Episode Transcript
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0:00
December 7th, 1941. A
0:07
date which will live in infamy.
0:09
It's history. One small
0:12
step for man. One
0:14
giant leap for mankind.
0:18
The events. The
0:20
city of the North is not a city of
0:22
the West. The city of the North is a
0:24
city of the West. Let's have
0:27
a fight now. Not quite to
0:29
the more massive mental world humanity.
0:32
From this time and place. I take
0:34
pride in the words. Ish
0:37
bin, I'm the Alina. Mr.
0:40
Wobichoff, tear down
0:42
this world. The
0:44
drama. Eight six of a half, gorgeous. Marine
0:47
six. Now at two,
0:49
has an immediate explosion and what appears to
0:51
be a complete collapse. So how can the
0:53
entire area... I welcome this kind of examination.
0:55
Because people have got to know whether or
0:57
not their presidents have come. The
0:59
deep question. If we dig deep in our
1:01
history and our doctrine. And
1:04
remember that we are not descended
1:06
from fearful men. It's
1:15
hardcore history. Like
1:20
many of you, I am a fan
1:22
of ancient mythology. The
1:25
stories of creation.
1:28
Or how human beings came to be.
1:31
Or tales that involve gods and
1:33
heroes and monsters. And sometimes just
1:35
regular people. Who go
1:38
through interesting sorts
1:40
of events. Or travels
1:42
or what not. And
1:46
often times these mythological
1:48
stories are meant to impart lessons.
1:51
We're supposed to learn something from
1:53
them. What to do,
1:55
what not to do. You're
1:58
tempted to almost say at the end of all. of
2:00
them and the moral of the story is, right?
2:03
What are we supposed to learn from this? Hunter
2:05
S. Thompson used to call it in his columns, The
2:07
Wisdom. And some
2:10
of my favorite mythological stories
2:12
are cautionary tales, examples
2:15
of what can happen if we're not
2:17
careful. And one of
2:19
my favorite versions of that
2:21
kind of story, that kind of
2:23
mythological teaching
2:26
tool, is the
2:28
famous story of Daedalus and Icarus.
2:32
If you know your ancient Greek philosophy,
2:34
you will recall that Daedalus is
2:36
a master craftsman, an inventor. He
2:39
can seemingly make anything. He's the one who
2:42
built the famous labyrinth
2:44
that held the Minotaur, and it
2:47
was the king of Minoa,
2:49
the Cretan area on the island
2:51
of Crete that had Daedalus build
2:53
this forum. But at a certain
2:56
point, he turns against Daedalus and
2:58
imprisons Daedalus and Icarus. But
3:00
of course, when you imprison one of
3:02
the great inventors of all time, he's
3:05
going to try to invent a way to get out. And
3:08
in this case, he does. He creates
3:10
wings for he and his son. Wings
3:14
made of multiple different materials,
3:16
including things like feathers and
3:18
beeswax, and he and his son
3:20
are going to be able to fly out of this prison.
3:23
But Daedalus warns his son before
3:25
doing so. He
3:28
tells him not to get
3:30
complacent and allow himself to
3:32
fly too close to the water, because if
3:34
you're too low, the moisture, he says, from
3:37
the sea will ruin the wings, and you'll
3:39
lose your power of flight and you'll crash.
3:42
Conversely, he warns
3:44
him about getting filled
3:46
with hubris and forgetting how dangerous
3:49
this is and allowing himself to fly
3:51
too high, because if he does that,
3:53
the sun will melt the beeswax
3:55
that hold these wings together and
3:57
you'll plummet and fall. And,
4:00
of course, being an ancient Greek
4:03
mythological tale, how would
4:05
it work if everything just went fine? And, of
4:07
course, it doesn't. Icarus
4:09
forgets his father's warnings, gets
4:12
taken sort of over by the
4:15
enthusiasm that happens when a human
4:17
being gets a chance to fly like a bird,
4:20
allows himself to fly too high, and
4:22
the sun melts, the bees wax,
4:25
the wings fall apart, and
4:27
Icarus plunges into the sea and
4:29
dies. The
4:32
moral of the story, the takeaway from
4:34
all this, is supposed
4:36
to be a warning
4:39
about ambition and
4:42
allowing oneself to
4:44
get too ambitious, to forget
4:47
that there is a middle
4:49
ground that everyone should shoot for.
4:53
In philosophy, this is sometimes called the
4:55
golden mean, and it
4:57
involves things that are considered to be virtues
4:59
when you have them in the right amount,
5:02
but if you have them in the wrong amount, can
5:04
turn into vices. And
5:07
one of the examples that's often used in
5:09
the ancient Greek philosophies is courage.
5:12
The right amount of courage is a virtue. If
5:16
you have too little of it, it's cowardice, and
5:18
that's a vice. But if you have
5:20
too much of it, it's recklessness, and that's
5:22
a vice too. The
5:26
question of ambition is
5:28
an equally interesting one. It's
5:30
a very Goldilocks-type concept, this
5:32
golden mean. This porridge
5:34
is too hot, this porridge is too cold, this
5:36
porridge is just right. Well,
5:38
if you're dealing with ambition and not porridge,
5:41
where is the just right point?
5:44
It's not easy to pin down, is it? The
5:51
dictionary defines ambition
5:55
as an ardent desire for
5:57
rank, fame, or power. It's
6:00
described as a character trait that
6:04
involves people who are driven to succeed
6:07
at lofty goals, right? It
6:09
involves drive, ambition, tenacity, the
6:12
pursuit of excellence, the desire
6:14
to be the best. The
6:19
interesting thing about the desire to be
6:21
the best though is that
6:23
that's a competitive thing. It
6:25
means you're competing with other people
6:27
who also want to be the
6:29
best. You're seeking distinction, right? Fame.
6:33
You want to be seen as better than
6:35
other people. There's
6:39
an interesting line Edmund Burke once said
6:41
that fame is the passion which is
6:43
the instinct of all great souls, right?
6:46
They seek distinction and
6:48
to a certain degree this is positive unless
6:51
it gets too intense to
6:55
steal a phrase that was originally used
6:57
for something else. Ambition is
6:59
a bit like fire, a dangerous
7:01
servant and a cruel master
7:03
and you can see what happens when it gets
7:06
out of control. In
7:08
the case of a mythological figure like
7:10
Icarus, his
7:13
over ambition or his
7:16
hubris obviously cost
7:18
him his life. And
7:21
in most cases where
7:23
something like ambition is out
7:26
of balance, right? Where you have too much of it,
7:29
it only burns the person who's trying to achieve
7:31
the fame and distinction, right? If you're a runner
7:34
and you want to be the fastest human being in the
7:36
world, maybe you cut corners,
7:38
maybe you cheat, maybe you take
7:40
performance enhancing drugs, but at
7:43
the end of the day the person who
7:45
paid the price for that is you. But
7:49
what if when Icarus' hubris
7:51
gets the best of him and
7:54
the sun melts his beeswax holding
7:56
the wings together and he falls,
7:59
what if he falls? on a crowd of people?
8:02
What if it isn't just about Icarus anymore? What
8:05
if the area where
8:07
you seek fame and
8:09
success and distinction
8:13
involves the lives and destinies
8:17
of lots and lots of people? That's
8:21
when this question of this
8:26
virtue of ambition or
8:28
desire to be the best can
8:31
become ultimately at
8:34
times genocidal. I mean
8:37
take for example a figure like
8:39
Julius Caesar from the Roman Republican
8:41
era, right? There's
8:44
a great story about Caesar and it very
8:46
well may not be true. It's recounted in
8:48
a couple of different sources which doesn't mean
8:50
it's true. The
8:52
Roman writer Suetonius recounts
8:55
a version of this tale as does the
8:57
Greek author Plutarch, but
8:59
they talk about when Julius Caesar was
9:01
stationed in Spain. He was about 32
9:03
years old at the time. Suetonius says
9:05
he's reading a history of Alexander
9:08
the Great. Plutarch says he
9:10
is sitting at the foot of
9:12
a statue of Alexander the Great who lived
9:14
a couple of centuries before Caesar. Suetonius
9:17
says he was sighing and
9:19
had a vexing look on his face. Plutarch
9:21
says he's out and out weeping and when
9:24
somebody says why are you crying Caesar is supposed
9:26
to have replied don't I have good reason to?
9:28
At the age
9:30
that I am now Alexander
9:33
the Great had conquered you know all
9:35
these kingdoms and what have I done
9:37
of distinction? Showing
9:39
that in Caesar's mind
9:41
he's not just competing with the other
9:44
august figures of his own era right the
9:46
other great human
9:48
beings who are pushing the
9:50
envelope of distinction and fame and notoriety
9:52
and power in the ancient Roman Republic.
9:55
Julius Caesar's competing on
9:58
a celestial level. He
10:00
wants to be the best that ever was, and
10:02
when you're playing on that
10:05
level of rarefied turf, you're up
10:07
against people like Alexander the Great.
10:12
But when your over-ambition sends
10:15
you crashing to the ground,
10:19
if you're Julius Caesar, you land
10:21
on a lot of people. As
10:24
author Tom Holland said about Caesar,
10:26
he said Caesar's own ambitions were
10:28
one day to consume the entire
10:31
Republic. Clearly
10:33
that never would have happened if Caesar's
10:35
ambitions had been to become the
10:37
best flute player in ancient
10:39
Rome, but he wanted to
10:42
be the great ruler,
10:44
conqueror, empire builder.
10:48
And when that's what you want to be famous for, it
10:51
means you're going to have to kill a lot of people
10:53
to win the gold medal. In fact, if you look at
10:55
the way the Roman Republic is
10:58
set up, it's set up to encourage
11:00
distinction between its greatest figures,
11:02
and that worked for Rome for a long
11:04
time. It was almost part
11:06
of the plan, right? Get your greatest figures desiring
11:09
to outdo one another, and when they do
11:11
great deeds, they pull the Republic with them.
11:15
There's also a built-in mechanism to keep it
11:17
from getting out of control. It's sort of
11:19
a crabs-in-a-bucket dynamic, where if any one figure
11:22
starts to become too successful and almost climb
11:24
out of the bucket, the other great figures,
11:26
the other crabs, pull them back down. And
11:29
that works until it doesn't. And
11:32
eventually somebody barbecues the Republic, and
11:34
that's Julius Caesar. And
11:37
the number of people who die because of that
11:40
is legion. The
11:43
reasons for this are recognized
11:45
by other people who
11:48
try to compete in
11:50
this same kind of celestial
11:52
historical event. There's a
11:54
very interesting line from Napoleon
11:56
Bonaparte, written in the 1790s, where he talks
11:59
about the danger of ambition. And remember,
12:02
Bonaparte's one of the few people that you could call a
12:05
peer of a guy like Alexander or Julius
12:07
Caesar. If they were going to be tried
12:09
in the celestial court of historical justice and
12:12
you had to have a jury of your
12:14
peers, Napoleon could be one of those people
12:16
sitting on the jury. And he once said
12:18
that ambition, which overthrows governments
12:20
and private fortunes, which
12:23
feeds on blood and crimes,
12:26
ambition is like all the nordant
12:28
passions, he wrote, a violent and
12:30
unthinking fever that ceases only when
12:32
life ceases, like a
12:35
conflagration which, fanned by a
12:37
pitiless wind, ends only after
12:39
all has been consumed. And
12:43
the poster child for
12:45
the dangers associated with outsize,
12:48
out-of-control ambition, the geopolitical,
12:52
real-life example of
12:55
an Icarus in global affairs, is
12:58
Alexander the Great. Of
13:02
course, Icarus clearly failed at what he
13:05
was trying to do. If you're trying
13:07
to fly across the water and instead
13:10
you crash into the sea and die, that's
13:12
not success. In
13:14
Alexander's case, measuring how
13:16
well he did depends on what he was trying to do
13:19
in the first place, doesn't it? If
13:21
he was trying to become eternally
13:23
famous, achieve glory,
13:26
conquer lots of places, and write
13:29
his name in the sands of time
13:31
more deeply and enduringly than anyone else
13:33
ever, he might have to
13:35
give the guy an A+. After
13:38
all, he lived more than 2,300 years ago, and
13:42
he's probably, I mean, biblical personages
13:45
aside, the most famous early figure in
13:47
history that most people, if you brought
13:50
a microphone and started asking them on
13:52
the street of any major city in
13:54
the world, that most people would recognize,
13:56
don't you think? The
14:00
guy still has books coming
14:02
out about him or some aspect of
14:04
his life or career every year. Regularly
14:08
has movies and TV shows and all kinds of
14:10
things like that coming out. Podcasts
14:13
too, it must be said. And
14:16
he's fascinated people ever
14:18
since his life. Yours truly,
14:20
clearly also. There's
14:22
a ton of reasons for this. First of all, we should
14:25
notice that he's one of the better examples you can use
14:27
to prove something that historians have
14:29
understood for a very long time, which is
14:31
that you interpret people through the
14:33
lens and the morality and the standards
14:36
and ethics of the time that you
14:38
live in. So Alexander has been seen
14:41
any number of different ways based
14:44
on who's doing the viewing. In
14:46
some eras he's been seen as
14:48
a almost philosopher king. In
14:51
others he's been seen as a
14:54
great representative of the idea of
14:57
the civilizing
14:59
force. We've
15:01
used the term historical arsonist before. In
15:03
some eras Alexander was seen as someone
15:06
who had to come along to break
15:08
the log jam that was keeping the
15:10
world from moving forward. A great blender
15:12
of civilizations, a great spreader of Hellenism,
15:14
or a butcher. Depends
15:18
on who's doing the viewing, right? Guys
15:20
like Alexander are the equivalent of holding
15:23
a mirror up to the society that's
15:25
assessing them. Like
15:27
so many great figures in history who
15:30
did amazing things, Alexander
15:32
benefited from nepotism. He
15:35
is the son of a king, right? He's
15:37
in a monarchy. That's
15:39
the best kind of nepotism if you're trying
15:42
to start your career off with a great
15:44
advantage. I mean, what's the old line that,
15:46
you know, they start off on third and
15:48
think they hit a triple? I
15:50
mean, don't you think a guy like Caesar or Napoleon
15:53
or Genghis Khan would have loved that
15:55
sort of a head start, right? When
15:58
Caesar's crying supposedly. at the
16:00
foot of Alexander's statue because
16:03
he hasn't achieved as much by the
16:05
same age as Alexander did. Well, Alexander had a huge
16:07
head start, didn't he? A
16:09
lot of guys who have the words,
16:11
the Great, after their name fall into that category.
16:13
I mean, you can look at a guy like
16:16
Frederick the Great of Prussia. He
16:18
had a father who did a lot
16:20
of the heavy lifting of building all
16:23
of the edifice for conquest
16:25
that would come later. He centralized a
16:28
state. He organized a taxation system. He
16:30
built a bureaucracy. And oh yeah, he
16:32
created a maserati of an army and
16:35
then handed the keys to the sports
16:37
car to his son to go
16:39
off and do amazing things and then get the
16:42
title, The Great, added to his
16:44
name. Probably should have been his dad's title when you
16:46
think about it. And you
16:48
can say similar things for
16:50
Alexander. Alexander's
16:52
father was an amazing figure. He
16:55
is such an incredible person that had
16:58
Alexander not lived, we would probably know
17:00
his dad's name instead. And maybe his
17:02
dad would have been called the Great.
17:06
Instead his dad was called Philip II of
17:09
a place called Macdonia. Quick
17:13
word on pronunciation here, or mispronunciation
17:15
as the case may be. I'm
17:18
one of those people who've long been
17:20
a heretic on the matter and pronounce
17:22
Macdonia with the hard C sound instead
17:24
of the more common in English soft
17:26
C sound. I have a
17:28
lot of reasons for that. If you'd like to read
17:30
a long-winded account of my thinking, we will link to
17:32
a written article in the show notes about it. But
17:35
I've been a heretic since I first encountered some
17:38
of the history writing in the 1980s where some
17:40
of those historians simply took the question out
17:42
of the hands of the reader by substituting
17:44
a K for a C in the words
17:46
like Macadonian or Scythian.
17:50
As you follow the tumbling
17:53
etymological dominoes on this
17:55
question, you might find
17:57
yourself a heretic too. If
18:00
I'm mispronouncing the word in your mind, just
18:02
know that I'm doing it intentionally. Macedonia,
18:05
though, is an area north of Greece. And
18:08
whether or not it's composed of people you
18:10
should call Greek has been
18:12
an ongoing issue from Philip
18:15
the Second's time until now. For
18:18
different reasons, though, in Philip the Second's
18:20
time, you couldn't participate, for example, in
18:22
the Olympic Games unless you were considered
18:24
Greek. And the Greeks during
18:26
the time period had debates about this,
18:28
and Philip the Second, amongst other Macedonian
18:30
kings, worked hard to try to make
18:32
sure he and his people
18:34
were considered meeting the criteria that
18:37
would classify them as Greek. These
18:39
days the question is still an open one, but
18:42
a lot of it revolves around all
18:44
of the DNA that has
18:46
moved into the region north of Greece over
18:48
all the centuries since Alexander the Great's time,
18:51
23 centuries or more. A
18:54
lot of different peoples move into that area.
18:56
How does that affect the ethnic makeup? Well,
18:59
people still talk about it. One
19:04
thing you can say, though, is that
19:06
this area north of Greece in classical
19:08
Greek times wasn't very
19:10
much like classical Greece. Classical
19:13
Greece, of course, is the Greece of the
19:15
Greek and Persian wars, the Peloponnesian wars. So
19:18
think 500 BC,
19:20
BCE, 400, 300, that
19:22
whole range, populated, of
19:24
course, by city-states. The
19:27
famous ones, right? Athens, Sparta,
19:29
Corinth, Argos, Thebes. All
19:33
these places could almost be
19:35
likened to small-scale countries, you know, where the
19:37
people were patriotic towards their cities, where the
19:39
cities went to war with one another. They
19:43
usually controlled a decent chunk of
19:45
the surrounding territory, and
19:47
the people who lived there were
19:50
considered to be sort of the members
19:53
of a country, but the countries were small-scale places. All of
19:55
these places tend to be small-scale.
20:00
to have thriving middle classes. The
20:04
citizens, up until a certain time period,
20:06
usually made up the militaries of these
20:08
places, and these city-states fought each other.
20:12
These armies were often militia
20:14
armies in terms of their
20:16
organization. So if you were
20:18
a farmer in Thebes, and all of a sudden you guys
20:20
were gonna go to war against Corinth,
20:22
well you were going to go
20:25
grab your armor from over the
20:27
fireplace, and it might have been
20:29
the same armor your dad and
20:31
your granddad used. Grab your three-foot
20:33
diameter round shield, put
20:35
the sword in your belt, get your six
20:38
to nine foot long long spear, and
20:40
run down the hill to join your
20:43
neighbors in the local phalanx,
20:45
the closed body of troops who
20:47
stood shoulder to shoulder, five
20:50
or eight ranks deep, and
20:53
met the other citizens of
20:55
the other city-state. And when the fighting
20:57
was done and the decision had,
20:59
you'd go back home, put the armor back
21:01
over the fireplace, grab the plow, and get
21:03
back to the farm. Things
21:07
were very different though, north of Greece
21:09
and Macedonia, where they really
21:11
didn't have a thriving middle class, and
21:13
they didn't have any city-states. They had
21:15
villages and towns and hamlets. Instead
21:18
of a thriving middle class, they sort of had
21:20
a group that tilled the land. I'm not sure if
21:23
you called them peasants, that would be exactly right, but
21:25
you definitely had a nobility that was often
21:28
referred to by a Greek word that's
21:30
often translated to knights or
21:33
barons, and
21:35
these people owed their allegiance to a
21:37
king. Now even
21:40
the idea of having a king
21:42
to the Greeks of this
21:44
time period was a sign, a
21:46
mark of barbarism. Kings
21:49
were what the Egyptians had with a pharaoh.
21:52
Kings were what the Persians had with
21:54
their great King of Kings. In
21:57
the Greek city-state you often had all kinds of
21:59
different governments, but kings weren't usually a part
22:01
of it. And one of the states that
22:04
had kings, Sparta, famously had two of them.
22:07
Kind of takes the whole, you know, absolute
22:09
ruler side of the question out of the
22:11
equation, doesn't it, if you have two of
22:13
them. Reminds me
22:15
a little of the Roman Republic's concept
22:18
of having not one consul, but
22:20
two consuls, right? Divides the
22:22
power and authority a little bit. But
22:25
if you had a king, that was a sure sign that
22:27
you probably weren't Greek. And if your
22:30
king was polygamous, well that was another
22:32
sure sign it probably wasn't a Greek
22:34
place, because in, you know, Greece of
22:36
the time period we're talking about, polygamy
22:38
was another sure sign of barbarism. Add
22:43
to that the fact that
22:45
these Macedonians lived a much
22:47
more sort of a rustic
22:49
existence than your average cosmopolitan
22:51
Greek city-state. Cosmopolitan by comparison,
22:55
you look at Macadonian Royal Society
22:58
and it looks more like a mafia crime
23:00
family than anything you can think of. Well
23:02
mafia crime family, if you combined it with
23:04
a daytime soap opera. A mafia
23:07
crime family with some more homosexuality and
23:09
sorcery than most mafia crime families are
23:11
known for. I wrote
23:14
down some of the adjectives used by historians
23:16
to describe, you know, the
23:18
Macadonian royal family situation and they talked
23:20
about assassinations, executions,
23:22
civil wars, hostage-taking,
23:24
incest, drunken murders,
23:27
adultery, witchcraft. Makes
23:30
for great reading, but you might not want to live
23:32
there. It
23:34
does mean that the kings
23:36
of Macadonia who came of age
23:38
and managed to rule were in
23:41
a sort of a Darwinian sense
23:43
pretty tough survivors. In
23:46
fact, Philip II had two older brothers.
23:49
It's interesting to note that Philip II's mother
23:51
gave birth to three sons. All three became
23:53
kings and all
23:56
three died violently. One
23:59
was killed in wars fighting
24:01
Macadonia's enemies. Another was assassinated, which
24:03
is a pretty normal
24:05
thing to happen. Actually, two of them were assassinated.
24:09
Macadonia was a territory with
24:12
powerful enemies all around them.
24:15
They had the Illyrian tribes in one
24:17
direction, which again the Greeks considered to
24:19
be barbarians. They had the
24:21
Thracian tribes, and there were like 40
24:23
different Thracian tribes, also to
24:26
the north in the other direction. What
24:29
this meant was twofold. One, they were always
24:31
fighting these people, but two, they were often
24:33
intermarrying their royal families to try to cement
24:35
deals. There are
24:37
strong strains of Thracian,
24:41
Illyrian, and Epirote
24:43
blood that runs through the royal
24:45
families of the Macadonians. Traditionally,
24:50
Philip II is seen as a guy
24:53
who brings Macadonia to power
24:55
from nothing. That
24:58
is probably not true, considering
25:00
the newfangled histories about him,
25:02
because one of the great
25:04
things that revisionist historians have figured out
25:06
in a lot of these cases is
25:08
that any time the history sort of
25:10
portrays someone as creating
25:13
something from nothing, it probably
25:16
wasn't true. That there were probably
25:18
foundational things bubbling up under the
25:20
surface that didn't make their appearance
25:22
felt in the history books until
25:24
someone was able to reach a
25:26
critical mass. That's probably
25:28
the case with Philip II, who was
25:30
probably building upon state formation
25:33
and development that his ancestors had been
25:35
able to lay down, lay
25:37
down a few levels of solidity
25:39
that a guy like Philip II could
25:41
finally run with in
25:44
the same way that he laid down the Maserati
25:47
type situation that his son got to
25:49
run with. And
25:53
one of the reasons that Philip is so
25:55
able to exploit these
25:58
maneuvers done by some of his his
26:00
predecessors is the
26:02
stability he brings to the leadership
26:04
question. I mean, that's the
26:06
key issue. If you look at it
26:08
in hindsight, that's keeping Macedonia from doing
26:11
better. They can't keep competent
26:13
leaders on the throne for very long. At
26:15
one point before Philip takes over, Macedonia
26:17
is going to have five kings in six years,
26:21
and most of them die violently. That's
26:23
a difficult situation to overcome, even
26:25
with a lot of advantages. And what sort of
26:28
advantages are we talking about? Well,
26:31
one is that Macedonia has got quite a bit
26:33
of arable land. Compare that
26:35
to the powerful Greek city-states in the south,
26:38
who are splitting
26:40
up the land between all the different
26:42
city-states. So no city-state controls at all.
