Show 71 - Mania for Subjugation
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December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. It's history. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The events. Not quite to the noise, man. Let the word go, sir.

From this time and place, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. The drama.

I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their presidents are corrupt. The deep question. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. It's hardcore history. Like many of you, I am a fan of ancient mythology. The stories of

creation or how human beings came to be or tales that involve gods and heroes and monsters and sometimes just regular people who go through interesting sorts of events or travels or whatnot. And oftentimes these mythological stories are meant to impart lessons. We're supposed to learn something from them, what to do, what not to do.

You're tempted to almost say at the end of all of them, and the moral of the story is, right? What are we supposed to learn from this? Hunter S. Thompson used to call it in his columns, the wisdom. And some of my favorite mythological stories are cautionary tales, examples of what can happen if we're not careful. And one of my favorite versions of that kind of story, that kind of mythological teaching tool is,

is the famous story of Daedalus and Icarus. If you know your ancient Greek philosophy, you will recall that Daedalus is a master craftsman, an inventor.

He can seemingly make anything. He's the one who built the famous labyrinth that held the Minotaur. And it was the king of Minoa, the Cretan area on the island of Crete that had Daedalus build this for him. But at a certain point, he turns against Daedalus and imprisons Daedalus and Icarus. But of course, when you imprison one of the great inventors of all time, he's going to try to invent a way to get out.

And in this case, he does. He creates wings for he and his son. Wings made of multiple different materials, including things like feathers and beeswax. And he and his son are going to be able to fly out of this prison. But Daedalus warns his son before doing so. He tells him not to get complacent.

and allow himself to fly too close to the water because if you're too low the moisture he says from the sea will ruin the wings and you'll lose your power of flight and you'll crash conversely he warns him about getting filled with hubris and forgetting how dangerous this is and allowing himself to fly too high because if he does that the sun will melt the beeswax that hold these wings together and you'll plummet and fall

And of course, being an ancient Greek mythological tale, how would it work if everything just went fine? And of course, it doesn't. Icarus forgets his father's warnings, gets taken sort of over by the enthusiasm that happens when a human being gets a chance to fly like a bird.

allows himself to fly too high, and the sun melts the beeswax, the wings fall apart, and Icarus plunges into the sea and dies. The moral of the story, the takeaway from all this, is supposed to be a warning about ambition and allowing oneself to get too ambitious, right? To forget that there is a middle ground that everyone should shoot for.

In philosophy, this is sometimes called the golden mean. And it involves things that are considered to be virtues when you have them in the right amount. But if you have them in the wrong amount, can turn into vices. And one of the examples that's often used in the ancient Greek philosophies is courage. The right amount of courage is a virtue. If you have too little of it, it's cowardice, and that's a vice. But if you have too much of it, it's recklessness, and that's a vice too.

The question of ambition is an equally interesting one. It's a very Goldilocks-type concept, this golden mean, right? This porridge is too hot, this porridge is too cold, this porridge is just right. Well, if you're dealing with ambition and not porridge, where is the just right point? It's not easy to pin down, is it? Dictionary defines ambition as an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power.

It's described as a character trait that involves people who are driven to succeed at lofty goals, right? It involves drive, ambition, tenacity, the pursuit of excellence, the desire to be the best. The interesting thing about the desire to be the best, though, is that that's a competitive thing. It means you're competing with other people who also want to be the best. You're seeking distinction, right? Fame, right?

You want to be seen as better than other people. There's an interesting line Edmund Burke once said that fame is the passion which is the instinct of all great souls, right? They seek distinction. And to a certain degree, this is positive unless it gets too intense to steal a phrase that was originally used for something else. Ambition is a bit like fire. A dangerous servant dies.

and a cruel master and you can see what happens when it gets out of control in the case of a mythological figure like icarus his over ambition or his hubris obviously cost him his life

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

When Icarus's hubris gets the best of him and the sun melts his beeswax, holding the wings together and he falls, what if he falls on a crowd of people? What if it isn't just about Icarus anymore? What if the area where you seek fame and success and distinction involves the lives and destinies of lots and lots of people? That's when this question of

this virtue of ambition or desire to be the best can become ultimately at times genocidal. I mean, take for example, a figure like Julius Caesar from the Roman Republican era, right? There's a great story about Caesar and it very well may not be true. It's recounted in a couple of different sources, which doesn't mean it's true.

The Roman writer Suetonius recounts a version of this tale, as does the Greek author Plutarch. But they talk about when Julius Caesar was stationed in Spain. He was about 32 years old at the time. Suetonius says he's reading a history of Alexander the Great. Plutarch says he's sitting at the foot of a statue of Alexander the Great, who lived a couple of centuries before Caesar.

Suetonius says he was sighing and had a vexing look on his face. Plutarch says he's out and out weeping. And when somebody says, "Why are you crying?" Caesar is supposed to have replied, "Don't I have good reason to? At the age that I am now, Alexander the Great had conquered all these kingdoms, and what have I done of distinction?" Showing that in Caesar's mind,

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

But when your overambition sends you crashing to the ground, if you're Julius Caesar, you land on a lot of people. As author Tom Holland said about Caesar, he said, Caesar's own ambitions were one day to consume the entire republic. Well, clearly that never would have happened if Caesar's ambitions had been to become the best flute player in ancient Rome and

But he wanted to be the great ruler, conqueror, empire builder. And when that's what you want to be famous for,

It means you're going to have to kill a lot of people to win the gold medal. In fact, if you look at the way the Roman Republic is set up, it's set up to encourage distinction between its greatest figures. And that worked for Rome for a long time. It was almost part of the plan, right? Get your greatest figures desiring to outdo one another. And when they do great deeds, they pull the Republic with them.

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

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

There's a very interesting line from Napoleon Bonaparte written in the 1790s where he talks about the danger of ambition. And remember, Bonaparte's one of the few people that you could call a peer of a guy like Alexander or Julius Caesar. If they were going to be tried in the Celestial Court of Historical Justice and you had to have a jury of your peers, Napoleon could be one of those people sitting on the jury. And he once said...

that ambition, which overthrows governments and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crimes. Ambition is like all inordinate passions, he wrote, a violent and unthinking fever that ceases only when life ceases, like a conflagration which, fanned by a pitiless wind, ends only after all has been consumed.

and the poster child for the dangers associated with outsize, out-of-control ambition, right? The geopolitical, real-life example of an Icarus in global affairs is Alexander the Great. Of course, Icarus clearly failed at what he was trying to do. If you're trying to fly across the water and instead you crash into the sea and die, that's not success.

In Alexander's case, measuring how well he did depends on what he was trying to do in the first place, doesn't it? If he was trying to become eternally famous, achieve glory, conquer lots of places, and write his name in the sands of time more deeply and enduringly than anyone else ever, he might have to give the guy an A+. After all, he lived more than 2,300 years ago, and he's probably, I mean, biblical, he's

Personages aside, the most famous early figure in history that most people, if you brought a microphone and started asking them on the street of any major city in the world, that most people would recognize, don't you think? The guy still has books coming out about him or some aspect of his life or career every year. Regularly has movies and TV shows and all kinds of things like that coming out. Podcasts too, it must be said.

And he's fascinated people ever since his life. Yours truly, clearly also. There's a ton of reasons for this. First of all, we should notice that he's one of the better examples you can use to prove something that historians have understood for a very long time, which is that you interpret people through the lens and the morality and the standards and ethics of the time that you live in, right? So Alexander has been seen any number of different ways based on who's doing the viewing, right?

In some eras, he's been seen as a almost philosopher king. In others, he's been seen as a great representative of the idea of the

you know, civilizing force. We've used the term historical arsonist before in some eras, you know, Alexander was seen as someone who had to come along to, you know, break the log jam that was keeping the world from moving forward. A great blender of civilizations, a great spreader of Hellenism or a butcher depends on who's doing the viewing, right? Guys like Alexander are the equivalent of holding a mirror up to the society that's assessing them.

Like so many great figures in history who did amazing things, Alexander benefited from nepotism. He is the son of a king, right? He's in a monarchy.

That's the best kind of nepotism if you're trying to start your career off with a great advantage. I mean, what's the old line that, you know, they start off on third and think they hit a triple? I mean, don't you think a guy like Caesar or Napoleon or Genghis Khan would have loved that sort of a head start, right? When Caesar's crying, supposedly, at the foot of Alexander's statue because he hasn't achieved as much by the same age as Alexander did. Well, Alexander had a huge head start, didn't he?

A lot of guys who have the words "the great" after their name fall into that category. I mean, you can look at a guy like Frederick the Great of Prussia.

He had a father who did a lot of the heavy lifting of building all of the, you know, the edifice for conquest that would come later. He centralized a state. He organized a taxation system. He built a bureaucracy. And oh, yeah, he created a Maserati of an army and then handed the keys to the sports car to his son to go off and do amazing things and then get the, you know, the title The Great added to his name. Probably should have been his dad's title when you think about it.

And you can say similar things for Alexander. Alexander's father was an amazing figure. He is such an incredible person that had Alexander not lived, we would probably know his dad's name instead, and maybe his dad would have been called the Great. Instead, his dad was called Philip II of a place called Macedonia.

Quick word on pronunciation here, or mispronunciation as the case may be. I'm one of those people who've long been a heretic on the matter and pronounce Macedonia with the hard C sound instead of the more common in English soft C sound.

I have a lot of reasons for that. If you'd like to read a long-winded account of my thinking, we will link to a written article in the show notes about it. But I've been a heretic since I first encountered some of the history writing in the 1980s, where some of those historians simply took the question out of the hands of the reader by substituting a K for a C in the words like Macedonian or Scythian.

Once you follow the tumbling etymological dominoes on this question, you might find yourself a heretic too. But if I'm mispronouncing the word in your mind, just know that I'm doing it intentionally. Macedonia, though, is an area north of Greece, and whether or not it's composed of people you should call Greek has been an ongoing issue from Philip II's time until now.

for different reasons though in philip ii's time you couldn't participate for example in the olympic games unless you were considered greek and the greeks during the time period had debates about this and philip ii amongst other macedonian kings worked hard to try to make sure he was and his people were considered meeting the criteria that would classify them as greek these days the question is still an open one but a lot of it revolves around all of the

DNA that has moved into the region north of Greece over all the centuries since Alexander the Great's time, right? 23 centuries or more. A lot of different peoples move into that area. How does that affect the ethnic makeup? Well, people still talk about it. One thing you can say, though, is that this area north of Greece in classical Greek times wasn't very much like classical Greece.

classical Greece, of course, is the Greece of the Greek and Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars. So think 500 B.C., B.C.E., 400, 300, that whole range populated, of course, by city states. The famous ones, right? Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Argos, Thebes, all these places could almost be likened to small scale countries, you know, where the people were patriotic towards their cities, where the cities went to war with one another.

They usually controlled a decent chunk of the surrounding territory, and the people who lived there were considered to be sort of the members of a country, but the countries were small-scale places. All of these places tended to have thriving middle classes. The citizens up until a certain time period usually made up the militaries of these places, and these city-states fought each other.

These armies were often militia armies in terms of their organization. So if you were a farmer in Thebes and all of a sudden you guys were going to go to war against Corinth, well, you were going to go grab your armor from over the fireplace. And it might've been the same armor your dad and your granddad used. Grab your three foot diameter round shield and

Put the sword in your belt, get your six to nine foot long spear and run down the hill to join your neighbors in the local phalanx, right? The closed body of troops who stood shoulder to shoulder

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

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

Kings were what the Egyptians had with a pharaoh. Kings were what the Persians had with their great king of kings. In the Greek city-state, you often had all kinds of different governments, but kings weren't usually a part of it. And in one of the states that had kings, Sparta famously had two of them. Kind of takes the whole, you know, absolute ruler side of the question out of the equation, doesn't it, if you have two of them?

reminds me a little of the roman republic's concept of having not one consul but two consuls right divides the power and authority a little bit but if you had a king that was a sure sign that you probably weren't greek and if your king was polygamous well that was another sure sign it probably wasn't a greek place because in you know greece of the time period we're talking about polygamy was another sure sign of barbarism

Add to that the fact that these Macedonians lived a much more sort of a rustic existence than your average cosmopolitan Greek city-state. Cosmopolitan by comparison. You look at Macedonian royal society and it looks more like a mafia crime family than anything you can think of. A mafia crime family if you combined it with a daytime soap opera. A mafia crime family with some more homosexuality and sorcery than most mafia crime families are known for.

I wrote down some of the adjectives used by historians to describe, you know, the Macedonian royal family situation. And they talked about assassinations, executions, civil wars, hostage taking, incest, drunken murders, adultery, witchcraft. Makes for great reading, but you might not want to live there. It does mean that the kings of Macedonia who came of age and managed to rule were in a sort of a Darwinian sense, pretty tough survivors, right?

In fact, Philip II had two older brothers. It's interesting to note that Philip II's mother gave birth to three sons. All three became kings, and all three died violently. One was killed in wars fighting Macedonia's enemies. Another was assassinated, which is a pretty normal thing to happen. Actually, two of them were assassinated.

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

Thracian, Illyrian, and Epirote blood that runs through the royal families of the Macedonians. Traditionally, Philip II is seen as a guy who brings Macedonia to power from nothing.

That is probably not true considering the newfangled histories about him because one of the great things that revisionist historians have figured out in a lot of these cases is that any time the history sort of portrays someone as, you know, creating something from nothing, it probably wasn't true.

that there were probably foundational things bubbling up under the surface that didn't make their appearance felt in the history books until someone was able to reach a critical mass. And that's probably the case with Philip II, who was probably building upon state formation and development that his ancestors had been able to sort of lay down, lay down a few levels of

solidity that a guy like Philip II could finally, you know, run with in the same way that he laid down the Maserati type situation that his son got to run with. And one of the reasons that Philip is so able to exploit

these maneuvers done by some of his predecessors is the stability he brings to the leadership question i mean that's the key issue if you look at it in hindsight that's keeping macedonia from doing better they can't keep competent leaders on the throne for very long at one point before philip takes over macedonia is going to have five kings in six years

and most of them die violently, that's a difficult situation to overcome, even with a lot of advantages. And what sort of advantages are we talking about? Well, one is that Macedonia's got quite a bit of arable land. Compare that to the powerful Greek city-states in the south who are...

you know, splitting up the land between all the different city states, right? So no city state controls at all. They've been cutting down trees for hundreds of years in Greece proper, which isn't fantastic tree growing territory to begin with. Well, Macedonia has got a lot of trees. In fact,

The ancient sources record that the best and most important timber in this period, and remember timber is used for everything, including the building of navies, very important in ancient Greece. The best timber comes from Macedonia. They've got wonderful areas to farm and to graze cattle and horses. They control important mineral and precious metal mines and will get more of them. And they've also got a population of

that will prove to be very culturally and maybe lifestyle wise good at fighting. This is sort of an interesting thing to examine compared to our modern era when people can kill other people with a push of a button from drones halfway around the world.

But in an era where you actually have to kill people by shoving a knife into their throat or something like that, the way you're brought up can influence how well you're able to do that. I mean, there's a big difference, isn't there, between somebody raised on a ranch

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

by the spear, Philip II, Alexander the Great, and the rise and fall of the Macedonian Empire. Historian Ian Worthington sort of draws this distinction. He compares an Athenian to a Macedonian and compares their cultures and the way they grow up and the carrots and sticks in their societies and how something like that might actually have an effect on the battlefield.

when you don't get to shoot somebody from 100 yards away, but you actually have to walk up and shove a spear into them. And Worthington talks about the Athenian lifestyle, you know, probably the most like the Los Angeles Dungeons and Dragons kids of this era, and he says, quote,

The whole fabric of Macedonian society was alien to Greeks and so abhorred by them. A Macedonian male was an entirely different animal from his Athenian counterpart, for example, who came of age at 18, was then eligible to attend the assembly, which is the body that debates and votes on domestic and foreign policy, he says.

served in the army as and when required was eligible for jury service when he turned 30 and if he came from a well-to-do family he attended symposia to engage in intellectual discussions before letting his hair down and swapping talk for sex with the ever-present courtesans end quote he then says quote

"'Macedonia was utterly different. "'No one was allowed to wash in warm water, "'except women who had just given birth. "'No man could recline at a banquet "'until he had speared and killed one of the ferocious wild boars "'without using a net to trap it. "'A soldier had to wear a rope or sash around his waist "'until he had killed his first man in battle.'

To achieve these expectations, he writes, boys from an early age were taught to fight, ride a horse, and hunt wild boar, foxes, birds, and even lions. End quote. He then says that Macedonian society was rugged and had more in common with the tough love of Homeric heroes or even Viking society than classical Greece. According to the ancient writers, there are all sorts of other things that the Macedonians

have as part of their lifestyle that make them seem a little like Vikings. They're supposed to wear animal skins or bear pelts, drink their alcohol out of big drinking horns, right? Reminds you of Vikings right there, doesn't it? The Athenians who, in a very cultured way, at their symposia where they're going to talk politics and all these sorts of things, they would always take their wine and mix it with water, cut the strength down, you know, to

Make sure people weren't just passing out at their parties. They could continue to have a nice, high-minded conversation. The Macedonians wanted their wine straight and unmixed, and they weren't going to have polite little sober conversations. They were going to have drinking parties where they were going to have competitions to see who could drink the most wine the fastest, right? You get two guys standing up there with giant tureens of unmixed wine, and they both go at it to try to see who can last the longest without just passing out at their feet.

Different kind of culture entirely. And this is the kind of culture that Philip is born into right around 383, 382 BC, BCE. The murderous soap opera of Macedonian royal life is in full swing during his birth.

And you don't know what to believe. The ancient sources are really hard on women, especially women of some power and authority. The Romans and the Greek historians always treat them as kind of uppity. You're evil or borderline malicious just by being powerful and assertive. Adrian Golesworthy, the modern historian, suggests we not treat these stories specifically as though they're 100% true. But Philip's mom, a woman named Eurydice,

is obviously married to philip's dad but supposedly is in a sexual relationship with her son-in-law philip's sister's husband and they both plot against philip's dad they uh the plot fails and philip's dad forgives them and they maybe go on to continue to maneuver behind his back and then when philip's dad dies the guy who's shacking up with

Philip's mom is continually, you know, inserting his hands and trying to manipulate the kingship, may have been involved by hook or by crook in the assassination of Philip's brother when he's a king. So it's an interesting family dynamic, to say the least, but nothing unusual given Macedonian history. Around the year 368, Philip is sent as a hostage to the Greek city-state of Thebes. Now, the reason you sent a royal hostage

family member to another city, state, or place like Thebes is as part of a peace agreement, right? It sort of seals the deal. You don't want to go back on the peace agreement when we have a bunch of your royal family members with us. Think about the phenomenon of pages in the Middle Ages. It's not that dissimilar. And Philip would have been treated nicely. It wasn't like they threw them in a dungeon. But it's in Thebes that supposedly Philip learns a lot of important things about warfare.

because he's in Thebes at a very specific time in history, the time in history where Thebes is, for a short period, sort of the kings of the Greek scene, because they've recently, in 371 BCE, defeated and broken Spartan power at a famous battle called Leuctra, maybe the greatest Greek general up until this time period, a guy named Epaminondas,

was the guy in charge and he was doing really interesting things militarily and philip is housed with one of his generals and so he's learning things things that he will well at least the tradition holds build off of he's going to create an army that builds on the foundation that he's taught when he's in thebes the other thing that happens in thebes is philip is exposed to all sorts of high-minded things i mean the guy he stays with is a um

follower of the pythagorean sort of lifestyle i mean vegetarianism self-sacrifice a whole bunch of things that philip really wasn't personality wise but he's getting a chance to really see how city states operate how their government works and to be exposed to these sorts of philosophical ideas that maybe wouldn't have been too common for a bare skin wearing drinking horn using you know barbarian

Meanwhile, Philip's oldest brother is assassinated during a war dance. His next oldest brother recalls Philip from Thebes, and he's killed in a fight with the Illyrians and another 4,000 Macedonian troops with him. And this is the scene that Philip finds himself in once he sort of reaches the kingship. Now, the first thing to say about Philip is, well,

You just don't know much about him that you can depend on because like his son Alexander, he is the subject of an immense propaganda campaign. And the Athenians in this time period who were his enemies are the best propagandists in Greece. They have some of the best orators and speakers going. One of them is named Demosthenes. And Demosthenes, I mean, he'll write a bunch of arguments against Philip known as the Philippics. And

And much of what we know about Philip comes from the Philippics, but the entire design and approach of the Philippics is to make Philip sound like he's Darth Vader or Sauron breathing down Athens's neck. So maybe not exactly a realistic or fair account of the guy.

