to be his favorite book, I believe.
41:07And Achilles isn't just some literary figure to Alexander. Remember, on his mother's side, he was raised to believe it's a direct ancestor. One of the tutors his father hired to help raise the boy kept telling him he was Achilles' descendant and he had to live up to that.
41:28Achilles is a stone-cold killer. And Alexander, in this early part of his career, is actually going to be trying to emulate the actions and deeds of this person he sees as his ancestor. It's part of the other weirdness to Alexander's motivations, because they may not completely be terrestrial, they may be divine.
41:58And this dovetails into another story that is supposed to happen, you know, via some traditions. That's a good way to put it. I love that Plutarch gives us both the, yes, it happened, and no, it didn't happen versions. But in some traditions, the last major thing that happens, while Alexander has this little interlude back in Macedonia, winter of 335-334 BCE, he's supposed to have a get-together with his mother, a last get-together, if you will.
42:26And while she couldn't have known that he would never come home, when you are going to be the tip of the spear in a battle against the great, large, and endlessly huge, in terms of expanses of territory, Persian Empire is likely to think you might not see him again. So you might want to get anything really important off your chest. Last conversation, perhaps, tell the boy anything that he really needs to know. And the story is, and Plutarch sends it back to, I think it's a contemporary source,
42:58a near-contemporary source, that suggests that Olympias tells Alexander that Philip II, the greatest man in the time and place where they're living, is not his father. Now, normally, this is going to be something that comes as a shock, right? I mean, it's like saying that, you know, your dad's really the milkman or something like that. And if you think of yourself as maybe hoping to be a chip off the old block of the great old man and then find out he's not your dad, well, you know, there's no place but down from
43:31there, right? Unless the person who is your dad is not human at all. And this is the tradition. Remember, Plutarch's given us all the stories. Remember the earlier conversation about the stories about Alexander's mom and snakes and maybe fooling around with Zeus and all these? I mean, so this story has been set up now this whole way. And here's the payoff moment. She finally tells him, listen, it was a lightning bolt struck my womb. There were snakes around, you know, you figure it out. Now, the counter story here, and Elizabeth Carney,
44:06who knows as much or more about Olympias than anybody living, I think, she says that historians disagree on whether or not it happened. But the counter story is that Alexander's mom turns around and tells people to stop, stop it with that story. Stop slandering me to Hera, she says. And of course, that's Zeus's wife. And she would not like to hear that Alexander's mom is fooling around with Zeus. She has enough problems keeping Zeus at home at night anyway. But if we're talking about Alexander's motivation, this becomes another thing that I don't know how to weigh.
44:42And normally, a story like this might even be something worth leaving out where you just blame it on. This is the normal, legendary, romantic stuff of Alexander. This is obviously chaff, and we're trying to, you know, weed out the wheat as much as we can, except later on in Alexander's career, there's going to be stuff that happens that's much better attested to, that seems to at least make a pretty good case that Alexander may think he is in one sense or another, and that itself is, you know, debatable, and we could talk about it. But in one sense or another, divine.
45:16Son of a god, demigod, hero, which is an intermediary step between human and divine, apparently. Or a god, I mean, just divine in one way or another. And it becomes logical at that point, you know, when it actually matters in the story, right? If you have a guy who's thinking he's divine running around commanding armies and, you know, influencing world affairs, I mean, today we would think they should be institutionalized, so it's going to be important one way or the other. But it's logical to ask yourself when he first came to that conclusion, when does that
45:48thought first enter your head? You know, I might be divine. When did you first think that? That's what the psychiatrist would ask the world leader today. When did you first think you might be a god? And the story is that in the winter of 335, 334 BCE, here in this little interlude in Macedonia, the last time Alexander ever sees his mother is when he finds out he might be divine. Now, the reason that this is interesting from a motivational standpoint, and again, when you make your movie, you have to decide how you want to play this.