26:45
They've been cutting down trees for hundreds
26:47
of years in Greece
26:49
proper, which isn't fantastic tree-growing
26:52
territory to begin with. Macedonia
26:54
has got a lot of trees. In fact, the
26:57
ancient sources record that the best and
26:59
most important timber in this
27:01
period, and remember timber is used
27:03
for everything, including the building of
27:05
navies, very important in ancient Greece.
27:08
The best timber comes from Macedonia. They've
27:11
got wonderful areas to farm and
27:14
to graze cattle and horses.
27:18
They control important mineral and precious
27:20
metal mines, and we'll get more
27:22
of them. And
27:24
they've also got a population
27:27
that will prove to be
27:30
very culturally and
27:32
maybe lifestyle-wise good
27:35
at fighting. This
27:37
is sort of an interesting thing to examine
27:39
compared to our modern era, when people
27:42
can kill other people with a
27:45
push of a button from drones
27:48
halfway around the world, but in
27:50
an era where you actually have to kill
27:53
people by shoving a knife into their throat
27:55
or something like that, the
27:57
way you're brought up can influence how well
27:59
you're able to do that. I mean
28:03
there's a big difference isn't there between
28:05
somebody raised on a ranch
28:08
like a cow hand who
28:11
slaughters and drives cattle for example and a
28:13
kid growing up in Los Angeles playing Dungeons
28:15
& Dragons. Now the Dungeons & Dragons kid
28:17
with his video games and all that might
28:20
be very good at the drone strikes from
28:22
the other side of the globe but
28:24
one's going to think that when it comes to
28:27
killing an animal or a person
28:29
by hand there might be
28:32
some advantages to the one who's doing that
28:34
on the farm and in
28:37
his book By
28:39
the Spear Philip II Alexander the Great
28:41
and the Rise and Fall of the
28:43
Macadonian Empire historian Ian Worthington sort of
28:45
draws this distinction he compares an Athenian
28:48
to a Macadonian
28:51
and compares their cultures and the way
28:54
they grow up and the carrots and
28:56
sticks in their societies and how something
28:58
like that might actually have an effect
29:00
on the battlefield when you
29:02
don't get to shoot somebody from a hundred
29:05
yards away but you actually have to walk
29:07
up and shove a spear
29:09
into them and Worthington
29:12
talks about the
29:14
Athenian lifestyle you know
29:16
probably the most like
29:18
the Los Angeles Dungeons & Dragons kids
29:20
of this era and he says quote
29:23
the whole fabric of Macadonian society
29:25
was alien to Greeks and
29:28
so abhorred by them a
29:30
Macadonian male was an entirely different
29:32
animal from his Athenian counterpart for
29:35
example who came of age in 18 was then eligible
29:38
to attend the assembly which is the
29:40
body that debates and votes on domestic
29:43
and foreign policy he says served
29:45
in the army as and when
29:47
required was eligible for jury
29:50
service when he turned 30 and if
29:52
he came from a well-to-do
29:55
family attended symposia to engage
29:57
in intellectual discussions before letting
30:00
down and swapping talk for
30:02
sex with the ever-present courtesans."
30:07
He then says, quote, Macadonia
30:10
was utterly different. No
30:12
one was allowed to wash in warm water,
30:14
except women who had just given birth. No
30:17
man could recline at a banquet until
30:19
he had speared and killed one of
30:22
the ferocious wild boars without using a
30:24
net to trap it. A
30:26
soldier had to wear a rope or sash
30:28
around his waist until he had killed his
30:30
first man in battle. To
30:33
achieve these expectations, he writes, boys
30:35
from an early age were taught to fight, ride
30:38
a horse, and hunt wild
30:40
boar, foxes, birds, and even
30:42
lions. End quote.
30:46
He then says that Macadonian
30:48
society was rugged and
30:50
had more in common with the
30:52
tough love of Homeric heroes or
30:54
even Viking society than classical Greece.
30:59
According to the ancient writers, there are all
31:01
sorts of other things that the Macadonians have
31:05
as part of their lifestyle that make them
31:07
seem a little like Vikings. They're supposed to
31:09
wear animal skins or bear pelts, drink
31:12
their alcohol out of big
31:14
drinking horns. Right? Reminds
31:16
you of Vikings right there, doesn't
31:18
it? The Athenians, who in a
31:20
very cultured way at their symposia, where they're
31:22
going to talk politics and all these sorts
31:24
of things, they would always take
31:27
their wine and mix it with water, cut
31:29
the strength down, you know, to make
31:32
sure people weren't just passing out at
31:34
their parties. They could continue to have
31:36
a nice, high-minded conversation. The Macadonians wanted
31:38
their wines straight and unmixed, and
31:41
they weren't going to have polite little
31:43
sober conversations. They were going to have
31:45
drinking parties where they were going to
31:47
have competitions to see who could drink
31:49
the most wine the fastest. Right? You
31:52
get two guys standing up there with giant terrines of
31:54
unmixed wine, and they both go at it to try
31:56
to see who can last the longest without just passing
31:59
out at their feet. different
32:01
kind of culture entirely. And this
32:03
is the kind of culture that
32:06
Philip is born into right around 383, 382 BC BCE. The murderous
32:08
soap opera of Macedonian
32:15
royal life is in full
32:17
swing during his birth. And
32:20
you don't know what to believe. The ancient
32:22
sources are really hard on women, especially women
32:24
of some power and authority. The Romans and
32:26
the Greek historians always treat them as kind
32:28
of uppity, you're evil
32:30
or borderline malicious
32:32
just by being powerful and assertive.
32:35
Adrian Goldsworthy, the modern historian, suggests
32:38
we not treat these stories specifically
32:40
as though they're 100% true. But
32:44
Philip's mom, a woman
32:46
named Eurydice, is
32:49
obviously married to Philip's dad, but supposedly
32:52
is in a sexual
32:55
relationship with her son-in-law,
32:58
Philip's sister's husband, and they
33:00
both plot against Philip's dad.
33:04
The plot fails and
33:06
Philip's dad forgives them and they
33:09
maybe go on to continue to maneuver
33:11
behind his back. And then when Philip's
33:13
dad dies, the
33:16
guy who's shacking up with Philip's
33:18
mom is continually inserting
33:21
his hands and trying to manipulate
33:23
the kingship. He may have been
33:25
involved by hook or
33:27
by crook in the assassination of Philip's brother
33:29
when he's a king. So
33:33
it's an interesting family dynamic
33:35
to say the least, but
33:38
nothing unusual given Macedonian history.
33:40
Around the year 368, Philip
33:43
is sent as a hostage to
33:45
the Greek city-state of Thebes. Now
33:48
the reason you send a royal family
33:51
member to another city-state or place
33:53
like Thebes is as
33:55
part of a peace agreement. It sort of
33:58
seals the deal. to go back
34:00
in the peace agreement when we have a bunch of
34:02
your royal family members with us. Think
34:05
about the phenomenon of pages in
34:07
the middle ages. It's not that dissimilar, and Philip
34:09
would have been treated nicely. It wasn't like they
34:11
threw them in a dungeon. But
34:15
it's in Thebes that supposedly Philip
34:17
learns a lot of
34:19
important things about warfare, because
34:21
he's in Thebes at a very
34:24
specific time in history, the time
34:26
in history where Thebes is for
34:28
a short period sort
34:30
of the kings of the Greek
34:32
scene, because they've recently, in
34:34
371 BCE, defeated
34:38
and broken Spartan power. At
34:41
a famous battle called Luchtra, maybe
34:44
the greatest Greek general up until
34:46
this time period, a guy named
34:48
Epaminondas was the guy
34:51
in charge, and he was doing
34:53
really interesting things militarily, and
34:55
Philip is housed with one of his
34:57
generals, and so he's learning
34:59
things, things that he will, well, at
35:02
least the tradition holds, build off of.
35:05
He's going to create an army that builds
35:07
on the foundation that he's taught when he's
35:09
in Thebes. The other thing that happens in
35:11
Thebes is Philip is exposed to all sorts
35:14
of high-minded things. I mean, the guy he
35:16
stays with is a follower
35:19
of the Pythagorean sort of
35:21
lifestyle, I mean, vegetarianism, self-sacrifice,
35:27
a whole bunch of things that Philip
35:29
really wasn't personality-wise, but he's
35:31
getting a chance to really see how
35:33
city-states operate, how their government works, and
35:35
to be exposed to these sorts of
35:37
philosophical ideas that maybe
35:39
wouldn't have been too
35:41
common for a bearskin-wearing
35:44
drinking horn-using, you know,
35:47
barbarian. Meanwhile,
35:50
Philip's oldest brother is assassinated
35:52
during a war dance. His
35:55
next oldest brother recalls Philip from
35:58
Thebes, and he's killed in
36:00
a fight with the Illyrians and another
36:03
4,000 macadonian troops with him,
36:06
and this is the scene that Philip
36:08
finds himself in once he
36:10
sort of reaches the kingship. Now
36:15
the first thing to say about Philip is
36:18
you just don't know much about
36:20
him that you can depend on, because like
36:23
his son Alexander, he is
36:25
the subject of an immense propaganda
36:28
campaign, and the Athenians in this time
36:30
period who were his enemies are the
36:32
best propagandists in Greece, they have some
36:35
of the best orators and speakers going,
36:38
one of them is named Demosthenes, and
36:40
Demosthenes, I mean he'll write
36:42
a bunch of arguments against Philip known
36:44
as the Philippics, and much
36:47
of what we know about Philip comes
36:49
from the Philippics, but the entire design
36:51
and approach of the Philippics is to
36:53
make Philip sound like he's Darth Vader
36:55
or Sauron breathing down Athens' neck, so
36:58
maybe not exactly a
37:02
realistic or fair account
37:04
of the guy. I've
37:06
always loved the way historian Will Durant,
37:09
gosh, I mean I want to say it's almost
37:11
a hundred years ago now, writing about
37:13
Philip describes him, and it may not be
37:15
a fair description either,
37:17
because some of the modern-day historians are
37:20
much kinder to Philip in terms of
37:22
treating him as a more cultured man,
37:24
a more well-spoken man than
37:26
the old-style historians, but Will Durant
37:29
gives a quick rundown that
37:31
just describes how amazing the
37:33
guy is, both in pro and cons,
37:35
and this is what he has to
37:37
say about the personality of Philip the
37:40
Great, or the man
37:42
who maybe should be named Philip the Great,
37:46
in his book The Life of Greece, and
37:48
he says, quote, He
37:50
had all the virtues except those
37:53
of civilization. He was strong
37:55
in body and will, athletic
37:57
and handsome, a magnificent animal,
38:00
trying now and then to be an
38:02
Athenian gentleman. Like his
38:04
famous son, he was a man
38:06
of violent temper and abounding generosity,
38:09
loving battle as much, strong
38:11
drink more. Unlike
38:13
Alexander, he was a jovial laughter, and
38:15
raised to high office a slave who
38:17
amused him. He liked
38:20
boys, but liked women better, and married
38:22
as many of them as he could. He
38:25
continues a little farther. Most
38:28
of all, he liked stalwart men, who
38:30
could risk their lives all day, and
38:32
gamble and carouse with him half the
38:34
night. He was literally, before
38:36
Alexander, the bravest of the brave,
38:39
and left a part of himself
38:41
on every battlefield." He
38:46
had a subtle intelligence, capable
38:48
of patiently awaiting his chance,
38:51
and of moving resolutely through
38:53
difficult means to distant ends.
38:55
In diplomacy, he was affable
38:58
and treacherous. He broke a
39:00
promise with a light heart, and was always
39:02
ready to make another. He
39:04
recognized no morals for governments,
39:06
and looked upon lies and
39:08
bribes as humane substitutes for
39:10
slaughter. But he was lenient
39:13
in victory, and usually gave the defeated
39:15
Greeks better terms than they gave one
39:17
another. All who met
39:19
him, except the obstinate Demosthenes, liked
39:21
him, and ranked him as the
39:24
strongest and most interesting character of
39:26
his time." And
39:29
Demosthenes, who really didn't like him, still
39:31
had to say, quoting
39:33
Demosthenes, "...What a man!
39:36
For the sake of power and
39:38
dominion, he had an eye struck
39:40
out, a shoulder broken, an arm
39:42
and leg paralyzed." To
39:46
personality-wise, we're not sure
39:48
what can be said about Philip. Here's
39:51
what you can say for a fact, though. This
39:54
is a guy who took
39:56
the field with his army every
39:59
single year. year of his twenty-three-year
40:01
reign except one, and the
40:03
one where he didn't, it was because he
40:06
was recovering from wounds, of
40:08
which he got several. As
40:11
Demosthenes said, he is a
40:13
guy who sacrificed multiple body parts, and
40:15
that was not any
40:17
sort of a lie. I mean, the man, by the
40:19
end of his reign, is crippled. He
40:22
loses an eye. He
40:24
has a collarbone broken. His
40:26
hand is supposedly completely mangled. He
40:29
takes a spear through his thigh,
40:31
his lower leg, both bones broken
40:33
at the same time. He
40:38
walked by the end of his life with
40:40
a pronounced limp. But
40:43
he took part in twenty-eight
40:45
campaigns, eleven sieges. Demosthenes says
40:47
he captured forty-five cities. This
40:49
is how you build an
40:51
empire, right? Or something
40:53
that's going to be an empire. And
40:57
like his son, and like Macadonian
40:59
commanders before him, he
41:01
fought in the front. These
41:04
are not Napoleonic-style commanders who
41:06
sit behind the army and
41:09
command the troops as the battle is
41:11
going on in real time, and move
41:13
forces around, and send in reserves, and
41:16
counter-march your forces to match what
41:18
the enemy is doing. These
41:20
are people who set things up in advance. They
41:23
build the military forces. They pick the commanders. They
41:26
position them on the field before the battle
41:28
starts, and then before the fighting actually commences,
41:30
they put themselves in the front rank in
41:33
a Homeric kind of style, right? A
41:36
hero king. And they command. And when you do
41:38
that and you fight twenty-eight
41:40
campaigns, you're going to
41:43
get wounded. And the number of times that
41:45
Philip's troops thought he was dead on the
41:47
battlefield is numerous. In
41:50
1977, to just take
41:53
a little break from all these, he
41:55
said, she said, kind of historical accounts
41:57
from the past and all the propaganda.
42:00
An archaeologist found
42:02
a tomb in
42:05
northern Greece, or the area where
42:07
Macadonia was during this time period,
42:09
the traditional Macadonian heartland. It
42:12
was under a mound, a hill,
42:14
a man-created hill, a tell. And
42:17
in the tomb they found multiple bodies,
42:19
but in one specific tomb around
42:23
a bunch of armor and
42:25
magnificent materials, they
42:28
found a golden box
42:31
with a Macadonian star etched
42:33
into the top, and purple
42:35
cloth, purple being the royal color. Inside
42:39
the box were bones. The
42:44
way that Macadonian royalty
42:46
was often treated
42:49
after death was what we might
42:51
call today a partial cremation. Because
42:54
unlike today's cremations, where you are left with
42:57
ashes and bone ships, very small bone ships,
43:00
in a lot of the funerals
43:02
during the time around Philip's lifespan,
43:04
it was common to have a fire that was only
43:07
hot enough to burn the skin off. And
43:09
then the bones would be taken, washed in wine,
43:11
and put in a container of
43:14
the sort that in 1977 was found in this tomb.
43:18
So you can still look at the bones and
43:20
analyze the bones. In addition
43:22
to the bones, there were things like armor.
43:25
For example, a specific sign
43:27
that maybe we're dealing with Philip II's bones
43:30
in this tomb are greaves
43:32
that were found. Greaves are the armor that
43:34
goes on the shins. And
43:37
these greaves were shaped differently. One in
43:39
particular, shorter than the other, shaped
43:42
for a person who'd suffered a bad
43:44
leg injury. And
43:46
in 77, they thought it might be
43:48
Philip II. Now, I think about 90%
43:51
of the people that are the
43:53
experts in the field would say, it's pretty close
43:55
to unanimous, but maybe not quite, would say that
43:58
this is Philip II. And what that means is
44:00
you can get some hard concrete
44:02
stuff about the guy. He
44:04
was between 5'6 and 5'8, for example, which
44:08
might seem a little short to us
44:10
today, but historians often say that that's
44:12
not that uncommon for the people
44:14
of the time period in this area. Although,
44:17
if he were a little shorter than the
44:20
average Macedonian, that
44:22
would sort of jibe with his son's
44:25
height too, who was also shorter than
44:27
the average Macedonian, so maybe Alexander got
44:29
it from his dad. The skeleton
44:32
also shows the wounds,
44:34
including the most obvious
44:37
during his lifetime that no one would have
44:39
been able to avoid the fact that an
44:41
arrow had struck him in the face and
44:44
took out an eye. Actually, it's
44:46
worse than that. It didn't take out the
44:48
eye because a physician had to scoop out
44:50
the eye with what amounted to a spoon,
44:52
and when you think of
44:55
someone doing that to you without any
44:57
sort of real anesthesia or anesthetic, it
44:59
boggles the mind to consider the amount of
45:02
pain we're talking about here. I
45:05
got that rundown of Philip's
45:07
campaign record from
45:09
historian Richard A. Gabriel, who wrote a
45:12
book called Philip II of Macazon, Greater
45:14
Than Alexander, and he ran
45:16
down how Philip's statecraft
45:20
was much more oriented
45:22
towards results than
45:24
perhaps Homeric glory
45:27
and swordplay,
45:30
and he writes, In
45:33
a very important way, however,
45:36
Philip's view of war as
45:38
distinct from personal bravery was
45:40
decidedly un-Homeric. Unlike the
45:42
Iliad's heroes, this great warrior king
45:44
who took the field every year
45:46
of his 23-year reign, save one
45:48
when he was recovering from wounds,
45:50
who took part in 28 campaigns
45:53
and 11 sieges, who captured
45:55
45 cities if one
45:57
can trust Demosthenes, and who was wounded
46:00
at least five times, never went to
46:02
war for its own sake, or only
46:04
for personal glory. For Philip,
46:07
war was first and foremost an instrument
46:09
of state policy, with which
46:12
to achieve specific strategic objectives.
46:14
It was always the continuation of
46:17
policy by other means, in the
46:19
genuine Clausewitzian sense. The
46:21
rhetorician, Paulianius, observed that, quote,
46:24
Philip achieved no less through
46:26
conversation than through battle, and
46:29
by Zeus he prided himself more on
46:31
what he acquired through words than on
46:33
what he acquired through arms. End
46:36
quote. And then Gabriel says
46:39
this Clausewitzian view of war led
46:41
Philip to become the greatest strategist of
46:43
his time. Clausewitz,
46:46
of course, is famous for saying
46:48
that war is
46:50
a continuation of politics or policies
46:53
by other means. But
46:55
for Philip II, this applied
46:57
to all sorts of things,
47:00
including marriage. Marriage
47:02
for Philip was Clausewitzian. In
47:05
this he is far from alone. After
47:08
all, royal marriages, for
47:10
diplomatic reasons, right to cement
47:12
alliances or connections between powerful
47:15
families, or to wed states
47:18
or kingdoms or locations more closely
47:20
together, isn't just common, it's
47:22
almost the norm. But
47:25
the Macedonian ruler has a huge advantage
47:27
over a lot of these other
47:29
royal families that do the same thing. I mean, after
47:31
all, if you're Henry VIII of
47:33
England and you're marrying for diplomatic reasons,
47:35
it's kind of a limitation, isn't it,
47:37
if you can just marry one wife?
47:41
Philip didn't have any sort of limitation like that
47:43
at all. One of the
47:45
things the Greeks used as evidence that
47:47
the Macedonians were barbarians is
47:49
that they were polygamous. Philip
47:51
could marry as many wives as he
47:54
wanted to to cement his
47:56
diplomatic and political goals.
48:00
he's going to have seven or eight
48:02
wives during his lifetime and have multiple
48:05
of them at the same
48:07
time. And the women that he
48:09
married are interesting characters if
48:12
the ancient sources are to be believed.
48:15
I mean, for example, he will marry an Illyrian
48:18
wife or two, and the Illyrians are
48:20
the problem children of that whole part
48:22
of the world, exceedingly
48:24
dangerous, responsible for the death
48:27
of Philip's older brother and four
48:30
thousand Macadonian soldiers right before Philip,
48:32
you know, takes the throne. So it
48:35
makes sense to marry an Illyrian princess, but
48:37
they seem to be, if the ancient sources
48:39
can be believed, quite the
48:41
handful. Supposedly,
48:43
Illyrian women could be trained
48:46
to fight in combat
48:48
as men, with swords, spears,
48:50
shield, armor, and on horseback.
48:53
And there will be a strain of
48:56
the Illyrian DNA running through the Macadonian
48:58
royal line, where mother
49:01
is supposed to continue the tradition of teaching the
49:03
daughters how to fight like this. And
49:05
it is a fascinating thing to
49:08
consider. There's a very Wonder Woman Amazonian
49:10
element to the whole thing, and it's interesting
49:12
to think of Philip marrying a woman who
49:15
could kill him in
49:17
combat. But that's
49:19
hardly the extent of
49:21
Philip marrying interesting and
49:24
potentially dangerous women.
49:26
I mean, he marries magical women, if you
49:28
believe the sources. I'm gonna say if you
49:30
believe the sources many times here, because one's
49:33
not sure what to make of them, and
49:35
remember, especially when dealing with women, they are
49:37
far from fair. I use
49:40
the term magical. Some of them might
49:42
say witches instead, and Philip
49:45
is supposed to have married at least
49:47
one of these magical princesses, maybe two.
49:52
One thing you can say is that
49:55
by the time Philip marries the woman
49:58
who will be Alexander the Great, Great's
50:00
mother, one wonders whether
50:02
or not, as a young couple, Philip
50:04
would have been in his 20s, and
50:07
Alexander the Great's mother, a woman named Olympias,
50:09
would have been in her teens. One
50:12
imagines that you could have
50:14
looked at them at a party and said,
50:16
I wonder what kind of children those two
50:18
people will produce, because one
50:21
has to look at
50:23
a teenage Olympias and
50:26
say that you can sort
50:28
of divine how formidable a
50:30
person she was, because
50:33
as a teenage girl she can
50:36
handle this guy, right? The
50:38
most formidable person of his
50:41
time, a figure
50:43
that the ancient Greeks to the south
50:45
of him had all kinds of trouble
50:47
with. You just heard, you
50:50
know, Professor Gabriel describe his qualities,
50:52
you heard Will Durant describe his
50:54
qualities, and yet this teenager from
50:57
a place called Melosia in Iparis
51:02
can handle him.