I've always loved the way historian Will Durant, gosh, I mean, I want to say it's almost 100 years ago now, writing about Philip describes him. And it may not be a fair description either, because some of the modern day historians are much kinder to Philip in terms of treating him as a more cultured man, a more well-spoken man than the old style historians. But Will Durant gives a quick rundown that just describes how

amazing the guy is both in pro and cons and this is what he has to say about the personality of philip the great or the man who maybe should be named philip the great in his book the life of greece and he says quote he had all the virtues except those of civilization he was strong in body and will athletic and handsome a magnificent animal trying now and then to be an athenian gentleman

Like his famous son, he was a man of violent temper and abounding generosity, loving battle as much, strong drink more. Unlike Alexander, he was a jovial laugher and raised to high office a slave who amused him. He liked boys, but liked women better and married as many of them as he could.

He continues a little farther. Most of all, he liked stalwart men who could risk their lives all day and gamble and carouse with him half the night. He was literally, before Alexander, the bravest of the brave and left a part of himself on every battlefield. End quote. Durant continues, quote,

He had a subtle intelligence, capable of patiently awaiting his chance and of moving resolutely through difficult means to distant ends. In diplomacy, he was affable and treacherous. He broke a promise with a light heart and was always ready to make another. He recognized no morals for governments and looked upon lies and bribes as humane substitutes for slaughter and

but he was lenient in victory and usually gave the defeated greeks better terms than they gave one another all who met him except the obstinate demosthenes liked him and ranked him as the strongest and most interesting character of his time

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

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

he loses an eye he has a collar-bone broken his hand is supposedly completely mangled he takes a spear through his thigh his lower leg both bones broken at the same time he walked by the end of his life with a pronounced limp

But he took part in 28 campaigns, 11 sieges. Demosthenes says he captured 45 cities. This is how you build an empire, right? Or something that's going to be an empire. And like his son and like Macedonian commanders before him, he fought in the front.

These are not Napoleonic style commanders who sit behind the army and command the troops as the battle's going on in real time and move forces around and send in reserves and counter march your forces to match what the enemy is doing. These are people who set things up in advance. They build the military forces. They pick the commanders. They position them on the field before the battle starts. And then before the fighting actually commences, they put themselves in the front rank and

in a Homeric kind of style, right? A hero king. And they command. And when you do that and you fight, you know, 28 campaigns, you're going to get wounded. And the number of times that Philip's troops thought he was dead on the battlefield is numerous. In 1977, to just take a little break from all these, he said, she said, kind of historical accounts from the past and all the propaganda, an archaeologist found a tomb.

in northern greece or the area where macedonia was during this time period the traditional macedonian heartland it was under a mound a hill a man created hill a tell and in the tomb they found multiple bodies but in one specific tomb around a bunch of armor and magnificent

materials, they found a golden box with a Macedonian star etched into the top and purple cloth, purple being the royal color. Inside the box were bones. The way that Macedonian royalty was often

treated after death was what we might call today a partial cremation because unlike today's cremations where you're left with ashes and bone chips very small bone chips in a lot of the funerals during the time around philip's lifespan it was common to have a fire that was only hot enough to burn the skin off and then the bones would be taken washed in wine and put in a container of the sort that in 1977 was found in this tomb

So you can still look at the bones and analyze the bones. And in addition to the bones, there were things like armor. For example, a specific sign that maybe we're dealing with Philip II's bones in this tomb are greaves that were found. Greaves are the armor that goes on the shins. And these greaves were shaped differently, one in particular, shorter than the other, shaped for a person who'd suffered a bad leg injury.

And in 77, they thought it might be Philip II. Now, I think about 90% of the people that are the experts in the field would say it's pretty close to unanimous, but maybe not quite, would say that this is Philip II. And what that means is you can get some hard concrete stuff about the guy. He was between 5'6 and 5'8, for example.

which might seem a little short to us today, but historians often say that that's not that uncommon for the people of the time period in this area. Although, if he were a little shorter than the average Macedonian, that would sort of jibe with his son's height, too, who was also shorter than the average Macedonian, so maybe Alexander got it from his dad. The skeleton also shows the wounds, including the most obvious wound

during his lifetime that no one would have been able to avoid the fact that an arrow had struck him in the face and took out an eye. Actually, it's worse than that. It didn't take out the eye because a physician had to scoop out the eye with what amounted to a spoon. And when you think of someone doing that to you without any sort of real anesthesia or anesthetic, it boggles the mind to consider the amount of pain we're talking about here.

I got that rundown of Philip's campaign record from historian Richard A. Gabriel, who wrote a book called Philip II of Macazon, Greater Than Alexander. And he ran down how Philip's statecraft was much more oriented towards results than perhaps Homeric glory and swordplay. And he writes, quote,

In a very important way, however, Philip's view of war as distinct from personal bravery was decidedly unhomeric.

Unlike the Iliad's heroes, this great warrior king who took the field every year of his 23-year reign, save one when he was recovering from wounds, who took part in 28 campaigns and 11 sieges, who captured 45 cities if one can trust Demosthenes, and who was seriously wounded at least five times, never went to war for its own sake or only for personal glory.

For Philip, war was first and foremost an instrument of state policy with which to achieve specific strategic objectives. It was always the continuation of policy by other means in the genuine Clausewitzian sense.

The rhetorician Polyanius observed that, quote, Philip achieved no less through conversation than through battle, and by Zeus he prided himself more on what he acquired through words than on what he acquired through arms, end quote. And then, Gabriel says, this Clausewitzian view of war led Philip to become the greatest strategist of his time. Clausewitz, of course, is famous for saying that

war is a continuation of politics or policies by other means but for philip the second this applied to all sorts of things including marriage marriage for philip was

In this, he is far from alone. After all, royal marriages for diplomatic reasons, right, to cement alliances or connections between powerful families or to wed states or kingdoms or locations more closely together isn't just common. It's almost the norm.

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

And Philip could marry as many wives as he wanted to to cement his diplomatic and political goals. I mean, he's going to have seven or eight wives during his lifetime and have multiple of them at the same time. And the women that he married are interesting characters if the ancient sources are to be believed.

I mean, for example, he will marry an Illyrian wife or two, and the Illyrians are the problem children of that whole part of the world, exceedingly dangerous, responsible for the death of Philip's older brother and 4,000 Macedonian soldiers right before Philip takes the throne. So it makes sense to marry an Illyrian princess, but they seem to be, if the ancient sources can be believed, quite the handful.

supposedly illyrian women could be trained to fight in combat as men with sword spear shield armor and on horseback and there will be a strain of the illyrian dna running through the macedonian royal line where mother is supposed to continue the tradition of teaching the daughters how to fight like this

And it is a fascinating thing to consider. There's a very Wonder Woman, Amazonian element to the whole thing. And it's interesting to think of Philip marrying a woman who could kill him in combat.

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

And Philip is supposed to have married at least one of these magical princesses, maybe two.

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

Because one has to look at a teenage Olympias and say that you can sort of divine how formidable a person she was because as a teenage girl, she can handle this guy, right? The most formidable person of his time, a figure that the ancient Greeks to the south of him had all kinds of trouble with.

You just heard, you know, Professor Gabriel describe his qualities. You heard Will Durant describe his qualities. And yet this teenager from a place called Melosia in Iperus can handle him. And she may have even scared him a little. Philip II's

family claimed a descent from heracles who we would call hercules right if you recall your greek mythology heracles is the son of zeus not just a greek god but the king of the greek mythological pantheon right if you're going to claim descended from a god at some point in your you know genetic line why not make it the king of the gods who could you possibly marry who's going to bring enough

you know cachet to the marriage to compete with something like that well olympius's family in melosia claimed descendant from the greatest hero of the most important greek story to most greeks growing up during this time period the iliad olympius's family claimed descent from achilles

Which means that when they have a child together, this family who claims descent from Heracles and through him Zeus, and this other family who claims descent through Achilles, you're going to have a kid who mixes the blood of Zeus, Heracles, and Achilles together.

And somehow the great God Dionysus manages to get involved in this whole affair too and creates this fusion in the child that they're going to have that impacts that child's life for its entirety. To this day, historians still try to argue and debate how important these three figures were to Alexander and like so much of his life are trying to disentangle the

true contemporary things, you know, things that were part of his life from the many fables and stories and romances or just plain bad histories that cropped up after his death.

Was he really into Achilles the way the later sources say? Some people say no. Dionysus, very hard to figure out. Heracles is the least controversial since Alexander definitely put the figure of the hero demigod on coins and whatnot. But there are other historians that will make a much more closely connected case. I mean, there's a whole book about Alexander's connection to Dionysus. And Dionysus is, in my opinion, this is one of those opinion books

comments, but is the most interesting and hard to get your mind around of the Greek deities, in part because he rules over those parts of humanity and humankind that are themselves hard to get one's mind around, right? The subconscious, the hidden sides of one's character, the psychological dark areas of

There's a book called Alexander the Great, The Invisible Enemy by historian John Maxwell O'Brien. And it's all about this connection between Alexander and this particular god Dionysus. And he describes Dionysus in the most interesting of ways. Dionysus is officially the god of wine, but wine itself is a weird sort of a concoction that can be both positive and negative, which is kind of how the god can be too.

Here's how O'Brien describes Dionysus, and he says, quote, The god of everything that blossomed and breathed, Dionysus could surface in the moisture on a rose, bellow majestically through a raging bull, or imperceptibly shed old skin for new in the guise of a snake. He was the divine patron of the theater, with an empty mask as his emblem, the god of a thousand faces, who epitomized metamorphosis and could transform mortals at will.

O'Brien points out that

Dionysus wasn't really so much the god of wine as he was the wine itself. And through the drinking of the wine, humans could commune sort of with the god and

and all the pros and cons that the drinking of alcohol or intoxicants, because there are interesting theories about the intoxicants that might have been used as part of the religious rites connected to Dionysus to induce different sides of human behavior and trances and all those kinds of the subliminal or unconscious sides of humanity. And O'Brien writes, quote,

Dionysus proffered himself through wine, and mortals revealed his personality, as well as their own, through drinking and drunkenness. A number of the gods' epithets describe his attractive attributes or praise the benefits to be culled from his precious gift. He is a relaxer of the mind, a healer of sorrow, a dispeller of care, a provider of joy, a merrymaker, and a lover of laughter.

Other epithets refer to his less admirable characteristics and simultaneously serve as a reminder of the potential destructiveness of his earthly agent. He is a disturber of the soul, a mind-breaker, a bestower of envy, a dispenser of anger, a chaser of sleep, a noisemaker, and a liar.

The visible effects of the wine, O'Brien writes, unmasked the fundamental ambivalence of the god and revealed a kindred quality in mortals. Wine exalted the spirit, but it also had the capacity to unleash primordial impulses. Under its influence, a veneer of sophistication might disappear abruptly, and civility could be transformed into uncontrollable rage.

the wine god disclosed reason's uneasy sway over emotion and served as a chilling reminder of bestiality at its core. Alexander's mother, Olympias, was a devotee of Dionysus.

if the sources are to be believed, in the mystery cult of the god. And it's a mystery cult because nobody knows what goes on in the various rites connected to the god. Although if one believes the Greek playwright Euripides, who was spending time hanging out in Macedonia, he wrote in his play The Bacchae about it. He says that the women met in sacred areas of

just amongst their own kind, and tore live animals to pieces and devoured them. They participated in magic rites, carried wands, and worshipped and kept snakes, which is another thing associated with Olympias. She's supposed to have kept snakes, maybe even in her bedroom, and it's long been said

part of the Alexandrian tradition may be written to make her sound just a bit more weird and interesting that this freaked out Philip II of Macedonia in his wonderful classic work on Alexander from the early 1970s. Historian Peter Green wrote about it this way, quote, "'In the autumn of 357, Philip married his Epirote princess, and for the first time in his life found he had taken on rather more than he could handle.'

Olympias, though not yet eighteen, had already emerged as a forceful, not to say eccentric, personality. She was, among other things, passionately devoted to the orgiastic rites of Dionysus, and her menandic frenzies can scarcely have been conducive to peaceful domestic life.

One of her more outre habits, unless, as has been suggested, it had a ritual origin, was keeping an assortment of large, tame snakes as pets. To employ these creatures on religious occasions could raise no objections, but their intermittent appearance in Olympias's bed must have been a hazard calculated to put even the toughest bridegroom off his stroke."

Now, it's always a mistake to assume that people from other cultures and earlier eras would react the same way to circumstances and stimuli that we would. I'm just going to say that personally, though, if I'm laying in my bed and all of a sudden crawling through my sheets and on my sleeping form is a large serpent, because that's how it's described in the sources, that's going to freak me out a little bit.

Puts a whole new sort of reptilian spin on the idea of love me, love my dog, doesn't it? But I'll say this about Peter Green in 1970. He's a lot fairer to Olympias than the ancient sources or even the early modern ones. I mean, the 1920s is one of those eras where there's a lot of writing about Philip and Alexander and Olympias. And the writers and historians from that era are just as harsh on

maybe more so on Alexander's mother and Philip's wife than even the ancients. I mean, listen to the way science fiction author but also popular historian H.G. Wells describes Philip's wife Olympias as,

And you get this sense that she's practically demonic. And he first extols all the wondrous qualities of Philip II, right? Very similar, I would say, to the way Professor Gabriel describes Philip, right? Greater than Alexander. If not for Philip, there is no Alexander. But he has this tragic flaw. He's joined, you know, like a ball and chain to a dangerous demonic force, right?

who eventually destroys him and limits alexander's ability to be as great as his father here's the way hg wells describes alexander's mother and philip's wife olympius and see if she doesn't sound very much like something you know out of a dark horror movie wells writes quote

It is necessary now to tell something of the domestic life of King Philip. The lives of both Philip and his son were pervaded by the personality of a restless and evil woman, Olympias, the mother of Alexander. He then talks about how

Philip and she were married and then says, quote, It was not long before Olympias and Philip were bitterly estranged. She was jealous of him, but there was another and graver source of trouble in her passion for religious mysteries. We've already noted that beneath the fine and restrained Nordic religion of the Greeks, the land abounded with religious cults of a darker and more ancient kind.

aboriginal cults with secret initiations orgiastic celebrations and often with cruel and obscure rights these religions of the shadows he writes these practices of the women and peasants and slaves gave greece her orphic dionysic and demeter cults and they've lurked in the tradition of europe down almost to our own times

the witchcraft of the Middle Ages, with its resort to the blood of babes, scraps of executed criminals, incantations and magic circles, seems to have been little else than the lingering vestiges of these solemnities of the dark whites. In these matters, Olympias was an expert and an enthusiast, and Plutarch mentions that she achieved considerable celebrity by use of tame serpents in these pious exercises."

The snakes invaded her domestic apartments, and history is not clear whether Philip found in them matter for exasperation or religious awe. These occupations of his wife must have been a serious inconvenience to Philip, for the Macedonian people were still in the sturdy stage of social development in which neither enthusiastic religiosity nor uncontrollable wives was admired."

So, according to Wells and a lot of other people writing in the 1920s, Alexander's father is one of the great men in history. His mother's a witch. Neither of those things matters very much, if not for the creation of the tool that leads to the fame of both of those people and their child, the military Maserati that Philip II will create, the Macedonian army.

The Macedonian army, by the way, is arguably the most important part of this story. I mean, you can make a case that without that, none of the sorts of things that get Philip II and, more importantly, his son Alexander in the history books happens. I mean, it's the tool that creates all the opportunities for conquest, right? In my head, I always try to switch places.

the battles around and imagine Alexander instead of commanding what is almost certainly the best army in the world at the time period he's commanding it, probably the best army the world had ever seen. I try to imagine Alexander having to switch sides with the general he's fighting, right? Why don't you give Darius the Macedonians and you take the Persians in this big battle and let's see how that goes. Might have gone fine. Alexander probably...

you know really good general knows what he's doing but i mean he was fighting with the best army in the world when he did what he did and so it seems like the real important decisive moment in the history of this story is philip creating this amazing army because philip made the macedonian army and then conversely it's safe to say that the macedonian army made philip where the heck did he get the idea for it

Well, we should talk a little bit about the Macedonian army, Philip's influences, and even kind of more important, ancient warfare and how it worked and what we know and what we don't know. Because trying to figure out how the army that Philip created worked is in itself a speculative kind of an affair, which is weird when you think about it. First of all, let's just talk about what he made. The Macedonian army, I can't...

It's like a boxer who's never lost. And then you try to imagine what it would have taken to beat them, right? Whereas if you have a fighter that has lost even once, you can say, well, you know, we saw how Buster Douglas broke him down. That's the strategy for, you know, beating this guy. When the army, at least under Alexander, is basically undefeated, every sort of mental scenario that you envision is a fantasy scenario.

So the army was that good. Now, remember, the entire world is not connected during this time period. So armies from far-flung areas generally didn't fight each other, right? So the great armies of China in this same era are not fighting the Macedonians. So we just don't have a comparison when we say the Macedonians were the best in the world. Well, they didn't fight the Chinese. And of course, no one in the Americas was fighting anyone from outside the Americas. So we don't know how they would have done. But I'm just going to say if we're betting that,

And we're having the Macedonians fight any of those contemporary armies from anywhere in the world. I'm taking the Macedonians because they're undefeated, basically. And what Philip does is invent a style of warfare that is going to become the Cadillac style of warfare in the entire region for like 175 years. For the next almost 200 years, if you're going to have a top flight army in the Mediterranean, you're going to have a Pike Phalanx probably.

and when in a couple of centuries the Romans and their manipuled legions throw the phalanxes on the ash heap of history and

It's worth questioning whether they were even fighting the same sort of army that Alexander and Philip had developed at all. A lot of evolution and changes and adaptations and maybe even, you know, de-evolution going on in the Alexandrian system of fighting over the 175 years it was dominant. But Philip develops a troop type that makes all the difference in the world. And he developed the pike phalanx.

It's interesting to think about one guy developing this because normally weapon systems are cultural in the ancient world. They develop as a part of, you know, what's going on in society. And a lot of people fight connected to the land and the kind of enemies they face and the terrain and all sorts of things.

I mean, who invented the hoplite, right? Sometime in the 700s, maybe BCE, the hoplite just sort of appears in a bunch of places. There's nobody you can say, yeah, that guy came up with the idea. But Philip invented the pike phalanx. And the Macedonian pike phalanx is kind of a hoplite killing machine. It takes the best parts of the hoplite phalanxes and sort of supercharges them in a way that makes them better hoplite phalanxes.

He gives them a much longer spear. He packs the human beings even more closely together. He makes the formation deeper. So if you have a bunch of hoplites, probably about eight ranks deep, sometimes four, sometimes 12, but usually about eight ranks deep.

with their seven to nine foot spears smash into a 16 rank pike phalanx with 16 to 23 foot spears um well you can see how one is almost built to overcome the other a lot of advantages than the pike phalanx

So if this is the key thing that Philip invents, because we'll talk about the rest of the army in a bit, but if this is the key thing Philip invents, where did he get the idea for this? Right. If this if this is the moment of development that's going to impact everything he does, Alexander does and a bunch of armies for 175 years do. Where did the guy come up with? Was it just he dreamt it?

And so, you know, you can start down this path of imagining where Philip incorporated, you know, brainstorm kinds of material. Diodorus Siculus, an ancient historian, says that one of the things that gave Philip the idea for these pike phalanxes was the Iliad.

And I find this fascinating to think about because if it's true, let's just play with this for a minute. If it's true, and it is true, the Iliad was a huge book in Macedonian society. I'm sure everyone, you know, Philip Alexander, all those people would have read it. Alexander is supposed to have memorized it. And why not? He's supposed to be descended from Achilles, takes a lot of pride in being descended from Achilles. Well,

You know, Achilles is the lead superhero in the, you know, ancient version of a mass movie blockbuster. You know, the Iliad, that's that's the Achilles story. Right. So you're going to know that story backwards and forwards. In fact, you know, there's a lot of historians who will call Macedonian society during this time period Homeric.

Meaning it kind of has a Homeric value system and all that. Maybe even Alexander's desire to be the best, right? This ambition, this thing at the core of his ambition, that may be a Homeric value.