46:18But either he's a guy who decides he might be divine after doing a bazillion amazing superhuman things. You look at his career and you go, well, you can't blame him. I think I was a god, too, if I did all those things. I mean, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Isn't that the Lord Acton line? It's brought down many a global figure in history, hasn't it? Power goes to your head. So it's interesting to know just for those purposes, because now you've got that person you have to deal with who believes they're divine. But what if something like that predates all of the
46:54great achievements? What if Alexander goes into his career thinking this? What if he thinks it from the time his mother tells him, allegedly, don't want to slander her to Hera, but allegedly during this interlude? Does it change your willingness to take risks, for example? I mean, I would think there'd be a whole bunch of things that if I truly believed I was the son of a god and that I had some sort of destiny here that might impact my willingness to take risks, my willingness to keep going, my
47:27willingness to sort of trust in fate. Sure is a confidence builder, you know, even if it's sort of a placebo effect. I mean, if it's Harry Potter with the liquid luck and if you drink it, everything just goes your way. And there's that scene where he gives a placebo to Ron, who thinks he's had the liquid luck and goes out and has an amazing day anyway, but of course never had drunk the stuff to begin with. I mean, Alexander's got a lifetime supply of this liquid luck that he was just born
47:59with. I mean, his belief, his fervent belief that he's the direct descendant of the greatest fighting man in the most popular book, probably in his time period, the Iliad on one side and Heracles and of course through Heracles, Zeus and maybe Dionysus on his other side. Well, there's liquid luck right there. And then if your real father or, you know, this is how weird Greek paganism can get, apparently you could have Philip the second as your father and Zeus. It's over my head. But if you have
48:30that going to or instead of the Achilles and Heracles thing, I mean, that's a version of liquid luck. And of course, you know, if you have it both. Well, shoot, think about what you could accomplish with that level of confidence and belief and maybe borderline fanaticism, the current way of looking at Alexander. And of course, this has changed over 2300 years. There's all kinds of different eras of the different ways they've looked at Alexander. But the latest secondary sources I've been reading suggest that the view these days is that he may have been very, very religious, you know, even judging
49:06by the standards of the time period. And there are stories and, you know, anecdotal things that may be back this up. But it's an interesting thing to consider that if you think you might be divine and you're a very, very religious person also, I mean, there's almost a force multiplier effect going on there, don't you think, on one's divinity? But if we want to make the story seem very Greek indeed, right, throw a little tragic flaw or a built-in disaster in there somewhere, you know,
49:38the seeds of his disasters sown in his gifts. I mean, maybe his version of lifetime liquid luck makes you insane eventually. And it's like having syphilis. But I don't know how to weigh that either. Insufficient data, as they might say. If it is a confidence builder, though, he's going to need that. Because when you think about what he's up against, there's a reason that there's a legendary, you know, shroud around the whole Alexander story. And that's because what he did
50:10was legendary. I mean, the line from mid-20th century historian Will Durant always sticks with me, where he says that what Alexander is about to do here is the most daring and romantic enterprise in the history of kings. That's a pretty, pretty rarefied air of the number of, you know, other historical incidents that would be in consideration for the top position. And Alexander still wins. It's indicative, though, of the size of the challenge. The Achaemenid Persian Empire is an amazing place. And I've been a big fan for a very long time.
50:49All you have to do, though, is consider its size to understand what a big deal this is for Alexander. Um, it's just a little bit smaller than the United States. And the fact that in ancient peoples with ancient technology, ancient communication, everything goes into it could hold down an empire that size for more than 200 years, by the way, doesn't get enough attention in the story that
51:19often portrays the Persians of this period, you know, at the bottom rung of a long, slow, self-inflicted decline, where they become sort of the punchline or the cautionary tale in the famous, you know, wooden shoes going upstairs, silk slippers going downstairs, Voltaire-era view of, you know, civilizational life cycles start off poor and hard scrabble, but, you know, rude. Uh, but those values then propel you to,
51:49uh, getting some wealth and civilization and some learning and the next generation can have it better than you can. And eventually you reach the golden mean, you know, pinnacle point of the balance between the hard scrabble values and the things that money buys. And you get a guy like Darius, right? Of the Persians, right? The famous king, um, who was the, you know, if you're looking at this from the Greek propaganda point of view, that was the last great Persian king. And then from, you know, Darius, you get the long, slow decline. And what a lot of the really good modern, uh, historians covering the
52:24Achaemenid Persian empire point out is this is all propaganda and bigotry and prejudice from the Greek side and also intended to show off, you know, sort of a pro-Greek everything. And it's colored the way we view the entire situation here though, because if the only sources you really have for a lot of this stuff are on the Greek side and they're turning every Greek fighter in the story into Captain America, right? Captain, you know, Helene, you know, Captain Major Helles or something like that.