51:04
And she may have even scared him a
51:06
little. Philip
51:08
II's family claimed
51:11
a descent from Heracles,
51:13
who we would call
51:15
Hercules, right? If you recall
51:17
your Greek mythology, Heracles is
51:19
the son of Zeus, not just
51:22
a Greek god, but the king
51:24
of the Greek mythological pantheon,
51:27
right? If you're gonna claim to send it from
51:29
a god at some point in your, you
51:31
know, genetic line, why not make it the king
51:33
of the gods? Who could you possibly marry who's
51:36
gonna bring enough, you know, cachet
51:38
to the marriage to compete with
51:40
something like that? Well,
51:42
Olympias's family in Melosia
51:45
claimed descendant from the greatest hero
51:47
of the most important Greek story
51:49
to most Greeks growing up during
51:52
this time period, the Iliad. Olympias's
51:55
family claimed descent from Achilles.
52:00
which means that when they have a child together,
52:02
this family who claims descent from
52:05
Heracles and through him, Zeus, and
52:08
this other family who claims descent through
52:10
Achilles, you're going to have a
52:12
kid who mixes the blood of Zeus, Heracles
52:15
and Achilles. And
52:17
somehow the great God
52:20
Dionysus manages to get
52:22
involved in this whole affair too and
52:24
creates this fusion in the
52:27
child that they're going to have that
52:29
impacts that child's life for
52:31
its entirety. To
52:36
this day, historians still try to
52:38
argue and debate how important these three
52:40
figures were to
52:42
Alexander and like so much of his life
52:45
are trying to disentangle true contemporary
52:48
things, you know, things that were part
52:50
of his life from the
52:52
many fables and stories and
52:54
romances or just plain
52:56
bad histories that cropped up after his death.
53:00
Was he really into Achilles the
53:02
way the later sources say?
53:04
Some people say no Dionysus is
53:07
very hard to figure out. Heracles
53:09
is the least controversial since Alexander
53:11
definitely put the figure of
53:13
the hero demigod on coins
53:15
and whatnot. But there are
53:17
other historians that will make a
53:20
much more closely connected case. I mean, there's
53:22
a whole book about Alexander's connection to Dionysus
53:24
and Dionysus
53:26
is in my opinion, this is
53:28
one of those opinion comments,
53:31
but is the most interesting
53:33
and hard to get your mind around of
53:35
the Greek deities in part
53:37
because he rules over those parts of
53:39
humanity and humankind that
53:43
are themselves hard to get
53:45
one's mind around, right? The
53:47
subconscious, the hidden sides of
53:50
one's character, the psychological dark
53:52
areas. There's
53:54
a book called Alexander the Great, The Invisible
53:56
Enemy by historian John Maxwell O'Brien, and it's
53:58
all about this connection. between Alexander
54:01
and this particular god Dionysus,
54:04
and he describes Dionysus in the most
54:06
interesting of ways. Dionysus is officially the
54:08
god of wine, but wine itself is
54:11
a weird sort of a concoction
54:14
that can be both positive and
54:16
negative, which is kind of how the god can
54:18
be too. Here's how
54:21
O'Brien describes Dionysus, and he
54:23
says, quote, The god
54:25
of everything that blossomed and breathed, Dionysus
54:27
could surface in the moisture on a
54:30
rose, bellow majestically through
54:32
a raging bull, or
54:34
imperceptibly shed old skin for new in the
54:36
guise of a snake. He
54:38
was the divine patron of the theater,
54:40
with an empty mask as his emblem,
54:42
the god of a thousand faces, who
54:45
epitomized metamorphosis and could transform
54:48
mortals at will. Armed
54:50
with ecstasy and madness, this
54:53
paradoxical deity would smile at
54:55
human determination and laugh at
54:57
logic. In league with death as
55:00
well as life, his realm reached
55:02
beyond the grave to the murky
55:04
waters of the netherworld. End
55:06
quote. O'Brien
55:09
points out that Dionysus
55:11
wasn't really so much the god
55:13
of wine as he was the
55:15
wine itself, and through the drinking
55:18
of the wine, humans could
55:20
commune with the god and
55:23
all the pros and cons that
55:26
the drinking of alcohol or intoxicants,
55:28
because there are interesting theories about
55:31
the intoxicants that might have been
55:33
used as part of the
55:35
religious rights connected to Dionysus to induce
55:38
different sides of human behavior and
55:40
trances and all those kinds of
55:43
the subliminal or unconscious
55:46
sides of humanity. And
55:49
O'Brien writes quote, Dionysus
55:51
proffered himself through wine and
55:54
mortals revealed his personality as
55:56
well as their own through
55:58
drinking and drunkenness. A
56:01
number of the gods' epithets describe
56:03
his attractive attributes or praise the
56:05
benefits to be culled from his
56:07
precious gift. He is a
56:09
relaxer of the mind, a healer
56:11
of sorrow, a dispeller of
56:13
care, a provider of
56:15
joy, a merry maker, and
56:17
a lover of laughter. Other
56:20
epithets refer to his less
56:22
admirable characteristics and simultaneously serve
56:24
as a reminder of the
56:27
potential destructiveness of his earthly
56:29
agent. He is a disturber of
56:31
the soul, a mind-breaker, a
56:33
bestower of envy, a dispenser
56:35
of anger, a chaser of
56:37
sleep, a noisemaker, and a
56:40
liar. The visible effects
56:42
of the wine, O'Brien writes, unmasked
56:45
the fundamental ambivalence of the god
56:47
and revealed a kindred quality in
56:49
mortals. Wine exalted
56:52
the spirit, but it also had
56:54
the capacity to unleash primordial impulses.
56:57
Under its influence, a veneer
56:59
of sophistication might disappear abruptly,
57:02
and civility could be transformed
57:04
into uncontrollable rage. The
57:07
wine god disclosed reasons uneasy
57:09
sway over emotion and served
57:11
as a chilling reminder of
57:13
bestiality at its core." Here's
57:19
mother Olympias was a
57:21
devotee of Dionysus, an
57:24
initiate if the sources are to be
57:26
believed in the mystery cult of
57:28
the god, and it's a mystery
57:31
cult because nobody knows what goes
57:33
on in the various rites connected
57:35
to the god, although
57:37
if one believes the Greek
57:39
playwright Euripides, who was spending
57:42
time hanging out in Macadonia,
57:44
he wrote in his play the Bacchae about
57:47
it. He says that the
57:49
women met in
57:51
sacred areas just
57:53
amongst their own kind and
57:56
tore live animals to pieces and
57:58
devoured them. They
58:02
participated in magic rites, carried
58:05
wands and worshiped and
58:07
kept snakes, which
58:10
is another thing associated with
58:12
Olympias. She's supposed to
58:14
have kept snakes, maybe
58:17
even in her bedroom. And
58:21
it's long been a part
58:23
of the Alexandrian
58:25
tradition, maybe written to
58:27
make her sound just a
58:30
bit more weird and interesting that
58:32
this freaked out Philip II
58:34
of Macedonia in his wonderful classic
58:37
work on Alexander from the early
58:39
1970s. Historian Peter Green
58:41
wrote about it this way, quote, in
58:44
the autumn of three 57, Philip married
58:46
his Eparate princess and for the first time
58:48
in his life, found he had taken on
58:50
rather more than he could handle. Olympias,
58:53
though not yet 18, had
58:55
already emerged as a forceful, not
58:58
to say eccentric personality. She
59:00
was among other things, passionately
59:02
devoted to the orgiastic rights
59:04
of Dionysus and her
59:06
Menandic frenzies can scarcely have been
59:09
conducive to peaceful domestic life. One
59:12
of her more outre habits, unless, as
59:14
has been suggested, it had a ritual
59:16
origin, was keeping an assortment
59:18
of large tame snakes as pets. To
59:21
employ these creatures on religious occasions
59:24
could raise no objections, but
59:26
their intermittent appearance in Olympias' bed
59:28
must have been a hazard calculated
59:31
to put even the toughest bridegroom
59:33
off his stroke. End
59:35
quote. Now, it's
59:37
always a mistake to assume that people
59:40
from other cultures and earlier eras
59:42
would react the same way to
59:45
circumstances and stimuli that we would.
59:47
I'm just going to say that
59:49
personally, though, if I'm
59:51
laying in my bed and all of
59:53
a sudden crawling through my sheets and
59:55
on my sleeping form is a large
59:58
serpent, because that's how it's called. described in the
1:00:01
sources, that's gonna freak me out
1:00:03
a little bit. Puts
1:00:05
a whole new sort of reptilian spin on
1:00:07
the idea of love
1:00:09
me love my dog, doesn't it? But
1:00:13
I'll say this about Peter Green in
1:00:15
1970. He's a lot fairer to
1:00:17
Olympias than the ancient sources or even
1:00:19
the early modern ones. I mean the 1920s
1:00:21
is one of those eras where there's
1:00:23
a lot of writing about Philip and Alexander and
1:00:25
Olympias and the writers
1:00:27
and historians from that era are
1:00:29
just as harsh, maybe more
1:00:32
so, on Alexander's mother
1:00:34
and Philip's wife than even
1:00:36
the ancients. I mean listen to
1:00:38
the way science fiction author but also
1:00:41
popular historian H.G. Wells describes Philip's
1:00:43
wife Olympias and
1:00:46
you get this sense that she's practically
1:00:48
demonic and he first
1:00:51
extols all the wondrous qualities of
1:00:53
Philip II, right? Very
1:00:56
similar I would say to the way
1:00:58
Professor Gabriel describes Philip, right? Greater than
1:01:00
Alexander. If not for Philip there is
1:01:02
no Alexander but he has this tragic
1:01:04
flaw. He's joined, you know,
1:01:07
like a ball and chain to
1:01:10
a dangerous demonic force
1:01:13
who eventually destroys
1:01:16
him and
1:01:18
limits Alexander's ability to be as great as
1:01:20
his father. Here's the way H.G. Wells
1:01:23
describes Alexander's mother
1:01:26
and Philip's wife Olympias
1:01:28
and see if she doesn't sound very
1:01:31
much like something, you know,
1:01:33
out of a dark horror movie. Wells
1:01:36
writes, quote, It
1:01:38
is necessary now to tell something of
1:01:40
the domestic life of King Philip. The
1:01:43
lives of both Philip and his
1:01:45
son were pervaded by the personality
1:01:47
of a restless and evil woman,
1:01:49
Olympias, the mother of Alexander. He
1:01:53
then talks about how Philip
1:01:55
and she were married and then says,
1:01:57
quote, It was not long
1:01:59
before Olympias and Philip were bitterly
1:02:01
estranged. She was jealous of him,
1:02:04
but there was another engraver source of
1:02:06
trouble in her passion for religious mysteries.
1:02:09
We've already noted that beneath the
1:02:11
fine and restrained Nordic religion of
1:02:13
the Greeks, the land abounded with
1:02:15
religious cults of a darker and
1:02:18
more ancient kind, aboriginal
1:02:20
cults with secret initiations,
1:02:22
or geastic celebrations, and
1:02:24
often with cruel and
1:02:26
obscure rites. These
1:02:29
religions of the shadows, he writes,
1:02:31
these practices of the women and
1:02:33
peasants and slaves, gave Greece
1:02:35
her orphic, Dionysic, and Demeter cults,
1:02:37
and they've lurked in the tradition
1:02:40
of Europe down almost to our
1:02:42
own times. The witchcraft
1:02:44
of the Middle Ages, with
1:02:46
its resort to the blood
1:02:48
of babes, scraps of executed
1:02:50
criminals, incantations, and magic circles,
1:02:53
seems to have been little else than
1:02:55
the lingering vestiges of these solemnities of
1:02:57
the dark whites. In these
1:02:59
matters, Olympias was an expert and
1:03:01
an enthusiast, and Plutarch
1:03:04
mentions that she achieved considerable
1:03:06
celebrity by use of tame
1:03:08
serpents in these pious exercises.
1:03:11
The snakes invaded her domestic apartments,
1:03:14
and history is not clear whether
1:03:16
Philip found in them matter for
1:03:18
exasperation or religious awe. These
1:03:21
occupations of his wife must have
1:03:23
been a serious inconvenience to Philip,
1:03:25
for the Macedonian people were still
1:03:28
in the sturdy stage of social
1:03:30
development, in which neither enthusiastic religiosity
1:03:32
nor uncontrollable wives
1:03:35
was admired." So,
1:03:39
according to Wells and a lot of
1:03:42
other people writing in the 1920s,
1:03:44
Alexander's father is one of the great men in
1:03:46
history, his mother's a witch. Neither
1:03:50
of those things matters very
1:03:52
much, if not for the
1:03:54
creation of the tool that leads to
1:03:56
the fame of both of
1:03:59
those people. and their child,
1:04:02
the military Maserati that Philip
1:04:04
II will create, the
1:04:06
Macadonian army. The
1:04:10
Macadonian army, by the way, is
1:04:12
arguably the most important part of this story. I
1:04:15
mean, you can make a case that
1:04:17
without that, none of the sorts
1:04:20
of things that get Philip II,
1:04:22
and more importantly, his son Alexander in
1:04:24
the history books, happens. I
1:04:26
mean, it's the tool that
1:04:28
creates all the opportunities for conquest,
1:04:31
right? In
1:04:34
my head, I always try to switch the
1:04:37
battles around and imagine Alexander, instead
1:04:39
of commanding what is
1:04:41
almost certainly the best army in the world
1:04:44
at the time period he's commanding it, probably
1:04:46
the best army the world had ever seen.
1:04:48
I try to imagine Alexander having
1:04:50
to switch sides with the general
1:04:53
he's fighting, right? Why don't you
1:04:55
give Darius the Macadonians and you
1:04:57
take the Persians in this big
1:04:59
battle and let's see how that
1:05:01
goes. Might have gone fine. Alexander
1:05:03
probably, you know, really good general
1:05:05
knows what he's doing, but I mean, he was
1:05:08
fighting with the best army in the world when
1:05:10
he did what he did. And
1:05:12
so it seems like the real important
1:05:16
decisive moment in the history of this
1:05:18
story is Philip creating this
1:05:21
amazing army.
1:05:23
Because Philip made the Macadonian
1:05:25
army and then conversely, it's safe to say
1:05:28
that the Macadonian army made Philip. Where
1:05:32
the heck did he get the idea for it? Well,
1:05:35
we should talk a little bit about
1:05:38
the Macadonian army, Philip's influences, and
1:05:40
even kind of more important ancient
1:05:43
warfare and how it worked and what
1:05:45
we know and what we don't know.
1:05:48
Because trying to figure out how the
1:05:50
army that Philip created worked is in
1:05:52
itself a speculative kind of an affair,
1:05:54
which is weird when you think about
1:05:57
it. First
1:06:01
of all, let's just talk about what he made.
1:06:03
The Macedonian army, I can't...it's
1:06:07
like a boxer who's never lost.
1:06:10
And then you try to imagine what it would
1:06:12
have taken to beat them, right? Whereas
1:06:14
if you have a fighter that has lost, even
1:06:16
once, you can say, well, you know, we saw
1:06:19
how Buster Douglas broke him down. That's the strategy
1:06:21
for, you know, beating this guy. And
1:06:24
the army, at least under Alexander, is
1:06:26
basically undefeated. Every sort
1:06:28
of mental scenario
1:06:31
that you envision is
1:06:33
a fantasy. So
1:06:36
the army was that good. Now remember,
1:06:38
the entire world is not connected during
1:06:41
this time period. So armies from far-flung
1:06:43
areas generally didn't fight each other,
1:06:45
right? So the great armies of China in
1:06:47
this same era are not fighting the Macedonians.
1:06:49
So we just don't have a comparison when
1:06:52
we say the Macedonians were the best in
1:06:54
the world. Well, they didn't fight the Chinese.
1:06:57
And of course, no one in the Americas was
1:06:59
fighting anyone from outside the Americas, so we don't
1:07:01
know how they would have done. But
1:07:04
I'm just going to say if we're betting and
1:07:06
we're having the Macedonians fight any of
1:07:08
those contemporary armies from anywhere in the
1:07:10
world, I'm taking the Macedonians because they're
1:07:12
undefeated, basically. And
1:07:15
what Philip does is invent a style
1:07:17
of warfare that is going to become
1:07:19
the Cadillac style of
1:07:21
warfare in the entire region for like 175 years. For
1:07:25
the next almost 200 years, if you're going to
1:07:27
have a top-flight army in the Mediterranean, you're
1:07:30
going to have a Pyke Phalanx, probably.
1:07:35
And when in a couple of centuries the Romans and
1:07:38
their mannipled legions throw
1:07:40
the Phalanxes on the ash
1:07:42
heap of history, it's worth
1:07:44
questioning whether they were even
1:07:46
fighting the same sort
1:07:48
of army that Alexander and
1:07:51
Philip had developed at all. A lot
1:07:53
of evolution and changes and adaptations and
1:07:55
maybe even de-evolution going
1:07:58
on in the Andrian
1:08:00
system of fighting over the 175 years it was
1:08:02
dominant. But
1:08:06
Philip develops a troop type that
1:08:09
makes all the difference in the world. And he
1:08:11
develops the Pyke Phalanx. It's
1:08:14
interesting to think about one guy developing this
1:08:17
because normally weapon systems are cultural in the
1:08:19
ancient world. They develop as a part of
1:08:21
what's going on in society. And a lot
1:08:23
of people fight connected to the
1:08:26
land and the kind of enemies they face
1:08:28
and the terrain and all sorts of things.
1:08:32
I mean who invented the hoplite right? Sometime
1:08:35
in the 700s maybe BCE
1:08:37
the hoplite just sort of appears in a bunch
1:08:39
of places. There's nobody you can say that guy
1:08:41
came up with the idea. But
1:08:44
Philip invented the Pyke Phalanx. And
1:08:47
the Macadonian Pyke Phalanx is kind of a hoplite
1:08:50
killing machine. He
1:08:52
takes the best parts of
1:08:54
the hoplite phalanxes and so the super
1:08:57
charges them in a way that makes
1:08:59
them better hoplite phalanxes. He
1:09:03
gives them a much longer spear.
1:09:06
He packs the human beings even
1:09:10
more closely together. He
1:09:12
makes the formation deeper. So
1:09:15
if you have a bunch of hoplites probably
1:09:17
about 8 ranks deep, sometimes 4, sometimes 12,
1:09:20
but usually about 8 ranks deep with
1:09:22
their 7 to 9 foot spears smash
1:09:25
into a 16 rank Pyke Phalanx
1:09:29
with 16 to 23 foot spears. Well
1:09:35
you can see how one is almost built to
1:09:38
overcome the other. A lot of advantages than
1:09:40
the Pyke Phalanx. So
1:09:42
if this is the key thing that Philip
1:09:44
invents, because we'll talk about the rest of
1:09:46
the army in a bit, but if
1:09:49
this is the key thing Philip invents, where
1:09:51
did he get the idea for this? If
1:09:54
this is the moment of development that's going to
1:09:56
impact everything he does, Alexander does
1:09:58
and a bunch of armies. for 175 years
1:10:01
do, where did the guy come
1:10:03
up with it? Was it just he dreamt it? And
1:10:06
so, you know, you can start down
1:10:08
this path of imagine, of imagining where
1:10:10
Philip, Incorporated, you know, brainstorm
1:10:13
kinds of material, Diodorus Siculus, ancient
1:10:15
historian, says that one of the
1:10:17
things that gave Philip the idea
1:10:19
for these pike phalanxes was
1:10:21
the Iliad. And
1:10:24
I find this fascinating to think about, because if
1:10:26
it's true, let's just play with this for a
1:10:28
minute. If it's true, and it is true, the
1:10:30
Iliad was a huge book in Macadonian society. I'm
1:10:33
sure everyone, Philip Alexander, all those people would have
1:10:35
read it, Alexander supposed to have memorized it. And
1:10:37
why not? He's supposed to be
1:10:39
descended from Achilles takes a lot of pride in being
1:10:41
descended from Achilles. Well, you know,
1:10:43
Achilles is the lead superhero in
1:10:46
the, you know, ancient version of
1:10:48
a mass movie blockbuster, you know,
1:10:51
the Iliad, that's, that's the Achilles story, right? So you're
1:10:53
going to know that story backwards and forwards. In fact,
1:10:56
you know, there's a lot of historians who will
1:10:58
call Macadonian society during
1:11:00
this time period Homeric, meaning
1:11:03
it kind of has a Homeric value system
1:11:05
and all that maybe even Alexander's desire to
1:11:08
be the best, right, this ambition, this
1:11:10
thing at the core of his ambition,
1:11:12
that may be a Homeric value. But
1:11:16
it's so weird to think about because, and
1:11:18
of course, it reminds me of a Star
1:11:20
Trek episode original series, the one
1:11:22
where a very imitative society on another
1:11:24
planet got a hold of
1:11:26
an Earth book, a history book that was
1:11:29
left behind by an earlier Earth expedition. And
1:11:31
the history book was the history of the
1:11:33
gangster wars in Chicago, you know, in the
1:11:35
prohibition 1920s. And then they
1:11:39
modeled their whole society on it, so
1:11:41
that when the Earth ships come back
1:11:43
a while later, the entire planet looks
1:11:45
like, you know, Al Capone, and guys
1:11:47
walking around with submachine guns and talking
1:11:49
like, you know, gangster era Chicago. It's
1:11:52
a little like, if this is true,
1:11:54
you just imagine Macadonian society with their one
1:11:56
book, and they model their whole society on
1:11:59
the value of a people that
1:12:02
if they existed, existed in
1:12:04
the late Bronze Age. If
1:12:07
there was a Trojan war of the
1:12:10
kind that the Iliad talks about, it
1:12:12
happened in like 1100 BCE, somewhere around
1:12:14
there. And then
1:12:16
people would have talked about it, and oral
1:12:18
historians would have transmitted the tale for hundreds
1:12:21
of years before a guy or group of
1:12:23
people, we don't know, that we
1:12:25
call Homer, consolidated all that
1:12:27
into sort of a written form that
1:12:30
could then be passed down for hundreds of
1:12:32
years more. So by the time a guy
1:12:35
like Alexander or Philip II is reading it,
1:12:37
this is material that's been written down for
1:12:40
like 500 years. And
1:12:44
when it was finally written down,
1:12:46
it had already been transmitted orally
1:12:49
for three or four centuries before
1:12:51
then. So
1:12:54
if Philip II really gets
1:12:56
this idea for Pike Phalanxes
1:12:59
from reading about the Achaeans in the
1:13:01
Trojan War, using block formations
1:13:03
of troops with very long spears,
1:13:06
that's wild to me. And
1:13:09
the fact that this formation then
1:13:11
goes on to dominate the battlefields
1:13:13
from Philip's time forward for
1:13:15
almost another 200 more years. Well,
1:13:18
if you really got that idea from the
1:13:20
echoes of the late
1:13:23
Bronze Age, I'd love to
1:13:25
think that was true. I'm going to pretend that
1:13:27
that story is true. There
1:13:30
are some more logical candidates,
1:13:32
though. How about the Athenian
1:13:34
general Efricrates and his famous reforms?
1:13:37
You ancient history military
1:13:40
nerds out there know that Efricrates
1:13:42
is one of these guys who
1:13:44
sort of looked at the traditional
1:13:46
hoplite heavy infantry and decided
1:13:48
they'd be better if they weren't so heavy. He
1:13:51
lightens them up, gives them a small wicker
1:13:53
shield instead of the big heavy wood one,
1:13:57
lighter equipment, less armor, gives them
1:13:59
some Jadlands to throw also.