But it's so weird to think about because, and of course it reminds me of a Star Trek episode, original series, the one where a very imitative society on another planet got a hold of an Earth book, a history book that was left behind by an earlier Earth expedition. And the history book was the history of the gangster wars in Chicago, you know, in the Prohibition 1920s.

And then they modeled their whole society on it so that when the earth ships come back a while later, the entire planet looks like, you know, Al Capone and guys walking around with submachine guns and talking like, you know, gangster era Chicago. It's a little like, if this is true, you just imagine Macedonian society with their one book and they model their whole society on the values of a people that if they existed, existed in the late bronze age, uh,

Right. If there was a Trojan War of the kind that the Iliad talks about, it happened in like 1100 BCE, somewhere around there. And then people would have talked about it and oral historians would have transmitted the tale for hundreds of years before a guy or group of people we don't know that we call Homer consolidated all that into sort of a written form.

that could then be passed down for hundreds of years more. So by the time a guy like Alexander or Philip II is reading it, this is material that's been written down for like 500 years. And when it was finally written down, it had already been transmitted orally for three or four centuries before then.

So if Philip II really gets this idea for pike phalanxes from reading about the Achaeans in the Trojan War using block formations of troops with very long spears, that's wild to me. And the fact that this formation then goes on to dominate the battlefields from Philip's time forward for almost another 200 more years is

Well, if you really got that idea from the echoes of the late Bronze Age, I'd love to think that was true. I'm going to pretend that that story is true. There are some more logical candidates, though. How about the Athenian general, Ephricrates, and his famous reforms?

You ancient history military nerds out there know that a fricratus is one of these guys who sort of looked at the traditional hoplite heavy infantry and decided they'd be better if they weren't so heavy. He lightens them up, gives them a small wicker shield instead of the big heavy wood one.

lighter equipment less armor gives them some you know javelins to throw also they become a much more flexible force on the battlefield much more useful maybe not as good if you get them into a slogging match with the old-fashioned hoplites but probably better at everything else oh yeah and this is maybe how you know it really plays into philip supposedly doubles the length of their spear

So if a hoplite spear is seven to nine feet, you know, he's rocking more of a 14 to 18 foot spear on his hoplite peltast mix, can we call them?

And it's interesting to imagine what that might actually mean, you know, if you're one of these guys facing a hoplite and all of a sudden your spear's twice as long as theirs. I mean, trying to imagine how you might use it is interesting, but you can certainly see some advantages in your being able to stab them and they not being able to stab you back, can't you?

and if rick ratees by the way was active in macedonia right around this time period so there's hardly one degree of separation involved so he certainly could be an influence on where the heck philip gets this idea to create this new thing on the battlefield which becomes dominant like this great idea and then of course the odds-on favorite for big influence on philip that you read just about everywhere is

is what he learned during his time as a hostage when he was a teenager in Thebes. This is always shown in the sources to be an important part of Philip's development because, well, how could it not rub off on him? Basically, he was staying in the house, I guess, of a noted Theban general,

And according to some of the ancient sources, he has access to this general's library and he's being encouraged to read up on all the latest, you know, knowledge of cutting edge Greek warfare. And he was probably interacting and certainly very close to Epaminondas, the Theban general, the guy often given credit for things like, oh, I don't know, smashing Spartan power in a way that it was never the same again.

Stuff like that. Maybe the greatest Greek general of all time. So Philip's interacting with a guy like that during the time period when Thebes is sitting on top of the world for a relatively short period of time in the hierarchy of Greek city-states. Once you smash Sparta, you're kind of left as the big dog. Menapemonondas famously defeated the Spartans at Leuctra in 371 BCE by breaking all the rules. And that's how you beat the Spartans.

the kind of things that he did to break all the rules. Once they work, everybody adopts them, but somebody's got to be the visionary that decides to roll the dice and really take a chance and try some new things on the battlefield. And that's what Epaminondas did. And of course, you know, by defeating the Spartans, he basically hit the jackpot, right? He rolled the right roll on the dice when he rolled them. But what makes his bet so...

is that in the ancient world, the punishments for having your innovation fail are massive. Nowadays, of course, we're accustomed to making constant updates and changes in warfare, new equipment, new tactics, new approaches, new technologies, all kinds of things involved, so that even over the course of a short war, we can expect to see all sorts of innovations and changes and whatnot. But this is a relatively modern world.

And it's connected to the opportunity costs and the dangers of innovations going sideways on you. So if you look at the First World War, which is one of these wars that really is the first time you can look and you can just watch technology happen.

having a leapfrogging effect as the war goes on, as sides, you know, continually try to out-improve and out-invent one another. You see it in the air war in the first world war, for example, where every six months, you know, either the allies or the central powers create some new engine or airframe or way of fighting or weapon or something that allows them to get the jump on the other side for like six months until a new invention or innovation on the other side flips the coin.

And you could see new technology and ways of fighting introduced all throughout that war. Look how the British introduced tanks, built them up in secret for a while. And then finally, in one battle, they throw out enough of them to make a difference and they sort of see what happens. And when it's not war changing and they really didn't expect it to be war changing in that battle, they then sit down and figure out, OK, how did it go? That was a good experiment. What can we do different next time? You know, what worked, what didn't work? But it doesn't lose you the war.

And that's the difference. In the First World War, you can try these things out, and the failure for your innovation not working isn't enormous.

Whereas in the ancient world where most wars are decided with one or two battles, having your innovation go sideways and costing you the battle could easily cost you the war. So the penalty for failure is huge and the incentives to be conservative are overriding. So when a guy like Epaminondas throws the dice on something like breaking all the rules of Greek warfare, you've got to admire his moxie.

But that's how you beat the Spartans. Right. So for those who don't know, and it's only important to know because a lot of what a Pamanundas does after he breaks the rules are going to be the kind of thing Philip incorporates into his way of fighting. Right. Um,

The first rule of Pamananda's breaks has to do with something, you know, I'm going off on tangents on tangents now, but has something to do with the way human beings fight when they get on a pre-modern battlefield, especially in these hoplite close formation type deals. And it's a fascinating part of what I like to call the physics of the ancient battlefield. But because this happens, there are certain things

of Greek fighting that were in place before Pamanonda. So we have to talk about what's going on in the battlefield. Did you know, because it's kind of interesting, that when you get two lines of hoplites facing off against one another, we try to imagine what this would look like visibly from the air. Think about like railroad tracks.

And you have the two tracks facing each other. Those are the lines of hoplites on both sides and an intervening space between them. And at some point when a battle happens, one or both of those lines of hoplites crosses the intervening space and starts bashing into the other one.

But what's interesting is when you get a bunch of men, you know, in long lines, maybe 100, maybe 200, maybe 300 yards long, four, eight, maybe 12 ranks deep, when they're all lined up shoulder to shoulder with a spear in the right hand and a shield in the left hand. Did you know that the formation drifts to the right and it's so reliable the Greeks count on it?

imagine a ripple going through the entire 100 to 300 yard line of men as everybody just sort of scooches a little bit to the right you say well what's going on well the sources indicate that men in these sorts of situations either while they're standing there waiting to advance or while the advance is happening or both tend to move a little to the right because to the right is where the shield of the guy next to them is

and they are almost unconsciously or maybe consciously trying to scooch over just a little bit more behind the protection of the guy next to them. And when everybody does that along the whole line, the whole line moves to the right. And if your whole line's moving to the right and the enemy you're facing's whole line is moving to their right, then your lines are moving sort of out of alignment with each other and going to overlap on each side.

So what these armies did in an attempt to control what was going on on their right and to have the troops that were the least likely to be prone to this drift on the right, you put your best troops on the right. And this became almost a Greek convention. And the sources will say things like, make it clear that the right wings expected to be victorious and the left wings of both armies expected to kind of lose. And that was just the way it was.

until Epaminondas didn't do it that way. At Leuctra, he put his best troops on the left. That's a violation. You just don't do that. He put his best troops up against the Spartans' best troops, the guys who made the Spartan reputation, the Spartiates. There were 700 of them at Leuctra and a Spartan king.

During this time period, any of you Spartan fans know that the Spartans were having issues keeping up with the number of Spartiates that they would normally want, and the culture and the society and a bunch of trends were making Spartiates rarer and rarer. So when you have 700 of them at the Battle of Leuctra, you have an irreplaceable number of Spartiates.

Epaminondas wanted to kill as many of those as he could. So he created the head of the sledgehammer at Leuctra aimed right at those people. That's the best way to envision what Epaminondas' army looked like. The Spartans looked like a long row, like a railroad track, like we said, of, you know, eight to 12-rank deep hoplites, right? So a long line of those people, hundreds of yards long.

The Thebans looked more like a sledgehammer. The head of the sledgehammer was made up of the one professional force the Thebans were known to have in their infantry, the famous Sacred Band, 300 strong professionals. Some of the sources indicate maybe homosexual lover pairs that were devoted to each other. That'll improve your unit cohesion maybe. But they were joined by a block of troops, wait for it,

50 ranks deep. Now, the Thebans were known to fight deeper than most other Greek city-states traditionally, but in this battle, Epaminondas goes wild, makes the formation 50 ranks deep.

He's going to face off against a Spartan hoplite force that's probably about 12 ranks deep. So think about the difference if we're talking about the physics of human, you know, mass and movement and weight and depth and all that stuff, the difference between a 50-rank closed formation running into a 12-rank closed formation. Now, if Pamananda is deciding to do this, though, means he has to weaken the rest of his army, right? Where do those 50 deep forces

units take from right you pull from the rest of the lines the rest of the line significantly weaker it's like the handle of the sledgehammer

Well, if you're worried about weakening part of your line because you don't want those troops to get smashed and run away, Epaminondas does something unusual. He angles that whole area away from the enemy. So imagine the sledgehammer head is right up against the Spartans they want to smash, but the handle of the sledgehammer is diagonally away from the rest of the enemy army. So...

theoretically the sledgehammer head could destroy the dangerous Spartans before the rest of the Theban line even came into contact with the troops across the way from them and that's what happened at Lutra the sledgehammer head of the Thebans ran into the Spartans killed 400 of the 700 irreplaceable Spartiates and the Spartan king and

And when the rest of the Spartan army saw what happened to those guys, the superheroes of the battlefield, they decided they wanted nothing to do with the rest of the Thebans. And that was the battle at Leuctra. But by changing certain key conventions of how people fought, Epaminondas was able to destroy Spartan power. And he would do it again.

at mantinea he'd lose his life there but the entire affair involved you know things that would be a staple of macedonian warfare like things like the oblique order of battle and refused flanks which were the things where epaminondas was angling the rest of his army away from his enemies um

That oblique order of battle will be a constant in Macedonian warfare. And of course, if Philip is hanging out with a Theban general with access to his library and making maybe some, you know, cocktail parties with the Pamanundis, this is the kind of stuff he might absorb. About the time Philip becomes king, though, and around the time he's marrying Olympias, that seems to be the time period where if he was going to create a new military system, that's when it was going to start. And it might be an ongoing process.

but by having these phalangites, these Pike Phalanx troops to act as a solid core for his army in the middle of his battle line, he's addressed the real weakness of the Macedonian armies that existed before him. They never had a sort of a hoplite heavy infantry element to the army. The army had great cavalry. They were called the companion cavalry. Uh,

maybe the best cavalry in the world, arguably, at this time period. And it was great, but it was all they had. So when Philip comes to the throne, he gets that, the wonderful Macedonian cavalry, and then creates the missing element that allows them to defeat people like Greek hoplites. He creates this phalanx, and then he adds all sorts of other elements to his army. He's often credited with the first European combined arms force, although one can make a case that that was also a Pamanundis' development strategy.

But to this Macedonian cavalry that's great and the Macedonian phalanx that's a missing ingredient, he adds mercenaries, for example. Extra important during this time period where he's, you know, introducing these military reforms because you need some professionals, you know, to handle the load and keep you from getting overrun with Illyrians and Paeonians and Thracians in the meantime.

He also starts employing large numbers of allies. I mean, the Thessalian cavalry is going to be absolutely vital in the army of Alexander. It starts fighting with Philip at a certain point, uses a lot of Thracians, employs light troops and skirmishers, which is, you know, something that's been a development going on in Greece for the past several decades, increasing importance and

new ways to use them. I mean, there was a Spartan unit that was destroyed by light troops, you know, in recent memory. So all these sorts of elements allow Philip to create an army that is more tactically flexible, depending on what you're facing. He's got the troops for the job. If you're facing someone that wants to smash right into you and punch you in the mouth, he's got great troops to punch you back.

If you don't want to punch those people in the mouth because you don't want to get that close to them because they scare you and you're going to try to stay away at a distance and throw things at them and then evade their charge, Philip has troops to get you too. You want to fight in bad terrain? Philip's got the troops for that.

Got his specialist corps, his agranians, people from the highlands. Think about like, you know, Gurkhas or something in the time period. He'll wheedle you out of the bad terrain. And if you hide behind the walls of your city, he and Alexander are going to bring the first really awesome men

siege troops in greek history all the times when you hide yourself behind the walls in greece the enemy army just ravages your fields and loots and and pillages and then leaves or maybe surrounds you and tries to wait you out philip and alexander go through your walls and they come and get you and that changes things too i mean there are going to be years in philip's timeline where he'll take three greek city states in a year that's like warp speed

I mean, famously, the Trojans were able to withstand a 10-year siege in the Iliad, right? And if that's a little long, maybe by most historical standards, Philip taking three towns in a year is crazy short, crazy quick, changes the entire equation between, you know, the reliance that a town or a city-state would have on its walls and fortifications to keep the bad guys out.

And part of what makes all this possible is more of these people that Philip is using in his army are professionals. They're specialists, they're engineers, and more and more of his army's getting paid. The mercenaries obviously get paid right away, but he's starting to pay the guys in the Pike phalanx eventually, and he's capturing... I love this part about, you know, ancient economics could be so interesting sometimes. When he needs money, he goes out there and takes silver and gold mines from other people, like...

takes it from the Thracians, for example, a couple of famous minds. And then all of a sudden the money, which comes right out of the earth, like an ATM machine goes right into his hands.

I was reading one historian that said that neither Philip nor Alexander, for that matter, were anything like economists. And they had a sort of a pirate mentality when it came to cash. When you needed more cash, you just took something, right? I mean, you racked up credit card debt, maxed out all of the credit lines. And then when you conquered some new territory, you paid off the credit cards and, you know, got right with the bank and started all over again.

One thing you can say about the way Philip used this army, though, is that it was just one of his many tools. And if you compare him to his son,

Alexander is going to be a lot more high handed than Philip. You know, it's my way or the highway. I'm going to tell you what to do. How dare you try to negotiate or get me to haggle? Whereas probably because he had to, Philip is a lot more clever and sneaky. He'll stab you in the back and then he'll give you a good deal when he doesn't have to later. I mean, he's he's working every sort of

slick, clever angle. And one might suggest because he has to. He's paying off people. I mean, I love the way, again, Peter Green describes this, because not only is he utilizing all these tools, but he's spent enough time now in one of these Greek city-states, Thebes, to get a look at how their government functions and compare it to how his government functions. He's a king. He's a king.

He can do certain things that they can't do in these governments where politics is a thing and you've got different factions vying for leadership. And, well, we can sort of relate today to how you might be a little inefficient with the way you conduct long term policy in a representative system, something a, you know, autocratic system might not have to worry about and

Green points out that Philip noticed this as a weakness that he could exploit right away. And Green writes, quote,

Philip's training for power was proceeding along useful, if unorthodox, lines. His experience as a member of the Macedonian royal household had given him an understandably cynical view of human nature. In this world, murder, adultery, and usurpation were commonplace, as liable to be practiced by one's own mother as by anyone else.

in later life green writes philip took it as axiomatic that all diplomacy was based on self-interest and every man had his price events seldom proved him wrong

In Thebes, he saw, too, the besetting weaknesses of a democratic city-state, constant party intrigue, lack of a strong executive power, the inability to force quick decisions, the unpredictable vagaries of the assembly at voting time, the system of annual elections, which made any serious long-term planning almost impossible, the amateur ad hoc military levies.

For the first time, Green writes, he began to understand how Macedonia's outdated institutions, so despised by the rest of Greece, might prove a source of strength when dealing with such opponents. Throughout his life, he gained his greatest advances by exploiting human cupidity and democratic incompetence, most often at the same time."

Philip's willingness to throw bribe money all over the place in large amounts seems to almost tie directly into one of the kind of tragic flaws of the Greek city-state experience during this time, and that's that bribes were really effective. The ancient historian Diodorus is supposedly quoting Philip as saying that the expansion of his kingdom owed far more to money than to arms.

And then Diodorus later picks up the story and just talks about how the bribes by Philip completely undercut any sort of Greek attempt at unity or a united front against, you know, this Darth Vader in the north, exerting more and more pressure on the freedom of the Greek city-states. Yeah, but he comes calling with a big wad of cash. You know, what are you going to do? And Diodorus writes, quote,

Nevertheless, there was such a crop of traitors, so to speak, at that time in Greece, that it was impossible for Athens to check the impulse of members of the Greek cities towards treachery. There was a story that once, Diodorus writes, when Philip wanted to take a particularly well-fortified city and one of the locals claimed that the place was impregnable, he, meaning Philip, responded by asking whether the walls were unscalable by cash.

Experience had taught him that anything that could not be subdued by force of arms could be overcome by goal. So by using bribery to make sure that he had traitors inside the cities, and by calling those who took his money his guest friends and familiars, he corrupted men's morals with this pernicious form of diplomacy. End quote. One of the historians that I was reading called Philip K.

A warrior diplomat, which I think is a great term, very descriptive, a good rundown of the things Philip brought to the table. But I would add one more term, warrior diplomat fixer, because in my mind, I envision him showing up to these negotiations and these diplomatic affairs, you know, dressed in full military regalia, armed to the teeth. Right. So we can do it that way if that's how you want to play it.

but also with a lawyer in tow, right? With a notary public and basically ready to negotiate some deal, right? Sign on the dotted line, my lawyer, notarize it, and we're good to go. No one has to die. But if you're just the kind of person that would rather not have anything so obviously signed, sealed, and delivered, just like a briefcase full of cash, well, Philip can do it that way too.

What's that old line that Malcolm X is supposed to have uttered, right? By any means necessary. That's how I kind of see Philip II. By any means necessary, he's going to achieve his goals. The question of what those goals were and how far-sighted Philip was in seeing those outcomes, well, that's a debatable point, right? That's the kind of thing that doesn't come down to us from the sources all these centuries later. There's a couple of ways you could look at it, though.

Philip could be a master opportunist, somebody who seizes unexpected occurrences when they happen and becomes the beneficiary of them. Some domino, some unexpected domino tumbles and Philip's right there, Johnny on the spot to be the one who benefits. And he's got some advantages in that regard.

We mentioned already that the form of government gives him an advantage, right? These other Greek states have to sit here and debate and have politics come into it and people try to convince the public to go along with one. I mean, Philip doesn't have to do any of that. He just orders it. He's also got a professional military by this time, which means it's basically standing ready to go. Whereas if Thebes decides they want to go somewhere or Athens does, they've got to get the

You know, got to get the guys to grab their spears and their armor and their shields and get out to the fields and start to muster the forces. I mean, by the time they get their act together, you know, Philip's moved already. He's occupied the key strategic point. He sees the opportunity, whatever it is. So he's particularly set up to be a beneficiary of opportunism, if that's how it goes. But another way of looking at it is that Philip is the guy who creates these opportunities and

that he's a chess master here setting up a checkmate down the road. And each one of these milestones that he achieves is one more connect the dots toward the ultimate goal. Now, do opportunities that are unexpected happen? And does he seize them? Absolutely. But you can expect to have opportunities develop without knowing explicitly what they are.

In this sense, then, Philip is a master strategist, setting up the kinds of an outcome that he wants and every step of the way pursuing that goal relentlessly. One of the things he obviously does is keep the major powers in Greece from uniting against him. He's had a problem with Athens since he pretty much took over the throne. Athens and Thebes are the key, most powerful Greek city-states. He keeps a close relationship

connection to thieves right as sort of an alliance with thieves keeps athens and thieves from realizing that they have more of an interest in preventing him from gaining any more power and being any more of a threat to them and keeps them focused on you know fighting the third sacred war and all these other things and this is a time period where greece famously will bleed itself of treasure and human beings in these many wars that they fight with each other and

making them all the weaker when the final, you know, Darth Vader versus the Republic conflict happens. And it's very interesting, too, because it depends on how you want to view this thing. But the Greeks portray this entire eventual showdown with Philip as Greek liberty against, you know, someone coming to snuff it out.