53:00Well, then it distorts a lot of the story. And because there's not much on the Persian side to help counteract it, Pierre Brion had a great line. He said, we can, we can plainly say that a lot of this stuff from the Greek side is nonsense, but what we can't do is suggest that the way the Persians actually were is just a mere image of that. You can't just say, oh, well, they said it's A, so it's obviously B. Some things might be true. Some things might be misinterpreted. So it's difficult. There's a lot of propaganda to wade through, including a ton of stuff Alexander put out
53:31himself during and after his war with Persia, intending to, you know, bolster his claim that he's the rightful king. And the last guy that was running things was the wrong kind of king. And our people were supermen and their people were, you know, got to cut through propaganda, lies and crap that stem from the very time period, right? You didn't have to wait a hundred years for the crap to develop. You know, Alexander starts throwing out chaff to obscure the wheat right away. And before we look at this as somehow nefarious, polluting the historical record,
54:05if you will, there's another way to view this and it's called genius. I mean, this is an absolutely multifaceted, you know, full spectrum dominance kind of approach here. And it is so dominant, if you will, that it still dominates the way we're trying to unravel this story today. That's some pretty good propaganda. You'd pay those people extra if it's still working 2300 years later, wouldn't you? But it leaves plenty of room for doubt, areas for the experts to fight and terrible
54:42positions to put, you know, non-historian podcasters in, obviously. But I'm a fan, always have been in the Persian empire. I do not buy this idea that they were in this inevitable long-term decline, sort of a death spiral that they couldn't get out of. And, you know, when I say anything like this, I'm not stating it based on my own archeological dig experience. I'm just siding with one group of historians over others. But to me, the key sign here is, is when the Persian
55:12empire gets good leadership and it's a monarchy situation with an oligarchy involved, I mean, it's complicated, but when they get good leadership, you see upturns in pretty much any category that's used to justify the idea that they're declining. Now they have leadership issues, but that's far from abnormal, even in places, you know, that weren't in a terminal decline. I mean, look at the Roman empire's history. So you sort of survive and maybe contract a little bit or have a few more
55:47revolts or, you know, things like that under the bad leaders. And then when the good leaders come back, they go in and repair some of the damage. And you see that in Achaemenid history, by the way. The bottom line, though, is you're talking about a place that extends at its biggest, which it wasn't necessarily at its biggest during this time. But at its biggest, though, it is a place that extends into what's now Pakistan in the east, all the way west to the borders of basically modern Egypt and everything in between, of course. From Arabia in the south up to Ukraine, over to the Balkans,
56:24all of modern day Turkey in the Middle East. I mean, the largest empire of its day. And often lauded by a lot of people, yours truly included, maybe, as, you know, maybe discovering. And you don't want to say that because remember, there are other worlds. There's things going on in the Americas totally disconnected from here. There's things going on in East Asia and China totally disconnected from here. So some of this stuff develops, you know, organically in different spots, sometimes at the same time.
56:55But the Persians come up with this almost secret sauce for how you rule giant multi-ethnic empires and tolerance is sort of the weapon. The hidden tactic that ends up, you know, pacifying so many of these people is a live and let live sort of approach. And it was so successful, by the way, obviously many other empires later copied it. And they often get credit maybe where it's not due.
57:27I mean, you see this with the current way the Mongols are often portrayed. And you'll hear about things like their religious tolerance as though they were somehow, you know, particularly tolerant guys. And then you look at other empires and you realize, oh no, it's just a good move because, you know, when you tell people they have to change their gods, they tend to get pretty angry about that. That's causing you long-term trouble. A lot easier to just say, hey, you know, worship anybody you want. Just stay pacified. And the people that are one of the earliest examples, I'm leaving myself a little room
58:01here, uh, of, of that approach are the Persians. And it kind of helps them that they sort of emerge from an era where a very sort of opposite approach had been the one for a long time. I mean, you know, this is the Assyrian Babylonian era before those guys, and they're famous for carving their atrocities into stone. And you can go to the British museum and see them today. People having their skin ripped off their still living bodies, gardens with heads hanging from the plants on the ceiling.