1:14:01
They become a much more flexible force
1:14:04
on the battlefield, much more useful,
1:14:07
maybe not as good if you
1:14:09
get him into a slogging match with the
1:14:11
old-fashioned Hoplites, but probably better at
1:14:13
everything else. Oh yeah, and this
1:14:15
is maybe how it really
1:14:18
plays into Philip, supposedly doubles the
1:14:20
length of their spear. So if
1:14:23
a Hoplite spear is seven to nine feet,
1:14:25
you know, he's rocking more of a 14 to 18
1:14:29
foot spear on his Hoplite
1:14:31
Peltast mix, can we call
1:14:33
them? And it's interesting
1:14:36
to imagine what that might actually mean, you know,
1:14:38
if you're one of these guys facing a Hoplite and all
1:14:41
of a sudden your spear is twice as long as theirs.
1:14:43
I mean, trying to imagine how
1:14:45
you might use it is interesting, but you
1:14:47
can certainly see some advantages in your being
1:14:49
able to stab them and they
1:14:52
not being able to stab you back, can't you?
1:14:54
And a
1:14:56
Fricrates, by the way, was active in
1:14:58
Macedonia right around this time period. So
1:15:00
there's hardly one degree of separation involved.
1:15:02
So he certainly could be an influence
1:15:04
on where the heck Philip gets this
1:15:06
idea to create this new
1:15:09
thing on the battlefield, which
1:15:11
becomes dominant, like this great
1:15:14
idea. And then of course, the
1:15:16
odds on favorite for big influence
1:15:18
on Philip that you read just
1:15:20
about everywhere is what
1:15:23
he learned during his time as a
1:15:25
hostage when he was a teenager in
1:15:27
Thebes. This
1:15:29
is always shown in the
1:15:31
sources to be an important part
1:15:34
of Philip's development because, well, how could it
1:15:36
not rub off on him? Basically, he was
1:15:38
staying in the house, I guess, of a
1:15:40
noted Theban general. And according
1:15:43
to some of the ancient sources, he has access
1:15:45
to this general's library and he's being encouraged to
1:15:47
read up on all the latest knowledge
1:15:50
of cutting edge Greek warfare. And
1:15:52
he was probably interacting and
1:15:54
certainly very close to Epaminondas, the
1:15:57
Theban general, the guy often given credit for
1:15:59
the things like, oh, I don't know, smashing
1:16:02
Spartan power in a way that it was
1:16:04
never the same again, stuff
1:16:07
like that, maybe the greatest Greek
1:16:09
general of all time. So Philip's interacting with a
1:16:11
guy like that during the time period
1:16:13
when Thebes is sitting on top of the world for
1:16:15
a relatively short period of
1:16:17
time in the hierarchy
1:16:20
of Greek city states. Right. Once you smash
1:16:22
Sparta, you're kind of left as the big
1:16:24
dog. And Epeminandus famously
1:16:27
defeated the Spartans at Luchtra in 371 BCE
1:16:29
by breaking all the rules. And that's
1:16:34
how you beat the Spartans. The
1:16:38
kind of things that he did to break all the
1:16:40
rules. Once they work, everybody
1:16:42
adopts them, but somebody's got to be
1:16:44
the visionary that decides to roll the
1:16:46
dice and really take a
1:16:48
chance and try some new things on the
1:16:50
battlefield. And that's what Epeminandus did. And of
1:16:53
course, you know, by defeating the
1:16:55
Spartans, he basically hit the jackpot, right? He
1:16:57
rolled the right roll on the dice when
1:16:59
he rolled them. But
1:17:01
what makes his bet so gutsy
1:17:05
is that in the ancient world, the
1:17:09
punishments for having your
1:17:11
innovation fail are massive.
1:17:15
Nowadays, of course, we're accustomed to making
1:17:17
constant updates and changes in warfare, new
1:17:19
equipment, new tactics, new approaches, you know,
1:17:21
new technologies, all kinds of things involved.
1:17:23
So that even over the course of
1:17:25
a short war, we can expect to
1:17:27
see all sorts of innovations and changes
1:17:30
and whatnot. But this
1:17:32
is a relatively modern development.
1:17:34
And it's connected to the opportunity
1:17:37
costs and the dangers of
1:17:39
innovations going sideways on you.
1:17:42
So if you look at the First World War, which is one
1:17:44
of these wars that you really is the first time you can
1:17:46
look and you can just watch technology, having
1:17:49
a leap frogging effect as the war
1:17:51
goes on as sides, you know, continually
1:17:53
try to out improve and out invent
1:17:55
one another, you see it in the
1:17:57
air war in the First World War, for example, where Every
1:18:00
six months, either the allies or
1:18:02
the central powers create
1:18:04
some new engine or airframe or way
1:18:06
of fighting or weapon or something that
1:18:08
allows them to get the jump on
1:18:11
the other side for like six months
1:18:13
until a new invention or innovation on
1:18:15
the other side flips the coin. You
1:18:19
can see new technology and ways of fighting introduced
1:18:21
all throughout that war. Look how the British introduced
1:18:23
tanks. Built them up in secret
1:18:25
for a while. And then finally in one battle, they
1:18:27
throw out enough of them to make a difference and
1:18:29
they sort of see what happens. And
1:18:32
when it's not war changing, and they really
1:18:34
didn't expect it to be war changing in
1:18:36
that battle, they then sit down and
1:18:38
figure out, okay, how did it go? That was a good
1:18:40
experiment. What can we do different next time? You know, what
1:18:43
worked, what didn't work? But it doesn't
1:18:45
lose you the war. And
1:18:47
that's the difference. In the First World War,
1:18:49
you can try these things out and the
1:18:51
failure for your innovation not working isn't
1:18:54
enormous. Whereas in the
1:18:56
ancient world where most wars are decided
1:18:58
with one or two battles, having
1:19:01
your innovation go sideways and costing you
1:19:03
the battle could easily cost you the
1:19:05
war. So the penalty for failure is
1:19:07
huge and the incentives to be conservative
1:19:10
are overriding. So when a guy like
1:19:12
Epaminondas throws the dice on something like
1:19:14
breaking all the rules of Greek warfare,
1:19:17
you've got to admire his moxie. But
1:19:20
that's how you beat the Spartans, right? So for
1:19:22
those who don't know, and it's only important to
1:19:24
know because a lot of what Epaminondas does after
1:19:26
he breaks the rules are gonna be the kind
1:19:29
of thing Philip incorporates into his
1:19:31
way of fighting, right? The
1:19:34
first rule of Epaminondas breaks has to do
1:19:36
with something, you know, I'm
1:19:38
going off on tangents on tangents now,
1:19:40
but has something to do with the
1:19:42
way human beings fight when they get
1:19:44
on a pre-modern battlefield, especially in these
1:19:46
hoplite, close formation type deals. And
1:19:49
it's a fascinating part of what I like to call
1:19:51
the physics of the ancient battlefield. But
1:19:53
because this happens, there are certain
1:19:57
conventions of Greek fighting
1:20:00
were in place before Pemminanda. So we have to
1:20:02
talk about what's going on in the battlefield. Did
1:20:04
you know, because it's kind of interesting, that
1:20:07
when you get two lines
1:20:09
of hoplites facing off against one
1:20:11
another, if we try to
1:20:13
imagine what this would look like visibly from the
1:20:15
air, think about railroad tracks. And
1:20:17
you have the two tracks facing each other.
1:20:20
Those are the lines of hoplites on both
1:20:22
sides and an intervening space between them. And
1:20:24
at some point when a battle happens, one
1:20:26
or both of those lines of hoplites crosses
1:20:28
the intervening space and starts bashing into the
1:20:30
other one. But
1:20:33
what's interesting is when you get a bunch of men, you
1:20:36
know, in long lines, maybe 100, maybe 200, maybe
1:20:39
300 yards long, four, eight,
1:20:41
maybe 12 ranks deep, when
1:20:44
they're all lined up shoulder to shoulder with a spear
1:20:46
in the right hand and a shield in the left
1:20:48
hand, did you know that
1:20:50
the formation drifts to the right and
1:20:53
it's so reliable, the Greeks count
1:20:56
on it? Imagine
1:20:59
a ripple going through the entire 100 to 300 yard line of men
1:21:01
as everybody just
1:21:04
sort of scooches a little bit to the right.
1:21:06
You say, well, what's going on? Well, the sources
1:21:08
indicate that men in these sorts of
1:21:12
situations, either while they're standing there, waiting to
1:21:14
advance or while the advance is happening or
1:21:17
both tend to move a little to the
1:21:19
right because to the right is where the shield of the
1:21:21
guy next to them is. And
1:21:26
they are almost unconsciously or
1:21:28
maybe consciously trying to scooch
1:21:30
over just a little bit more behind the
1:21:32
protection of the guy next to them. And
1:21:35
when everybody does that along the whole line, the
1:21:37
whole line moves to the right. And
1:21:41
if your whole line is moving to the right and
1:21:44
the enemy you're facing's whole line is
1:21:46
moving to their right, then your lines
1:21:48
are moving sort of out of alignment
1:21:50
with each other and going to overlap
1:21:53
on each side. So
1:21:56
what these armies did in an
1:21:59
attempt to control what was going on on
1:22:01
their right and to have the troops that
1:22:04
were the least likely to be prone to
1:22:06
this drift on the right, you
1:22:08
put your best troops on the right. And
1:22:11
this became almost a Greek convention and the
1:22:13
sources will say things like, make
1:22:15
it clear that the right wing is expected
1:22:17
to be victorious and the left wings of
1:22:20
both armies expected to kind of lose. And
1:22:22
that was just the way it was until
1:22:24
the Pemenondis didn't do it that way.
1:22:29
At Luchtra he put his best
1:22:31
troops on the left. That's
1:22:34
a violation, you just don't do that.
1:22:37
He put his best troops up against
1:22:39
the Spartans best troops, the
1:22:41
guys who made the Spartan reputation,
1:22:43
the Spartiates. There
1:22:45
were 700 of them at Luchtra and
1:22:48
a Spartan king. During
1:22:51
this time period any of you Spartan
1:22:54
fans know that the Spartans were having
1:22:56
issues keeping up with the number of
1:22:58
Spartiates that they would normally want and
1:23:01
the culture in the society and a bunch
1:23:03
of trends were making Spartiates rarer and rarer.
1:23:05
So when you have 700 of
1:23:08
them at the Battle of Luchtra you have
1:23:10
an irreplaceable number of Spartiates. If
1:23:13
Pemenondis wanted to kill as
1:23:15
many of those as he could, so
1:23:18
he created the head of
1:23:20
the sledgehammer at
1:23:22
Luchtra aimed right at those
1:23:24
people. That's
1:23:27
the best way to envision what if
1:23:29
Pemenondis' army looked like. The Spartans
1:23:31
looked like a long row, like
1:23:33
a railroad track, like we said,
1:23:35
of you know eight to
1:23:37
twelve rank deep hop lights, right? So
1:23:40
a long line of those people, hundreds
1:23:42
of yards long. The
1:23:44
Thebans looked more like a sledgehammer. The
1:23:47
head of the sledgehammer was made up of
1:23:50
the one professional force the Thebans were known
1:23:52
to have in their infantry, the famous Sacred
1:23:54
Band, 300 strong
1:23:57
professionals, some of the sources.
1:24:00
indicate maybe homosexual lover pairs
1:24:02
that were devoted to each
1:24:04
other. That'll improve your unit
1:24:06
cohesion maybe. But
1:24:08
they were joined by
1:24:10
a block of troops. Wait
1:24:13
for it. 50 ranks
1:24:15
deep. Now the Thebans
1:24:17
were known to fight deeper than
1:24:19
most other Greek city states
1:24:21
traditionally, but in this
1:24:23
battle, the Pemmon on this goes
1:24:26
wild, makes the formation 50
1:24:28
ranks deep. He's going to
1:24:31
face off against a Spartan hoplite force. That's
1:24:33
probably about 12 ranks deep. So think about
1:24:35
the difference. If we're talking about the
1:24:38
physics of human, you
1:24:40
know, mass and movement and weight and depth
1:24:42
and all that stuff, the difference between a
1:24:45
50 rank closed
1:24:47
formation running into a 12 rank closed
1:24:49
formation. Now, if
1:24:51
Pemmon is deciding to do this though, means
1:24:54
he has to weaken the rest of his
1:24:56
army, right? Where do those 50 deep
1:24:59
units take from? Right? You pull from the rest
1:25:01
of the lines, the rest of the lines significantly
1:25:04
weaker. It's like the handle
1:25:06
of the sledgehammer. Well, if
1:25:09
you're worried about weakening part of your
1:25:11
line, cause you don't want those troops
1:25:13
to get smashed and run away. If
1:25:15
Pemmon on this does something unusual, he
1:25:17
angles that whole area away
1:25:19
from the enemy. So imagine the
1:25:22
sledgehammer head is right up against the
1:25:24
Spartans. They want to smash, but
1:25:26
the handle of the sledgehammer
1:25:28
is diagonally away from the
1:25:30
rest of the enemy army.
1:25:33
So theoretically,
1:25:36
the sledgehammer head could
1:25:38
destroy the dangerous
1:25:41
Spartans before the rest
1:25:43
of the Theban line even came into contact
1:25:45
with the troops across the way from them.
1:25:48
And that's what happened at Lutra. The
1:25:51
sledgehammer head of the Thebans ran
1:25:54
into the Spartans killed
1:25:56
400 of the 700 irreplaceable
1:25:59
Spartans. and the Spartan
1:26:02
King. And when the rest of
1:26:04
the Spartan armies saw what happened to those
1:26:06
guys, the superheroes of
1:26:08
the battlefield, they decided they wanted nothing
1:26:10
to do with the rest of the
1:26:12
Thebans and that was the Battle at
1:26:14
Luchtra. But
1:26:17
by changing certain key
1:26:19
conventions of how people fought, Epaminondas
1:26:21
was able to destroy Spartan
1:26:23
power and he would do it again, at
1:26:26
Mantonie, he'd lose his life there. But
1:26:29
the entire affair involved things
1:26:32
that would be a staple of Macedonian
1:26:34
warfare, things like the oblique order of
1:26:36
battle and refused flanks, which were the
1:26:38
things where Epaminondas was angling the rest
1:26:41
of his army away from his enemies.
1:26:45
That oblique order of battle will be a constant
1:26:47
in Macedonian warfare and of course, if
1:26:50
Philip is hanging out with a Theban general
1:26:52
with access to his library and making maybe
1:26:54
some cocktail parties with the Pamanunas,
1:26:56
this is the kind of stuff he might absorb. About
1:27:00
the time Philip becomes king though, and around
1:27:02
the time he's marrying Olympias, that
1:27:04
seems to be the time period where if he
1:27:07
was going to create a new military system, that's
1:27:09
when it was going to start. And
1:27:13
it might be an ongoing process, but
1:27:16
by having these Phalangites,
1:27:18
these pike phalanx troops,
1:27:21
to act as a solid core
1:27:23
for his army in the middle
1:27:25
of his battle line, he's addressed
1:27:27
the real weakness of the Macedonian
1:27:29
armies that existed before him. They
1:27:31
never had a sort of a
1:27:33
hoplite, heavy infantry element to the
1:27:35
army. The army had great
1:27:37
cavalry, they were called the companion cavalry,
1:27:41
maybe the best cavalry in the world,
1:27:43
arguably, at this time period. And
1:27:45
it was great, but it was all they had.
1:27:47
So when Philip comes to the throne,
1:27:49
he gets that, the wonderful Macedonian cavalry
1:27:51
and then creates the missing element that
1:27:53
allows them to defeat people like Greek
1:27:55
hoplites. He creates the phalanx and then
1:27:57
he adds all sorts of other his
1:28:00
army. He's
1:28:02
often credited with the first European Combined
1:28:04
Arms Force, although one can
1:28:06
make a case that that was also a
1:28:08
Pemminundus's development, but to this
1:28:11
Macadonian cavalry that's great and
1:28:13
the Macadonian phalanx that's a missing
1:28:15
ingredient, he adds mercenaries for example.
1:28:19
Extra important during this time period where he's,
1:28:21
you know, introducing these military reforms because you
1:28:24
need some professionals, you know, to handle the
1:28:26
load and keep you from getting overrun with
1:28:29
Illyrians and Peyoneans and Thracians. In
1:28:31
the meantime, he
1:28:34
also starts employing large numbers of allies.
1:28:36
I mean the Thasalian cavalry
1:28:38
is going to be absolutely vital in
1:28:40
the army of Alexander. It starts fighting
1:28:42
with Philip at a certain point, uses
1:28:45
a lot of Thracians, employs light troops
1:28:47
and skirmishers, which is, you
1:28:49
know, something that's been the development going on
1:28:51
in Greece for the past several
1:28:54
decades. Increasing importance and new
1:28:57
ways to use them. I mean there was a
1:28:59
Spartan unit that was destroyed by light
1:29:02
troops, you know, in recent
1:29:04
memories. So all these sorts of elements allow
1:29:07
Philip to create an army that is more
1:29:09
tactically flexible depending on what you're facing. He's got
1:29:11
the troops for the job. If you're
1:29:13
facing someone that wants to smash right into you and
1:29:16
punch you in the mouth, he's got great troops to punch
1:29:18
you back. If you don't want to
1:29:20
punch those people in the mouth because you don't want
1:29:22
to get that close to them because they scare you
1:29:24
and you're gonna try to stay away at a distance
1:29:26
and throw things at them and then evade their charge.
1:29:28
Philip has troops to get you too. You want
1:29:31
to fight in bad terrain? Philip's got the troops for
1:29:33
that. Got his specialist corps,
1:29:35
his agranians, people from the highlands. Think
1:29:37
about like, you know, Gurkhas or something
1:29:39
in the time period. He'll wheedle you
1:29:42
out of the bad terrain and if
1:29:44
you hide behind the walls of your
1:29:46
city, he and Alexander are going to
1:29:48
bring the first really
1:29:50
awesome siege
1:29:53
troops in Greek history. All the times when
1:29:55
you hide yourself behind the walls in Greece,
1:29:58
the enemy army just ravages your face. fields
1:30:00
and lutes and, and pillages and then leaves,
1:30:02
or maybe surrounds you and tries to wait
1:30:04
you out. Phillip and Alexander go through your
1:30:06
walls and they come and get you. And
1:30:09
that changes things too. I
1:30:13
mean, there are going to be years in
1:30:15
Phillips timeline where he'll
1:30:17
take three Greek city-states in a
1:30:19
year. That's like warp
1:30:21
speed. I mean, famously the
1:30:24
Trojans were able to withstand a 10
1:30:26
year siege in the Llyat, right? And if
1:30:29
that's a little long, maybe by most
1:30:31
historical standards, uh, Philip
1:30:34
taking three towns in a year is
1:30:36
crazy short, crazy quick, changes
1:30:38
the entire equation between, you know,
1:30:41
the reliance that a town or a city
1:30:44
state would have on its walls and fortifications
1:30:46
to keep the bad guys out. And
1:30:49
part of what makes all this possible is
1:30:52
more of these people that Philip is
1:30:54
using in his army or professionals, they're
1:30:57
specialists, they're engineers and more and more of
1:30:59
his army's getting paid. The
1:31:02
mercenaries obviously get paid right away, but he's
1:31:04
starting to pay the guys in
1:31:06
the Pike-Fehlencks eventually. And he's capturing, I
1:31:08
love this part about, you know, ancient
1:31:10
economics could be so interesting sometimes when
1:31:12
he needs money, he goes out there
1:31:14
and takes silver and gold mines
1:31:16
from other people, like takes it from the
1:31:19
Thracians, for example, a couple of famous mines.
1:31:21
And then all of a sudden the money,
1:31:23
which comes right out of the earth, like
1:31:25
an ATM machine goes right into his hands.
1:31:28
I was reading one historian that said that neither Philip
1:31:31
nor Alexander for that matter, um, were
1:31:34
anything like economists and
1:31:36
they had a sort of a pirate mentality
1:31:38
when it came to cash. Uh,
1:31:41
when you needed more cash, you just
1:31:43
took something, right? I mean, you racked
1:31:45
up credit card debt, maxed out all
1:31:47
of the, you know, credit lines.
1:31:49
And then when you conquered some new territory,
1:31:51
you paid off the credit cards and you
1:31:54
know, got right with the bank and started all
1:31:56
over again. One
1:31:59
thing you can say about. the way Philip used
1:32:01
this army though is that it was just one
1:32:04
of his many tools and if you compare
1:32:06
him to his son Alexander
1:32:08
is going to be a lot more
1:32:10
high-handed than Philip. You know it's
1:32:12
my way or the highway I'm going to tell
1:32:14
you what to do how dare you you know
1:32:16
try to negotiate or get me to haggle whereas
1:32:19
probably because he had to Philip
1:32:22
is a lot more clever and
1:32:24
sneaky he'll stab you in
1:32:27
the back and then he'll give you a
1:32:29
good deal when he doesn't have to later
1:32:31
I mean he's he's working every sort of
1:32:34
slick clever angle and
1:32:37
one might suggest because he has to he's
1:32:40
paying off people I mean I love
1:32:42
the way again Peter Green describes this
1:32:45
because not only is he utilizing all
1:32:47
these tools but he's spent enough
1:32:49
time now in one of these Greek city-state's
1:32:51
Thebes to get a look at
1:32:53
how their government functions and compare it to how
1:32:55
his government functions right he's a king he can
1:32:58
do certain things that they can't do
1:33:01
in these governments where politics is a
1:33:03
thing and you've got different factions vying
1:33:05
for leadership and well we can sort
1:33:07
of relate today to how you
1:33:10
might be a little inefficient with
1:33:12
the way you conduct long-term policy
1:33:14
in a representative system something
1:33:16
a you know autocratic system might not
1:33:18
have to worry about and Green
1:33:21
points out that Philip noticed this as
1:33:23
a weakness that he could exploit right
1:33:26
away and Green writes quote Philip's
1:33:29
training for power was proceeding
1:33:31
along useful if unorthodox lines
1:33:34
his experience as a member of
1:33:36
the macadonian royal household had given
1:33:38
him an understandably cynical view of
1:33:40
human nature in this
1:33:42
world murder adultery and usurpation
1:33:45
were commonplace as liable to
1:33:47
be practiced by one's own
1:33:49
mother as by anyone else
1:33:51
in later life Green writes Philip
1:33:54
took it as axiomatic that all
1:33:56
diplomacy was based on self-interest and
1:33:58
every man had At his price,
1:34:01
events seldom proved him wrong. In
1:34:04
Thebes, he saw, too, the
1:34:06
besetting weaknesses of a democratic
1:34:08
city-state, constant party intrigue,
1:34:11
lack of a strong executive
1:34:13
power, the inability to
1:34:15
force quick decisions, the unpredictable
1:34:18
vagaries of the assembly at voting
1:34:20
time, the system of
1:34:22
annual elections which made any
1:34:24
serious long-term planning almost impossible,
1:34:27
the amateur ad hoc military
1:34:29
levies. For the
1:34:31
first time, Green writes, he
1:34:34
began to understand how Macedonia's
1:34:36
outdated institutions, so despised
1:34:38
by the rest of Greece, might
1:34:40
prove a source of strength when dealing
1:34:42
with such opponents. Throughout
1:34:45
his life he gained his greatest
1:34:47
advances by exploiting human cupidity and
1:34:50
democratic incompetence, most
1:34:52
often at the same time." Thebes
1:34:57
willingness to throw bribe money all
1:35:00
over the place, in large amounts, seems
1:35:03
to almost tie directly into
1:35:05
one of the tragic flaws
1:35:07
of the Greek city-state experience
1:35:09
during this time, and that's
1:35:12
that bribes were really effective.