But at this point in time, the Greeks can't focus on their collective liberty. They're too busy fighting one another, and that's working exactly the way Philip II would have wanted it to, whether he meant to do it that way or whether it just is a happy coincidence. One thing you can say about Philip is that he's out there in the field working tirelessly to make this stuff happen and giving up, you know, the use of major body parts along the way. I mean, he's the ultimate road dog.

What did we say? There was one year where he wasn't out in the field and he may have been recovering, you know, from some terrible injury inflicted upon him by some enemy. But while he's on the road...

in 356 BCE, so a year after he marries Olympias, and maybe only a year or two after he actually takes over as the king of Macedonia, he gets some good news while on the road. Traditionally, three pieces of good news. The first piece of good news is that his general Parmenio has defeated the Illyrians, which is always a good thing.

The second piece of good news he supposedly gets at the same time is that his horse has won in the Olympic Games in a competition. And this has a deeper meaning than the way it might sound. The fact that a Macedonian king is allowed to take part in the Olympic Games is a sign that the Macedonians have met the qualifications, the minimum qualifications to be considered as Greeks, which would have been a big deal to Philip.

Then finally, the third piece of news, not necessarily in the order of importance, but that Olympias has born Philip a son, officially named Alexander III, but we know him as Alexander the Great. Now, there are some things that have gone on, at least that's what sources hundreds of years later say, that would have clued any, you know, soothsayer or orator

oracle worth their salt that this was going to happen right you don't have these great figures born in history without a lot of signs from the heavens and they're out there according to people like plutarch plutarch says that olympias has a dream of lightning striking her womb philip has a dream that her womb is sealed up with a seal with an imprint of a lion on it philip also supposedly according to plutarch looks through a

crack in the wall or the equivalent of a keyhole with one eye and spies Olympia's cavorting with a god, perhaps in snake form. And then, of course, there's a temple that burns down because supposedly the goddess wasn't there to protect her own temple. She had to be there for Alexander's birth. Here's the way Plutarch, hundreds of years later, writes about this stuff. For example, he talks about the marriage consummation between Philip and Olympia's

And then Olympias' dream that happens right afterwards and Plutarch says, quote,

The night before the consummation of their marriage, she, meaning Olympias, dreamed that a thunderbolt fell upon her body, which kindled a great fire, whose divided flames dispersed themselves all about and then were extinguished. And Philip, Plutarch writes, sometime after he was married, dreamt that he sealed up his wife's body with a seal, whose impression, as he fancied, was the figure of a lion."

"'Some of the diviners interpreted this as a warning to Philip "'to look narrowly to his wife.'" That means watch your wife, man. "'But Aristander of Telmussus, "'considering how unusual it was to seal up anything that was empty, "'assured him the meaning of his dream was that the queen was with child, "'of a boy who would one day prove as stout and courageous as a lion.'"

Once, moreover, Plutarch writes, a serpent was found lying by Olympias as she slept, which more than anything else, it is said, abated Philip's passion for her, whether he feared her as an enchantress or thought she had commerce with some god, and so looked on himself as excluded. He was ever after less fond of her conversation."

commerce with the god means fooling around with the god and if you know zeus's history by the way he's always fooling around with mortal women so you know if he showed up in snake form or dionysus did or something like that well that's just in keeping with those god's characters right they get around but apparently philip saw some of this according to plutarch and you get punished for spying on a god having sex with your wife i'm just saying and plutarch says quote

Philip, after this vision, sent Charon of Megalopolis to consult the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, by which he was commanded to perform sacrifice, and henceforth pay particular honor above all other gods to Amon, who is also known as Zeus, and was told that he should one day lose that eye with which he presumed to peep through that chink of the door when he saw the god under the form of a serpent in the company of his wife."

well he did lose the eye about a year maybe two years later in a siege so there you go that's what you get for spying on zeus or whomever in snake form with your wife what were you thinking and then of course the story of the temple of diana at ephesus burnt down and plutarch says quote

The temple, he says, took fire and was burnt while its mistress, the goddess, was absent, assisting at the birth of Alexander. And all the eastern soothsayers who happened to be then at Ephesus, looking upon the ruin of this temple to be the forerunners of some other calamity, ran about the town, beating their faces and crying that this day had brought forth something that would prove fatal and destructive to all of Asia."

Famous queens who dream their womb is struck by lightning, which then shoots out of their genitals and catches parts of the room on fire. Maybe the greatest or one of the greatest kings of ancient Europe seemingly looking through a keyhole type crevice in the door and seeing his wife cavorting with snakes and going to an oracle and being told you're going to lose that eye for spying on the god.

The verifiable fact of the temple of Artemis or Diana, as the Romans would have known her, really being destroyed around the time of Alexander's birth, but then human beings being what they are, noticing that there really are no coincidences. And doesn't it just make sense that the only real story that explains how this temple could be burned down, right? The home of a God is that the God wasn't there. And where the heck would the God be? Well, you know, that's right around the time Alexander was being born. Folks,

This is the sort of stuff that those of us who love ancient history, this is what we love about it, right? This is a place in your legitimate history books, right? I mean, if it's a history from the beginning of time to now, you're going to have, you know, the founding of the UN and the Second World War and all these things near the end of the book. But you keep going backwards and the ratio of facts to myths sort of changes. Maybe that's a good way to put it.

Ancient history is where facts and historical data and archaeological discoveries intersect with things like legend and myth. Maybe the proper word here is lore.

right there is lore in your legitimate history books the farther back you go the more of it you get it's a little like blended wine right where you go and you get oh it's 60 percent cabernet and it's 40 percent merlot well by the time you get to the second world war you're probably at 80 20 right 80 percent facts 20 percent you know myth misinformation whatever you want to say the farther back you go in history the more that ratio changes in lore's favor

And the interesting thing about the lore part is that while it is not true, you can still learn a lot by studying it, can't you?

It's like that line that Pierre Briant used. It was a Leo Ferrer quote or whatever, where he said, even if it's not true, you have to believe in ancient history. We use that line before. But it's just so wonderful because in your legitimate history book, right, based on facts and archaeological discoveries and written by historians and experts and PhDs, you're going to have these stories about Alexander if it's a detailed enough book. Are they real or are they stories? At a certain point, it doesn't matter.

Because that is a part of the lore of Alexander, which affects a lot of people later. It's like we say about magic. Magic may not be real, but if people believe it's real and act on it as though it's real, it has real world effects, right? Well, so does this lore stuff. Take two examples. Example number one.

When Alexander's dead and gone, his giant empire that we all know, right? It's not a spoiler alert to say he's going to conquer a lot of territory. His generals are going to rip up all that territory and take off huge chunks for themselves and start dynasties where they're the first king and then they have tons of descendants after them. Their claim to legitimacy rests on Alexander.

Right. And the more Alexander is deified, the more it seems like you have the stamp of approval of the very highest authority that he should have conquered the world and that you should have had your piece of it afterwards. Right. So it serves a political purpose, a Machiavellian political purpose of legitimacy and tying yourself, you know, maybe through a degree or two of separation to a deity somewhere. I mean, the closer you are to Alexander, the better it is for you. And the greater Alexander is ditto.

And number two point here is that some of this misinformation or some of this legend creation or some of this lore may originally have come from a ground zero level from Alexander himself. Alexander took propagandists and chroniclers and all these kinds of people with him while he did everything he's famous for. And they're not just cataloging what happened. They are putting the most pro-Alexandrian spin on it while doing so.

It's propaganda coming from the source. Alexander wasn't just trying, you know, we're going to find out more about this side of him as we go, right? This is a guy playing for the long historical game. Of course, he's concerned about his own time period and how people in the world he's operating in will view, you know, his propaganda. But this is a guy writing his name down.

in a more pronounced big graffiti form on your history books. And he's concerned about how you're going to see him. He's writing some of this propaganda for you and for me.

Which is crazy. And the way we get it is like third hand, right? Because if Alexander's pushing this propaganda in his own time and people writing close after his own time use it in their history books and then the guys we're using from 400 years later, because they're our earliest source, they're using books based on, I mean, you follow the chain of data or misinformation. Some of this stuff may extend all the way back to Alexander and the people that worked for him before.

originally it's and and so the point is is that that's how by studying the lore which may not even be true and maybe probably isn't true you still maybe get closer to elements of the truth in an oblique kind of way i understand why people who love the second world war in the first world war in the 20th century stuff where there's so many documents to look at and you can compare and contrast different accounts i mean i can understand why it'd be hard for them to maybe get their mind around this

Right. Because they don't have a whole lot of prophecy going on in their story or oracles or, you know, snakes that are really gods, you know, having sex with the wife of historical kings. I mean, I get it. You don't like a lot of King Arthur in your, you know, Battle of Okinawa story.

But that's precisely what those of us who love ancient history love about it, is that, you know, by the time you get back to Alexander's time, your 60% Cabernet, 40% Merlot split is more like a 60% lore, 40% fact split. And the fact that this Alexander story is so well known and has influenced people ever since, the stories that we can't prove are true and maybe think are false are still stories that have to be included in the legitimate history book, which is crazy.

You have to tell the story of the lightning bolt on Alexander's mom. And this, I mean, all this is history. It's crazy because it's lore, right? It's, it's Tolkien-esque. And the reason this matters to where we are in the story right now is because when you look at the few stories you have about Alexander the Great growing up, right? Young Alexander, they all sound like part of this lore, right?

Most of it is geared towards showing that, you know, the signs were all there as Alexander grew up that he was going to be this amazing figure. So they're all sort of looking back with prophecy, predicting the future after it happened, that kind of thing.

For example, there's the story of Alexander at like seven years old talking to the Persian ambassadors that show up in Philip's court and contrasting, you know, the story contrasts how a normal seven-year-old might question a Persian diplomat, you know, saying things like, tell me about the wealth of the king of Persia, tell me about the great king. And Alexander's asking instead for distances between where they are and the Persian capital. And what is the condition of the roads?

and the morale of the Persian army. And, you know, at seven years old, I'm not saying it's impossible. I might have done that, not because I'm Alexander, but because I was goofy at that age. And that's the kind of stuff I'd have wanted to know. Nonetheless, you turn back on it and look at it from, you know, later and you go, wow, boy, you could just see this. Alexander was cut out for greatness, can't you? And a bunch of the stories are kind of like that.

And the vast majority of these stories about Alexander's youth come from Plutarch anyway. So you're kind of relying on an almost single source for some of this stuff.

He's a wonderful lesson, by the way, Plutarch, a Greek who wrote in the Roman imperial era. He's a wonderful lesson about how sometimes, especially when you go into ancient history, the sources dwindle down to almost nothing. And sometimes you have certain historical facts resting upon a single work sometimes. I mean, Plutarch's one of these weird sorts of accountants.

where you don't have a bunch of stuff to compare and contrast it to. You can't measure Plutarch's accuracy on some of these subjects that he talks about next to some of his contemporaries because we really don't have them. We do have other people that write about Alexander, but they usually talk about politics and his campaigns and his conquests and all that kind of stuff. Plutarch's like a screenwriter for A&E's biography. He's interested in different things.

he's the guy that'll go up to a family member you know an aunt or something and say tell me that story again about when alexander was seven years old and he interrogated the persian diplomat and asked him about you know the condition and morale of the persian army those are the kind of facts that plutarch liked and because of that

He's our main source for a bunch of this stuff. The famous Alexander stories growing up, like the one about taming the untamable horse that became his horse, Bucephalus. That's another one of those Plutarch stories. The good news is there's a lot written on Plutarch and a lot of scholarly work on dissecting his writings. But, you know, Plutarch was a guy...

who was supposed to be an Alexander expert, lived hundreds of years after Alexander, but he's an expert. He's a fan, and he's read all the documents in the library, and he probably had access to firsthand stuff, memoirs of people who campaigned with Alexander, stuff like that.

So he's kind of a facts launderer or a data launderer for us today. We are getting firsthand accounts filtered through him, but he's got a purpose and he's pretty open about it. He's a fan of Alexander. He seems to live, I was reading something about the time period in which he was writing, he seems to live in an era where the Roman attitude toward Alexander and that attitude changes over time, right? Alexander will be a, a,

popular philosopher king type figure in one era and then a bad guy in another and it goes back and forth and Plutarch lives in an era where most Romans are looking at Alexander maybe as not a figure to be emulated, right? An example of some of the downsides of power and corruption and ambition and all that. And Plutarch might have been writing sort of a counterpoint to that. Well, let me, you know, I'm an Alexander expert. Let me highlight some stories from his life that shows you he's not the kind of guy you think he is.

and he freely said that he had all these stories to choose from knowing alexander as well as he didn't used him to sort of you know paint a picture of a different sort of guy than much of his contemporaries thought of as alexander so we're getting maybe a very positive view of the guy

Because Plutarch is one of those rare sources, though, his importance is inordinately exalted, which means his positive view of Alexander often becomes our sort of default starting position as we're assessing the guy. We have a mildly positive view of him starting out, and that's probably due to Plutarch.

And some people get, you know, as they say, kissed by Plutarch as a historian's treatment. And some people get screwed. Poor Olympias doesn't come off nicely under the pen of Plutarch. And you can't tell if that's just because she suffers from the way women are often treated in ancient history. Not very well. Or because Plutarch himself didn't like uppity, powerful women and she was all that.

or because she actually was this kind of person. And unlike a bunch of these sort of legendary queen figures, Olympias, you know, veers between the lore and the facts part of history. So there are things that you can say with reasonable certainty that she did. And once you hear about the things that she with reasonable certainty did, well, then nothing's off the table. She'll do those things. She'll do anything she's accused of.

And she plays into this story in a way that most women in ancient history don't. Alexander's got two incredible parents. This is where you sort of see Olympias come into the story big because Philip's gone. What do we say? He's a road dog. He's out, you know, making the family fortune, taking city after city on a campaign every year, coming back a little worse for wear every time, but not a lot of time at home, which means Alexander's with mom and with mom's people.

And this is where I, you know, when I try to immerse myself in the story, I have to remember Alexander's only half Macedonian. And when it really counts is who he's spending his time with as a young man. And this is traditional. I was reading in growing up when you're Macedonian, when you're a kid, five, six, seven, you spend a lot of time around mom. That's normal. But Alexander's mom and the people around her are not Macedonian either.

And I love the way that where they're from sort of is seen by the Macedonians. Everybody in all of these neighborhoods, right, has their stereotypes about other regions. The Greeks have their stereotypes about Macedonia. The Greeks and the Macedonians both have their stereotypes about these areas that are now, you know, around the modern nation of Albania up in that area. And this is where Alexander's mother's kin come from, the Melosians, the descendants of Achilles supposedly, right?

These wild people, sort of witchy, sort of scary people.

And I was reading some good historians who were pointing out that you can tell how different Alexander is with the way he associates with his mother's side of the family because normally the society Alexander's a part of really pays attention to the father's bloodline. That's the one that really matters. But Alexander's an exception to this and it comes up all the time, this Achilles connection and all these other things. I mean, there's Alexander's connection to his mom's side of the family is unusual.

and his relationship to his mom might be too as we've said before and we'll say again alexander is multitudes he's been seen so many different ways that you know you can pick and choose the various um aspects of the story if you want to go into psychologically breaking down this guy's character or anything for example there's one tradition of alexander is sort of uh the term that they used to use was mama's boy

Outdated what would you say that's from like the 1920s or the 1930s he's a mama's boy well the old line when I was growing up was it was Alexander a mama's boy and there's one strand of you know idea out there that he kind of was that he has this weird relationship with his mother.

which, as we said, we know something about because she's going to be a powerful person. And after Alexander's off conquering the world, he's writing letters back and forth. And she's a player in the power structure of Macedonia, often sort of in a tug of war with murderous, you know, experienced professional generals. I mean, she's a fabulously interesting person. And you can tell she has one of these personalities that just

She's a very strong person. She won't be denied. She's not going to stay in the background. She's going to be proactive in some cases. And this is the part of the story where, you know, Philip is obviously this august person. He's doing all these historical things. You don't even have to be told that he must have been this interesting, intense human being. But this is the part of the Alexander story where you get to see the contribution of his mother to the whole genetic process.

makeup here. She is herself an intense, interesting person. And under Plutarch's pen, malevolent, interesting person, very dangerous. I mean, the internal family structure of the Macedonian royal family, we said earlier, there's a mafia style feel to some of this and a survival of the fittest sort of feel to it.

And Philip has all these wives. Right. And what did we say? Olympias is third, fourth or fifth. Depends on what you read. She's in the middle there. One of those wives, which means there are more. I mean, calling it sister wives probably makes it sound more Mormon than it really was. But what do you what do you describe the intense relationship, both competition and otherwise, that all these wives are going to have with each other? Right. They're all married to the same guy.

They're all capable of producing an heir to that guy. And then your heir will be in competition with the heir of one of your, you know, fellow wives. I mean, it's an absolute hornet's nest of...

for all these people. And normally you would think to yourself, okay, Alexander, if you look at his life during this time period, is already being set up to be Philip's successor. I mean, the wheels are already greased. He's ready to go. And you're looking and you're going, wait a minute, that doesn't seem very Macedonian. Wait a minute.

Where is the, you know, alternative candidates to the throne? Where is the threat of assassination or rebellion or, I mean, civil war? How come Alexander's so obviously chosen to be the successor here? Why is he the prince-in-waiting? Well, it's a good question, and it involves Olympias a little bit, maybe. Alexander has a brother, round about his own age, maybe a little older, known to history as Aridaeus, sometimes called Philip Aridaeus. You would think that

that this figure would provide a threat, a competitor to Alexander, someone else who might be eligible to take over from Philip after Philip's gone someday, right? The next king. Aridaeus is the son of a different one of Philip II's wives. And interestingly enough, according to Plutarch, she is another magical wife. Philip seemed to have a thing for magical women sometimes.

And Olympias is just one of the magical women he married. He's either marrying magical women or like Amazons from Wonder Woman. These women who fight with sword and spear. So those are his types. If he has a type, he either wants you to be an enchantress or, you know, an Amazon. In this case, Aridaeus' mother is another one of these enchantresses, we're told. And she's using her defensive spells to try to protect Aridaeus from Olympias.

But it seems like Olympias gets him anyway because there's something wrong with Philip Aridaeus. He's not a genetic competitor against Alexander as a potential candidate for the throne because he clearly isn't up to that kind of job. Something's wrong with Philip Aridaeus. And the historians, they don't disagree. Nobody knows what was wrong with him. It seems he had some sort of mental disability.

One of the ancient sources, maybe Plutarch also said something to the effect of when he was all grown up, he was still like a child. Plutarch makes it sound like this guy didn't start out this way. Perfectly normal child, gifted, was going to be just fine. And then somewhere in his early life, his mental health goes sideways. And Plutarch says it's because of Olympias.

that she practices something the greek word is related to pharmacology or pharmacy but it could mean potions drugs magic whatever olympius gets him and she either tries to kill him and fails but leaves him mentally damaged anyway or just tries to mentally damage him i think it's plutarch who said that olympius destroyed his mind

Now, I don't know if Olympias really did something like this or not, but if she did, think about the whole different sort of spin that puts on the nature versus nurture debate and how important that is to how a child turns out as an adult. If this is your mom, right, and your dad is Philip II, right?

These are really interesting people to have the ones setting the table for you as a child, literally, right? Infusing their values and their ethics, their conduct, their morals, you know, all that sort of stuff. And let's not suggest that their values are our values anyway. We judge them on a different scale because, you know, look at how the rest of Macedonian history looks. They're not that outlandish, graded on a curve. But if mom is poisoning kids

The other sons of your dad, let's just say that it's an interesting household and she's an interesting woman. And for the at least first part of Alexander's life, she has an inordinate amount of influence on it. And it's an amount of influence that will continue to some degree for the rest of Alexander's life. And he will be writing letters back and forth to her as he's conquering the known world.

you know, chastising her, helping her, getting information from her. She's sort of her son's inside man in Macedonia while he's gone. And she's in power struggles with powerful, murderous, ruthless, professional, experienced veteran generals. She's an amazing woman.

But the lore part of her, right, the lore, for example, the idea that she poisons Philip Aridaeus to cause his mental disability, the lore side of her sometimes matches up pretty well with the stuff most historians consider to be factual. I mean, the woman who's accused of poisoning her son's half-brother will eventually kill him. That's not...