58:33Uh, and these often put in the diplomatic waiting rooms where the foreign ambassadors would cool their heels waiting for an audience with the Assyrian King. And he would have just shown them probably in living color, uh, what happened to people who, you know, didn't do what they said they were going to do. And then you get the Persians in, in here who, even though they had some of the most horrific punishments you could ever hear about. I mean, the boats, for example, more on that in our, uh, three part series we did on the Persians a while back, Kings of Kings, but the Persians
59:08could be rough and tough and nasty and everything. But when you follow an act like the Assyrians and the Neo Babylonians, um, you, you look pretty tolerant by comparison. And when you're going to form a tiny little crust, you know, a tiny percentage of the population that's ruling a vast empire of tons of other different people, you know, one of the best things you can do is say, Hey, you know what? You live just the way you always have lived, pay your taxes, provide troops for the army when we
59:42need it. Sometimes we're going to need some, uh, infrastructure projects and some people for that. But basically the Persians would come in and just let you live the way you always had. In fact, some of the, um, rulers that were ruling for the Persians were the families that had been ruling there before the Persians. They came in and just said, Hey, you can stay long as you do these things that we ask for. Uh, and they did. And we'd mentioned earlier that the Persians sort of ran their, um, empire like a business. Well, the ruling strategy here is sort of, if you imagine like a bunch of
1:00:13regional vice presidents, they were called satraps, governors, they were really like kinglets almost, which is why that title for the Persian ruler, King of Kings sort of rings so true when you think about it. But it's a great strategy because when, you know, you look at the size of this place, again, imagine almost the United States and now try running it with, you know, Wells Fargo horse speed type communications, right? And transport. And I mean, it's just smart to have governors on
1:00:44the scene who can make these kinds of decisions over a territory that large. Now, sometimes those governors, those kinglets, if you will, those regional vice presidents get a little uppity and they revolt. And the biggest problem that the Persians have by this time period is they just deal with sort of a weakening of central authority under some kings and they deal with revolts. And both of those things are almost certainly influenced by the fact that they have a problem
1:01:16keeping good kings on the throne for significant periods of time. Achaemenid historical, uh, expert Pierre Briand did the calculations and he said, in the history of the Achaemenid Persian empire, one king died on a military expedition. That would be the founder, Cyrus the Great.
1:01:37Five died of natural causes and seven were assassinated. Add to that the fact that the problems that you see in Alexander's family and the Macedonian situation with Philip and his six or seven wives and all the kids that come from that is magnified exponentially in the Achaemenid one. And even though the king seems to have had a limited number of so-called legitimate wives, they often had a lot of, you know, concubine types. I mean, Artaxerxes II supposedly had 360 wives
1:02:14and between, depending on which source you want to pick, with 115 to 150 sons. Artaxerxes III allegedly had 80 of his brothers killed in one day. Now, these may not be people that can come to the throne, although they might be, but these sort of half kings are obviously part of power blocks. Otherwise, why kill 80 of them in one day? But in these systems where, you know, you have hundreds of half kings running around,
1:02:48where bloodlines mean everything, I mean, you can see how this would create complicated court dynamics, right, and create circumstances where there might be assassinations and rebellions within the family. I mean, it doesn't exactly lend itself to stability. And whereas, you know, in the 20th century and all the way back to ancient Greece, so much of what happened to Persia is ascribed to things like, you know, becoming weak over time due to wealth and luxury and becoming effeminate and the tools of eunuchs and the lures of the harem and all that kind of
1:03:20stuff, the modern day histories point to systemic problems. And one of them that's clear here is by the time Alexander's invading Persia, I mean, they have a newbie king on the throne too. And whereas you might like to jettison the lurid sort of proto-Arabian knights stereotypes involved in the view of Persia here, it's hard to totally escape it when the reason this Darius III, the king
1:03:50of Persia, when Alexander invades, the reason he's on the throne in the first place is supposedly he's put there by a guy Diodorus Siculus describes as a militant rogue eunuch.
1:04:02Bagoas, he's famous. If this Bagoas did what the Greek authors said he did, then he killed multiple Persian kings. By poisoning too, which is also part of the Arabian knights sort of trope here. He's a eunuch who uses poison to kill effeminate kings. I mean, who are led around by the nose, by their many wives in the harem? I mean, there's a whole trope here, right?