1:35:16
The ancient historian Diodorus is
1:35:18
supposedly quoting Philip as
1:35:21
saying that the expansion of
1:35:23
his kingdom owed far more to money than
1:35:26
to arms, and then Diodorus
1:35:28
later picks up the story and just talks
1:35:30
about how the bribes
1:35:32
by Philip completely undercut
1:35:35
any sort of Greek attempt
1:35:38
at unity or a united
1:35:40
front against this Darth Vader in
1:35:42
the north exerting more and
1:35:45
more pressure on the freedom of the Greek city-states.
1:35:47
He says, yeah, but he comes calling with a
1:35:49
big wad of cash. What are
1:35:51
you going to do? This writes, quote,
1:35:54
Nevertheless, there was such a crop of
1:35:56
traders, so to speak, at that time
1:35:58
in Greece, that It was impossible for
1:36:01
Athens to check the impulse of
1:36:03
members of the Greek cities towards
1:36:05
treachery. There was a
1:36:07
story that once, Diodorus writes, when
1:36:09
Philip wanted to take a particularly
1:36:11
well-fortified city, and one of the
1:36:13
locals claimed that the place was
1:36:15
impregnable, he, meaning
1:36:17
Philip, responded by asking whether
1:36:19
the walls were unscalable by
1:36:22
cash. Experience
1:36:24
had taught him that anything that could
1:36:26
not be subdued by force of
1:36:28
arms could be overcome by gold,
1:36:30
so by using bribery to make
1:36:32
sure that he had traitors inside
1:36:34
the cities, and by calling those
1:36:37
who took his money his guest
1:36:39
friends and familiars, he corrupted
1:36:41
men's morals with this pernicious
1:36:43
form of diplomacy." One
1:36:47
of the historians that I was reading called Philip
1:36:50
a warrior diplomat, which I think is
1:36:53
a great term, very descriptive, a
1:36:55
good rundown of the things Philip brought to
1:36:58
the table, but I would add one more
1:37:00
term, warrior diplomat fixer, because
1:37:03
in my mind I envision him showing
1:37:05
up to these negotiations and these diplomatic
1:37:07
affairs, you know, dressed in full military
1:37:10
regalia, armed to the teeth, right? We
1:37:12
can do it that way if that's how you want to play it.
1:37:16
But also with a lawyer in tow, right?
1:37:18
With a notary public and basically ready to
1:37:20
negotiate some deal, right? Sign on the dotted
1:37:22
line, my lawyer, notarize it and we're good
1:37:24
to go. No one has
1:37:27
to die. But
1:37:29
if you're just the kind of person that
1:37:31
would rather not have anything so obviously signed,
1:37:33
sealed and delivered, just like a briefcase full
1:37:35
of cash, well, Philip can do it that
1:37:38
way too. What's that
1:37:40
old line that Malcolm X is supposed to
1:37:42
have uttered, right? By any means necessary. That's
1:37:44
how I kind of see Philip II. By
1:37:47
any means necessary, he's going
1:37:49
to achieve his goals. The
1:37:51
question of what those goals were
1:37:54
and how farsighted Philip
1:37:56
was in seeing those outcomes
1:38:00
Well, that's a debatable point, right? That's the kind of thing
1:38:02
that doesn't come down to us from the sources all
1:38:05
these centuries later. There's a couple
1:38:07
of ways you could look at it though. Philip
1:38:10
could be a master opportunist, somebody
1:38:12
who seizes unexpected occurrences
1:38:15
when they happen and becomes the
1:38:17
beneficiary of them. Some domino,
1:38:19
some unexpected domino tumbles, and Philip's right
1:38:21
there, Johnny on the spot to be
1:38:23
the one who benefits, and he's got
1:38:25
some advantages in that regard. We
1:38:28
mentioned already that the form of government gives
1:38:30
him an advantage, right? These other Greek states
1:38:32
have to sit here in debate and have
1:38:34
politics come into it, and people
1:38:36
try to convince the public to go along with one of
1:38:38
them. I mean, Philip doesn't have to do any of that.
1:38:40
He just orders it. He's
1:38:42
also got a professional military by this time,
1:38:44
which means it's basically standing ready to go,
1:38:47
whereas if Thebes decides they want to go
1:38:49
somewhere, or Athens does, they've got to
1:38:52
get the guys to grab their spears
1:38:54
and their armor and their shields and get
1:38:56
out to the fields and start to muster
1:38:58
the forces. I mean, by the time they
1:39:00
get their act together, you know, Philip's moved
1:39:02
already. He's occupied the key
1:39:04
strategic point. He sees the opportunity,
1:39:06
whatever it is. So he's particularly
1:39:08
set up to be a beneficiary
1:39:11
of opportunism, if that's how it goes.
1:39:15
But another way of looking at it is that
1:39:17
Philip is the guy who creates these opportunities, he's
1:39:21
a chess master here setting up a
1:39:23
checkmate down the road, and each one
1:39:25
of these miles stones that he achieves
1:39:28
is one more connect the dots toward
1:39:30
the ultimate goal. Now do opportunities that
1:39:32
are unexpected happen? And does he seize
1:39:34
them? Absolutely. But you
1:39:36
can expect to have opportunities develop
1:39:38
without knowing explicitly what they are.
1:39:42
And this sense, then Philip is a master
1:39:44
strategist, setting up the kinds of
1:39:46
an outcome that he wants and
1:39:49
every step of the way, pursuing that goal
1:39:51
relentlessly. One of the things he obviously does
1:39:54
is keep the major powers in Greece
1:39:56
from uniting against him. problem
1:40:00
with Athens since he pretty much took
1:40:02
over the throne. Athens and
1:40:04
Thebes are the key most powerful Greek
1:40:06
city-states. He keeps a close connection
1:40:09
to Thebes, right? A sort of an alliance with
1:40:11
Thebes keeps Athens and Thebes from
1:40:13
realizing that they have more of an
1:40:15
interest in preventing him from gaining
1:40:18
any more power and being any more of a
1:40:20
threat to them and keeps them focused on, you
1:40:22
know, fighting the Third Sacred War and all these
1:40:24
other things. And this is a time period where
1:40:27
Greece famously will bleed itself
1:40:29
of treasure and
1:40:31
human beings in these many wars that they fight
1:40:34
with each other, making
1:40:36
them all the weaker
1:40:38
when the final, you know,
1:40:40
Darth Vader versus the Republic conflict
1:40:44
happens. And
1:40:46
it's very interesting too because it depends
1:40:49
on how you want to view this
1:40:51
thing, but the Greeks portray this entire
1:40:53
eventual showdown with Philip as
1:40:55
Greek liberty against, you know, someone
1:40:57
coming to snuff it out. But
1:41:01
at this point in time the
1:41:03
Greeks can't focus on their collective liberty. They're
1:41:05
too busy fighting one another and that's working
1:41:07
exactly the way Philip II would have wanted
1:41:09
it to. Whether he meant to do it
1:41:12
that way or whether it just is a
1:41:14
happy coincidence. One
1:41:17
thing you can say about Philip is
1:41:19
that he's out there in the field
1:41:21
working tirelessly to make this stuff happen
1:41:24
and giving up, you know, the
1:41:26
use of major body parts along the way.
1:41:28
I mean he's the ultimate road dog. What
1:41:31
did we say? There was one year where he wasn't out in the
1:41:33
field and he may have been recovering, you know,
1:41:36
from some terrible injury inflicted upon him
1:41:38
by some enemy. But
1:41:41
while he's on the road in 356
1:41:46
BCE, so a year after he marries Olympias
1:41:48
and maybe only a year or two after
1:41:50
he actually takes over as
1:41:53
the king of Macedonia, he
1:41:55
gets some good news while on the road.
1:41:57
Traditionally three pieces of good news. The
1:42:00
first piece of good news is that his
1:42:02
general, Parmenio, has defeated the Illyrians, which is
1:42:04
always a good thing. The
1:42:06
second piece of good news he supposedly gets at
1:42:09
the same time is that his horse has won
1:42:11
in the Olympic Games in a competition. And
1:42:14
this has a deeper meaning than the way it might sound.
1:42:16
The fact that a Macedonian king
1:42:18
is allowed to take part
1:42:20
in the Olympic Games is a sign
1:42:22
that the Macedonians had met the qualifications,
1:42:24
the minimum qualifications, to be considered as
1:42:27
Greeks, which would have been a big deal
1:42:29
to Philip. Then finally the
1:42:31
third piece of news, not necessarily in
1:42:33
the order of importance, but
1:42:36
that Olympias has borne Philip a
1:42:38
son, officially
1:42:40
named Alexander the third, but we
1:42:42
know him as Alexander the Great.
1:42:46
Now there are some
1:42:48
things that have gone on, at
1:42:51
least that's what sources hundreds of
1:42:53
years later say, that would have
1:42:55
clued any soothsayer
1:42:58
or oracle
1:43:01
worth their salt that this was going to happen.
1:43:05
You don't have these great figures born in history without
1:43:07
a lot of signs from the heavens, and
1:43:09
they're out there according to people like Plutarch.
1:43:14
Plutarch says that Olympias has
1:43:16
a dream of lightning striking
1:43:19
her womb, Philip has a
1:43:21
dream that her womb is sealed up
1:43:23
with a seal with
1:43:25
an imprint of a lion on it. Philip
1:43:29
also supposedly according to Plutarch looks
1:43:31
through a crack in
1:43:33
the wall or the equivalent of a keyhole
1:43:35
with one eye and spies
1:43:37
Olympias cavorting with a
1:43:40
god perhaps in snake form. And
1:43:43
then of course there's a temple
1:43:45
that burns down because supposedly
1:43:48
the goddess wasn't there to protect her own
1:43:50
temple. She had to be there for Alexander's
1:43:52
birth. Here's the way Plutarch, hundreds of years
1:43:54
later, writes about this stuff. For
1:43:56
example, he talks about the marriage.
1:44:00
summation between Philip and Olympias,
1:44:03
and then Olympias's dream that
1:44:05
happens right afterwards, and Plutarch
1:44:07
says, quote, The
1:44:11
night before the consummation of their
1:44:13
marriage, she, meaning Olympias, dreamed that
1:44:16
a thunderbolt fell upon her body,
1:44:18
which kindled a great fire, whose
1:44:21
divided flames dispersed themselves all about,
1:44:23
and then were extinguished. And
1:44:26
Philip, Plutarch writes, sometime after he
1:44:28
was married, dreamt that he
1:44:30
sealed up his wife's body with a seal, whose
1:44:33
impression, as he fancied, was the figure
1:44:35
of a lion. Some
1:44:37
of the diviners interpreted this as a
1:44:39
warning to Philip to look narrowly to
1:44:41
his wife. That means,
1:44:43
watch your wife, man. But ere
1:44:46
a stander of Telmosis, considering how unusual
1:44:48
it was to seal up anything that
1:44:50
was empty, assured him the meaning
1:44:52
of his dream was that the queen was
1:44:54
with child, of a boy, who would one
1:44:56
day prove as stout and courageous as a
1:44:58
lion. Once, moreover,
1:45:00
Plutarch writes, a serpent
1:45:02
was found lying by Olympias as she
1:45:05
slept, which more than anything else it
1:45:07
is said, abated Philip's passion
1:45:09
for her, whether he feared her
1:45:11
as an enchantress, or thought she
1:45:13
had commerce with some god, and
1:45:15
so looked on himself as excluded.
1:45:18
He was ever after less fond of her
1:45:20
conversation." Commerce
1:45:23
with a god means fooling around with a
1:45:25
god, and if you know Zeus' history, by
1:45:27
the way, he's always fooling around with mortal
1:45:29
women. So you know, if
1:45:32
he showed up in snake form or Dionysus
1:45:34
did or something like that, well, that's just
1:45:36
in keeping with those gods' characters, right? They
1:45:39
get around. But
1:45:41
apparently, Philip saw some of
1:45:43
this, according to Plutarch,
1:45:46
and you get punished for spying on a god
1:45:48
having sex with your wife, I'm just saying, and
1:45:50
Plutarch says, quote, Philip, after
1:45:53
this vision, sent Charon of
1:45:55
Megalopolis to consult the Oracle of Apollo
1:45:57
at Delphi, by which he was commanded
1:45:59
to perform sacrifice, and
1:46:02
henceforth pay particular honor above
1:46:04
all other gods to
1:46:06
Ammon, who is also known as Zeus, and
1:46:09
was told that he should one day lose
1:46:11
that eye with which he presumed to peep
1:46:13
through that chink of the door when he
1:46:15
saw the god under the form of the
1:46:18
serpent in the company of his wife." End
1:46:20
quote. Well,
1:46:23
he did lose the eye about a year, maybe
1:46:26
two years later in a siege. So
1:46:28
there you go. That's what you get for spying
1:46:31
on Zeus or whomever in
1:46:34
snake form with your wife. What were you thinking?
1:46:37
And then, of course, the story of
1:46:40
the temple of Diana
1:46:42
at Ephesus burnt down, and Plutarch
1:46:45
says, quote, "'The temple,'
1:46:47
he says, "'took fire, and was
1:46:49
burnt while its mistress, the goddess,
1:46:52
was absent, assisting at the birth
1:46:54
of Alexander, and all the
1:46:56
eastern soothsayers who happened to be then
1:46:58
at Ephesus, looking upon the ruin of
1:47:01
this temple, to be the forerunners of
1:47:03
some other calamity, ran about
1:47:05
the town, beating their faces and
1:47:07
crying that this day had brought
1:47:09
forth something that would prove fatal
1:47:11
and destructive to all of Asia.'"
1:47:15
End quote. Famous
1:47:18
queens who dream their womb is struck by
1:47:20
lightning, which then shoots out of their genitals
1:47:22
and catches parts of the room on fire.
1:47:26
Maybe the greatest, or one of
1:47:28
the greatest kings of ancient Europe, seemingly
1:47:32
looking through a keyhole-type
1:47:35
crevice in the door and seeing his wife cavorting
1:47:37
with snakes and going to an oracle and being
1:47:39
told, you're going to lose that eye for spying
1:47:41
on the God. The
1:47:43
verifiable fact of the temple
1:47:46
of Artemis, or Diana, as the Romans would
1:47:48
have known her, is being
1:47:51
destroyed around the time of Alexander's birth, but then
1:47:53
human beings being what they are noticing
1:47:55
that there really are no coincidences and doesn't
1:47:57
it just make sense that
1:47:59
the The only real story that explains how this temple
1:48:01
could be burned down, right? The home of a god?
1:48:04
Is it the god wasn't there? And where the heck
1:48:06
would the god be? Well, you know, that's
1:48:08
right around the time Alexander was being
1:48:10
born. Folks, this is the sort of
1:48:12
stuff that those of
1:48:14
us who love ancient history, this
1:48:17
is what we love about it, right? This
1:48:20
is a place in your legitimate history books, right? I
1:48:22
mean, if it's a history from the beginning of time
1:48:24
to now, you're going to have, you know, the founding
1:48:26
of the UN and the Second World War and all
1:48:28
these things near the end of the book, but you
1:48:30
keep going backwards and the
1:48:32
ratio of facts to myth
1:48:35
sort of changes. Maybe that's a good way to put
1:48:37
it. Ancient
1:48:40
history is where facts and
1:48:42
historical data and archaeological discoveries
1:48:45
intersect with things like legend
1:48:49
and myth. Maybe the proper
1:48:51
word here is lore, right? There
1:48:54
is lore in your legitimate history books. The farther
1:48:56
back you go, the more of it you get.
1:48:58
It's a little like blended wine, right? Where you
1:49:00
go and you get out 60% Cabernet and it's
1:49:02
40% Merlot. Well
1:49:04
by the time we get to the Second World War, you're probably at
1:49:07
80 20, right? 80%
1:49:09
facts, 20%, you know, myth, misinformation, whatever you
1:49:11
want to say. The farther back you go
1:49:13
in history, the more that ratio changes in
1:49:15
lores favor. And
1:49:18
the interesting thing about the lore
1:49:21
part is that while it
1:49:23
is not true, you can still learn
1:49:25
a lot by studying it, can't you?
1:49:28
It's like that line that Pierre Breant used. It was
1:49:30
a Leo Ferrer quote or whatever where
1:49:33
he said, even if it's not true, you
1:49:35
have to believe in ancient history. We use
1:49:37
that line before, but it's just so wonderful
1:49:39
because in your legitimate history book,
1:49:42
right, based on facts and archaeological discoveries and
1:49:44
written by historians and experts and PhDs, you're
1:49:46
going to have these stories about Alexander if
1:49:48
it's a detailed enough book. Are
1:49:51
they real or are they stories? At a certain
1:49:53
point, it doesn't matter because that
1:49:55
is a part of the lore
1:49:57
of Alexander, which affects a
1:49:59
lot of people. lot of people later. It's like
1:50:02
we say about magic. Magic may not be real, but
1:50:04
if people believe it's real and act on it as
1:50:06
though it's real, it has real-world effects,
1:50:08
right? Well, so does this lore stuff.
1:50:11
Take two examples. Example number
1:50:13
one, when Alexander's dead and
1:50:15
gone, his giant empire that we all know,
1:50:18
right? It's not a spoiler alert to say
1:50:20
he's gonna conquer a lot of territory. His
1:50:22
generals are gonna rip up all that territory
1:50:24
and take off huge chunks for themselves and
1:50:26
start dynasties where they're the first king and
1:50:29
then they have tons of descendants after them.
1:50:31
Their claim to
1:50:34
legitimacy rests on
1:50:36
Alexander, right? And the
1:50:38
more Alexander is deified, the more it seems
1:50:40
like you have the stamp of approval of
1:50:42
the very highest authority that he should have
1:50:45
conquered the world and that you should have
1:50:47
had your piece of it afterwards, right? So
1:50:50
it serves a political purpose,
1:50:52
a Machiavellian political purpose of legitimacy and
1:50:54
tying yourself, you know, maybe through a
1:50:56
degree or two of separation to a
1:50:59
deity somewhere. I mean, the closer you
1:51:01
are to Alexander, the better it is
1:51:03
for you and the greater Alexander is,
1:51:05
ditto. And
1:51:08
number two point here is that some
1:51:10
of this misinformation or some of this
1:51:12
legend creation or some of this lore
1:51:15
may originally have come from a
1:51:17
ground zero level from Alexander himself.
1:51:21
Alexander took propagandists and chroniclers and
1:51:23
all these kinds of people with
1:51:25
him while he did everything he's
1:51:27
famous for. And they're not just cataloging
1:51:30
what happened, they are
1:51:32
putting the most pro-Alexandrian
1:51:34
spin on it while
1:51:36
doing so. It's propaganda coming
1:51:38
from the source. Alexander wasn't just
1:51:40
trying, you know, we're gonna find
1:51:42
out more about this side of him as we go,
1:51:45
right? This is a guy playing for
1:51:47
the long historical game. Of
1:51:49
course he's concerned about his own time period
1:51:52
and how people in the
1:51:54
world he's operating in will view
1:51:56
his propaganda. But this is a
1:51:58
guy writing his name. in
1:52:01
a more pronounced big graffiti form on
1:52:03
your history books and he's concerned about
1:52:05
how you're gonna see him. He's writing
1:52:07
some of this propaganda for you and
1:52:10
for me, which is crazy.
1:52:12
And the way we get it is like
1:52:15
third-hand, right? Because if Alexander's pushing this propaganda
1:52:17
in his own time and people writing close
1:52:19
after his own time use it in their
1:52:21
history books and then the guys we're using
1:52:23
from 400 years later because
1:52:25
they're our earliest source, they're using
1:52:27
books based on, I mean you
1:52:29
follow the chain of data or
1:52:31
misinformation. Some of this stuff may
1:52:33
extend all the way back to Alexander and the people
1:52:36
that worked for him originally.
1:52:38
And so the point is that that's how
1:52:41
by studying the lore, which may not even
1:52:43
be true and maybe probably isn't true, you
1:52:46
still maybe get closer to elements of
1:52:48
the truth in an oblique kind of
1:52:50
way. I understand
1:52:53
why people who love the Second World War and the
1:52:55
First World War and the 20th century stuff where there's
1:52:57
so many documents to look at and you can compare
1:52:59
and contrast different accounts. I mean I can understand why
1:53:01
it'd be hard for them to maybe
1:53:04
get their mind around this, right?
1:53:06
Because they don't have a whole lot of prophecy
1:53:09
going on in their story
1:53:11
or oracles or
1:53:13
you know snakes that are really
1:53:15
gods, you know having sex with the wife
1:53:17
of historical kings. I mean I get it. You
1:53:20
don't like a lot of King Arthur in your, you
1:53:22
know, Battle of Okinawa
1:53:25
story. But that's precisely what
1:53:27
those of us who love ancient history love about it
1:53:29
is that you know by the time you
1:53:31
get back to Alexander's time your 60% Cabernet, 40% Merlot split
1:53:34
is more like a 60% lore, 40% facts split. And the
1:53:42
fact that this Alexander story is so
1:53:44
well known and has influenced people ever since,
1:53:48
the stories that we can't prove are true
1:53:50
and maybe think are false are still stories
1:53:52
that have to be included in the legitimate
1:53:54
history book which is crazy. You
1:53:58
have to tell the story of the
1:54:01
lightning bolt on Alexander's
1:54:03
mom and this I mean all this
1:54:05
is history it's crazy cuz it's lore
1:54:07
right it's it's Tolkien-esque and
1:54:10
the reason this matters to where we are in
1:54:12
the story right now is because when you look
1:54:14
at the few stories you have about Alexander the
1:54:16
Great growing up right young Alexander they
1:54:19
all sound like part of this lore most
1:54:22
of it is geared towards showing
1:54:24
that you know the signs were all
1:54:26
there as Alexander grew up that he was gonna be
1:54:28
this amazing figure so they're all sort of looking
1:54:31
back with prophecy predicting
1:54:35
the future after it happened that kind of thing for
1:54:39
example there's the story of Alexander at
1:54:41
like seven years old talking
1:54:44
to the Persian ambassadors that show up
1:54:46
in Phillips Court and
1:54:48
contrasting you know the story contrasts how
1:54:50
a normal seven-year-old might question a Persian
1:54:52
diplomat you know saying things like tell
1:54:54
me about the wealth of the king
1:54:56
of Persia tell me about the great
1:54:58
king and Alexander is asking instead for
1:55:00
distances between where they are and the
1:55:02
Persian capital and what is the condition
1:55:04
of the roads and
1:55:06
the morale of the Persian army and
1:55:10
you know it's seven years old I'm
1:55:12
not saying it's impossible I might have done that not because
1:55:14
I'm Alexander but because I was goofy at that age and
1:55:16
that's the kind of stuff I don't wanted to know nonetheless
1:55:19
you turn back on it and look at it from
1:55:22
you know later and you go wow boy you could just
1:55:24
see this Alexander was cut out for greatness can't you and
1:55:26
a bunch of the stories are kind of like that and
1:55:30
the vast majority of these stories
1:55:32
about Alexander's youth come from Plutarch
1:55:34
anyway so you're kind of relying
1:55:36
on an almost single source for some of this
1:55:39
stuff he's a wonderful
1:55:41
lesson by the way Plutarch or Greek
1:55:43
who wrote in the Roman imperial era
1:55:45
he's a wonderful lesson about
1:55:47
how sometimes especially when you go into
1:55:49
ancient history these sources dwindled
1:55:51
down to almost nothing
1:55:53
and sometimes you're you have certain historical
1:55:56
facts resting upon a single
1:55:58
work sometimes I mean Plutarch one of
1:56:00
these weird sorts of accounts
1:56:02
where you don't have a bunch of stuff
1:56:04
to compare and contrast it to. You can't
1:56:06
measure Plutarch's accuracy on some of
1:56:08
these subjects that he talks about next to some
1:56:11
of his contemporaries because we really don't have them.
