Show 71 - Mania for Subjugation

The Sumbers 7th 1941, a date which will live in infamy. It's history. The one for their plan, for their fire, please prevent them. The events. 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I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their presidents are corrupt. The deep, black-spirits. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. F***. Banana field cops. 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 the famous story of Daedalus and Echorus. 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 Minitar. And it was the king of Minoa, the Cretan area on the island of Crete that had Daedalus built this for him. But at a certain point, he turns against Daedalus and imprisoned Daedalus and Echorus. 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 son 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. Echorus forgets his father's warnings, gets taken 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 son melts the beeswax, the wings fall apart and Echorus 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? The 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. 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, 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? But 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. Take for example a figure like Julius Caesar from the Roman Republic in the 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, Soutonius, 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. Soutonius says he's reading a history of Alexander the Great. Plutarch says he is sitting at the foot of a statue of Alexander the Great who lived a couple of centuries before Caesar. Soutonius says he was sighing and had a vexing look on his face. Plutarch says he's out now 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 is 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 over ambition 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. 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. 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 the 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 is 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 of violence 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 you're trying to fly across the water and instead you crash into the sea and die that's not success. And 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 enduring than anyone else ever you might have to give the guy a plus. After all he lived more than 2300 years ago and he's probably a me biblical personages aside the most famous early figure in history that most people if you brought a microphone and started asking them on the street of any major city in the world that most people would recognize don't you think. The guy still has books coming out about him or some aspect of his life or career every year regularly has movies and TV shows and all kinds of things like that coming out podcasts to 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 in some areas 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 he's we've used the term historical arsonist before in some areas you know Alexander was seen as someone who had to come along to 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 or 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 once the old line that you know they start off on third and think they hit a triple don't you think a guy like Caesar or Napoleon or a jengus con 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 his 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 Maza Roddy 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 he could have been a father he has dad would have been called the great instead his dad was called Philip II of a place called Macdonia 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 the the more common in English soft seasound 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 heretics 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 Macadonian or Kithian once you follow the tumbling etymological dominoes on this question you might find yourself a heretic to but if I'm mispronouncing the word in your mind just know that I'm doing it intentionally Macadonia 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 and 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 Macadonian 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 is moved into the region north of Greece over all the centuries since Alexander the great's time right 23 centuries or more 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 in Persian wars the Peloponnesian war so I think 500 BC BC 40 300 that whole range populated of course by city states the famous ones right Athens Sparta Corinth Argos Thieves 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 control the decent chunk of the surrounding territory and the people who live 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 Thieves and all of a sudden you guys were going to go to war against Corinth while you were going to go grab your armor from over the fireplace and it might have been the same armor your dad and your granddad used grab your three foot diameter round shield put the sword in your belt get your you know six to nine foot long long speed and run down the hill to join your neighbors in the local failings 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 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 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 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 one of the states that had king sparda famously had two of them kind of takes the whole you know absolute ruler side of the question out of the equation doesn't if you have two of them reminds me a little of the Roman republics concept of having not one console but two consoles 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 macadonians lived a much more sort of a rustic existence than your average cosmopolitan Greek city state cosmopolitan by comparison you look at macadonian royal society and it looks more like a mafia crime family than anything you can think of a mafia crime family if you combine it with the 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 macadonian royal family situation and they talked about assassinations execution 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 macadonia who came of age and managed to rule were in a sort of a Darwinian sense pretty tough survivors in fact Philip II had two older brothers it's interesting to note the Philip II's mother gave birth to three sons all three became kings and all three died violently one was killed in wars fighting macadonia's enemies another was assassinated which is a pretty normal thing to happen actually two of them were assassinated macadonia was a territory with powerful enemies all around them they had the elirian tribes in one direction which again the Greeks considered to be barbarians they had the thrasian tribes and they were like forty of different thrasian tribes also to the north in the other direction what this meant was twofold one they were always fighting these people but to they were often