That's history. And she'll not just kill him. She'll kill his wife too. And that wife is the granddaughter of her former husband, Philip the second. So, um, she's fully capable of that sort of inter family type, you know, homicide, but mom likes snakes tells me maybe that I'm a God and that Philip's not my real father and who happily would destroy the mind of my half brother. Uh,

gives a whole new meaning to the term maternal instinct, doesn't it? And the one thing that I liked in the movie that Oliver Stone did, his Alexander film, and I didn't like this move when I first heard about it. I was completely wrong about it. It was casting Angelina Jolie in the role of Olympias.

She was perfect for it because there's that there's a little bit of the exotic stuff going on where she feels a little bit more like she's from upcountry than the rest of the Macedonians. But there's also something a little, you know, Dionysic about her. I mean, it worked perfectly.

She's responsible for Alexander's early years, which I guess is pretty Macedonian anyway. Five, six, seven-year-old kids usually spend time with their mom, and Alexander and his mom are together a lot, and she is the one who sets up his first tutor. She gets this guy from her home country, may have even been a relative.

He's like a drill sergeant type of character, a Molossian hard ass, right? Comes in there and he's going to whip the young pampered prince into shape, right? You want to command a bunch of killer Macedonian veterans. They're not going to take orders from some softy. Look, your dad's already lost an eye. He's limping. He's got broken collarbones. You know, he's beaten up all over, leading the charge from the front. You better toughen up.

Little king boy. And so the first guy, traditionally, Alexander talks about, you know, how he would search his luggage to see if his mom had hidden any little dainties or luxuries for him. Deny him food, march him all night, then march in the next day. I mean, sort of toughen up his body.

So the next guy is the one that traditionally, the sources always say, taught Alexander his letters. So I guess to read and to write and the basics like this. He's sort of an austere character. And reading between the lines, one gets a sense that he's almost like a guy, like a stoic philosophy devotee who's sort of teaching Alexander to comport himself more like a king, even though

you know he'll have the power but but you're supposed to be more reserved more marcus aurelius like uh if you thought about a later example uh if you're going to be a king and he's involved in the famous story where alexander as a kid is supposed to go up to the altar where you throw the expensive incense on the fire as a sacrifice to the god and young alexander in front of this teacher is supposed to grab two giant handfuls of incense and the teacher again this is one of those stories right one of those

examples of um showing that we knew alexander was going to be something special when and he throws these big handfuls of incense on the fire and the teacher admonishes him and says something to the effect of listen that's expensive stuff when you're the one earning the money and buying the incense you can throw as big handfuls as you want but till then you know take it easy

And in one of the aspects that's kind of fun in some of these stories is there's the before and after. The you knew me when version of this story where after Alexander's made good and he's out conquering the world, he sends back to this world

professor showing that he didn't forget that incident caravans tons of the expensive incense back to him with a notation not to be parsimonious meaning you know don't be selfish when you're offering sacrifices to the gods there's almost like that little idea of hey if you'd have been the one throwing the big handfuls to the gods maybe they would have favored you and you'd be here instead of me

right a sort of a remember me before i was great well how do you like me now have some incense and then there's famously the third teacher of alexander and this is a rock star himself alexander is a rock star tutor it's before his heights of rock stardom in the world of philosophy he's sort of an up-and-comer when

philip ii entices him to come up and teach his son and a small group of friends several of whom turn out to be kings interesting class how do you pick the valedictorian of that small group of people but the tutor that philip ii manages to convince to come up to the cultural backwater that is macedonia though he's trying to spruce it up intellectually is aristotle

famously of the school of Plato, right? A student of Plato who was a student of Socrates. And that's, you know, now you're getting to the fountain heads of Western philosophical traditional thought, right? This is like almost like secret knowledge. There's an element to the teaching of philosophy in this period that has a Raiders of the Lost Ark kind of feel to it, like hidden knowledge, like stuff no one knows.

And that's one of the things that Aristotle is supposed to bring to the table here. But the deal, and this is again from the sources, that Philip II offers to Aristotle to get Aristotle to come up to Macedonia is literally one of those deals only a king could give you.

and that it would probably be foolish to say no to. But in addition to money and all the other things, Philip II promises to Aristotle that if you come up and teach my son for a few years, I will restore, rebuild, and repopulate your home city because it had been destroyed. That's a heck of an offer to make. A little bit of pressure maybe from the neighbors to, you know, maybe get this deal done. We'd love to have our city rebuilt.

Now, the twisty part of the whole offer, though, is that the guy who destroyed the city in the first place was Philip II. So he's basically saying, I know I destroyed your city, but come work for me and I'll rebuild it and repopulate it. That's just a side benefit. I'll pay you two and, you know, all kinds of good things.

But, you know, hard to say no to a king anyway. So Aristotle famously goes up to Macedonia, holds these classes for several years between Alexander and a couple of his friends. And like I said, it's a distinguished group of guys.

There is a suggestion that one of the group in the class wrote something about it, like on the education of Alexander that would have been in all your fine ancient libraries and that some of our sources may have been able to read. So maybe one degree of separation from, you know, class stories with Alexander in high school.

But when we look at the subjects Alexander supposedly learned, this is where you start to get to this side of Alexander that differentiates him from your average run-of-the-mill, drunken, mass, homicidal killer. Because there's a lot of conquerors in history, but there aren't a lot of conquerors in history with as much education in some of the key foundational academic disciplines that most college curricula 50 or 60 years ago would have considered possible.

mandatory. I mean, we are told that he is learning ethics, mathematics, literature, medicine, biology, politics, philosophy, zoology, rhetoric, and some secret knowledge. The secret knowledge, by the way, is something we know about because it was written about in Plutarch, where he publishes what he basically says is a

A letter from Alexander to Aristotle later in life when Alexander is conquering the world and has made good. And when Aristotle is a philosophical rock star and apparently is publishing his work. Right. So you can buy it. But he's including in the publishing of his work, the secret stuff. Right. The hidden Shaolin priest, secret raiders of the lost dark knowledge that gives you an advantage over other men if you know it and they don't.

Because that's kind of how Alexander describes it in this nasty letter to his former tutor saying, if you're giving away this kind of information, how am I supposed to have any advantage over other men? Now, it's interesting to think about what secret information might have been involved in the philosophical teachings of a guy like Aristotle, you know, which came from Plato, which came from Socrates. I mean, there's an intellectual tradition here that goes back to somewhere really interesting. But the way we should think about it

is that Alexander has all of this as part of his makeup, right? All of this philosophical and educational learning and culture could recite the Iliad and the plays of the Greek playwrights, often sort of by memory, by heart. I mean, this is an interesting kind of guy. And there's a whole tradition out there. And Plutarch is probably fairly put into it. Alexander is kind of a philosopher king, as we said earlier.

or even more interesting, a philosopher in action. And that's how he's sort of portrayed sometimes as a guy who the philosophers of ancient Greece in this great time period where you have all these interesting people, the

Socrates is in the Plato's and the Aristotle's and all those guys that they're creating these ideas through debate and writing and reflection and argument and all this. But they await a man of action who can take those ideas and put them into practice. Right. It's all theoretical until somebody tries it right. And Alexander is that lightning bolt man.

flash moment when the rubber meets the road in terms of philosophical thought being transmitted into the hands of somebody who can implement it in the real world, a philosopher in action. And for people that would love to see a more rational, more intelligently run, more deeply thoughtful world, that is almost addictive to think about that happening.

It brings a tear to your eye. It brings out all your utopian sensibilities, hopes and dreams, right? Wouldn't it be great to have a philosopher king? You can almost hear it in some of the eras in human history where Alexander was seen that way, that this would have been the dream of some of the people back then. They were living in a time period where the idea of a philosopher king didn't have a lot of the baggage that it has today. Although if Alexander's a philosopher king himself,

He's probably, wouldn't you think, the philosopher king with the highest body count of any of them? Although philosopher kings can kill a surprising number of innocent people, but Alexander's got to be right up at the top, don't you think? And maybe there's a couple of key questions that we should throw into the mix when we're discussing this issue of Alexander as a potential philosopher king. What sort of philosophy are we talking about?

i mean just because you say it as though it's a high-minded humanitarian sort of philosophy that we should all be looking towards is something to be proud of and emulated and a sign of human progress doesn't necessarily mean that at all right philosophies can be evil too so maybe he's pushing an evil philosophy we substituted a more modern word ideology well we wouldn't have any problem would we assuming that it might be something negative

And then there's the impact of the body count on the philosophical point at all. I mean, let's imagine it's a wonderful philosophy meant to spread kindness and humanity and all the things we would love to think of as coming into the world and getting a chance to thrive. But what if he kills 50 million people to implement it?

Is there a number there where it doesn't matter how great the philosophical ideas are, you killed too many people to implement them so it doesn't matter? I don't know the answer to that. This is part of the great unknowables with Alexander and the fact that he's got so many centuries of propaganda that's overlay the original issue. Good luck getting to the heart of that issue.

But that begs the question, what can we get to the heart of? Is there anything you can know about something that long ago, so clouded by intervening, you know, evidence and information with so many people who've had so many axes to grind over the eras? Can we get to any facts at all? Well, maybe. I mean, one of the questions I've asked before is, what if Alexander the Great had a podcast?

trying to imagine how wonderful it's going to be for all those historians 500 years from now delving into our time period and the fact that they're going to have all these podcasts and blogs and and instagram accounts and everything that they can mine and look at maybe more info than they want right be careful you know if you wish for more needles in a haystack be careful because you could end up with what we have now haystacks and needles everywhere for future historians but just give me

one podcast with Alexander the Great in it, right? His podcast. And I'm going to learn so much. The first thing that's going to be obvious, though, is we're going to know what the guy looked like. And wouldn't that be a heck of a question to answer? But the descriptions are actually more consistent than anything you're going to get about his philosophical viewpoints.

The way historians, by the way, come up with these descriptions is they will read the various sources and pick out any little thing that seems to refer to his appearance. And there'll be little clues here or there, as opposed to somebody describing him, you know, with five or six adjectives in a row. You'll find out little tidbits of things that will allow you to assemble a picture of

So, for example, one of the tidbits that's often used is at one point in his career, Alexander will capture the throne of his adversary and he'll sit on the throne and his feet won't touch the ground. Right. It's remarked upon that he's too short to be sitting in the seat. So they bring him in like a footstool. But you start to add up the height references and you come up with a person who seems to be a little bit shorter than normal, which brings up another question, of course, which is what is normal for this place in this time?

We've mentioned that it's almost certain that Alexander's father's tomb has been found and that his partially cremated remains measured somewhere between like 5'6 inches and 5'8 inch tall. So does that mean that's an average height for a Macedonian? In which case, Alexander might be a little smaller than that. Or is Philip himself a shorter than normal Macedonian? In which case, 5'6", 5'7", could be Alexander's height too.

I looked up the skeleton measurements from this area in this time period. I wasn't able to find Macedonia, but I found Greece. And in standard Greece, this appears to be a standard height, right? So Philip would be around the average height of a Greek male. So what does that put Alexander at?

Well, here's Peter Green's description from around 1970, and I find it hard to improve on that. I will say that the blonde hair question is an open one because Green says that he has blonde hair. He has the color of a lion's mane. And if you've looked at a lion's mane, there's a number of different colors in your average lion's mane.

Some of them are more blonde, but a bunch of them are sort of a darker color with like golden highlights. And you'll still see that color hair all over northern Greece and Albania in those areas today. Maybe with a little bit of like a red orange tone thrown in. You add campaigning in the sun all the time and you're going to get a certain look. So here's the way Green describes Alexander as the composite of all the various appearance elements.

throwaway lines that are in the sources also notice you remember there was a kim karn song once she's got betty davis eyes well alexander's got like ziggy stardust eyes listen to this description quote alexander had grown into a boy of rather below average height but very muscular and compact of body he was already like his hero achilles a remarkably fast runner

his hair blond and tousled is traditionally said to have resembled a lion's mane and he had that high complexion which fair-skinned people so often display his eyes were odd one being gray-blue the other dark brown

his teeth were sharply pointed like little pegs says the alexander romance an uncharacteristically realistic touch green writes which carries instant conviction

He had a somewhat high-pitched voice, which tended to harshness when he was excited. His gait was fast and nervous, a habit he had picked up from old, the drill sergeant from Melosia is the name of the person, and he carried his head bent slightly upwards and to the left, whether because of some physical defect or through mere affectation cannot now be determined.

He says there is something almost girlish about his earliest portraits, a hint of leashed hysteria behind the melting charm. End quote. The mention about Alexander's voice being higher than one would expect is not uncommon with great generals, actually. Same is true, for example, of General George Patton. You want him to sound like George C. Scott in the movie Patton, but that's not what he sounds like. Higher than normal voice, higher than what you would expect.

And something interesting, and you don't know whether this is just something that's made it down in the sources because, you know, maybe you want to put the great human figures in history on a special pedestal and say that they smell extra good. But Alexander is supposed to have smelled really good. So good, in fact, that the smell would linger on his clothes. And he just had a really good scent. And some ancient historians, I try to figure out why that might be.

Historian Ian Worthington in his book By the Spear gives a different account of Alexander's look and points out that even this could be a product of all the propaganda and even Alexander's ability to control this sort of stuff because he's said to have liked certain things.

statues of himself and not other ones and said that you know the guy who made the statue that he liked is the only guy who can make statues of him now so he may have controlled how we see his look but here's how ian worthington described it quote alexander was a short man

After the Battle of Issus in 331, one of the captured Persian noblewomen mistook the taller Hephaestion for Alexander, and when he sat on the royal throne in the palace of Susa, his feet did not reach the ground. His actual appearance, Worthington writes, is controversial, depending on which ancient account is read. He was said to have a lopsided face because his neck inclined to the left.

a round chin, a long thin nose, a bulging forehead above watery eyes, one of which was apparently light blue and the other brown, very sharp pointed teeth, a high-pitched voice, and a thick tousled mane of blonde hair. If he really did look like this, Worthington writes, then his later portraits were deliberately softened to make him more handsome.

These busts also depict Alexander with his blonde hair in ringlets, with a central parting, and against the tradition of the times, beardless. Roman images, he says, like the one on the Alexander mosaic were likewise idealized as they feature Alexander with dark curly hair and sideburns, end quote.

The sources say that Alexander was strong, that he was athletic, that he was a very good fighter and horseman, a very fast runner. At one point, it is suggested to him that he should compete in the Olympics. He's so fast. And he said he would if he could only compete against kings, which is a very Alexandrian sort of line.

There's a couple of things we can infer and that we can know about this guy. The first thing is we know he's young. And it's an obvious thing to say, but we have to remember this is like Bob Dylan's forever young concept here. This is a guy who's never going to get old. And so when we talk about how one should imagine him, height, weight, gait, look, hair color, all that sort of stuff, we should reflect on the fact that he's going to be young. And when he starts, he's going to be very young.

We've got an 18 year old or something or a 19 year old when this guy is going to be leading this Macedonian Maserati of an army at some point. Can you imagine having tons of responsibility at 18, 19, 20 years? I mean, so this is a young guy. He is a person we are told who has a temper that can get out of control at times and

He is somebody that is clearly a superior fighter because if you look at the life of Alexander, he's a person who fights all the time. This is not a general like Napoleon or someone like Caesar who's back behind the lines making sure everything's where it needs to be and troops are going where they need to go. Alexander is leading the pack. And the number of times that he's going to jump over a city wall that they're besieging first...

you know that he'll run into the midst of the enemy with his bodyguards trailing behind him and the sheer fact that he doesn't die in these encounters that happened over years and years and years is a sign that he's quite capable of taking care of himself and being deadly i mean if the guy is like five foot four or five foot five he's a deadly monster of a five foot five right

We're told that his education basically stops when he's 16 years old because his dad makes him regent while his dad is out road-dogging. His dad's still got to do what his dad's got to do, right? Making the family fortune, conquering new territories, besieging cities, becoming more and more powerful. But, you know, it takes time, and Philip is continually hurt. He gets hurt again in another campaign incident.

In the not-too-distant future, so badly he'll never be able to walk without a limp again. But he leaves, and this time at 16 years old, he leaves Alexander in charge around about 340 B.C., B.C.E. And while Alexander is running the show while Philip's away, a rising up or some sort of insurrection occurs up north of Macedonia amongst a tribal people. So Alexander takes what forces he's been left behind

from his dad goes up there conquers him you know exiles them from their city repopulates the city the same way dad would have done and renames it alexandropolis just like his dad would have done too his dad would have called it a philopolis his son just named it this will be my first city i'll name for myself 16 years old got my first city alexandropolis what would you have named it

This also is presented like a milestone in this guy's life, right? First battle he's commanded. I'm trying to think of 16-year-old Alexander. Again, whatever we want to think of this guy, he's clearly a kid out there in his first battle as the one in charge. I'm sure he's leaning on the very powerful, very dominant personalities of these generals heavily, but at the same time,

This is a guy who at 26 years old is going to be able to say, I've been out there on the battlefield for a decade. That's crazy. But after Alexander has a chance to be a regent for a little while for his dad while he's away and command some troops and have a little agency in terms of command, it sort of marks the end of his formal education in this period in his life where he's sort of his dad's right-hand man, where he's working for Pop in the family business, learning the ropes,

And so his fortunes sort of dovetail with his dad's for a while. And this is an interesting period in his dad's career. First of all, there's an undercurrent of public opinion, maybe you could say, out there during this time period that it's difficult to divorce from the fact that we know what's going to happen. So it's tough to put maybe this sort of information in its proper perspective and

But there is an undercurrent maybe starting around 345, 346, you know, when Alexander only would have been 10 or 11 years old, of maybe his dad being seen as the guy who's going to stop all this terrible warfare of Greeks killing Greeks and unite the Greeks together in a crusade against Greece's historical enemy is the way that this was portrayed, the Persian Empire.

who invaded Greece 150 or so years before and is still awaiting payback for that. And so if we could only stop fighting and killing each other and draining the treasuries of rival city-states, we could unite and go take the treasuries of this historically super-uber-wealthy empire and they can be our slaves and everything will be better. Probably 345, 346, there's a famous philosopher who issues sort of a public decree

plea to Philip to be the guy who does this. And he'd already chosen a couple people before Philip in the time period where those people look to be like the great unifier. But once Philip starts to really assert himself in that role, if you were going to see a person who might unify Greece through force and violence in the middle 340s, Philip is your guy.

The reason that this undercurrent of discussion about Philip leading a crusade against Persia matters is because when Philip is no longer with us, it's going to be this desire, this goal, this outcome that his son will adopt as his own. That is, again, assuming that Philip hadn't had this idea himself already, didn't need some Athenian or some

philosopher giving it to him maybe he thought to himself i'll take persia let me just you know make sure i don't have any hostile greek cities in my rear when i do which is what's going on around the time alexander first gets to command troops right he's about 16 years old philip's upcoming face off with the powers that be in greece is starting to sort of crystallize and shape up

Philip's big enemy has always been Athens. And even when they're at peace, it's kind of a Cold War kind of peace. I mean, I think it was Demosthenes, the Athenian orator, who was always sort of anti-Philip that said that even when Athens wasn't at war with Philip, Philip was still at war with Athens, implying that there's always a jockeying for maneuvering for advantage here until the next hot war starts.

But Philip has been controlling the whole situation in Greece for some time now by having the Thebans, right, the other great city-state that are historically the anti-Athenian city-state during this time period, having the Thebans as his allies, right? So you sort of checkmate the Athenians in that situation. What changes that leads to a showdown is the position of Thebes, right?

they start to see Philip as a threat too. And what we should recall here, and it's partly what makes Greek politics so difficult to follow, but also at the same time so vulnerable to a king operating in a system with one person making all the decisions, you can see how that affects these city-states where public opinion is divided.

Athens has a pro-Macedonian camp and an anti-Macedonian camp, and so does Thebes. And Philip can work angles like that. One of the reasons he's getting the Thebans angry with him and the Athenians are already mad at him is he's funding division in Greece, right? He's deliberately trying to create disunity and hostility among the major powers. He's devoting a lot of his money to that cause.

I mean, if there are Russian troll farms now trying to get people in the West to hate each other by instigating, you know, online combat and all that sort of stuff to make us a more divided society, that might be an imitation of what Philip's been doing in Greece. And you could understand why the Greek city-states might take offense after a while, right? It's in his interest to keep Greece destabilized. And, well, it's not so fun to live in a destabilized place.