1:04:28What's so fascinating, though, is if you want to read this trope written to you as though it's, you know, factual modern history, go read the way this story is told in the great Will Durant's History of Civilization, book one. That's, of course, his life's work, the multi-part series. And you can see how his style changes from book one to the last book in the series over the many decades it took for him to write it, right? He sort of stays with the,
1:04:59you know, tenor of the history writing times. As standards and styles change, he changes with it. But in 1935, you see the social Darwinist stuff creep in. You definitely see the wooden shoes going upstairs, silk slippers going downstairs thing happening. And what's so fascinating about reading it now, though, and I bet I read it in the King of Kings series, so I apologize if I'm repeating myself, but it's worth it. Because you not only get a sense here now of the way a Greek audience would
1:05:30have heard this story and thought about it, but how long that way of looking at the story persisted. Because this is Will Durant writing about the decline and fall, which, again, I don't even agree with the decline and fall thing, of the Persian Empire, why it happened, and then the Game of Thrones-like transition from one ruler to another. And you'll see why it's a guilty pleasure for so many of us. Durant, like many of the Greeks, saw Darius I as sort of the golden mean of Persian
1:06:00leadership, right? The best combination of the ancient Stoic values the Persians had when they were poor, hardscrabble types, mixed with what money can buy, as I said. Darius, by the way, was called by the Greeks the huckster, because he was the financial guy. He's the guy that basically, if we're keeping with our Persia core sort of metaphor here, he's the guy that took the company public, got us out of the garage doing the mail order stuff, put us on the stock market map. I think the coins were named after him. I mean, it was just one of those sort of things. And the
1:06:32Greeks saw him sort of the high watermark of the pinnacle of the best balance of the Persian virtues and vices. And then it's all downhill from there. And, you know, 2,000 years later, 2,200 years later, Will Durant's basically saying the same thing. And he writes, quote, The empire of Darius lasted hardly a century. The moral, as well as the physical backbone of Persia, was broken by, he means the battles of, Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. The emperors exchanged Mars for
1:07:02Venus, and the nation descended into corruption and apathy. The decline of Persia anticipated, almost in detail, the decline of Rome. Immorality and degeneration among the people accompanied violence and negligence on the throne. The Persians, he writes, like the Medes before them, passed from Stoicism to Epicureanism in a few generations. Eating became the principal occupation of the aristocracy. These men who had once made it a rule to eat but once a day now interpreted the rule
1:07:34to allow them one meal prolonged from noon to night. They stocked their larders with a thousand delicacies and often served entire animals to their guests. They stuffed themselves with rich rare meats and spent their genius upon new sauces and desserts. A corrupt and corrupting multitude of menials filled the houses of the wealthy, while drunkenness became the common vice of every class. Cyrus and Darius created Persia. Xerxes inherited it. His successors destroyed it. End quote.
1:08:10Now, let me just say that I am fascinated with this way of looking at history, and I'm not the only one because, you know, history writers have been writing with this sort of style forever. I mean, up until relatively recently, I mean, Durant was 1935, right? This whole idea about, well, it is, it's the silk slippers, wooden shoes thing. We did a show a long time ago where we used the Great Depression as sort of a tentpole to examine the question of whether tough times make tough people and what that even means, right? I mean, we all understand that you can have individuals
1:08:43who are tough or not tough, but what does it mean if you have a society collectively that isn't? And did it matter more once upon a time, a long time ago, when you had to go out on a battlefield the size of a few football fields and, you know, slam into other human beings face-to-face with edged weapons or something? Did it mean something different back then? I mean, there's a lot of questions. The one thing you can say, though, is that few historians in the 21st century would be comfortable with that sort of an approach if for no other reason than how would you ever defend an idea
1:09:17like that in front of a peer-reviewed panel of other historians, right? How do you back that up with data and experimentation and testing? I mean, just once history becomes more like archaeology and anthropology and less like the humanities of like religion and law and language and literature, the interpretive part sort of gets stripped away for good and ill, and it's both. And you lose these ideas that have pervaded history writing since the very beginning, whether or not they're true that somehow, you know, civilizations rise and fall based on the,