intermarrying their royal families to try to cement deals and there is strong strains of thrasian elirian and upper it blood that runs through the royal families of the macadonians traditionally Philip II has seen as a guy who brings macadonia 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 anytime the history sort of portrays someone as 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 run with in the same way that he laid down the mausorati 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 macadonia from doing better they can't keep competent leaders on the throne for very long that one point before Philip takes over macadonia 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 macadonia has 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 macadonia 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 macadonia they've got wonderful areas to farm and to graze cattle and horses they control important mineral and precious metal mines and we'll get more of them and they've also got a population that will prove to be very culturally and maybe lifestyle wise good at fighting 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 your 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 cowhand 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 the second Alexander the great and the rise and fall of the macadonian empire historian Ian Worthington sort of draws this distinction he compares an Athenian to a macadonian and compares their cultures in the way they grow up in 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 a hundred 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 macadonian society was alien to Greeks and so abhorred by them a macadonian male was an entirely different animal from his Athenian counterpart for example who came of age in 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 attended symposia to engage in intellectual discussions before letting his hair down and swapping talk for sex with the ever present courtesans and quote he then says quote macadonia 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 voice from an early age were taught to fight write a horse and hunt wild boar foxes birds and even lions and quote he then says that macadonian 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 macadonians have as part of their lifestyle that make them seem a little like Vikings they're supposed to wear animal skins or bare pelt drink their alcohol out of big drinking horns right reminds you 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 want just passing out at their parties they could continue to have a nice high minded conversation the macadonians 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 terrenes of unmixed wine and they both go out 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 macadonian 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 up a day your evil or borderline malicious just by being powerful and assertive Adrian goals worthy the modern historian suggest we not treat these stories specifically as though they're 100% true but Phillips mom woman name your ridicule is obviously married to Phillips dad but supposedly is in a sexual relationship with her son-in-law Phillips sisters husband and they both plot against Phillips dad they plot fails and Phillips dad forgives them and they maybe go on to continue to maneuver behind his back and then when Phillips dad dies the guy who's shaking up with Phillips mom is continually inserting his hands and trying to manipulate the kingship may have been involved by hooker by crook in the assassination of Phillips brother when he's a king so it's an interesting family dynamic to say the least but nothing unusual given macadonian history around the year 368 Philip is sent as a hostage to the Greek city state of thieves now the reason you sent a royal family member to another city state or place like thieves 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 people who are not 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 it's in thieves that supposedly Philip learns a lot of important things about warfare because he's in thieves at a very specific time in history the time in history where thieves 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 looked at maybe the greatest Greek general up until this time period a guy named him and does 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 the army in the other thing that happens in thebs is Philip is exposed to all sorts of high-minded things I mean the guy stays with is a follower of the Pythagorean sort of lifestyle 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 very good person bear skin wearing drinking horn using you know barbarian meanwhile Phillips oldest brother is assassinated during a war dance his next oldest brother recalls Philip from thebs and he's killed in a fight with the aliens and another 4,000 Macedonian troops with him and this is the scene that Philip finds himself in once he sort of reaches the kingship now the first thing to say about Philip is you just don't know much about him that you can depend on because like his son Alexander he is the subject of an immense propaganda campaign the Athenians in this time period who were his enemies are the best propagandist in Greece they have some of the best orators and speakers going one of them's named the mothanese and the mothanese I mean he'll write a bunch of arguments against Philip known as the philippics and much of what we know about Philip comes from the philippics but the entire design and approach of the philippics is to make Philip sound like he's Darth Vader or Sohron 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 do rant gosh I mean I want to say it's almost a hundred years ago now writing about philipp describes him and it may not be a fair description either because some of the modern day historians are much kinder to philipp in terms of treating him as a more cultured man a more well spoken man than the old style historians but will to rant 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 philipp the great or the man who maybe should be named philipp 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 a bounding generosity loving battle as much strong drink more unlike Alexander he was a jovial laugh 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 corouse with him half the night he was literally before Alexander the bravest of the brave and left a part of himself on every battlefield and quote derand 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 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 de mausthenes liked him and ranked him as the strongest and most interesting character of his time end quote and de mausthenes who really didn't like him still had to say quoting de mausthenes 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 to 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 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 de mausthenes said he's a guy who sacrificed multiple body parts and that was not any sort of a lie I mean the man by the end of his reign is crippled he loses an eye he has a collarbone broken 