Demosthenes and the Athenians will always portray this as a war for Greek liberty when they're dealing with Philip. And Philip is the empire and the Athenians and friends, because that's maybe how the Athenians would see them. It's the Athenians and all these other people, our supporters, even if they're major city states. The Athenians cast themselves in the role of the plucky, beleaguered republic.

right fighting to maintain the old ways the tradition the greatness of athens traditionally and of course you know the uh status quo and guys like demosthenes who's considered to be one of the greatest orators in world history lets this fear and warning about philip to overcome his entire career i think for like 10 years straight all he's writing about is the danger of philip we need to do something before philip gets us that kind of thing

in his third Philippic, which is usually considered his best, in 341 BC BCE. So that would be when Alexander is, the year before Alexander takes over for that regency. Demosthenes again warns about Philippine. These are long tracks if you read them, but if you take pieces of it out,

You can see the Churchillian comparisons come pretty easily, right? Where Winston Churchill's warning about the Nazis for all this time before they finally take over. And then he's brought to lead, you know, against the foe that he saw before anyone else. Well, Demosthenes isn't looking to lead, but he's certainly looking to

to warn the Athenians that their freedom is at stake. And it's really interesting the way they define freedom, and a lot of modern historians pick up on this too. The Greeks want the freedom to basically fight each other. We would today say they want the freedom to make their own foreign policy, knowing full well that a large part of what they think of as their foreign policy is the struggle for hegemony against other Greek states, right? The freedom to fight our adversaries in Greece, and that's what Philip wanted.

If he takes over, he's going to take away one of the things that Demosthenes points out. Hey, you want to be able to control your own foreign policy? Better not let Philip get in charge. And so at one point, the third Philippic, he has this, I looked at this paragraph or two and I pulled it up from the web and it doesn't say who translated it. So thousand apologies if that person is still alive today.

But from about the middle of the piece or two thirds of the way through, he kind of gets to this moment where he's blaming the Athenians for all this, that they don't want to put forward the effort and the money and the demands on their own precious time that it would take away from whatever it is they want to do to stop Philip. And yet they're going to pay a price for this. They're not the men that their grandparents and great grandparents were because they would have done what needed to be done. Whereas, you know, you're more concerned about

you know, looking out for number one. And he says, quote, So it is, men of Athens, with us. While we're still safe with our great city, our vast resources, our noble name, what are we to do? Perhaps someone sitting here, meaning the assembly where he's speaking, has long been wishing to ask this question. I and I will answer it, and I will move my motion, and you shall carry it if you wish.

we ourselves in the first place must conduct the resistance and make preparation for it with ships that is and money and soldiers for though all but ourselves give way and become slaves we at least must contend for freedom

And when we've made all these preparations ourselves and let them be seen, then let us call upon the other states for aid and send envoys to carry our message in all directions, to the Peloponnese, to Rhodes, to Chios, to the king, meaning the king of Persia,

for it is not unimportant for his interest either that philip should be prevented from subjugating all the world that so if you persuade them you may have partners to share the dangers and the expense in case of need and if you do not you may at least delay the march of events for since the war is with a single man and not against the strength of a unified state even delay is not without its value

End quote. That's a pretty cool, ominous line, right? I mean, if you're really just fighting one guy as opposed to, you know, the next guy in line who can take over because they're not foreseeing Alexander, they figure Macedonia is just going to fall apart without Philip and anything could happen to one guy, right? Well, that Philippic was giving Athens yet another warning a full three years before the disaster that's in their future, the disaster that is the Battle of Chaeronea.

The Battle of Chaeronea is one of those battles that everyone who's familiar with ancient Greek history knows because it's very famous, it's super important, but it's not one of those battles that's gotten a lot of publicity outside, you know, the narrow, specific, ancient Mediterranean genre. But the reason it's important is this is the time period where really the first time in hundreds of years since the Greek city-states first arose on the scene that they get leashed by an outside power.

There have been moments where one Greek city-state like a Sparta or an Athens or a Thebes dominates the other ones, but it's always been a Greek city-state involved in the process of controlling other Greek city-states. The Battle of Chaeronea is between Greek city-states and an outside power.

And it is one of those battles where everything is on the line. It's very typical of battles in the pre-modern world, the ancient world, where a single battle can decide the whole war. So think of the stakes here. Lose here, lose everything. Win here and see what happens. To get a sense of the dread, though, and the feeling that

overcame the Athenians when they realized that the Darth Vader figure that people like Demosthenes had been warning about forever was finally upon them. Diodorus of Sicily, Diodorus Siculus writes about what happens when as tensions are sort of heating up, Philip makes a surprise move and seizes the initiative that puts Athens in a precarious position. And then the people in Athens find out about it. And Diodorus writes, quote,

Given that the Athenians were unprepared, there was, after all, a peace treaty in place between them and Philip. He was expecting an easy victory, and that is exactly what transpired. Some men, Diodorus writes, arrived one night in Athens with news of Philip's occupation of Elade and of his imminent arrival in Attica with his forces.

The Athenian generals had not been expecting anything like this, and in a state of shock they summoned the trumpeters and told them to keep sounding the alarm all night long. By the time word had spread to every household, the city was alert with fear, and the first thing in the morning the entire population converged on the theater without waiting for the customary proclamation by the archons.

when the generals arrived they introduced one of the men who had brought the information and after he had said his piece a fearful silence gripped the theatre none of the men who usually address the assembly dared to offer any advice

And although the herald called repeatedly for people to recommend courses of action that might save them all, not a single speaker came forward. In a state of great uncertainty and fear, the people kept looking towards Demosthenes. End quote. So Demosthenes says we got to get Thebes working with us. Thebes and Athens joined forces, raised their militaries, rushed to this

Carinia site in the area around Thebes, you know, Boeotia, that area. And they get to have it out for all the marbles with this amazing figure of a man who is commanding an army now that we should pay attention to is not the same army of 20 years ago or almost 20 years ago.

By the time Carinia happens in 338, this reform of the Macedonian army that Philip started to pursue when he took over as king, it's been going on like 18, 19 years. And this army has been fighting continually. And he's been adding new elements and innovations and applying learned lessons from battlefield encounters into reforms. I mean, this is an army now that is terrifying.

especially to these armies like the Thebans and the Athenians who are going to raise these militia armies that have generally a small core, like in the Theban army, they have the Theban sacred band, professionals, but there's 300 of them. It's nothing. And then maybe they hire some mercenaries too to help because there's a lot of mercenaries running around.

But a lot of these troops are guys, as we said earlier, who, you know, put on the armor and grab the traditional family weaponry and show up there as the militia to do battle with a bunch of professionals.

Then you add the command factor. One of the things that just bedevils a person who's interested in Greek military history is that so much of the political side of places like Athens bled into things like military command. Their political system essentially liked to elect generals and then keep moving them around all the time. And, you know, don't let anybody get too powerful, but...

There's a famous line quoted, I forgot which of the ancient sources mentioned it, but Philip is supposed to have marveled in the fact that the Athenians could come up with like 10 good generals a year because that's how many they had to elect. He goes, well, I've only found one good one in my whole life. He was talking about Parmenio.

But when you add the fact that they're going to have a professional army facing an army that has a lot of people who are not professionals in it, you're going to have them commanded by people with tons of experience. The Macedonian Corps of Generals reminds one of like the guys around Napoleon.

you know, all of his great general staff people. Alexander's got a similar thing. And in this era, Philip's got him with him and they're going to survive him and they're going to help Alexander. This is sort of the hidden part of the Alexander Maserati secret weapon here is the fact that these generals provide a ton of institutional memory and

And they're all very good. And a bunch of them will actually, as we said earlier, go on to found dynasties where tons of their descendants will rule for centuries. So these are very august people. And they're contrasted with people who are, as we said, elected political. I mean, it's that's a washout, too, right? And, you know, when we talk about these professional versus militia armies or these armies that fight all the time versus the kind that only get called up

you know, once a decade. Athens hasn't done a lot of fighting with their citizen militia in a while. I use a lot of mercenaries, but according to the sources, Athens raises its age where they want you to show up at the battlefield to 50 years old for this battle. I'm going to say that that shows a level of concern. Um, that's rather desperate. If you're pulling the 50 year olds out to the battlefield, um,

to face you know the young killers in the macedonian army um that's a little scary and here's the thing scarier in the ancient world than now i mean if you told me that we were going to put together a volksturm of 50 year old plus guys but you were going to arm them with high powered rifles or something and send them out there to do something that that's a force that can do something

Maybe one could argue that some of the predominantly bow-armed armies in the world, I mean, the Persians use a lot of bow, for example. Maybe those people could get out there and fight at 50 and be effective. But both the Greeks in this period and the Macedonians, they get at you. I mean, it's physical. There's going to be, you know, close-range stabbing and fighting and wrestling and martial arts and the whole thing.

Both sides go into this battle expecting that. And when that's the case, while a lot of the ancient sources talk about the value of having the older guys in the unit, right, having them in the phalanx, they're a steadying force, they're veterans, they know how this stuff goes. They've got, you know, actual experience they can draw on to calm the young folks and whatever. But at certain points in this battle, again, the sourcing for this battle is going to make it really tough to piece together, although that hasn't stopped generations of people from trying.

But there are accounts where it suggests that it was a very long, drawn-out battle and that this was totally to the advantage of the Macedonians because even if a bunch of older guys, and, you know, we should think of mixed units, there's going to be younger guys too, but even if a bunch of older guys can still manage to bring it like they used to for a certain period of time, if the battle goes on a long time, this is a physical fitness war at a certain point.

And some of these 50-year-old, 49-year-old guys are going to tap out after a while. And if only one side's using 49 or 50-year-old guys, well, okay, I see a problem potentially right there. There's a great line from the 1950s movie about Alexander the Great starring Richard Burton as Alexander. And I tried to find the line in my history books, figuring that the screenwriters lifted it from one of the classical sources and

I couldn't find it. That doesn't mean it's not there, but maybe the script writers wrote it. It's fantastic, though. Spoiler alert, it has Philip after the Battle of Chaeronea, after he's defeated the Athenians, and he's walking around Athens amongst these defeated Athenians, past all the fantastic classical statues that all look like

Olympians, right, with the fantastic musculature. They look like perfect human specimens. And in the movie, the actor playing Philip looks at the defeated Athenians, motions to the statues and says, where were all these physiques at Chaeronea?

Now, let's talk a little about the battle, though, in terms of what we know. Such an important battle, you'd think we'd know more, and you can pick up a bunch of history books and feel like you know quite a bit unless you compare them to each other. That's when you realize, wait a minute, these guys have completely different takes on this battle.

What's more, they've been arguing about some of the key points that are, well, still argued about for more than 100 years. Hans Delbruck's got it in his book, and I love the way he actually breaks down one of these central questions about the battle, just as relevant today, by the way. But the main source is Diodorus Siculus. He's writing it more in an adventure sort of tone as opposed to giving us a sense of, okay, tell me where all the units were. Let me get an idea of the terrain, that sort of thing.

Ian Worthington in his book By the Spear sort of sets up a best guess at the numbers in ancient history, battlefield numbers and army strengths is something, well, you shouldn't take it with a grain of salt. You should take it with a whole big old barrel of salt. But, you know, sometimes you, you know, even if it's not true, you must believe in ancient history, right? Here's how Ian Worthington sort of sets the stage for this pivotal, one of the most important battles in the history of ancient Greece, Battle of Chaeronea in 338.

The Greek coalition troops numbered 30,000 infantry and 3,800 cavalry and were commanded by the Athenian generals Charis, Lysicles, and Stratocles, and the Theban general Theogenes. Boeotia provided 12,000 hoplites, including the elite sacred band, and the Athenians 6,000 citizen soldiers to age 50, and 2,000 mercenaries.

Demosthenes, who had the phrase, good luck, which sounds a little sarcastic, I've read also good fortune, emblazoned in gold letters on his shield, was one of the infantrymen in the Athenian contingent. Philip commanded 30,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry, composed of 24,000 Macedonians and the rest from Thessaly and Phocis, or Phocis, end quote. Theodorus Siculus is the main account of the battle.

And he makes it sound as though, you know, the second that Demosthenes goes to convince Thebes to join the alliance with Athens, that it was on and the battle happened right away. But it was several months of jockeying and Philip still trying to pursue diplomacy. If you were trying to take a pro-Macedonian position here, you might say, hey, Philip kept trying to make a deal, didn't want it this way. Whereas the people on the allied Greek side would say Philip was trying to pry us apart so

so that he didn't have to face us, but eventually, of course, it comes down to the battle, and this is how Diodorus Siculus has it set up and how it goes. I'm using the excellent Robin Waterfield translation of Diodorus, by the way, and the author has Diodorus saying, quote,

At daybreak, the armies were drawn up for battle. Philip posted his son Alexander on one of the wings. He was only a teenager, but was already well known for his martial spirit and forceful energy, and gave him his most senior officers in support, while he took command of the other wing at the head of the crack troops, and deployed all the other individual units as the situation demanded.

The Athenians, for their part, divided their forces by nationality, entrusting one wing to the Boeotians and taking command of the other themselves." Then Diodorus has the battle happening and Alexander sort of having the initial success, which he says prompted Alexander's dad to then compete with him. Well, judge for yourself, but here's how the actual account of the battle in the best account that we have of the battle describes it. Quote,

A fearsome prolonged engagement ensued. So many men fell on both sides that for a while the battle allowed them both equally to anticipate victory. But Alexander was eager to put on a display of valor for his father, and he was in any case excessively ambitious. And besides, there were many good men fighting alongside him in support, so it was he who was the first to create a breach in the enemy lines.

he slew so many of those who were ranged opposite him that the line was wearing thin and since his companions were being just as effective the enemy formation as a whole was constantly in danger of being breached the bodies were lying in heaps by the time alexander was first able to force the troops facing him to turn and flee

Next, Diodorus writes, it was Philip's turn to bear the brunt of the fighting. Refusing to yield the credit for victory even to Alexander, he first drove the enemy back by main force and then compelled them to turn and flee. Victory was his. End quote. Like many of the Athenians at the battle, Demosthenes ran away. They were driven through a narrow pass and

A couple thousand dead amongst the Thebans, a couple thousand amongst the Athenians, probably more taken prisoner. And one of the most consequential battles that have ever occurred in Greek history is over. Now, from that meager description that Diodorus gives and then another historian who's not even as good on this as Diodorus, the entire battle has been mapped out by some historians.

The arguments over what the tactics were and how it played out have been going on for well over 100 years. And the ones in Hans Delbruck's from more than 100 years ago, I think I still like the best. If I had to name the number one controversy, and it's still the number one controversy today, it was in Delbruck's time too, is the supposed backstepping of Philip and the Phalanx.

What they mean by that is there's a tradition that in order to destabilize the Athenians, either by making their line separate, right, one part of the line moving forward while the other stays still leaving a gap, or simply destabilizing because it has to move the formation in front of them that Philip and the phalanx backed up on the battlefield during the fighting.

You will find a lot of historians who will believe this. And I'm in no position to contradict them, but I am going to cite the wonderful Hans Dobro, who I love so much because he was able to arm his students with these weapons and drill them on the field and see how things go. And sometimes he just won't accept that.

nonsense. Now, I do think he undersells the capabilities of our ancestors to some degree and that some of what we know now about how the Romans functioned and some of these armies in the Chinese. I mean, I think he would find some of that intriguing and he'd have to, you know, modify some of his beliefs. But there are certain bedrock that

hardcore logic from a German military perspective before the First World War that just brings to these issues where you just find it hard to argue with. And here's what he says about the idea that Philip and the phalanx backed up on the battlefield while the battle was going on. And he says, quote, and by the way, this is in the footnotes where Dalbrook is arguing with his fellow German military historians about this question. And he writes, quote,

Since the above words were written, Kronmayr has studied the topography of the battlefield, and based on that study has attempted to make a more exact reconstruction of the battle in the above cited work. His reconstruction effort, however, completely failed, as Roloff, another historian, has proved in the work already cited, and Yvonne Stern has also recognized.

for the attempt is based on not only a completely insufficient and unreliable source materials, but also on the monstrous idea that Phillips' phalanx pulled back 600 meters without making a turn, he's quoting the other author now,

An individual man, Delbrook writes, can hardly move backwards 600 meters on good ground without stumbling. A phalanx that tried to do that, he writes, in the open field would very quickly end up with its men lying on the ground, one on top of the other.

When a unit moves backwards on the drill field, it can only go a few feet in the strictest drill formation of the back step. It is particularly characteristic that Cronmeyer's idea of an orderly back step movement by a close mass formation of 15,000 men is not just a possible accidental slip, but

but the author sought to justify his grotesque concept in detail. End quote. It's an example, though, of how wonderfully he did these what-really-happened-in-this-ancient-battle sort of conversations can get, and at the core of the issue, how ultimately unsolvable it all is, because we don't understand the physics of the ancient battlefield. More on that later in this story.

My favorite summation of what this battle meant to the history of ancient Greece, to the history of Philip, Alexander, Macedonia, and everything that's going to happen from this point out. My favorite account of this is again also, I guess I love the old classics, the Will Durant one where he sums up the stakes of what just happened and says, quote,

The results of Chaeronea were endless. The unity that Greece had failed to create for itself had been achieved, but only at the point of a half-alien sword. The Peloponnesian War had proved Athens incapable of organizing Hellas, meaning Greece. The aftermath had shown Sparta incapable. The Theban hegemony in its turn had failed. The wars of the armies and the classes had worn out the city-states and left them too weak for defense.

under the circumstances durant writes they were fortunate to find so reasonable a conqueror who proposed to withdraw from his scene of his victory and leave to the conquered a large measure of freedom indeed philip and alexander after him watchfully protected the autonomy of the federated states lest any one of them by absorbing others should grow strong enough to displace macedon

one great liberty however philip took away the right of revolution he was a frank conservative who considered the stability of property an indispensable stimulus to enterprise and a necessary prop to government

He persuaded the synod at Corinth to insert into the Articles of Federation a pledge against any change of constitution, any social transformation, any political reprisals. In each state, he lent his influence to the side of property and put an end to confiscatory taxation."

Durant kind of makes Philip II sound a little like a Reagan-era Republican there at the end of that quote. Maybe he's into supply-side economics, too. But, you know, Reagan sort of had a tough-guy image, sort of portraying a John Wayne-style character. And John Wayne, of course, was another actor portraying a sort of a cowboy character, right? A self-reliant, tough-but-fair, wouldn't-want-to-mess-with-him-or-get-him-mad-at-you kind of an American stereotype character.

Well, Philip II's not an actor playing that stereotype. Philip II is the cowboy. And after the Battle of Chaeronea, he treats the two main opponents that he just defeated quite differently. Athens gets treated lovely. They're so scared after the battle, we're told that they're ready to arm their slaves, conscript every guy up to 60 years old, frantically trying to get the defenses in order.

And then Philip shows up and Alexander's the one who actually brings the ashes after a while and says, we're not going to ransom your dead or ransom your prisoners, which is a huge deal. I said earlier, I think that a couple thousand Thebans and a couple thousand Athenians died. The ancient sources put that closer to a thousand each with about double that for prisoners. So that's a lot of money that Philip is turning down to make a good impression on this

state that he just defeated in battle and the athenians are so touched that they apparently put up a statue honoring philip which is a weird thing to do to a guy who just killed a thousand of your citizens and that demosthenes has been comparing you know to the guy who's going to snuff out greek freedom which he just kind of did but we'll put a statue up to him

But he's playing the long game here, right? These people all kind of work for him now, and he wants a little, you know, tranquility amongst his employees. And by working for him, I mean he's going to create this league that includes all these people as members. Thebes is not going to be treated as nicely as Athens, by the way. They were seen as...

allies who treacherously turned on the macedonians so philip was tough on them and he's sort of sending a message here right you be my friend you cooperate with me i can be very lenient and fair but you turn on me you go against my wishes you work against the you know collective cause here of the group and you'll pay the new group is called the league of corinth philip invites everyone the spartans don't show up but at this point in greek history nobody cares

The Spartans are not a major arbiter of power in Greece anymore, so when they decide to sort of thumb their nose at all this, it's fine with everyone. But this League of Corinth, which would probably be called the League of the Greeks, which I think is closer to its contemporary name, this is Philip's vehicle for controlling Greece.