1:09:51you know, virtue or toughness or what have you of their people. But taken at face literal value, the idea that the Persian Empire fell because they liked eating too much is both ludicrous and, if true, we might be in big trouble ourselves. Nonetheless, as fascinating as that is, Durant's on more firm ground when he talks about what happened to Persian leadership after the high water mark, as he saw it, of Darius I, the huckster, when you started to see, you know, the court intrigue and
1:10:25all that sort of stuff take over. And you got to be honest, it's, it's, it's both engrossing in a sort of a grab your popcorn and watch the Game of Thrones sort of thing play out. And at the same time, if you're a Persian patriot, you just have to sort of weep at what's going on here, because clearly, eventually, this sort of problem with succession and keeping good rulers on the throne is going to come back to bite you, right? I mean, Will Durant writes about, uh, the Persian leadership struggles
1:11:01after Darius I and says, quote, Only the records of Rome after Tiberius could rival in bloodiness the royal annals of Persia. The murderer of Xerxes, a Persian king, Darius' son, actually, was murdered by Artaxerxes I, who, after a long reign, was succeeded by Xerxes II, who was murdered a few weeks later by his half-brother, Sogdianus, who was murdered six months later by Darius II, who suppressed the revolt,
1:11:34I believe it is Teratukmes, and I think he was a satrap, the revolt of Teratukmes by having him slain, his wife cut into pieces, and his mother, brothers, and sisters buried alive. Darius II, Durant writes, was followed by his son, Artaxerxes II, who, at the Battle of Kunaxa, had to fight to the death his own brother, the younger Cyrus, when the youth tried to seize the royal power. Artaxerxes II enjoyed a long reign, killed his son, Darius, for conspiracy,
1:12:07and died of a broken heart on finding that another son, Ocus, was planning to assassinate him. Ocus ruled for twenty years, and was poisoned by his general, Bagoas. This iron-livered warwick, meaning Bagoas, placed Artaxerxes, son of Ocus, on the throne, assassinated Artaxerxes' brothers, to make Artaxerxes' secure, then assassinated Artaxerxes and his infant children, and gave the scepter to Codomanus, a safely effeminate friend." End quote. Okay, there's a lot wrong there,
1:12:43including the idea that Codomanus, the future Darius III, was a safely effeminate friend. But you get the gist, right? I mean, when you need strong Persian leadership, you're not getting it. And this would be, as we had mentioned earlier, the systemic issues that were causing the Persian Empire problem. And if you want to look deeper into things, you'll note that Artaxerxes III, who is going to be the first king that this Bagoas guy poisons, allegedly poisons, he's killed somehow. Artaxerxes III, and Philip II, Alexander's dad, were getting into it over
1:13:21things. And some people see that as sort of the spark that first, you know, gets this whole interest on Philip's part to invade the Persian Empire to begin with, started. This Bagoas character is fascinating. And the Greeks found him fascinating too, but for more sort of prurient reasons. Bagoas was supposedly a eunuch. And I say supposedly because Pierre Briant says that there's a Persian official title that for some reason the Greeks always translated to eunuch, whether or not it reflected, you know, the physical traits of the person involved. So he may or
1:13:54may not have been physically altered. But this Bagoas character is sometimes described as a general or a vizier. Keliarch, I think, was his official title. But he's someone around the king. And according to the Greek sources, he poisons multiple Persian kings. Artaxerxes III, then this Arsys guy he puts on the throne. And he somehow manages to wipe out the whole royal line. So when he puts the last king on the throne, he has to sort
1:14:24of go away from the direct succession because he's already killed everybody in this direct succession. The view from more modern historians, especially people who focus on the Achaemenids, are that the focus on the militant rogue eunuch, as I think Diodorus referred to him, is more because that corresponds with the prejudice and the bigotry and the stereotypes and everything that the Greek audience would have wanted to believe. It's salacious. It's the same sort of thing that if you're a showrunner trying to do your Alexander movie and you go to the
1:14:56network, they're going to come back with some notes. And one's going to be play up the fact that the Persian king's got a different wife for every day of the year. And oh yeah, more of the militant rogue eunuch poisoner guy. We love that. People love that from, you know, the time of Alexander on.