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 de mausthenes says he captured 45 cities this is how you build an empire right or or something that's going to be an empire and like his son and like macadonian 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 battles 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 they position them on the field before the battle starts and then before the fighting actually commences they put themselves in the front rank you know 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 Phillips 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 and archaeologists found a tomb in northern Greece or the area where Macedonia was during this time period the traditional Macedonian heartland it was under amount a hill a man created hill a tell and in the tomb if 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 ships very small bone ships in a lot of the funerals during the time around Phillips 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 into 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 grieves that were found grieves are the armor that goes on the shins and these grieves were shaped differently one in particular shorter than the other shaped for a person who 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 five foot six and five foot eight 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 macadonian that would sort of jive with his son's height to who was also shorter than the average macadonian so maybe Alexander got it from his dad the skeleton also shows the wounds including the most obvious during his lifetime that no one would have been able to avoid the fact that an arrow had struck him in the face 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 Maccasson greater than Alexander and he ran down how Philip's state craft was much more oriented towards results than perhaps Homeric glory and sword play and he writes quote in a very important way however Philip's view of war as distinct from personal bravery was decidedly 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 a moth the knees 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 clouds witsy and sense the rhetorician paulianius 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 clouds witsy and view of war led Philip to become the greatest strategist of his time clouds wits of course is famous for saying that war is a continuation of politics or policy is by other means but for Philip the second this applied to all sorts of things including marriage marriage for Philip was clause witsy and 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 macadonian 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 macadonians 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 a lyrian wife or two and the a lyrians 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 macadonians soldiers right before Philip takes the throne so it makes sense to marry an a lyrian princess but they seem to be if the ancient sources can be believed quite the handful supposedly a lyrian women could be trained to fight in combat as men with swords spear shield armor and on horseback and there will be a strain of the a lyrian DNA running through the macadonian 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 which is instead 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 Olympus would have been in her teens one imagines that you could have been a woman who could have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would have been a woman who would 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 Olympus 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 derand described 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 scared him a little Philip the seconds family claimed a dissent 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 the king of the gods who could you possibly marry the king of the gods who could you possibly marry the king of the gods who could you possibly marry the king of the gods who could you possibly marry the king of the gods who could you possibly marry the king of the gods who could you possibly marry the king of the gods who could you possibly marry the king of the gods who could you possibly marry the king of the gods who could you possibly marry the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of the king of and through him Zeus and his other family who claims to send through Achilles, you're going to have a kid who mixes the blood of Zeus, Heracles, and Achilles. 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 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. Because 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 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. 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 and the guys 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. Armed with ecstasy and madness, this paradoxical deity would smile at human determination and laugh at logic. In league with death as well as life, his realm reached beyond the grave to the murky waters of the netherworld. End quote. 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 with the god 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 their religious rights 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 profered 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 called from his precious gift. He is a relaxer of the mind, a healer of sorrow, a dispeller of care, a provider of joy, a merry maker, 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 disturbor of the soul, a mind-breaker, a bestower of envy, a dispenser of anger, a chaser of sleep, a noise maker, 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 reasons uneasy sway over emotion, and served as a chilling reminder of bestiality in its core. End quote. Alexander's Mother Olympias was a devotee of Dionysus. A initiate, 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 rights 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 Bacchai about it. He says that the women met in sacred areas just amongst their own kind and tore live animals to pieces and devoured them. They participated in magic rights, carried wands and worshiped 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 a 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. In the autumn of 357 Philip married his hyper-it-princess, and for the first time in his life found he had taken on rather more than he could handle. Olympias, though not yet 18, had already emerged as a forceful not to say eccentric personality. She was, among other things, passionately devoted to the orgyastic rights of Dionyses, and her monastic frenzies can scarcely have been conducive to peaceful domestic life. One of her more outtray 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' bed must have been a hazard calculated to put even the toughest bridegroom off his stroke. End quote. 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. Put 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, 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, HG Wells describes Philip's wife Olympias. And you get this sense that she's practically demonic and he first extols all the wondrous qualities of Philip the second, 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 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 Olympias. 