1:56:15
We do have other people that write about Alexander,
1:56:17
but they usually talk about politics and his
1:56:19
campaigns and his conquests and all that kind
1:56:21
of stuff. Plutarch's like a screenwriter for A&E's
1:56:23
biography. He's interested in different things. He's
1:56:26
the guy that'll go up to a family member, you know, an
1:56:28
aunt or something and say, tell me that
1:56:30
story again about when Alexander was seven years
1:56:33
old and he interrogated the Persian
1:56:35
diplomat and asked him about, you know, the condition
1:56:37
of morale of the Persian army. Those are the
1:56:39
kind of facts that Plutarch liked and because of
1:56:41
that he's our main
1:56:43
source for a bunch of this
1:56:45
stuff. The famous Alexander stories growing
1:56:48
up, like the one about taming
1:56:50
the untameable horse that became his
1:56:52
horse, Bucephalus. That's another one of
1:56:54
those Plutarch stories. The
1:56:58
good news is there's a lot written on Plutarch and a lot
1:57:00
of scholarly work on dissecting his writings,
1:57:03
but you know Plutarch was a guy who was
1:57:06
supposed to be an Alexander expert, lived
1:57:08
hundreds of years after Alexander, but he's an expert. He's a
1:57:10
fan and he's read all the documents
1:57:12
in the library and he probably had access
1:57:14
to first-hand stuff, memoirs
1:57:17
of people who campaigned with Alexander, stuff like
1:57:19
that. So he's kind of a facts launderer or
1:57:23
a data launderer for us today.
1:57:25
We are getting first-hand accounts
1:57:27
filtered through him, but he's got a purpose
1:57:29
and he's pretty open about it. He's
1:57:32
a fan of Alexander. He seems to
1:57:34
live, I was reading something about the time period in which
1:57:36
he was writing, he seems to live in an era where
1:57:38
the Roman attitude toward Alexander and
1:57:41
that attitude changes over time.
1:57:43
Right? Alexander will be a
1:57:46
popular philosopher king type figure in one era
1:57:48
and then a bad guy in another and
1:57:50
it goes back and forth and Plutarch lives
1:57:52
in an era where most Romans are looking
1:57:55
at Alexander maybe as not a
1:57:57
figure to be emulated. Write an example of some of
1:57:59
the the downsides of
1:58:01
power and corruption and ambition and all that. And Plutarch
1:58:03
might have been writing sort of a counterpoint to that.
1:58:05
Well, let me you know, I'm an Alexander expert, let
1:58:07
me highlight some stories from his life that shows you
1:58:09
he's not the kind of guy you think he is.
1:58:13
And he freely said that he had all these stories to
1:58:15
choose from knowing Alexander as well as he didn't use them
1:58:18
to sort of, you know, paint a picture of a different
1:58:20
sort of guy than much of
1:58:22
his contemporaries thought of
1:58:24
as Alexander. So we're getting maybe
1:58:26
a very positive view of the
1:58:28
guy. Because
1:58:31
Plutarch is one of those
1:58:33
rare sources, though, his importance
1:58:35
is inordinately exalted, which means
1:58:38
his positive view of Alexander often
1:58:40
becomes our sort of default starting
1:58:43
position as we're assessing the guy.
1:58:46
We have a mildly positive view of him starting
1:58:48
out and that's probably due to Plutarch. And
1:58:51
some people get, you know, as
1:58:54
they say, kissed by Plutarch as
1:58:56
a historians treatment. And some people
1:58:58
get screwed poor Olympias doesn't come
1:59:00
off nicely under the pen of
1:59:02
Plutarch. And
1:59:06
you can't tell if that's just because she
1:59:09
suffers from the way women are often
1:59:11
treated in ancient history, not very well.
1:59:14
Or because Plutarch himself didn't like
1:59:16
uppity powerful women and she was
1:59:18
all that. Or
1:59:21
because she actually was this
1:59:23
kind of person. And unlike
1:59:26
a bunch of these sort of
1:59:28
legendary queen figures, Olympias, you know,
1:59:31
veers between the lore and the facts
1:59:33
part of history. So there are things
1:59:35
that you can say with reasonable certainty
1:59:37
that she did. And once
1:59:39
you hear about the things that she with
1:59:41
reasonable certainty did, well, then nothing's off the
1:59:44
table. She'll do those things. She'll do anything
1:59:46
she's accused of. And
1:59:50
she plays into this story in a
1:59:52
way that most women in ancient history
1:59:54
don't Alexander's got two incredible parents. This
1:59:57
is where you sort of see Olympias
1:59:59
coming to the story big because Philip's
2:00:01
gone. What did we say? He's a road
2:00:04
dog. He's out making the family
2:00:06
fortune, taking
2:00:08
city after city on a campaign every year,
2:00:11
coming back a little worse for wear every
2:00:13
time, but not a lot of time at
2:00:15
home, which means Alexander's with mom and with
2:00:17
mom's people. And
2:00:20
this is where I, when I try to immerse myself in
2:00:22
the story, I have to remember Alexander's
2:00:24
only half-Makadonian. And
2:00:27
when it really counts as who he's spending
2:00:29
his time with as a young man, and
2:00:31
this is, this is traditional. I was reading
2:00:33
and growing up when you're a Macadonian, when
2:00:35
you're a kid, five, six, seven, you spent
2:00:37
a lot of time around mom, that's normal,
2:00:39
but Alexander's mom and the people around her
2:00:41
are not Macadonian either. And
2:00:44
I love the way that where
2:00:47
they're from sort of is seen by
2:00:49
the Macadonians. Everybody in all of these
2:00:51
neighborhoods, right? Has their stereotypes about other
2:00:53
regions. The Greeks have their stereotypes about
2:00:56
Macadonia. The Greeks and the Macadonians
2:00:58
both have their stereotypes about
2:01:00
these areas that are now, you know,
2:01:02
around the modern nation of Albania
2:01:04
up in that area. And this
2:01:06
is where Alexander's mother's kin come
2:01:08
from. The Milosians, the descendants
2:01:11
of Achilles supposedly, right? These
2:01:13
wild people, sort
2:01:16
of witchy, sort of scary. And
2:01:18
I was reading some good historians who
2:01:20
were pointing out that you can tell how
2:01:23
different Alexander is with the way
2:01:25
he associates with his mother's side of the family,
2:01:27
because normally the society Alexander's a
2:01:29
part of really pays attention to the father's
2:01:32
bloodline. That's the one that
2:01:34
really matters. But Alexander's an exception to this, and
2:01:37
it comes up all the time, this Achilles connection
2:01:40
and all these other things. I mean, there's Alexander's
2:01:42
connection to his mom's side of the family's unusual.
2:01:47
And his relationship to his mom might be too. As
2:01:51
we've said before, and we'll say again, Alexander
2:01:54
is multitudes. He's been seen so many
2:01:56
different ways that, you know, you can
2:01:58
pick and choose the very. aspects
2:02:01
of the story if you want to go into psychologically
2:02:04
breaking down this guy's character or
2:02:06
anything. For example, there's one tradition
2:02:09
of Alexander as sort of the
2:02:12
term that they used to use was mama's boy. It outdated
2:02:15
what would you say that's from like the 1920s or the 1930s. He's
2:02:17
a mama's boy. Well, the old line
2:02:21
when I was growing up
2:02:23
was Alexander a mama's boy.
2:02:25
And there's one strand of idea
2:02:28
out there that he kind of was that he
2:02:30
has this weird relationship with his mother which
2:02:33
as we said we know something about
2:02:35
because she's going to be a powerful person
2:02:37
and after Alexander's off conquering the world
2:02:39
he's writing letters back and forth and
2:02:41
she's a player in the
2:02:44
power structure of macadonia often sort of
2:02:46
in a tug-of-war with murderous
2:02:49
experience professional generals. I mean she's
2:02:51
a fabulously interesting person and you
2:02:53
can tell she has one of
2:02:55
these personalities that just she's
2:02:58
a very strong person. She won't be denied.
2:03:01
She's not going to stay in the background. She's
2:03:05
going to be proactive in some cases and
2:03:07
this is the part of the story where
2:03:10
you know Philip is obviously this august person.
2:03:12
He's doing all these historical things. You don't
2:03:14
even have to be told that he must
2:03:17
have been this interesting intense human being. But
2:03:19
this is the part of the Alexander
2:03:22
story where you get to see the contribution
2:03:25
of his mother to the whole genetic makeup
2:03:27
here. She
2:03:30
is herself an intense
2:03:32
interesting person and under
2:03:34
Plutarch's pen malevolent
2:03:37
interesting person very dangerous.
2:03:40
I mean the internal
2:03:42
family structure of a
2:03:44
macadonia royal family we said earlier there's
2:03:46
a mafia style feel to some of
2:03:48
this and a survival of the fittest
2:03:50
sort of feel to it and
2:03:53
Philip has all these wives right and what did we
2:03:55
say Olympias is third fourth or fifth depends on what
2:03:57
you read she's in the middle there one of those
2:04:00
wives, which means there are more, I mean,
2:04:02
calling it sister wives probably makes it sound
2:04:04
more Mormon than it really was, but what
2:04:06
do you what do you describe the intense
2:04:09
relationship, both competition and otherwise, that all
2:04:11
these wives are gonna have with each
2:04:13
other, right? They're all married to the
2:04:15
same guy, they're all capable of producing
2:04:18
an heir to that guy, and
2:04:20
then your heir will be
2:04:22
in competition with the heir of one of
2:04:25
your, you know, fellow wives. I mean, it's
2:04:27
an absolute hornet's
2:04:29
nest of danger
2:04:32
for all these people, and normally
2:04:34
you would think to yourself, okay,
2:04:36
Alexander, if you look at
2:04:38
his life during this time period, is already being set
2:04:40
up to be Philip's successor. I
2:04:43
mean, the wheels are already greased,
2:04:45
he's ready to go, and you're looking and you're
2:04:47
going, well, wait a minute, that doesn't seem very
2:04:50
macadonian. Where's the, you
2:04:52
know, alternative candidates to
2:04:54
the throne? Where's the threat of
2:04:56
assassination or rebellion or, I mean,
2:04:58
civil war? How come Alexander's so
2:05:00
obviously chosen to be the successor
2:05:03
here? Why is he the
2:05:05
prince in waiting? Well, it's a
2:05:07
good question and it involves Olympias a little
2:05:09
bit, maybe. Alexander has
2:05:11
a brother, round about his
2:05:13
own age, maybe a little older, known
2:05:15
to history as Eridaeus, sometimes called Philip
2:05:17
Eridaeus. You
2:05:20
would think that this figure
2:05:22
would provide a threat, a competitor
2:05:24
to Alexander, someone else who might
2:05:27
be eligible to take over from
2:05:29
Philip after Philip's gone someday, or
2:05:31
at the next king. Eridaeus
2:05:34
is the son of a different
2:05:37
one of Philip II's wives, and
2:05:40
interestingly enough, according to
2:05:42
Plutarch, she is
2:05:44
another magical wife. Philip seemed to have
2:05:47
a thing for magical women, and
2:05:50
Olympias is just one of
2:05:52
the magical women he married. He's either
2:05:54
marrying magical women or like Amazons
2:05:56
from Wonder Woman, these women
2:05:59
who fight with so much power. and spear. So
2:06:01
those are his types. If he has a type,
2:06:03
he either wants you to be an Enchantress or,
2:06:05
you know, an Amazon. In this
2:06:08
case, Aridaius' mother is another one
2:06:10
of these Enchantresses, we're told, and
2:06:12
she's using her defensive spells to
2:06:14
try to protect Aridaius from
2:06:17
Olympias. But
2:06:20
it seems like Olympias gets him anyway,
2:06:23
because there's something wrong with Philip
2:06:25
Aridaius. He's
2:06:28
not a genetic competitor against
2:06:30
Alexander as a potential candidate
2:06:32
for the throne, because
2:06:35
he clearly isn't up to that kind
2:06:37
of job. Something's wrong with Philip Aridaius
2:06:40
and the historians. They
2:06:43
don't disagree. Nobody knows what was wrong with
2:06:45
him. It seems he had some sort of
2:06:48
mental disability. One
2:06:50
of the ancient sources, and maybe Plutarch also
2:06:52
said something to the effect of when he
2:06:54
was all grown up, he was still like
2:06:56
a child. Plutarch
2:06:59
makes it sound like this guy didn't
2:07:02
start out this way. Perfectly
2:07:04
normal child, gifted,
2:07:06
was going to be just fine, and
2:07:08
then somewhere in his
2:07:10
early life, his mental health
2:07:12
goes sideways. And
2:07:14
Plutarch says it's because of Olympias,
2:07:18
that she practices something. The
2:07:20
Greek word is related to
2:07:23
pharmacology or pharmacy, but it
2:07:25
could mean potions, drugs, magic,
2:07:28
whatever. Olympias gets him, and
2:07:31
she either tries to kill him and fails,
2:07:34
but leaves him mentally damaged anyway, or
2:07:36
just tries to mentally damage him. I
2:07:39
think it's Plutarch who said that Olympias
2:07:41
destroyed his mind. Now, I
2:07:44
don't know if Olympias
2:07:47
really did something like this
2:07:49
or not, but
2:07:52
if she did, think about the
2:07:54
whole different sort of spin that
2:07:57
puts on the nature versus
2:07:59
nurture. debate, and
2:08:02
how important that is to how a child
2:08:04
turns out as an adult. If
2:08:06
this is your mom, writing
2:08:08
your dad is Philip the second.
2:08:12
These are really interesting people to have
2:08:14
the one setting the table
2:08:17
for you as a child
2:08:19
literally, right, infusing their values
2:08:21
and their ethics, their
2:08:23
conduct, their morals, there's, you know, all the all
2:08:25
that sort of stuff. And let's not suggest
2:08:28
that their values are our
2:08:30
values. Anyway, we judge them on a
2:08:32
different scale. Because, you know, look at
2:08:34
how the rest of Macedonian history looks,
2:08:36
they're not that outlandish, graded on a
2:08:38
curve. But if mom
2:08:40
is poisoning the other
2:08:43
sons of your dad, let's
2:08:46
just say that it's an interesting household, and
2:08:48
she's an interesting woman. And for the at
2:08:50
least first part of Alexander's life, she has
2:08:52
an inordinate amount of influence
2:08:54
on it. And it's an amount of influence
2:08:56
that will continue to some degree for
2:08:59
the rest of Alexander's life. And he will
2:09:01
be writing letters back and forth to her
2:09:03
as he's conquering the known world, you know,
2:09:06
chastising her helping her getting information from
2:09:08
her, she's sort of her son's
2:09:11
inside man in Macedonia while
2:09:13
he's gone. And she's in
2:09:15
power struggles with powerful, murderous,
2:09:18
ruthless, professional experienced veteran generals.
2:09:21
She's an amazing woman. But
2:09:24
the lower part of her right
2:09:26
the lower, for example, the idea
2:09:28
that she poisons Philip Aride as
2:09:30
to cause his mental disability, the
2:09:32
lower side of her sometimes
2:09:35
matches up pretty well with the
2:09:37
stuff most historians consider to be
2:09:39
factual. I mean, the woman
2:09:42
who's accused of poisoning her
2:09:44
son's half brother will
2:09:46
eventually kill him. That's not
2:09:50
lower, that's history. And
2:09:52
she'll not just kill him, she'll kill his
2:09:54
wife too. And that wife is
2:09:56
the granddaughter of her former
2:09:58
husband, Philip II. So she's
2:10:00
fully capable of that sort of
2:10:03
inter-family type
2:10:06
homicide. But
2:10:09
Mom likes snakes and
2:10:12
tells me maybe that I'm a god and that
2:10:15
Philip's not my real father, and
2:10:18
who happily would destroy the mind
2:10:20
of my half-brother, gives
2:10:23
a whole new meaning to the term maternal
2:10:25
instinct, doesn't it? But
2:10:28
the one thing that I liked in the movie
2:10:31
that Oliver Stone did is Alexander
2:10:34
film. And
2:10:36
I didn't like this move when I first heard
2:10:38
about it. I was completely wrong about it. It
2:10:40
was casting Angelina Jolie in the role
2:10:42
of Olympias. She
2:10:46
was perfect for it because there's that, there's
2:10:48
a little bit of the exotic stuff going
2:10:50
on where she feels a little bit more
2:10:52
like she's from upcountry than the rest of
2:10:55
the Macedonians, but there's also something a little,
2:10:57
you know, Dionysek about her.
2:10:59
I mean, it worked perfectly. She's
2:11:03
responsible for Alexander's early years, which I
2:11:05
guess is pretty Macadonian anyway. Five, six,
2:11:07
seven year old kids usually
2:11:10
spend time with their mom and Alexander and his
2:11:12
mom are together a lot. And she is
2:11:15
the one who sets up his first tutor. She
2:11:18
gets this guy from her home country, may have
2:11:20
even been a relative. He's
2:11:23
like a drill sergeant type of character, a Malosian
2:11:26
hardass, right? Comes in
2:11:28
there and he's going to
2:11:30
whip the young pampered Prince into shape,
2:11:33
right? You want to command a bunch
2:11:35
of killer Macadonian veterans.
2:11:37
They're not going to take orders
2:11:39
from some softy. Look,
2:11:41
your dad's already lost an eyes. He's
2:11:44
limping. He's got a broken collarbones. You
2:11:46
know, he's beaten up all over leading the charge from
2:11:48
the front. You better toughen up little
2:11:51
King boy. So the
2:11:53
first guy traditionally Alexander talks
2:11:55
about, you know, how
2:11:58
he would search his luggage. to
2:12:00
see if his mom had hidden
2:12:02
any little dainties or luxuries for
2:12:05
him, deny him food, march him all night,
2:12:07
then march him the next day, I mean sort
2:12:09
of toughen up his body. So
2:12:11
the next guy is the one that
2:12:13
traditionally, the sources always say, taught Alexander
2:12:15
his letters, so I guess to read
2:12:17
and to write and the basics like
2:12:19
this. He's sort of
2:12:21
an austere character and
2:12:23
reading between the lines one gets
2:12:25
a sense that he's almost like
2:12:27
a guy, like a stoic philosophy
2:12:30
devotee who's sort of teaching Alexander
2:12:32
to comport himself more like a
2:12:34
king even though you know he'll
2:12:36
have the power but you're supposed
2:12:38
to be more reserved, more Marcus
2:12:40
Aurelius-like if you thought about
2:12:42
a later example, if you're gonna be
2:12:44
a king and he's involved in the famous story where
2:12:46
Alexander as a kid is supposed to go up to
2:12:49
the altar where you throw the
2:12:51
expensive incense on the fire as a
2:12:53
sacrifice to the God and young Alexander
2:12:55
in front of this teacher is supposed
2:12:57
to grab two giant handfuls of incense
2:13:00
and the teacher again this is one of those
2:13:02
stories right one of those examples
2:13:05
of showing that
2:13:07
we knew Alexander was gonna be something special
2:13:09
when and he
2:13:12
throws these big handfuls of incense on the
2:13:14
fire and the teacher admonishes him and says
2:13:16
something to the effect of listen that's
2:13:18
expensive stuff when you're the one
2:13:20
earning the money and buying the incense you
2:13:23
can throw as big handfuls as you want
2:13:25
but till then you know take it easy
2:13:27
and in one of the aspects that's that's
2:13:29
kind of fun in some of these stories
2:13:31
is there's the before and after the you
2:13:33
knew me when version of
2:13:35
this story where after Alexander's
2:13:38
made good and he's out conquering the world
2:13:40
he sends back to this professor
2:13:42
showing that he didn't forget that
2:13:45
incident caravans tons of
2:13:47
the expensive incense back to him
2:13:49
with a notation not to be
2:13:52
parsimonious meaning you know don't be
2:13:54
selfish when you're offering
2:13:56
sacrifices to the gods there's almost like
2:13:59
that little I idea of, hey, if
2:14:01
you'd have been the one throwing the big handfuls to the
2:14:03
gods, maybe they would have favored
2:14:05
you and you'd be here instead of me. Right?
2:14:08
A sort of a remember me before I was great.
2:14:10
Well, how do you like me now? Have
2:14:13
some incense. And
2:14:15
then there's the famously the
2:14:17
third teacher of Alexander,
2:14:19
and this is a
2:14:22
rock star himself. Alexander has a
2:14:24
rock star tutor. It's
2:14:27
before his heights of
2:14:29
rock stardom in the world of
2:14:31
philosophy. He's sort of an up-and-comer
2:14:33
when Philip II
2:14:36
entices him to come up and teach
2:14:38
his son, and a small group of
2:14:41
friends, several of whom turn out to be
2:14:43
kings. Interesting class.
2:14:47
How do you pick the valedictorian
2:14:49
of that small group of people? But
2:14:52
the tutor that Philip II manages to
2:14:55
convince to come up to the cultural
2:14:57
backwater that is macadonia, though
2:14:59
he's trying to spruce it up intellectually,
2:15:01
is Aristotle, famously
2:15:05
of the school of Plato, right? A student
2:15:07
of Plato who was a student of Socrates.
2:15:09
And that's, you know, now
2:15:11
you're getting to the fountainheads of western
2:15:14
philosophical traditional thought,
2:15:17
right? This is like almost like
2:15:19
secret knowledge. There's
2:15:22
an element to the teaching
2:15:24
of philosophy in this period that has a
2:15:26
Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of feel
2:15:28
to it, like hidden knowledge, like stuff no
2:15:30
one knows. And
2:15:33
that's one of the things that Aristotle is
2:15:35
supposed to bring to the table here. But
2:15:38
the deal, and this is again
2:15:40
from the sources, that Philip II offers
2:15:43
to Aristotle to get Aristotle to
2:15:45
come up to macadonia is literally
2:15:47
one of those deals only a king could give
2:15:50
you, and that
2:15:52
it would probably be foolish to say no
2:15:54
to. But in addition to money
2:15:56
and all the other things, Philip II promises to
2:16:00
Aristotle that if you come up and teach my son for
2:16:02
a few years, I will restore,
2:16:04
rebuild and repopulate your home
2:16:06
city. Because
2:16:09
it had been destroyed. That's
2:16:11
a heck of an offer to make that a little bit
2:16:13
of pressure maybe from the neighbors to you know, maybe get
2:16:15
this deal done. We'd love to have our
2:16:17
city rebuilt. Now
2:16:20
the twisty part of the whole offer
2:16:22
though, is that the guy who destroyed the
2:16:24
city in the first place was Philip the
2:16:26
second. So he's basically saying I know I
2:16:28
destroyed your city. Become work for
2:16:30
me and I'll rebuild it and repopulate it. That's just
2:16:32
a side benefit I'll pay you to and you know,
2:16:34
all kinds of good things. But
2:16:36
you know, hard to say no
2:16:39
to a king anyway. So Aristotle famously
2:16:41
goes up to Macedonia, holds these classes
2:16:44
for several years between Alexander and a couple of
2:16:46
his friends. And like I said, it's a distinguished
2:16:49
group of guys. There
2:16:52
is a suggestion that one
2:16:54
of the group in the class wrote
2:16:57
something about it like on the education of Alexander
2:16:59
that would have been in all your fine
2:17:02
ancient libraries and that some of our sources
2:17:04
may have been able to read. So maybe
2:17:06
one degree of separation from you
2:17:08
know, class stories with Alexander
2:17:10
in high school. But
2:17:13
when we look at the subjects Alexander
2:17:16
supposedly learned, this is where
2:17:18
you start to get to this side of
2:17:20
Alexander that differentiates him from your average run
2:17:22
of the mill, drunken
2:17:25
mass homicidal killer. Because
2:17:27
there's a lot of conquerors in
2:17:29
history, but there aren't a lot
2:17:32
of conquerors in history with as
2:17:34
much education in some of the
2:17:36
key foundational academic disciplines that most
2:17:39
college curricula 50 or 60 years ago
2:17:41
would have considered mandatory.