1:15:12I will say though, that if this Bagoas guy really murdered two Persian kings, wiped out a bunch of the bloodline, and then of course, you know, in just such a wonderful ancient Greek-like fashion, you have to love the way that they do stories. And there's always karmic justice involved or something. Bagoas meets his end by going to the well once too often and trying to kill yet another Persian king that he put on the throne, this Codomanus guy, the future Darius III, the guy who's going to face off against Alexander because
1:15:44he decides he doesn't like the fact that Darius III's getting all, you know, uppity and like he's the king and like he should be making decisions. They're going to poison him too. And the Greek story is, of course, that Darius III gets wind of this, pulls the old princess bride inconceivable switcheroo on him and says something like, here, have my cup and, you know, make a toast to me, which is not an optional thing in the court of the Persian king of kings. And so Bagoas has to drink the cup of the poison that he intended to murder yet another Persian king with. Wonderful Greek end. Who knows how the guy died,
1:16:19but try leaving him out of your story. If you leave him out of your story, how do you explain how Darius III gets on the throne? The bottom line, though, is, as we said, Darius III's a newbie king, just like Alexander, right? You don't have some guy like Artaxerxes III or someone's been around a long time, knows all the levers of power. You have this guy, well, Durant calls him an effeminate person, which is just picking up the ancient Greek effeminate slur more than 2,000 years later when repeating it as though it's testable fact. When the modern day historians would point out this Cotomanus guy was likely the
1:16:56same person who, when the Persians were challenged to a single combat duel in a battle with, I think it's the Cardusians, this is the guy who raised his hand and said he'll take on the Cardusian challenger in hand-to-hand combat and killed him. And that the king noticed, and that that'll get you rising up through the ranks and all that. He also was a, I mean, his grandfather, I guess, was the king's brother, so he may not be part of the direct line. But despite the fact that Alexander will claim this is an illegitimate king because he's not from the direct line, most historians of the Achaemen-Persian Empire
1:17:30say he's just fine in terms of legitimacy. But remember, Alexander's got a real interest in tarring and feathering this guy's reputation, questioning his legitimacy for all time. And in 1935, the great Will Durant is still spewing some of the propaganda that Alexander's still getting great mileage out of, that this guy's an effeminate ruler that doesn't belong on the throne. And by the way, Alexander also says that the Persian king, whether this one or his predecessors, had a hand in his father's assassination too. Which by the way, all I'm
1:18:03going to say is if I'm a Persian patriot and that's true, well, that's what I would expect my government to do. They've had a multi-generational long geopolitical policy of keeping the Greeks from uniting because that's dangerous for Persia. And it's been working great because you probably don't even have to pay money to get the Greeks fighting each other, but you pay a lot of good gold. It's working out perfectly until somebody, Alexander's dad, unites the Greeks against their will, screwing up your whole, you know, disunity policy, and then is going to come after you once in a generation or even more rare individual. What do you do with a
1:18:38guy like that? You get rid of him. What would the mafia do? You kill him. So if the Persians were involved in Philip II's murder, as I believe we said in the last installment of the show, that's probably just smart. That's just playing the odds. And what are the odds that you're going to replace the greatest man of his, you know, time and place with somebody even more historically significant, right? Sometimes you play the odds and lose. So this Darius III, though, is on the throne when Alexander shows up in Persia. He may have been quelling revolts in Babylon and Egypt that
1:19:15erupted when he took the throne, which, as I said, is still relatively recently. Don't be surprised by the revolt in Egypt, either. Egypt's one of the classic places that is hard to hold on to if you conquer it. In wargaming during the Ptolemaic period, they actually had a troop type, and you could paint up a group of miniature figures to represent them on the battlefield called the Egyptian mob, because there was always rebelling and revolts and protests and riots in the cities.
1:19:49Darius III is supposed to be in his mid-40s, and of course, he's facing a guy who, if he's not 22 yet, is just about to be. I feel like I'm doing a sporting event broadcast, like a boxing telecast or something, and we're talking about how the two sides match up, and we just did the pregame part where they always do sort of the backstory on the opponent, you know, explain, you know, their history and their upbringing and their training and how they got to this point, right? So now we've set up
1:20:22the Persians. I suppose we would move from something like that to the tail of the tape and sort of lay out the two sides, which is easier for the Macedonian side than the Persian side, because we're in one of those rare circumstances where you kind of have a pretty decent handle on at least the potential range of an army size here. And I know that seems like a very low bar to clear, but numbers in ancient warfare are, well, if you'll pardon the pun, historically crazy might even be a good way to
1:20:59portray it. And we'll see some of that on the Persian side. Sometimes they just get insane. But Alexanders are pretty well attested to, even if we don't know the right number, right? We know a range.