And there are multiple different ways to look at it, because if you are worn out by essentially civil war for decades and decades and decades, maybe anybody who keeps the peace and protects all the Greek city-states from all the other Greek city-states is a hero. And that's sort of what this new arrangement requires, by the way. It's a wonderful example of, in history, which you don't often get, of collective security being imposed.

where the deal that everyone agrees to is that if anybody gets out of line and starts fighting, tries to conquer something, anything like that, the rest of the city-states and Macedonia all turn against them, show up on the battlefield with their soldiers and chastise them back into peaceful coexistence, collective security. It's a little like a NATO alliance if a NATO alliance were run by an authoritarian dictator.

But as we said, I mean, depends on your point of view. Demosthenes can paint Philip out to be this, you know, Al Capone like figure. Whereas if you're a small city state in Greece and you don't care one whit for who's wrestling over the top dog hegemony position, Thebes, Sparta, Athens, what does it matter to you? You just don't want to get your city rolled over as part of the wars.

What a guy like Philip is finally promising you is that it's going to be peaceful around here and safe. And because he does this almost instantly, I mean, first he establishes the league, then the league votes him the boss. And then he essentially makes the plan of the league to go and launch a revenge war against the historic enemies, the Persians, you know, Philip.

is not somebody who believes that old phrase justice delayed is justice denied he's fine getting them for what they did 150 years ago and he's going to use this league as the tool that creates a collective effort for that goal i mean this is the dream of the people who advocate pan-hellenism forever right unite the greeks enforce peace go get the persians we'll all be rich have slaves and you

you know, Greeks won't be killing Greeks and Greece will be ruling barbarians the way it's supposed to be. And here it is. It's not a perfect situation. I'm sure a lot of these pan-Hellenic philosophers would have preferred an unquestioningly Greek person to play the role of Philip, but they'll take what they can get. What did Durant call him? A half alien. But Philip is about to embark on...

this endeavor at 45 years old sure he's beat up sure he's likely to be involved in a lot of physical fights still to go but this is a guy who could live quite a bit longer most macedonians would want the greatest king by far in their history probably to get a chance to live quite a bit longer but that might not be a universal feeling and wouldn't that be a very macedonian thing too in this case

It's worth asking what Alexander's feeling at a moment like this, because at this point, there's not much that can stop what Philip's about to do here. He's poised to create a higher level of history than anyone from his part of the world has ever done. Not much can stop him, but his personal life can.

What's about to happen in this story is proof positive that the personal lives of people in the past can influence even the largest events. And you can see it all the time when you run into places where power is highly concentrated, especially if it's in a single individual.

then the drama in that single individual's life intersects with global geopolitical events, you know, that have ramifications for the entire rest of history. It's crazy how you can get a sort of, you know, real kings of Macedonia kind of, you know, real Beverly Hills housewives kind of feel to the whole thing.

But what's going to destroy Philip is not some enemy that can contend with his generalship or his, you know, machinations conducting realpolitik or his economic base that he's built over, you know, decades now ruling. What's going to hold Philip back and eventually destroy him is his personal life and his family life and who he sleeps with probably forever.

Let's start with the problem in his immediate household with his son. Having a father about to do what Philip is about to do here is a mixed blessing if you're looking at this from Alexander's point of view. I mean, Philip is in his mid-40s. He can live quite a bit longer, even battling from the front and even sucking up all the injuries he sucks up. This is a guy that doesn't necessarily have to go anywhere. Adrian Goldsworthy has a really interesting point in his book called

Philip and Alexander that at this point, you know, Philip has never said what chastising Persia is going to mean here. I mean, what is payback for the Persian Wars 150 years ago, 145 years ago? Is it the freeing of the Greeks who live on the coast of what's now modern day Turkey? Is that enough? Or is it taking all of what's now modern day Turkey or maybe the coastline around Syria and Lebanon and all? I mean, where does it stop?

Maybe you want to take all the west of Persia, or maybe you just want to fight some battles against the great king of Persia and see how it goes and adjust your goals accordingly. Nobody knows what Philip's trying to do here, and nobody knows whether Alexander is a part of those plans or not. Can you imagine if Alexander gets left at home to be the regent who rules Macedonia when nothing's going on in Macedonia as his father goes out and conquers the world?

In Philip versus Alexander, Adrian Goldsworthy puts it this way. And you just imagine how much money a counselor or a psychologist who could get this son, father and mother anywhere near his psychiatry couch, how much money. I mean, that's a twice a week problem right there. Maybe three times a week visits. I mean, Adrian Goldsworthy writes about the prospect of Philip being

you know, going out there and conquering the world and maybe even leaving Alexander at home, quote, Alexander was bound to resent this. The 19-year-old prince was impatient, quick-tempered, determined, and obsessively competitive. All of his future career testifies to these traits, as well as a strong streak of suspicion and jealousy.

whether or not the story is true of his regretting each success won by his father as one less victory he might win alexander's relationship with philip was made all the more complicated and tense because both craved glory even by the standards of their age goldsworthy writes they were fiercely competitive

the father because he'd already done so much and craved even more, and the son because his father's deeds had set the bar for being the best even higher than before. For all his prodigious talent, we should not expect exceptional emotional maturity from the young prince, who struggled to cope with playing a supporting role. He knew that his future depended on his father." Unless something happened to his father...

which is when Philip's personal life makes a situation that seems so well set up on his part, established on a bed of sand. First, there's the marriage for love. If that's really what it was, then,

But it's portrayed to me, Diodorus straight up says she was too young for him. It's almost portrayed like a man having a midlife crisis, right? In his mid-40s, about to launch this giant expedition. At the top of his game, though, already, nobody's even done what I've done already. And I'm in the prime of life, poised to, you know, build on this. And he falls in love with a teenager, is the way the ancient sources like Diodorus portray it.

Her name is Cleopatra. Not the Cleopatra that fooled around with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. That's way in the future. But Cleopatra is a very common traditional Macedonian name. In fact, Alexander the Great's sister's name is Cleopatra. And Philip takes this wife supposedly because he loves her.

She's likely a teenager. Richard Gabriel thinks she might be as old as 22, but if she's 22, why is everybody making a big deal about her age? A 22-year-old queen would not raise anyone's eyebrows. She's probably a teenager. She is also probably his seventh wife. The number of wives that Philip has is always a little bit hard to pin down, but teenage, seventh wife. And if he really married her for love, that would be unusual for him.

This is a guy who usually marries to cement diplomatic relationships or to finalize peace treaties or to blend his important family with other important families. And there's a good reason to marry her for those reasons. She's the niece of an important Macedonian named Attalus. And Attalus is from an old family in lower Macedonia, the sort of people that if

Philip wants to make sure the home front, remember Macedonian history, is safe while he's gone away to Asia maybe for years on this endeavor, but that it's nailed down. Well, maybe you want to marry your family into some of the powerful barons of lower Macedonia. So maybe that's more what's going on here, but it's portrayed as a guy who

you know, wants to buy a Ferrari and, you know, get a new trophy wife. He doesn't have to get rid of his old wives. That's the difference between Philip and someone today. He can keep them all. Doesn't necessarily make him happy, though. And Plutarch has this marriage to this Cleopatra teenager get Olympias angry.

And Plutarch says that she puts ideas into Alexander's head, worries him about what this means. And, you know, in a situation where it doesn't matter to us, it's easy for us to look at this and say, what on God's green earth would Alexander have to be worried about here?

So his father's going to marry a teenager. She's going to maybe give him a child. It may be a son, right? So already there's a bunch of maybes. But if it's a son, Alexander's like 19, almost 20 years old. This kid's not going to be a threat to him for quite a long time. Why would you care? But he cares.

He supposedly had complained to his dad once before about fathering children, you know, saying something like, you know, what about me? And his father said back to him, what about you? You know, be the best and you'll get the job. And if they're better, they should have the job, that kind of thing. But there could be other reasons why you don't get the job. So far, everything had seemed pretty good between father and son. But then Philip's personal life comes into the picture again, this time with

with one of the more famous drinking parties in history, if this drinking party really happened and if it really unfolded the way it's come down to history, geopolitically speaking, it's hard to get your mind around how important it might have been. And you do try to resist the temptation to

Keep Dionysus out of this, but this is what Dionysus does, right? The God comes in and messes with stuff and he manifests...

you know, a reality maybe that in normal times people would want to keep hidden and secret. And, you know, there are certain things you just shouldn't say in polite company, especially to the people they're about. But then Dionysus loosens your tongue through the unmixed wine. And all of a sudden you're saying crap at a party that is so important to future geopolitical histories that we're still talking about it more than 2000 years later.

But Philip has a drinking party to celebrate the marriage, and he's there, and Alexander's there, and the uncle of the bride, Athalus, is there.

When we talked about the tendency of the Macedonians to have drinking parties a little earlier, I think I undercut what I was trying to say about the way the drinking parties go and made it seem like two competitors who want to have a drink off against each other could sit there with tureens over their head and drink wine. I made it sound like maybe they could just sip

And the first one who couldn't handle anymore stopped. These are chugga-lug contests. These are like you have to breathe while you're chugga-lugging. And the first person that falls to the ground, passed out, loses or dies. Sometimes people died.

So these are serious drinking contests, which means Dionysus has a serious chance to get involved in the proceedings. And Dionysus loosens the tongue, we're going to assume it was not meant to come out, of the bride's uncle Attalus. At the feast, he offers a toast. And the toast is that the gods...

provide a legitimate heir, a Macedonian heir for the throne of Macedonia, which might have just gone into the room and passed by everybody and just been seen as a normal toast for a, you know, uncle of the bride to make at a fine wedding dinner like this. But that's not how Alexander perceived it. And he threw his cup at Atlas and in this room of stunned, intoxicated men.

Warriors, dignitaries and friends said, you villain, are you calling me a bastard? Everything is about to go to hell in a handbasket. The room's going to explode. Philip gets up off the couch, pulls his sword and goes after Alexander and then falls on his face. It's interesting to go and read about the various theories of how debilitating the

Philip's various maladies were but he certainly had at at the least a limp maybe it was even worse than that and he had to swing his leg around just to move but a clearly wasted Philip the second can't even pass from one couch to another without falling and Alexander issues one of the most famous burns and the whole Alexandrian story when he tells the whole room look everybody

the man who's preparing to cross from europe to asia can't cross from one couch to another there are a lot of ways to view something like this first of all we should ask the obvious history detective kind of question is did it ever happen it seems relatively safe you got to say that about ancient history relatively safe that some sort of rift develops between alexander and philip at this point and via alexander also olympius

But whether or not the stories that a guy like Plutarch tells to explain how it happened are true is anyone's guess. The problem is when you have so little to go on, you still analyze the stuff, even though you don't know whether you can confirm it or not. And people have dissected

this public event that maybe happened most important drinking cocktail party ever maybe uh if that's what really happened and they've dissected it and tried to figure out what it means what does it mean when philip draws a sword goes after his son well some accounts sort of suggest that what really happened is that philip told alexander to apologize to atlas he refused to apologize which is like defying a direct order from the king so you know philip drew on him

But there's a lot of legitimate questions historians have pointed out. I think it was David Ogden who said basically, you know, why wasn't there more public support by Philip at the time? Right. If somebody makes some claim about a legitimate heir in front of the legitimate heir or the perceived legitimate heir and his dad and, you know, a whole bunch of dignitaries, wouldn't the dad say right there and then now, wait a minute, we have a legitimate heir or something. And by not doing that, you know,

You take an already kind of suspicious guy, Alexander, maybe, and make him more suspicious. And then if he wasn't suspicious enough to begin with, he's got a mom who can perhaps act as a little gasoline thrown on that fire. A lot of ways you can see this. If I was going to try to see it from a fierce devotee of Dionysus, which maybe his mom was, I would say that Dionysus was showing you the minds of your adversaries, right?

He was ripping away the masks of these people who want to hurt you. And via the drink, he had them expose their ambitions and their plans and their schemes to you. That's the way I like to see it because it's the better story, which brings us to another great way to see this.

Just as likely as any of the rest, I suppose, it's the one several ancient historians latch on to, which is that what's about to happen to Philip is going to be because he messed with maybe the one person in this story strong enough to resist him, Olympias.

If this drinking party did happen, it is afterwards that the part of the rift that seems pretty safe to say happened, happens. And Alexander, for whatever reason, leaves Macedonia with his mom. They go together back to the old homeland.

which might be more significant than I've made it out to be, because some of the ways that this nasty toast by Attalus has been interpreted is that he's sort of

implying that Alexander's not really a full Macedonian and it may be, you know, Macedonia would be better off with a full Macedonian. And here's the thing. He's not wrong. It's easy to forget that Alexander's half, um, Epirot or Epirot or a pirate, take your choice. And from his mother's people stems from a different location. And what's funny about

sort of cultural superiority and prejudice and bigotry is that the Greeks can feel that the Macedonians to the north of them are barbarians and culturally backward and uncouth and all these sorts of things. And the Macedonians can bristle at that.

But then from the Macedonian perspective, farther northwest of them is, you know, Melossi and those places that the Macedonians are just as sniffy and prejudicial and biased and bigoted towards those people and almost with the exact same adjectives about them as the Greeks are about the Macedonians. So how wonderfully human is all that?

But if Attalus did imply that wouldn't it be nice to have 100% Macedonian king to follow Philip, I'd imagine that that might play well among Attalus and the other barons from the very, very Macedonian part of lower Macedonia.

And Alexander doesn't help things when he, you know, runs away for his own safety. And where does he go? Up to, you know, his mother's country. And then from there to the Illyrians, which are the historical enemy of the Macedonians. But he's got kin among those people, too, apparently. So it's not a good look, right?

Sort of look like you're backing up the point of Adalys saying, you know, where's the first place this half Melossian goes when the, you know, going gets tough to Melossia. It doesn't stay here. So where are his real loyalties, right?

But Philip has allowed, and the ancient sources are hard on him, Philip has allowed his personal life here to completely undercut his geopolitical goals that he's been working for forever. I mean, he finally gets Greece where he wants it, right? United, not fighting amongst itself, going to support him now on this mission to Asia. This is the crowning glory moment of this guy's life. And the sand from the foundation underneath his feet is beginning to just blow away.

Plutarch tells a story of a Greek friend of Philip's from Corinth showing up around this time period and Philip asking him whether or not they were getting along well in Greece now that he's created the conditions where it will be fatal to not get along anymore in Greece. And his Greek friend says something to the effect of, it doesn't look good if you're asking whether or not the Greeks are all getting along when you've got dissension and catastrophe in your own family and the implied consequences

suggestion here is that it's your own fault too which maybe it is i mean tradition has him sort of having the midlife crisis falling in love with the teenager and that messing everything up which would be just another story winded of a powerful man who gets you know undercut by his less than logical choices shall we say especially sexually

Or this marriage to this young bride from lower Macedonia might be exactly what the country needs and just as much a political and diplomatic act and coup as the earlier marriages that Philip was involved in. The potential exists, and some historians bring this up, that what's really going on here is Alexander and Olympias just freaking out over essentially nothing.

But the bottom line is it doesn't matter what it is. If a real rift has occurred, Philip has to fix that. And so he does. He invites Alexander back and apparently organizes a royal wedding to sort of reestablish the relationship. You know how some people will get second marriages to sort of renew their vows? Well, Philip doesn't do that, but he does the next best thing with Olympias. He marries off their daughter.

that they have together. Cleopatra is her name, as I said, and she's Alexander's full sister. And so there's going to be a royal wedding where, you know, the unhappy couple, Philip and Olympia, sort of come together for a wedding of their daughter. And just to keep it in the family and make sure that we show that it's not just no hard feelings against Olympia. It's no hard feelings against you people in Melosia either. It's going to be a royal wedding with the king of that kingdom, the king of Olympia.

Epirus, Epirus, Epirus, choose your name, who also confusingly enough, because they seem to have never enough names in the baby book in any of these ancient societies, his name is Alexander II, Alexander of Epirus. And he is the full uncle of his bride. And like his sister, maybe had slept with Philip II himself, which is part of the Macedonian tradition

If you were a genealogist in Macedonian society, you would just be driven crazy by all the affairs or alleged affairs. There's a lot of gossip in the royal house, so who knows? But when Alexander of Epirus was a young man, sort of like a Batman-Robin relationship, if that weren't entirely straight-edged,

Philip may have, you know, fooled around with him. So he fooled around with Olympias, obviously, and begat Alexander and maybe with Olympias, his brother. And now he's going to marry off his full daughter with Olympias to Olympias, his brother. I mean, again, genealogist head explodes.

But you can see how a royal wedding of this caliber would be huge. And so Philip invites everyone. Ever been to one of those parties where everybody's allowed to invite people themselves? But Philip wants everybody there. He's going to throw a massive festival, multiple days. It sounds like music, great food, entertainment, the whole thing.

And it's ostensibly for this wedding, so everybody's choreographed into it and plays a part. But it's really going to turn out to be more of a festival for Philip. And to sort of bring the Greeks on board, like, now we're all on the same side. Let's celebrate. We'll renew our vows to each other as, you know, League of Corinth, this whole thing. And then we'll go, you know, conquer Persia. It's a crowning moment for a guy like Philip and sort of a chance for him to finally, you

you know, take a breath here after a whole career of just toil and enjoy the moment. And Diodorus says that he first goes to the great oracle, Adelphi, Apollo's oracle. And of course, Apollo speaks through a female prophetess, the Pythia.

And famously, you want to be careful about your interpretation, shall we say, of what an oracle tells you. They often are much more accurate after the fact. Right. When you look back and you go, oh, I see what they meant. They were right again. There's a magic eight ball sort of feel to some of them.

And famously, for example, when the king of Lydia asked the oracle if he should attack the Persian empire, the oracle told him, listen, if you attack the Persian empire, you will destroy a great empire, which he took to mean, yeah, go do it. And he did it and he did destroy a great empire, but it was his empire, unfortunately. And you would think stories like that would give ample warning to a guy like Philip who goes to the oracle and the Pythia tells him when he says, should I attack Persia? Quote,

The bull is reef. Its end is nigh. The sacrificer is at hand. End quote. Now, in hindsight, that looks like an accurate magic eight ball prediction. But ahead of time, it might have looked more like, you know, one of those things. All signs point to yes or something a little bit more amorphous. I'm not sure I'd roll the dice on a

unclear prediction like that but philip takes it in the best possible way assumes that the bull means the persian king and they're ready to be sacrificed and he's the guy at hand to do it and so he you know organizes his party and deodorus says does all these sacrifices after the oracle gives him the good news and writes quote

He, Philip, therefore lost no time in performing magnificent sacrifices to the gods and celebrating the marriage of Cleopatra, his daughter by Olympias, to Alexander, the king of Epirus, and Olympias' full brother. As well as honoring the gods, he wanted as many Greeks as possible to enjoy the festivities, so he laid on splendid musical contests and spectacular banquets for his friends and intimates.

From all over Greece he invited those who were closest to him, and he told his friends to ask as many as possible of their acquaintances from abroad to come, for he particularly wanted to show favor to the Greeks and to repay the honor they had granted him of supreme command with the appropriate courtesies. Theodorus continues, quote,

The upshot was that large numbers of people poured in from every quarter to the festival. The contests and the marriage took place, he mentions in the capital, in Macedon. And Philip was awarded golden crowns, not just by distinguished individuals, but also by the majority of the important cities.

Athens was one of them, he says, and when the herald proclaimed this crown, the last thing he said was that anyone who plotted against King Philip and sought refuge in Athens would be extradited to him. By means of this spontaneously prophetic utterance, Diodorus says, the gods were clearly indicating, as though by divine foresight, that a plot was imminently to be launched against Philip's life."

Here is the thing about a guy like Philip.

We've mentioned the word mafia and organized crime a lot to deal with the Macedonian royal dynamic, but this guy is like a mafia Don. He's powerful and he's feared and he's in danger at all times. And sometimes some of the most satisfying moments in life can come right before the hit men come in and machine gun you all at the table while you're eating pasta and smoking cigars and having a nice Chianti.