2:17:44
I mean,
2:17:46
we're told that he is learning ethics,
2:17:50
mathematics, literature,
2:17:53
medicine, biology, politics,
2:17:55
philosophy, zoology,
2:17:59
rhetoric, And some secret
2:18:01
knowledge. The secret
2:18:03
knowledge, by the way, is something
2:18:05
we know about because
2:18:07
it was written about in Plutarch, where
2:18:10
he publishes what he basically says is
2:18:12
a letter from Alexander
2:18:14
to Aristotle later in life, when
2:18:16
Alexander is conquering the world and
2:18:18
is made good, and when Aristotle
2:18:20
is a philosophical rock star and
2:18:23
apparently is publishing his work.
2:18:26
Right, so you can buy it. But he's including in
2:18:28
the publishing of his work the secret stuff, or
2:18:30
at the hidden Shaolin priest
2:18:33
secret, Raiders of the Lost, dark knowledge that gives
2:18:35
you an advantage over other men if you know
2:18:38
it and they don't. Because
2:18:40
that's kind of how Alexander described it in
2:18:42
this nasty letter to his former tutor saying,
2:18:45
if you're given away this kind of
2:18:47
information, how am I supposed to have any
2:18:49
advantage over other men? Now,
2:18:53
it's interesting to think about what secret
2:18:56
information might have been involved in
2:18:59
the philosophical teachings of a guy like Aristotle, you
2:19:02
know, which came from Plato, which came from
2:19:04
Socrates. I mean, there's an intellectual tradition here
2:19:06
that goes back to somewhere really interesting. But
2:19:10
the way we should think about it is
2:19:13
that Alexander has all of this as
2:19:15
part of his makeup, right? All
2:19:18
of this philosophical and educational
2:19:20
learning and culture could
2:19:23
recite the Iliad and the plays of the
2:19:25
Greek playwrights, often sort of by memory, by
2:19:27
heart. I mean, this is an interesting kind
2:19:29
of guy, and there's a whole tradition out
2:19:31
there. And Plutarch is probably
2:19:34
fairly put in into it. Alexander
2:19:37
is kind of a philosopher king, as
2:19:39
we said earlier, or even
2:19:41
more interesting, a philosopher in action.
2:19:44
And that's how he sort of portrayed sometimes
2:19:46
as a guy who the philosophers
2:19:49
of ancient Greece in this great
2:19:51
time period where you
2:19:53
have all these interesting people, the Socrateses
2:19:56
and the Plato's and the Aristotle's and all those
2:19:58
guys, But they're creating
2:20:00
these ideas through debate and writing and
2:20:03
reflection and argument and all this, but
2:20:06
they await a man of action who
2:20:08
can take those ideas and put them
2:20:10
into practice. Right?
2:20:12
It's all theoretical until somebody tries
2:20:14
it, right? And Alexander
2:20:17
is that lightning
2:20:19
bolt flash
2:20:21
moment when the rubber
2:20:23
meets the road in terms of philosophical
2:20:26
thought being transmitted into the hands
2:20:28
of somebody, who can implement it
2:20:30
in the real world, a philosopher
2:20:33
in action. And
2:20:36
for people that would love to see a
2:20:38
more rational, more intelligently
2:20:40
run, more deeply
2:20:42
thoughtful world, that
2:20:45
is almost addictive
2:20:48
to think about that happening. It
2:20:51
brings a tear to your eye. It
2:20:53
brings out all your utopian sensibilities, hopes,
2:20:56
and dreams. Right? Wouldn't it be great
2:20:58
to have a philosopher King? You
2:21:02
can almost hear it in some of the eras
2:21:04
in human history where Alexander was seen
2:21:07
that way, that this would have been the dream
2:21:09
of some of the people back then. They
2:21:11
were living in a time period where the idea
2:21:13
of a philosopher King didn't have a lot of
2:21:16
the baggage that it has today. Although if Alexander's
2:21:18
a philosopher King, he's probably
2:21:20
wouldn't you think the philosopher King with the
2:21:22
highest body count of any of
2:21:24
them? Although philosopher Kings can kill
2:21:26
a surprising number of innocent people, but Alexander's got
2:21:29
to be right up at the top. Don't you
2:21:31
think? And
2:21:33
maybe there's a couple of key questions that
2:21:36
we should throw into the mix when we're
2:21:38
discussing this issue of Alexander
2:21:40
as a potential philosopher
2:21:42
King. What sort of
2:21:44
philosophy are we talking about? I
2:21:47
mean, just because you say it as
2:21:49
though it's a high-minded humanitarian sort of
2:21:51
philosophy that we should all be looking
2:21:53
towards as something to be proud of
2:21:56
and emulated in a sign of human
2:21:58
progress doesn't necessarily. mean
2:22:00
that at all, right? Philosophies can
2:22:02
be evil too. So
2:22:04
maybe he's pushing an evil philosophy. We substituted
2:22:07
a more modern word, ideology.
2:22:09
Well we wouldn't have any
2:22:11
problem, would we? Assuming that it might be
2:22:13
something negative. And then
2:22:16
there's the impact of the body count
2:22:19
on the philosophical point at
2:22:21
all. I mean let's imagine it's
2:22:23
a wonderful philosophy meant to spread
2:22:25
kindness and humanity and all
2:22:28
the things we would love to think of as
2:22:30
coming into the world and getting a chance to
2:22:32
thrive. But what if he kills 50 million people
2:22:34
to implement it? Is there
2:22:37
a number there where it doesn't matter
2:22:39
how great the philosophical ideas are, you
2:22:42
killed too many people to implement them so it
2:22:44
doesn't matter? I don't know the
2:22:46
answer to that. This is part of the great
2:22:48
unknowables with Alexander and the fact that he's got
2:22:50
so many centuries of propaganda
2:22:53
that's overlay the original
2:22:55
issue. Good luck getting to the heart of
2:22:57
that. But that begs the
2:22:59
question, what can we get to the heart
2:23:01
of? Is there anything you can know about
2:23:04
something that long ago so clouded
2:23:06
by intervening, you know,
2:23:08
evidence and information with so many people who've
2:23:10
had so many axes to grind over the
2:23:12
arrows? Can we get to any facts at
2:23:14
all? Well maybe. I mean
2:23:18
one of the questions I've asked before is,
2:23:21
what if Alexander the Great had a podcast
2:23:24
trying to imagine how wonderful it's going to be
2:23:26
for all those historians 500 years
2:23:28
from now delving into
2:23:30
our time period and the fact that they're
2:23:32
gonna have all these podcasts and blogs and
2:23:35
and Instagram accounts and everything that they can
2:23:37
mine and look at maybe more info than
2:23:39
they want, right? Be careful, you
2:23:41
know, if you wish for more needles in
2:23:43
a haystack be careful because you could end
2:23:46
up with what we have now. Haystacks and
2:23:48
needles everywhere for future historians but just give
2:23:50
me one podcast with Alexander
2:23:52
the Great in it, right? His
2:23:54
podcast and I'm gonna learn so much.
2:23:56
The first thing that's gonna be obvious though is we're gonna know
2:23:59
what the guy's gonna do. I looked like and wouldn't that
2:24:01
be a heck of a question to
2:24:03
answer? But
2:24:06
the descriptions are actually more consistent
2:24:08
than anything you're going to get
2:24:10
about his philosophical viewpoints. Um,
2:24:13
the way historians, by the way, come up
2:24:15
with these descriptions is they will read
2:24:18
the various sources and pick out any
2:24:20
little thing that seems to refer to
2:24:22
his appearance. And there'll be little
2:24:24
clues here or there, as opposed to somebody
2:24:26
describing him, you know, with five or
2:24:28
six adjectives in a row, you'll find out little tidbits
2:24:31
of things that will allow you to
2:24:33
assemble a picture. So for
2:24:35
example, one of the tidbits that's often used
2:24:37
is at one point in his career, Alexander
2:24:39
will capture the throne of his adversary and
2:24:41
he'll sit on the throne and his
2:24:44
feet won't touch the ground. Right. And it's remarked
2:24:46
upon that he's too short to be sitting in
2:24:48
the seat. So they bring him in like a
2:24:50
footstool, but you start to add up the height
2:24:52
references and you come up with a person who
2:24:54
seems to be a little bit shorter than normal,
2:24:57
which brings up another question of course, which
2:24:59
is what is normal for
2:25:01
this place and this time? We've
2:25:04
mentioned that it's almost certain that Alexander's
2:25:06
father's tomb has been found and
2:25:09
that is partially cremated remains measured
2:25:11
somewhere between like five foot, six inches
2:25:13
and five foot, eight inch tall. So
2:25:17
does that mean that's an average height for a Macadonian?
2:25:19
In which case, Alexander might be
2:25:21
a little smaller than that. Or
2:25:23
is Philip himself a shorter
2:25:26
than normal Macadonian? In which case,
2:25:28
five foot, six, five foot, seven could
2:25:31
be Alexander's height too. I
2:25:35
looked up the skeleton measurements from
2:25:37
this area in this time period.
2:25:40
I wasn't able to find Macadonia, but I found Greece
2:25:43
and in standard Greece, this appears
2:25:45
to be a standard height,
2:25:48
right? So Philip would be around the average
2:25:50
height of a Greek male. So
2:25:54
what does that put Alexander
2:25:56
at? Well,
2:25:59
here's Peter. your greens description
2:26:01
from around 1970 and I
2:26:04
find it hard to improve on that.
2:26:08
I will say that the blonde hair question
2:26:10
is an open one because green
2:26:12
says that he has blonde hair. He has
2:26:15
the color of a lion's mane and if
2:26:17
you've looked at a lion's mane there's a
2:26:20
number of different colors in your average lion's
2:26:22
mane. Some of them
2:26:24
are more blonde but a bunch of them
2:26:26
are sort of a darker color with like
2:26:28
golden highlights and you'll still see that color
2:26:30
hair all over northern
2:26:33
Greece and Albania in those areas today
2:26:35
maybe with a little bit of like
2:26:37
a red orange tone thrown in. You
2:26:40
add campaigning in the sun all the time and
2:26:42
you're gonna get a certain look. So
2:26:45
here's the way green describes Alexander
2:26:47
as the composite of all the
2:26:49
various appearance throwaway
2:26:51
lines that are in the sources.
2:26:53
Also notice you remember there was
2:26:55
a Kim Carne song once she's
2:26:57
got Bette Davis eyes. Well Alexander's
2:26:59
got like Ziggy Stardust eyes. Listen
2:27:01
to this description quote Alexander
2:27:05
had grown into a boy
2:27:07
of rather below average height
2:27:09
but very muscular and compact
2:27:11
of body. He was
2:27:13
already like his hero Achilles
2:27:15
a remarkably fast runner. His
2:27:17
hair blonde and tousled is
2:27:20
traditionally said to have resembled
2:27:22
a lion's mane and
2:27:24
he had that high complexion which
2:27:26
fair-skinned people so often display. His
2:27:29
eyes were odd one
2:27:31
being gray-blue the other
2:27:34
dark brown. His teeth
2:27:36
were sharply pointed like
2:27:38
little pegs says the
2:27:40
Alexander romance an uncharacteristically
2:27:42
realistic touch green rights
2:27:44
which carries instant conviction.
2:27:47
He had a somewhat high-pitched voice which
2:27:50
tended to harshness when he was excited. His
2:27:53
gait was fast and nervous. A
2:27:55
habit he had picked up from old the
2:27:58
drill sergeant from Melosia is the name of
2:28:00
the person, and he carried
2:28:02
his head bent slightly upwards and
2:28:05
to the left, whether because of
2:28:07
some physical defect or through mere
2:28:09
affectation cannot now be determined. He
2:28:13
says there is something almost girlish
2:28:15
about his earliest portraits, a
2:28:18
hint of leashed hysteria behind the
2:28:20
melting charm." The
2:28:24
mention about Alexander's voice being higher
2:28:26
than one would expect is
2:28:29
not uncommon with great generals, actually. Same
2:28:31
is true, for example, of General George
2:28:33
Patton. You want him to
2:28:35
sound like George C. Scott in the movie Patton,
2:28:37
but that's not what he sounds like. Higher than
2:28:39
normal voice, higher than what you would
2:28:42
expect. And something interesting,
2:28:44
and you don't know whether this is just something
2:28:46
that's made it down in the sources because, you
2:28:48
know, maybe you want
2:28:51
to put the great human figures
2:28:53
in history on a special pedestal
2:28:56
and say that they smelled extra good,
2:28:58
but Alexander is supposed to have smelled
2:29:00
really good. So good, in
2:29:02
fact, that the smell would linger on his
2:29:04
clothes, and he just had a really
2:29:06
good scent. And some ancient historians
2:29:08
try to figure out why that might be. Historian
2:29:13
Ian Worthington in his book By the
2:29:15
Spear gives a different
2:29:18
account of Alexander's look and
2:29:20
points out that even this could be
2:29:23
a product of all the propaganda and
2:29:25
even Alexander's ability to control this sort
2:29:27
of stuff because he's said to have
2:29:29
liked certain statues of
2:29:31
himself and not other ones and said
2:29:33
that, you know, the guy who made
2:29:35
the statue that he liked is the only guy who
2:29:38
can make statues of him now. So he may have
2:29:40
controlled how we see his look, but here's how Ian
2:29:43
Worthington describes it. Alexander
2:29:46
was a short man. After
2:29:49
the Battle of Issus in 331, one
2:29:51
of the captured Persian noblewomen mistook
2:29:54
the taller Hephaestion for Alexander,
2:29:56
and when he sat on the
2:29:58
royal throne in the palace of Susa, his
2:30:01
feet did not reach the ground. His
2:30:04
actual appearance, Worthington writes, is
2:30:06
controversial, depending on which ancient
2:30:08
account is read. He was
2:30:10
said to have a lopsided face, because
2:30:12
his neck inclined to the left, a
2:30:15
round chin, a long thin nose,
2:30:17
a bulging forehead above watery
2:30:20
eyes, one of which was apparently
2:30:22
light blue, and the other
2:30:24
brown. Very sharp pointed
2:30:26
teeth, a high-pitched voice, and a
2:30:29
thick tousled mane of blond hair.
2:30:32
If he really did look like
2:30:34
this, Worthington writes, then his later
2:30:36
portraits were deliberately softened to make
2:30:38
him more handsome. These
2:30:40
busts also depict Alexander with
2:30:42
his blond hair in ringlets,
2:30:44
with a central parting, and
2:30:47
against the tradition of the times, beardless.
2:30:51
In images, he says, like
2:30:53
the one on the Alexander
2:30:56
mosaic were likewise idealized, as
2:30:58
they feature Alexander with dark
2:31:00
curly hair and sideburns." The
2:31:05
sources say that Alexander was strong,
2:31:07
that he was athletic, that
2:31:09
he was a very good fighter and
2:31:11
horseman, and a very fast runner. At
2:31:14
one point, it is suggested to him
2:31:16
that he should compete in the Olympics.
2:31:20
He said he would if he could only compete
2:31:22
against kings, which
2:31:24
is a very Alexandrian sort of line.
2:31:29
There's a couple of things we can infer
2:31:31
and that we can know about this guy.
2:31:33
The first thing is we know he's young,
2:31:35
and it's an obvious thing to say, but
2:31:37
we have to remember, this is like
2:31:39
Bob Dylan's forever young concept here. This is
2:31:41
a guy who's never going to get old,
2:31:44
and so when we talk about how
2:31:46
one should imagine him, height, weight, gait,
2:31:49
look, hair color, all that sort of stuff, we
2:31:52
should reflect on the fact that he's going to be young.
2:31:54
And when he starts, he's going to be very young. We've
2:31:57
got an 18 year old or something, or a 19 year
2:31:59
old. year old when this guy is going
2:32:02
to be leading this macadone and Maserati of
2:32:04
an army at some point. Can
2:32:08
you imagine having tons
2:32:10
of responsibility at 18, 19, 20 years? I mean,
2:32:12
so this is a young guy. He
2:32:17
is a person we are told who
2:32:20
has a temper that can
2:32:22
get out of control at times. He
2:32:25
is somebody that is clearly a
2:32:27
superior fighter because if you look
2:32:29
at the life of Alexander, he's
2:32:32
a person who fights all the time. This is
2:32:34
not a general like Napoleon or
2:32:36
someone like Caesar who's back behind the lines
2:32:38
making sure everything's where it needs to be
2:32:40
and troops are going where they need to
2:32:42
go. Alexander is leading the pack and the
2:32:44
number of times that he's going to jump
2:32:46
over a city wall that they're besieging first,
2:32:49
you know, that he'll run into the midst
2:32:51
of the enemy with his bodyguards trailing
2:32:53
behind him. And the sheer fact
2:32:55
that he doesn't die in these
2:32:57
encounters that happened over years and
2:33:00
years and years is a
2:33:02
sign that he's quite capable of taking care
2:33:04
of himself and being deadly. I mean, if
2:33:06
the guy is like five foot four or
2:33:08
five foot five, he's a deadly monster of
2:33:10
a five foot five, right? We're
2:33:14
told that his education basically stops when
2:33:16
he's 16 years old because his
2:33:19
dad makes him regent while his dad
2:33:21
is out road dogging. His dad still
2:33:23
got to do what his dad's got
2:33:25
to do, right? Making the family fortune,
2:33:27
conquering new territories, besieging cities, becoming more
2:33:29
and more powerful. But you know, it
2:33:31
takes time and Philip is
2:33:33
continually hurt. He gets hurt again in another
2:33:36
campaign in the not too
2:33:38
distant future. So badly, he'll never be able to
2:33:40
walk without a limp again. But he leaves and
2:33:42
this time at 16 years old, he leaves
2:33:44
Alexander in charge round
2:33:47
about 340 BC
2:33:50
BCE. And
2:33:54
while Alexander is running the
2:33:56
show while Phillips away a rising
2:33:58
up. or some
2:34:00
sort of insurrection occurs up north of
2:34:03
Macadonia amongst a tribal people. So
2:34:05
Alexander takes what forces he's been
2:34:07
left from his dad,
2:34:10
goes up there, conquers them, exiles
2:34:13
them from their city, repopulates the city the
2:34:15
same way dad would have done and renames
2:34:17
it Alexandropolis,
2:34:20
just like his dad would have done too. His dad
2:34:22
would have called it a fallopolis. His son just named
2:34:24
it. This will be my first city I'll name for
2:34:26
myself. 16 years old, got my first city. Alexandropolis,
2:34:29
what would you have named it? This
2:34:33
also is presented like a milestone in this
2:34:35
guy's life. First battle he's commanded. I'm trying
2:34:37
to think of 16 year
2:34:39
old Alexander. Again, whatever we wanna think
2:34:42
of this guy, he's clearly a kid
2:34:44
out there in
2:34:46
his first battle as the one in
2:34:48
charge. I'm sure he's leaning
2:34:50
on the very powerful, very dominant
2:34:52
personalities of these generals heavily,
2:34:55
but at the same time, this
2:34:58
is a guy who at 26 years old is
2:35:00
gonna be able to say, I've been out there
2:35:02
on the battlefield for a decade. That's crazy. But
2:35:07
after Alexander has a
2:35:09
chance to be a region for a little while for
2:35:11
his dad while he's away and command some troops and
2:35:13
have a little agency in
2:35:15
terms of command, it
2:35:17
sort of marks the end of his formal education
2:35:19
in this period in his life where he's sort
2:35:21
of his dad's right hand man, where he's working
2:35:23
for pop in the family business, learning
2:35:26
the ropes. And
2:35:30
so his fortune sort of dovetail
2:35:32
with his dad's for a while. And this
2:35:35
is an interesting period in his dad's career.
2:35:38
First of all, there's an undercurrent
2:35:40
of public opinion,
2:35:42
maybe you could say out there during
2:35:44
this time period, that it's difficult to
2:35:46
divorce from the fact that we know
2:35:48
what's going to happen. So
2:35:51
it's tough to put maybe this sort
2:35:53
of information in its proper perspective, but
2:35:56
there is an undercurrent maybe starting around 345, 340.
2:36:01
146, you know when Alexander only would have
2:36:03
been 10 or 11 years old of maybe
2:36:05
his dad being seen as the
2:36:07
guy who's going to stop all
2:36:10
this terrible warfare of Greeks killing
2:36:12
Greeks and Unite the
2:36:14
Greeks together in a crusade against
2:36:16
Greece's historical enemy is the way
2:36:19
that this was portrayed the
2:36:21
Persian Empire Right who
2:36:24
invaded Greece a hundred and fifty or so years
2:36:26
before and is still awaiting
2:36:28
payback for that And so
2:36:30
if we could only stop fighting and killing each
2:36:33
other and draining the treasuries of
2:36:35
Rival city-states we could unite and
2:36:38
go take the treasuries of this
2:36:40
historically super uber wealthy Empire And
2:36:43
they can be our slaves and everything will be better
2:36:46
Probably 345 346. There's a
2:36:49
famous philosopher who
2:36:51
issues sort of a public plea
2:36:54
to Philip to be the guy who
2:36:56
does this and He'd
2:36:59
already chosen a couple people before Philip
2:37:01
in the time period where those people
2:37:03
look to be like the great unifier
2:37:06
but once Philip starts to
2:37:08
really assert himself in that role if you were
2:37:10
going to see a Person
2:37:12
who might unify Greece through force
2:37:15
and violence In
2:37:17
the middle 340s Philip is your guy The
2:37:21
reason that this undercurrent of
2:37:24
discussion about Philip leading a crusade
2:37:26
against Persia matters is Because
2:37:29
when Philip is no longer with us, it's
2:37:31
going to be this desire
2:37:33
this goal This
2:37:35
outcome that his son will adopt as his
2:37:38
own That is
2:37:40
again assuming that Philip hadn't had this idea
2:37:43
himself already didn't need some
2:37:46
Athenian or some Philosopher
2:37:48
giving it to him. Maybe he thought to himself. I'll
2:37:50
take Persia. Let me just you know, make sure I
2:37:53
don't have any hostile Greek cities
2:37:55
in my rear when I do Which
2:37:58
is what's going on around the time Alexander? first
2:38:00
gets to command troops, right? He's about 16
2:38:02
years old. Philip's upcoming
2:38:05
face-off with the powers that be in
2:38:07
Greece is starting to sort of crystallize
2:38:09
and shape up. Philip's
2:38:13
big enemy has always been Athens, and even
2:38:15
when they're at peace it's
2:38:17
kind of a Cold War kind of peace. I
2:38:19
mean, I think it was Demosthenes, the Athenian
2:38:22
orator, who was always sort of anti-Philip
2:38:24
that said that even when
2:38:26
Athens wasn't at war with Philip. Philip
2:38:28
was still at war with Athens, implying
2:38:32
that there's always a jockeying
2:38:34
for, maneuvering for
2:38:37
advantage here until the next
2:38:39
hot war starts. But
2:38:43
Philip has been controlling the whole situation in
2:38:45
Greece for some time now by having the
2:38:47
Thebans, or the other great city-state
2:38:49
that are historically the anti-Athhenian
2:38:51
city-state during this time period, having
2:38:54
the Thebans as his allies, right?