What's about to occur is the prototype for all the great conspiratorial, multilayered, whodunit, heads of state assassination stories for the rest of time. I mean, the John F. Kennedy assassination is nothing but a pale shadow of what's about to happen in this country.

theater that's been deliberately set up, paid for and established so that this affair can happen and Philip can have this moment in the sun that is, you know, long awaited for, much deserved. But once again, it's very possible that unlike major geopolitical events that we expect will move the needle in terms of the way history breaks like a wave, that

Sometimes when you get into these places where, as we said, power is concentrated, especially in one person, the seemingly most personal, most intimate sorts of events can end up literally toppling demigods. And in this case, it may come from Philip having a relatively common, it sounds like sort of homosexual affair with a young man and then

deciding he liked some younger, handsomer man instead. Now, this is partly what makes ancient history so fun. There's an old line from a play, I think it was, that the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. It's a great line. But some countries are like Canada,

And others are like Easter Island, right? Canada, they do things a little differently. Easter Island, you're going to, it's a major life change. Um, if I told you that some general, some four-star general head of the joint chiefs of staff or major world leader was having an affair, a heterosexual affair, um,

You would say, OK, well, that's not all that surprising. And if I said that they got rid of girlfriend number one for a younger version of her, you'd probably think to yourself, OK, this is just a good gossip column story for, you know, my tabloid newspaper. I want to sit down and get some popcorn and read up on what's going on with them.

The homosexuality angle, though, is what turns this into a story that just makes it part of this time and this place. And it's hard to get your mind around the sexuality situation anyway, because sometimes you'll run into sources that make it sound like things are frowned upon, other times like

that they're common. So I can't figure out when one line is crossed or another one isn't, but there are some weird things about the, a better way to phrase it would probably be homosexual behavior or pansexuality in this period. And it's that it mixes elements you don't see very much anymore. For example, the kind of people we're talking about involved in the homosexual acts when we talk about the king of Macedonia or these Macedonian nobles,

are hard-bitten killers, hand-to-hand killers. These are alpha males, if we want to use the parlance of our time. Extremely masculine, major drinkers and party animals and comrades who are tough as nails and who make up

Almost certainly the greatest army of their time, one of the greatest armies in the ancient world, one of the most famous armies in history. These are men's men, but that can mean numerous things, can't they?

The point is, is you don't normally see the equivalent of your four-star generals or, you know, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or whatnot involved in some sort of a homosexual love triangle. But, you know, the past is a different country and they do things differently there. And in Macedonia, there wasn't a lot of reaction to Philip having these affairs. I mean, you don't see Olympias being too angry about them, right? It's not bothering her.

In fact, if you're looking at this from an Olympius viewpoint, I like looking at it from multiple viewpoints. Again, I'm seeing this all working out towards my benefit, and Dionysus is looking after his own, right? This is why you pray to a God like Dionysus, because when you need him, he comes through, and there's going to be another incident involving wine.

That leads to a chain of events that one could see as working out very well for Olympias and Alexander too. This guy that Philip is having the affair with is named Pausinias.

As yet another wonderful example that the Macedonians need more names in their baby book, the person in the story besides Pausanias is also named Pausanias. So both of these lovers of Philip are named Pausanias. I said he had a type with women, right? He likes his warrior women and he likes his enchantresses. Well, with guys, he likes his Pausaniases.

So Pausanias one is the original guy that Philip is having the affair with, and he's thrown aside for Pausanias two. So he runs around spreading malicious gossip about Pausanias two. We would call it slut shaming today. And once again, it's hard to figure out where the line between, uh,

OK, behavior in the minds of all these people versus something that should be ridiculed is sometimes it can even involve, you know, sexual position. So I'm going to leave that to people who are more intelligent and well versed on the subject than I am. It is interesting to know, though, that when Pausanias won the

says, you know, awful things about Pausanias 2, to our modern minds, we would be going, wait a minute, didn't Pausanias 1 just do those same things? Nonetheless, it was so mortifying to Pausanias 2 that he went to someone he was apparently close to, the bride, Cleopatra's uncle, the guy that Alexander threw the cup at, Attalus, and said, I can hardly live with myself. This guy is, you know, making me out to be this

awful person. So I'm going to go prove that I'm not an awful person, that I'm an admirable, honorable person. And he goes out into a battle, we're told, where Philip is fighting his old enemies, the Illyrians, and

And the Illyrians are about to kill Philip. And instead, Pausanias, too, jumps in front of him, takes all of the slings and arrows meant for Philip, dies heroically. But it's really like a suicide to prove that he was a good man. And this upsets Attalus, who then wants to get even with Pausanias, one for putting Pausanias, too, in a position where Pausanias, too, had to throw his life away. And so Attalus involves Pausanias, one, two, three.

You guessed it, a place where they could have a little wine. And this is where the sources diverge a little bit. Some suggest that Attalus already had a sexual affair or sexually abused Pausanias I in the past. Some of the sources suggest that he gets Pausanias I drunk at this get-together and rapes him here and now.

And maybe he lets his friends also do it. And then all the sources say that after he rapes him or just gets him dead drunk, he throws him to the stable boys so that they can all do that to him. And of course, you know, telling everybody's friends, doing the equivalent of posting it on the Macedonian Facebook page or whatever, right? MySpace page, probably way back then.

So everybody knows, right? So if Pausanias too had to throw his life away because Pausanias one said a few probably not true slurs about him. How's Pausanias one feeling now? Where's his reputation? So he goes back to the old boyfriend, Philip, and asked for redress of grievances. Attalus did this stuff to me. What are you going to do about it? And the sources say Philip admitted it was wrong and he felt bad about it, but he needs Attalus.

Maybe that's why he even married his daughter, right? He needs this guy. This guy is going to be one of the commanders, by the way, who right around the same time period goes and essentially in a very sort of a laid back, quiet way starts the invasion of Persia. 10,000 Macedonians go and establish a bridgehead over in Persian society, waiting for Philip and the rest of the army to follow. So that's how close that invasion is to where we are in the story right now.

So Philip is in a position here where he can't satisfy Pausanias' demands on how severe he wants him to be on Attalus without screwing up his long-term conquest goals here. So he tries to sort of buy Pausanias off, right? Gives him precious gifts, we're told, and stuff. Promotes him to higher positions of authority, maybe even bodyguard, which may explain some of the story coming up a little bit.

But the sources say that this isn't enough for Pausanias. Aristotle, writing a near contemporary, just it's a blurb from his treatise Politics, just mentions this, quote, The plot hatched by Pausanias against Philip arose from the latter's allowing Pausanias to be sexually assaulted by Attalus and his men, end quote.

Even though it may sound like it, that's not saying that Pausanias is blaming Philip for allowing him to be sexually assaulted. He's blaming Philip for not doing anything about it afterwards, for letting Attalus and his men get away with it, laugh about it afterwards. And Pausanias is out for vengeance, we are told. It's also possible that this revenge needed to be public, that the people that

Pausanias had been shamed in front of reputationally. We're going to be the kind of people that would be, you know, at a public event, and it's important maybe that they know that he was the one involved. There's a story where Pausanias is supposed to have asked his professor once what the best way to become famous was. And the professor is supposed to have told Pausanias that

by killing somebody who is famous, right? Then you forever link your lives together, right? Anytime they bring up the famous person, they'll bring up the person who ended the famous person. You become part of their story. Well, if you really wanted your revenge to get attention, there just happens to be a party going on in a theater where all...

All of the people that matter have been invited and are waiting for some sort of a statement. They think the statement's going to come from the guy getting all the gold crowns and all the honors heaped on him, but maybe the statement's going to come from a different direction. We are told that Philip had the audacity, Diodorus portrays it as almost sacrilegious,

to have 12 ivory and gold statues made of the principal Greek gods in the Greek pantheon so that they could be, you know, part of the ceremonies. And he has a 13th ivory and gold statue matching the 12 gods made of himself. And maybe something like that is a little like Icarus flying too close to the sun. Maybe you're tempting fate there.

There's a wonderful tradition that they supposedly practiced during Roman times where whenever a Roman got to celebrate a triumph, right? One of those moments in their life where they were honored in parades and all those kinds of things, that there was a assistant whose job at these things was to whisper into the ear of the person being honored with the triumph, remember that you're human too.

just to keep his feet a little on the ground, keep him from getting a little too carried away with himself, remind him that, you know, we exist here and now at the pleasure of, well, make your choice, the gods or fate or chance, or maybe you exist until your enemies can get to you. And the event that is about to occur here is so famous that

So salacious, so interesting from a conspiratorial angle, involves one of the greatest figures of his time, the father of one of the greatest figures of all time, who only becomes the king because his father dies. And this is the event where his father dies. I mean, this is such an enormous moment that you would think you'd have several different firsthand contemporary accounts to go by here.

and compare and contrast with each other. I mean, if nothing else, Philip has invited the entire glitterati here, all the journalists, all the tastemakers, all the important people. I mean, there you would think would be a lot of people who'd sit down, a bunch of these playwrights, whatever, and write this stuff down. And instead we have the usual suspects, you know, writing hundreds of years later, hopefully using sources closer to, you know, the time and place.

Diodorus is the closest to the one I've always liked because it's the most cinematic and weird and puts Philip in this strange situation where he's almost thrown his own assassination party. He's created an event that's highly choreographed with tons of symbolism with himself sort of at the center of the whole thing.

in a form of kind of blood theater where the star of the show, Philip, has apparently not been given the last page of his script, right? He doesn't realize he dies at the end. He doesn't realize this is blood theater until the blood starts flowing.

The idea that his killer might have been a jilted lover involved in a sexual crime is the sort of thing one can see every TMZ-like gossip columnist for 2,400 years or something latching onto and writing about. And yet again, the sources are not plentiful.

then there's the fact that it's possible that the assassin is only in a position to do what he does, you know, to have proximity to Philip here, because it might have been one of the

Things that Philip threw at him as a way to mollify him over what happened with Adalas. Listen, I know it's bad here. Take these precious gifts and I'll make you a bodyguard or I'll give you a backstage pass. Come right down on the theater stage with me, you know, when I'm giving all the gold crowns, right? So you put the assassin in the position to do what he did. The Diodorus version of this is the one that turns this into a giant...

cinematic event. And I like the way historian Ian Worthington in his book By the Spear, Philip II, Alexander the Great and the Rise and Follow the Macedonian Empire. I like the way he puts it into words and then intersperses Diodorus a little bit into his narrative. And he writes, quote, The spectators began cramming into the theater at dawn and settled down in excitement over the day's events.

They were soon greeted by a grand procession in which first appeared statues of the 12 Olympian gods and then a splendid one of Philip, as if he were, quoting Diodorus, enthroned among the 12 gods. Then Philip, Worthington writes, Alexander the heir, meaning Alexander the Great, and Philip's new son-in-law, Alexander of Epirus, strode into the theater's orchestra,

Worthington calls this the performance area. It's kind of like center stage. The two Alexanders dutifully removed themselves to their seats so that Philip, dressed all in white, occupied center stage to the shouts and applause of all present.

The king turned to his personal bodyguards and told them to fall back so that he could, now quoting Diodorus, quote, show publicly that he was protected by the goodwill of the Greeks and had no need of a guard of spearmen. Such was the pinnacle of success that he had attained. End quote. Worthington continues.

suddenly as philip stood alone basking in all the glory one of his body-guards pausanias of oristus rushed from his position and before the horrified stares of the people stabbed the king in his chest and fled

Rousing themselves from their shock, Worthington writes, some of the other bodyguards tore after him, while others hastened to where Philip had collapsed. In his rush to get away, Pausanias fell over a vine, and three of the pursuing guards, without hesitation, speared him to death with their javelins. By the time they returned, carrying Pausanias's bloody corpse, Philip II was dead, his white attire crimson with his blood.

The theater, Worthington writes, dissolved into pandemonium as Alexander's friends grabbed their weapons to protect him in case he too was a target of assassination, end quote.

There are other accounts, probably not as close to good source material as Diodorus, that suggest that the assassination happened before Philip got to the center stage area, right? He's about to make his entrance and the assassin leaps out of an alcove and gets him. But it's all only made possible because Philip's bodyguards are not where they're supposed to be. And they're not there because he dismissed them. It's an interesting thing, isn't it?

Pausanias also has horses waiting, right? The ancient history version of the famous gangster getaway car. And at least some of the sources say multiple horses. So the conspiracy antennas, you know, go straight up on your head and you think multiple horses. Why are there multiple horses if there's one assassin? And so begins this, like I said, it makes the John F.K. assassination look interesting.

straightforward by comparison, because there are a lot of people that would like to see Philip dead, either because of what they would gain or over what they might not lose, right? Philip was poised to come and get some people, and it would be in their interest if

Well, he wasn't around to do that. And you could be forgiven if you're anybody in the world at this time period who thinks that without Philip, Macedonia just goes back to what it was from before Philip, right? Civil wars, assassinations, dynastic crises, whatever.

I mean, all rebellions, all the things that were part of what kept Macedonia down before this unbelievable singular figure, you know, took control will probably return. Right. The status quo, anti-Philip.

which is why Alexander being hailed almost right away is really important. And there's a general named Antipater who right away will sort of raise Alexander's hand. And this makes a huge difference because if this descends into some kind of succession crisis, all heck's going to break loose, right? Without the puppet master, what's going to happen in Greece? What's going to happen to the beachhead of 10,000 troops already in Persian territory ready for the invasion? I mean, there's a lot on the line here.

and that probably helped Alexander. But if you start applying the Roman legal idea of cui bono to this whole thing, right, who benefits? There's a lot of possible people pulling the strings of Pausanias. If Pausanias is just a patsy, he might not be. I mean, the idea of a jilted lover, angry, trying to get his honor back, that could be true.

But the stories and of course, Plutarch would be one of them. But he's not the only one in this case that have Olympias honoring the dead assassin afterwards. I mean, if you try to apply this and plug in all the circumstances here into the Kennedy assassination one, like a historical mad libs, look how look how weird it gets right away. I mean, JFK would have had to have been having a homosexual affair with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Dump Lee Harvey Oswald for some younger, cuter, you know, more exciting assassin, potential assassin, and then have Lee Harvey Oswald kill him for that reason. And then if you had, think about how weird this would be, if you had Jackie Kennedy going and honoring the dead Lee Harvey Oswald afterwards, that would be really weird, wouldn't it? And some sources have Olympias putting a crown on the corpse, honoring, I mean, just

It looks weird. And that's not to even mention the fact that the killer of Philip II, just like Lee Harvey Oswald, is wiped out so that there can be no long-term uncomfortable questions asked. I mean, in Oswald's case, it was a day or two later. Philip's assassin is dead.

Maybe before Philip's heart stops beating. I mean, two to four minutes later and anybody who could answer any questions about what just happened here isn't available anymore. Convenient. Pausanias number one has just been Jack Rubied. But in the sources, Olympias has always been sort of highly suspect. Our Jackie Kennedy in this story often has the finger of potential blame pointed at her.

She once again establishes her credentials as the most potentially dangerous person in this story if she just knocked off the king somehow. And all of a sudden, she and Alexander go from potentially frightened, endangered members of the royal family who may be soon to be sort of cut out of the succession to in charge, which is an enormous difference.

Needless to say. But then there are the Greeks. I mean, if you just lost a battle where you had 35,000 people and lost one or 2,000 of them at the battle and 2,000 more, I mean, and all the money and time and effort that took from your state, if you could just wipe out your problem with one lone assassin, well, think about how cost effective a move that would have been.

what was the line Demosthenes was supposed to have used when talking about, I think he was referring to thieves, but about the value of even delay here, because this situation revolves around one person. And the longer you string this affair out, the more time there is for, uh,

Well, as my grandmother used to say, for fate to have an opportunity to intervene, sickness can happen, death can happen, death did happen. So if the Greeks were behind trying to eliminate the guy who eliminated their freedom so they could get their freedom back, well, that wouldn't have surprised anybody, would it? You think Demosthenes might have been enticed to donate, you know, a few gold coins to that cause?

There are also sides of Alexander's family that it was rumored were starting to be seen as potential regents for Philip.

who could have a new son with the new wife, Cleopatra, but somebody's going to have to guard the son while he grows up. And that's what this other side of the family might have done, in which case you could throw Alexander aside now if you don't need him, if he's becoming too much problem, if he's a pain in the rear and you want to get rid of him and his troublesome sorceress mother. Well, maybe this other side of the family is the answer. So they're often implicated. And in fact, some of the people that will be put to death rather quickly afterwards are

Are those family members? But of course, if you're Alexander, you might have wanted to kill them anyway. Finally become king, you're going to settle a few scores, whether or not they killed your pop. And then there's the Persians. The Persians wouldn't have been looking to gain something from this. They would have been looking to prevent loss.

Because this expedition that Philip is, well, he's already launched it by 336. He dies in like July is the estimate in 336, right when Alexander's about to turn 20. It's not theoretical if he's going to attack Asia. He's already there with his bridgehead already attacking cities in Persian territory. So if you get rid of this guy and the traditional problems that keep Macedonia divided and unsettled and

Weak? Get back to normal? Well, you just dodged a bullet, right? You don't want to see the Greeks united for any reason. And if they are united, you want them united against Macedonia. To have them all working together in this League of Corinth is your worst nightmare. Fortunately, nobody is better at throwing money around to achieve geopolitical goals than the Achaemenid Persian Empire. And if they did that here, it would surprise nobody.

Later in his career, Alexander is actually supposed to have confronted the Persians via a letter directly about involvement in his dad's assassination. That could be propaganda, too, so you can't trust it. But one gets a sense that if Philip II ceased to exist, the Persians might be pretty happy about that. After all, what are the odds that's not going to be better for you? What are the odds of getting two Philip IIs in a row, you know, in the monarchy lottery?

They've got a 20 in blackjack, and they're pretty certain it's a good time to stick, wouldn't you? What are the odds that someone's going to get a 21 and then someone does get a 21? And all of a sudden, instead of Philip II, you have given the keys to the most dangerous mass-killing machine ever produced, right? The Macedonian Maserati, to a guy who is perhaps abnormally eager to make history with it.

It is always interesting to speculate how this story might have gone differently if a man of lesser ambition or lesser ability or both got a hold of that army because it was a nasty enough army to have done damage in just about any competent person's hands. But instead it gets fused with a level of leadership, a fusion of army and leadership that's rarely been equaled. You know, those two things sort of meeting in a perfect instrument and

which is awesome if you happen to be on the same side as the perfect instrument, a lot less awesome if you're in the crosshairs of the instrument. I mean, what happens if you have endless ambition and nobody can beat you and you're 20?

If you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar, Dan and Ben would love to have it. Go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show. So this is supposed to be the tease for part two, and what you've heard just now is clearly part one of a multi-part series on Alexander the Great, and we are more than four hours into it, and we've mostly talked about his dad and his mom and where he comes from and his upbringing and all that, but if you think about

biographical narrative those are kind of important things aren't they especially when it is such a key component of you know creating this unusual figure you got to have parents like that well they deserve a part one of a multi-part series all to themselves i would think we are as we always say addicted to context around here though and what would alexander's story have been without philip

I mean, Alexander's a classic case of the second generation corporate CEO or whatever, right? I mean, a good one, not Tommy Boy or something, but you take over the family business from dad. Dad built it from nothing. It's a little bit different when you sort of inherit a going concern, even if it's going to require greatness from you on your part to take it to the next level.

that it belongs at, the level of greatness is of a different sort. It takes a different skill set to build it from scratch than to keep it going. And the difference in the styles between Philip and Alexander sort of exemplify this. Whereas Philip is a whatever-it-takes kind of dude, clever, deception, diplomacy, clever,

you know, rear end kissing versus, I mean, whatever it takes, Alexander is going to be much more high handed. He's it's his way or the highway. He knows he's got the great army. Um, he's not a big compromiser and he takes offense pretty easily. It's a little bit of a different style, a little bit more entitled if you will. But while almost anyone may have done well with that army, especially with the generals that come with it,

It's Alexander's ambition that's the great historical wild card here. Because as we said at the end of the conversation just now, if nothing can stop you, where do you stop? If you're only 20 years old when you start your conquering career, it gives you a lot of time to keep conquering. What if there are no natural limits to how far you go? But of course, the question of Alexander's unstoppability is still in the future.

As Plutarch says about his career at this moment when he succeeds his just murdered father, he faces, quote, great jealousies, terrible hatred, and danger everywhere, end quote. He may have inherited a lot, but it's going to take an extremely formidable individual to

to hold together what Philip built after the earthquake that was Philip's death shakes the entire budding empire to its foundations. Alexander has a lot of benefits in life by virtue of who his parents were. But from here on in, he's on his own.

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Just a few of the classic hardcore history titles available from DanCarlin.com. Every true fan has heard these favorites. Hey, they make great gifts, too. Quick message here about speaking tours. We did one recently in 2024, and it was to sort of stick your toe in the water and see if there's much of a demand. And it went really well. So we're going to, I think, do some more cities down the road if it's something you might be interested in.

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