2:38:56
So you sort of checkmate the
2:38:59
Athenians in that situation. What changes
2:39:02
that leads to a showdown
2:39:05
is the position of Thebes. They
2:39:08
start to see Philip as
2:39:11
a threat too, and what we should
2:39:13
recall here, and it's partly what makes
2:39:15
Greek politics so difficult to follow, but
2:39:17
also at the same time so vulnerable
2:39:19
to a king operating in a
2:39:22
system with one person making
2:39:24
all the decisions, you
2:39:27
can see how that affects these
2:39:29
city-states where public opinion is divided.
2:39:32
Athens has a pro-Maccadonian
2:39:35
camp and an anti-Maccadonian camp,
2:39:37
and so does Thebes. And
2:39:40
Philip can work angles like that. One
2:39:44
of the reasons he's getting the Thebans angry with
2:39:46
him and the Athenians are already mad at him
2:39:48
is he's funding
2:39:50
division in Greece, right? He's deliberately
2:39:52
trying to create disunity and hostility
2:39:54
among the major powers, and he's
2:39:56
devoting a lot of his money
2:39:58
to that cause. I
2:40:01
mean, if there are Russian troll farms now trying
2:40:03
to get people in the West to hate each
2:40:05
other by instigating, you know
2:40:07
online combat and all that sort of stuff
2:40:09
to to make us a more divided society
2:40:11
that might be an Imitation
2:40:13
of what Philips been doing in Greece and
2:40:15
you could understand why the Greek city-states might
2:40:18
take offense after a while Right. It's in
2:40:20
his interest to keep Greece destabilized
2:40:22
and well, it's not so fun
2:40:24
to live in a destabilized place Demosthenes
2:40:29
and the Athenians will always portray this
2:40:31
as a war for Greek
2:40:33
liberty when they're dealing with Philip and Philip
2:40:35
is The Empire and the
2:40:37
Athenians and friends because that's maybe how
2:40:40
the Athenians would see them It's the
2:40:42
Athenians and all these other people our
2:40:44
supporters Even if
2:40:46
they're major city-states the Athenians cast
2:40:48
themselves in the role of the
2:40:50
plucky beleaguered Republic Right
2:40:53
fighting to maintain the old ways the tradition
2:40:55
the greatness of at the Athens traditionally and
2:40:57
of course, you know the Status
2:41:01
quo And
2:41:05
guys like Demosthenes who's considered to be
2:41:07
one of the greatest orators in world
2:41:09
history Let's
2:41:12
this fear and warning about Philip
2:41:14
to overcome his entire career I think for
2:41:16
like 10 years straight all he's writing about
2:41:18
is the danger of Philip We need to
2:41:20
do something before Philip gets us that kind
2:41:22
of thing In
2:41:25
his third Philippic, which is usually considered his
2:41:27
best in 341
2:41:30
BC BCE. So that would be when Alexander
2:41:32
is a year before Alexander takes over for
2:41:34
that Regency Demosthenes
2:41:36
again warns about Philip and these are long
2:41:39
tracks if you read them But
2:41:41
if you take pieces of it out, you
2:41:43
can see the church chilean comparisons come pretty
2:41:45
easily Right where Winston Churchill's warning about the
2:41:48
Nazis for all this time before they finally
2:41:50
take over and then he's brought to lead
2:41:53
You know against the foe that he saw before
2:41:55
anyone else Well, Demosthenes isn't looking to
2:41:58
lead but he's certainly looking to
2:42:00
warn the Athenians that
2:42:03
their freedom is at stake. And it's really interesting
2:42:05
the way they define freedom and a lot of modern
2:42:07
historians pick up on this too. The
2:42:09
Greeks want the freedom to basically fight each
2:42:11
other. We would today
2:42:13
say they want the freedom to make their own
2:42:16
foreign policy, knowing full well that
2:42:18
a large part of what they think of
2:42:20
as their foreign policy is the struggle for
2:42:22
hegemony against other Greek states, right?
2:42:24
The freedom to fight our adversaries
2:42:26
in Greece, and that's what Philip, if
2:42:29
he takes over, is going to take
2:42:31
away one of the things that Demosthenes points out. Hey,
2:42:33
you want to be able to control your own foreign
2:42:35
policy? Better not let Philip get in charge. And
2:42:38
so at one point, the third Philippic, he has this, I
2:42:41
looked at this paragraph for two, and
2:42:44
I pulled it up from the web,
2:42:46
and it doesn't say who translated it,
2:42:48
so a thousand apologies if that person's
2:42:50
still alive today. But
2:42:53
from about the middle of the piece, or two
2:42:55
thirds of the way through, he kind
2:42:57
of gets to this moment where he's blaming the
2:42:59
Athenians for all this, that they don't want to
2:43:02
put forward the effort and the money
2:43:04
and the demands on their
2:43:06
own precious time that
2:43:09
it would take away from whatever it is they want to do
2:43:11
to stop Philip, and yet they're going to pay a price for
2:43:13
this. They're not the men that their grandparents
2:43:16
and great-grandparents were because they would have done
2:43:18
what needed to be done, whereas you're more
2:43:20
concerned about looking out
2:43:22
for number one, and he says,
2:43:24
quote, so it is
2:43:26
men of Athens with us. While
2:43:29
we're still safe with our great
2:43:31
city, our vast resources, our noble
2:43:33
name, what are we to do? Perhaps
2:43:37
someone sitting here, meaning the assembly where
2:43:39
he's speaking, has long been
2:43:41
wishing to ask this question. I
2:43:44
and I will answer it, and I will
2:43:46
move my motion, and you shall carry it
2:43:48
if you wish. We ourselves
2:43:50
in the first place must
2:43:53
conduct the resistance and
2:43:55
make preparation for it with ships,
2:43:57
that is, and money and soldiers.
2:44:00
For though all but ourselves give way
2:44:02
and become slaves, we at
2:44:04
least must contend for freedom. And
2:44:07
when we've made all these preparations
2:44:09
ourselves, and let them be seen, then
2:44:11
let us call upon the other states
2:44:14
for aid, and send envoys to carry
2:44:16
our message in all directions, to
2:44:18
the Peloponnese, to Rhodes, to Chios,
2:44:20
to the King, meaning the King
2:44:22
of Persia. For it
2:44:24
is not unimportant for his interest either
2:44:27
that Philip should be prevented from
2:44:29
subjugating all the world, that
2:44:32
so, if you persuade them, you
2:44:35
may have partners to share the dangers
2:44:37
and the expense in case of need,
2:44:39
and if you do not, you
2:44:41
may at least delay the march of events.
2:44:44
For since the war is with a single
2:44:46
man, and not against the strength
2:44:48
of a unified state, even
2:44:50
delay is not without its value." That's
2:44:56
a pretty cool ominous line, right? I mean, if
2:44:58
you're really just fighting one guy as opposed to,
2:45:01
you know, the next guy in line who
2:45:03
can take over because they're not foreseeing Alexander,
2:45:05
they figure Macadone is just going to fall
2:45:07
apart without Philip and anything could happen to
2:45:09
one guy, right? Well,
2:45:12
that Philippic was
2:45:14
giving Athens yet another warning, a
2:45:17
full three years before the disaster
2:45:20
that's in their future, the
2:45:23
disaster that is the Battle of Caranea.
2:45:25
The Battle of Caranea
2:45:27
is one of those battles that everyone who's
2:45:29
familiar with ancient Greek history knows because it's
2:45:31
very famous, it's super important, but it's not
2:45:33
one of those battles that's gotten a lot
2:45:36
of publicity outside, you know,
2:45:38
the narrow specific ancient Mediterranean
2:45:40
genre. But the reason
2:45:43
it's important is this is the time period
2:45:45
where really the first time in hundreds of
2:45:47
years since the Greek city-states first arose on
2:45:49
the scene that
2:45:51
they get leashed by an outside
2:45:53
power. There
2:45:55
have been moments where one Greek city-state
2:45:57
like a Sparta or an Athens or
2:45:59
or Thebes dominates the other ones,
2:46:02
but it's always been a Greek
2:46:04
city-state involved in the
2:46:06
process of controlling other Greek city-states.
2:46:09
The battle of Carine is between Greek city-states
2:46:11
and an outside power. And
2:46:15
it is one of those battles where everything
2:46:17
is on the line. It's
2:46:19
very typical of battles in the, in
2:46:22
the pre-modern world, the ancient world, where
2:46:24
a single battle can decide the
2:46:26
whole war. So think of the stakes here. Lose
2:46:30
here, lose everything, win here
2:46:33
and see what happens. To
2:46:39
get a sense of the dread though, and the
2:46:41
feeling that overcame
2:46:44
the Athenians when they realized that
2:46:46
the Darth Vader figure, that people
2:46:48
like Democides had been warning about
2:46:50
forever was finally upon them. Diodorus
2:46:53
of Sicily, Diodorus Siculus
2:46:55
writes about what happens
2:46:58
when, as tensions are sort of heating
2:47:00
up, Philip makes a surprise move and
2:47:03
seizes the initiative that puts Athens
2:47:05
in a precarious position. And
2:47:08
then the people in Athens find out
2:47:10
about it. And Diodorus writes, quote, given
2:47:13
that the Athenians were unprepared. There
2:47:16
was, after all, a peace
2:47:18
treaty in place between them and Philip.
2:47:21
He was expecting an easy victory.
2:47:23
And that is exactly what transpired.
2:47:26
Some men, Diodorus writes, arrived
2:47:28
one night in Athens with
2:47:30
news of Philip's occupation of
2:47:32
Elade and have his imminent
2:47:34
arrival in Attica with his
2:47:36
forces. The Athenian generals
2:47:38
had not been expecting anything like this.
2:47:41
And in a state of shock, they summoned
2:47:43
the trumpeters and told them to keep sounding
2:47:46
the alarm all night long. By
2:47:48
the time word had spread to every
2:47:50
household, the city was alert with fear.
2:47:53
And the first thing in the morning, the
2:47:55
entire population converged on the theater without
2:47:58
waiting for the customary proclamation. by
2:48:00
the Archons. When the generals
2:48:02
arrived, they introduced one of the men
2:48:04
who had brought the information, and after
2:48:06
he had said his peace, a
2:48:09
fearful silence gripped the theater. None of
2:48:12
the men who usually addressed the assembly
2:48:14
dared to offer any advice, and
2:48:16
although the Herald called repeatedly for
2:48:18
people to recommend courses of action
2:48:20
that might save them all, not
2:48:22
a single speaker came forward. In
2:48:25
a state of great uncertainty and fear,
2:48:27
the people kept looking towards
2:48:30
Demosthenes." So
2:48:34
Demosthenes says, we've got to get Thebes
2:48:36
working with us. Thebes and Athens joined
2:48:38
forces, raised their militaries, rushed
2:48:40
to this Carinea site
2:48:42
in the area around
2:48:44
Thebes, you know, Boeotia, that area, and
2:48:48
they get to have it out for all
2:48:50
the marbles with this
2:48:54
amazing figure of a man who
2:48:56
is commanding an army now that we should
2:48:58
pay attention to, is not the same army
2:49:01
of 20 years ago, or almost 20 years
2:49:03
ago. By
2:49:05
the time Carinea happens in 338, this
2:49:08
reform of the Macadonian army that Philip
2:49:10
started to pursue when he took over
2:49:13
as king has been going on like
2:49:15
18-19 years, and this army has been
2:49:17
fighting continually, and he's
2:49:19
been adding new elements and
2:49:21
innovations and applying learned lessons
2:49:24
from battlefield encounters into reforms.
2:49:27
I mean, this is an army now that is terrifying,
2:49:32
especially to these armies like the Thebans and
2:49:34
the Athenians, who are going to raise these
2:49:38
militia armies that have generally
2:49:40
a small corps, like in the Theban army, they
2:49:42
have the Theban sacred band professionals, but there's 300
2:49:45
of them. It's nothing. And
2:49:47
then maybe they hire some mercenaries too to help, because
2:49:50
there's a lot of mercenaries running around, but
2:49:52
a lot of these troops are guys, as
2:49:55
we said earlier, who, you know, put on the
2:49:57
armor and grab the traditional
2:50:00
family weaponry and show up there as
2:50:02
the militia to do battle with
2:50:04
a bunch of professionals. Then
2:50:09
you add the command factor. One
2:50:12
of the things that just bedevils
2:50:14
a person who's interested in Greek
2:50:16
military history is that so much
2:50:18
of the political side of places
2:50:20
like Athens bled into things like
2:50:23
military command. Their political system essentially
2:50:25
likes to elect generals and then keep moving them
2:50:27
around all the time. And you know don't let
2:50:30
anybody get too powerful, but there's
2:50:33
a famous line quoted I forgot which of the
2:50:35
ancient sources mentioned it, but Philip
2:50:37
is supposed to have been have marveled
2:50:39
in the fact that the Athenians could come up with
2:50:41
like 10 good generals a year because that's how many
2:50:43
they had to elect. He goes when I've only found
2:50:46
one good one in my whole life he
2:50:48
was talking about Parmenia. But
2:50:52
when you add the fact that they're going to have
2:50:54
a professional army facing an army that has
2:50:57
a lot of people who are not professionals
2:50:59
in it, you're going to have them commanded
2:51:01
by people with tons of experience. The macadonian
2:51:04
core of generals reminds one of like
2:51:06
the guys around Napoleon, you
2:51:09
know all of his great general staff people. Alexander's
2:51:12
got a similar thing and in
2:51:14
this era Philip's got them with him and they're
2:51:16
going to survive him and they're going to help
2:51:18
Alexander. This is sort of the hidden part of
2:51:20
the Alexander Maserati
2:51:23
secret weapon here is the fact
2:51:26
that these generals provide a ton
2:51:28
of institutional memory and
2:51:30
they're all very good. And a bunch
2:51:32
of them will actually as we said
2:51:34
earlier go on to found dynasties where
2:51:36
tons of their descendants will rule for
2:51:39
centuries. So these are very august people
2:51:43
and they're contrasted with people who
2:51:45
are as we said elected
2:51:47
political I mean it's that's
2:51:49
a washout too right? And
2:51:52
you know when we talk about these professional
2:51:54
versus militia armies or these armies that fight
2:51:56
all the time versus the kind that only
2:51:58
get called up. You know once
2:52:01
a decade Athens hasn't done a lot of fighting
2:52:03
with their citizen militia in a while use
2:52:06
a lot of mercenaries, but According
2:52:08
to the sources Athens raises its age where
2:52:10
they want you to show up at the
2:52:13
battlefield to 50 years old for this battle
2:52:15
I'm gonna say that that shows a level
2:52:18
of concern That's
2:52:20
rather desperate if you're pulling the 50 year
2:52:22
olds out to the battlefield To
2:52:25
face, you know the young killers in the
2:52:27
Macadonian army That's
2:52:29
a little scary and here's the thing Scarier
2:52:31
in the ancient world than now I mean
2:52:34
if you told me that we were gonna
2:52:36
put together a volksturm of 50 year
2:52:38
old plus guys But
2:52:41
you were gonna arm them with high-powered rifles or
2:52:43
something and send them out there to do something
2:52:45
that that's a force that can do something maybe
2:52:49
one could argue that some of the Predominantly
2:52:52
bow armed armies in the world. I mean
2:52:54
the Persians use a lot of bow for
2:52:56
example Maybe those people could get out there
2:52:58
and fight at 50 and be effective But
2:53:02
both the Greeks in this period and
2:53:04
the Macadonians They get
2:53:06
at you. I mean it's physical there's going to
2:53:08
be you know, close-range
2:53:10
stabbing and Fighting and
2:53:12
wrestling and martial arts and the whole thing
2:53:16
Both sides go into this battle expecting
2:53:18
that And
2:53:21
when that's the case While
2:53:23
a lot of the ancient sources talk about the
2:53:25
value of having the older guys in the unit
2:53:27
right having them in the phalanx There is steadying
2:53:30
force their veterans. They know how this stuff goes.
2:53:32
They've got you know actual experience They can draw
2:53:34
and to calm the young folks and whatever But
2:53:37
at certain points in this battle again The
2:53:40
sourcing for this battle is gonna make it really
2:53:42
tough to piece together. Although that hasn't stopped generations
2:53:44
of people from trying But There
2:53:48
are accounts where it suggests
2:53:51
that it was a very long
2:53:53
drawn-out battle and that this was
2:53:55
Totally to the advantage of the Macadonians because
2:53:57
even if a bunch of older guys
2:54:00
you know, we should think of mixed units is
2:54:02
gonna be younger guys too. But even if a
2:54:04
bunch of older guys can still manage
2:54:06
to bring it like they used to for a
2:54:08
certain period of time, if the battle goes on
2:54:10
a long time, this is a physical fitness war
2:54:13
at a certain point. And
2:54:16
some of these 50 year old 49 year old guys are gonna
2:54:19
tap out after a while. And if only one size
2:54:21
using 49 or 50 year old
2:54:23
guys, well, okay, I see
2:54:25
a problem potentially right there. There's
2:54:29
a great line from the 1950s movie about
2:54:33
Alexander the Great starring Richard Burton as Alexander
2:54:36
and I tried to find the line in
2:54:38
my history books figuring that the screenwriters lifted
2:54:40
it from one of the classical sources. I
2:54:43
couldn't find it. That doesn't mean it's not there.
2:54:46
But maybe the script writers wrote it.
2:54:48
It's fantastic though. Spoiler alert, it has
2:54:50
Philip after the Battle of Cara Nia
2:54:52
after he's defeated the Athenians and he's
2:54:54
walking around Athens amongst these defeated Athenians
2:54:57
past all the fantastic classical
2:55:00
statues that all look like
2:55:03
Olympians right with the fantastic fantastic
2:55:06
muscular chair they look like perfect
2:55:08
human specimens. And in the movie,
2:55:10
the actor playing Philip looks at
2:55:13
the defeated Athenians motions to
2:55:15
the statues and says, where
2:55:17
were all these physiques
2:55:20
at Cara Nia? Now
2:55:22
let's talk a little about the battle though, in
2:55:25
terms of what we know such an important battle
2:55:27
you think we know more. And you can pick
2:55:29
up a bunch of history books and feel like
2:55:31
you know quite a bit unless you compare them
2:55:33
to each other. That's when you
2:55:36
realize, wait a minute, these guys are have
2:55:38
completely different takes on this battle. What's
2:55:41
more, they've been arguing about some of the
2:55:43
key points that are well still argued about
2:55:45
for more than 100 years. Hansel Brooks got
2:55:48
it in his book. And I love the
2:55:50
way he actually breaks down one of these
2:55:52
central questions about the battle just
2:55:54
as relevant today, by the way. But the
2:55:58
main source is Diodorus cicula. He's
2:56:01
writing it more in an adventure sort of tone
2:56:03
as opposed to giving us a sense of, okay,
2:56:06
tell me where all the units were. Let me get an
2:56:08
idea of the terrain, that sort of thing. Ian Worthington
2:56:12
in his book By the Spear sort of
2:56:14
sets up a best guess at the numbers
2:56:17
in ancient history. Battlefield
2:56:19
numbers and army strengths is something,
2:56:22
well, you shouldn't take it with a grain of salt.
2:56:24
You should take it with a whole big old barrel of salt. But
2:56:27
sometimes you, even if it's not true,
2:56:29
you must believe in ancient history, right? Here's
2:56:33
how Ian Worthington sort of sets the stage for this
2:56:35
pivotal, one of the most important battles in
2:56:37
the history of ancient Greece, Battle of
2:56:39
Caranea in 338. The
2:56:43
Greek coalition troops numbered 30,000 infantry and
2:56:45
3,800 cavalry, and
2:56:48
were commanded by the Athenian generals Charus,
2:56:51
Lysocles, and Stratocles, and
2:56:54
the Theban general Theogenes. Boeotia
2:56:57
provided 12,000 hoplites, including the
2:57:00
elite sacred band, and
2:57:02
the Athenians 6,000 citizen
2:57:04
soldiers to age 50 and 2,000 mercenaries. Demosthenes,
2:57:09
who had the phrase, good luck,
2:57:11
which sounds a little sarcastic, I've
2:57:13
read also good fortune, emblazoned
2:57:15
in gold letters on his shield, was
2:57:18
one of the infantrymen in the Athenian
2:57:20
contingent. Philip commanded 30,000 infantry
2:57:22
and 2,000 cavalry, composed of 24,000 Macedonians, and
2:57:28
the rest from Thessaly and
2:57:31
Phocas, or Phocas, end
2:57:33
quote. Theodorus Siculus
2:57:35
is the main account of the battle, and
2:57:37
he makes it sound as though, you know,
2:57:39
the second that Demosthenes goes to convince Thebes
2:57:42
to join the alliance with Athens, that it
2:57:44
was on and the battle happened right away,
2:57:46
but it was several months of jockeying, and
2:57:48
Philip still trying to pursue diplomacy. If you
2:57:50
were trying to take a pro-Macodonian position here,
2:57:52
you might say, hey, Philip kept trying to
2:57:55
make a deal. Didn't want it this way,
2:57:57
whereas the people on the... Allied
2:58:00
Greeks I would say Philip was trying to
2:58:02
pry us apart so that he didn't
2:58:04
have to face us, but eventually of course it comes down
2:58:06
to the battle, and this is
2:58:08
how Diodorus Siculus has it set up and
2:58:11
how it goes. I'm
2:58:14
using the excellent Robin Waterfield translation
2:58:16
of Diodorus, by the way, and
2:58:19
the author has Diodorus saying, quote,
2:58:22
At daybreak the armies were drawn up for
2:58:24
battle. Philip posted his
2:58:26
son Alexander on one of the wings.
2:58:29
He was only a teenager, but was
2:58:31
already well known for his martial spirit
2:58:33
and forceful energy, and gave him his
2:58:35
most senior officers in support while he
2:58:37
took command of the other wing at
2:58:40
the head of the crack troops and
2:58:42
deployed all the other individual units as
2:58:44
the situation demanded. The
2:58:46
Athenians, for their part, divided their
2:58:48
forces by nationality, entrusting
2:58:50
one wing to the Boeotians and
2:58:52
taking command of the other themselves.
2:58:55
End quote. Then
2:58:57
Diodorus has the battle happening and
2:58:59
Alexander sort of having the initial
2:59:02
success, which he says
2:59:04
prompted Alexander's dad to then compete
2:59:06
with him. Well, just for
2:59:08
yourself, but here's how the actual account
2:59:10
of the battle, in the best account
2:59:12
that we have of the battle, describes it, quote,
2:59:16
A fearsome prolonged engagement ensued.
2:59:18
So many men fell on both sides
2:59:20
that for a while the battle allowed
2:59:23
them both equally to anticipate victory. And
2:59:26
Alexander was eager to put on a display
2:59:29
of valor for his father, and he was
2:59:31
in any case excessively ambitious. And
2:59:33
besides, there were many good men fighting
2:59:35
alongside him in support. So
2:59:37
it was he who was the first to create a
2:59:40
breach in the enemy lines. He
2:59:42
slew so many of those who were arranged
2:59:44
opposite him that the line was wearing thin.
2:59:47
And since his companions were being just as
2:59:49
effective, the enemy formation as a whole
2:59:51
was constantly in danger of being breached. The
2:59:54
bodies were lying in heaps by the time
2:59:56
Alexander was first able to force the troops
2:59:58
facing him.
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