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. And 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 engraver source of trouble in her passion for religious mysteries. We've already noted the beneath the fine and restrained Nordic religion of the Greeks, the land abounded with religious cults of a darker and more ancient kind. Some original cults with secret initiations or geastic celebrations and often with cruel and obscure rights. These religions of the shadows, he writes, these practices of the women in peasants and slaves gave Greece her orfic, 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. End quote. 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 is 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 maza rotti that Philip II will create the Macedonian army. The Macedonian army by the way is arguably the most important part of the story. 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. That's the tool that creates all the opportunities for conquest. In my head I always try to switch 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. 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 the 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. Whereas if you have a fighter that has lost even once you can say well you know we saw how Buster Douglas broken down that's 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. 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 see the Macedonians were the best in the world while 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 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 failax probably. And when in a couple of centuries the Romans and their Manipled legions throw the failaxes on the ash heap of history 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 failax. 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 hop light right sometime in the 700s maybe BCE the hop light just sort of appears in a bunch of places there's nobody you can say that guy came up with the idea but Philip invented the pike failax and the Macedonian pike failax is kind of a hop light killing machine. It takes the you know best parts of the hop light failaxes and so the supercharges him in a way that makes him better hop light failaxes. He gives him 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 hop lights probably about eight ranks deep sometimes for sometimes twelve but usually about eight ranks deep with their seven to nine foot spears smash into a 16 rank pike failax with 16 to 20 three foot spears. Well you can see how one is almost built to overcome the other a lot of advantages in the pike failax. So if this is the key thing that Philip invent because we'll talk about the rest of the army in a bit but if this is the key thing Philip invent where did he get the idea for this right at 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 dumped it and so you know you can start down this path of imagine of imagining where Philip incorporated you know brainstorm kinds of material deodoros syculas an ancient historian says that one of the things that gave Philip the idea for these pike failaxes 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 Macedonia society I'm sure everyone will fill up Alexander all those people would have read it Alexander supposed to memorize 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 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 shipped come back a while later the entire planet looks like you know Al Capone and guys walking around with sub-machine 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 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 an oral historians would have transmitted the tale for hundreds of years before a guy or a 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 failaxes from reading about the Akeans 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 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 of Frickrities and his famous reforms you ancient history military nerds out there know that a Frickrities is one of these guys who sort of looked at the traditional hop light 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 him into a slogging match with the old fashioned hop lights 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 hop light spear is seven to nine feet you know he's rocking more of a 14 to 18 foot spear on his hop light 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 hop light and all of a sudden your spear is twice as long as theirs I mean trying to imagine how you might use it is interesting but you can certainly see some advantages and you're being able to stab them and they not being able to stab you back can't you and Frickrities 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 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 Lieben 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 Epimodon does the Theben 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 Spartan you're kind of left as the big dog and Epimodon dis famously defeated the Spartans at Lutra in 371 BCE by breaking all the rules so 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 Epimodon does 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 gutsy is that in the ancient world the punishments for having your innovation fail are massive nowadays of course we were accustomed to making constant updates and changes in warfare new equipment new tactics new approaches you know 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 development 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 you really is the first time you can look and you can just watch technology 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 you can see new technology in ways of fighting and 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 figure out okay 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 failures huge and the incentives to be conservative are overriding so when a guy like a pamananda 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 pamananda does after he breaks the rules are going to be the kind of thing Philip incorporates into his way of fighting right 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 hot light 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 conventions of Greek fighting that were in place before pamananda 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 hot lights 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 hot lights on both sides and an intervening space between them and at some point when a battle happens one or both of those lines of hot lights 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 a hundred maybe 200 maybe 300 yards long for 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 hundred 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 the miss 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 lines 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 a Pemmonondis didn't do it that way at looptra he put his best troops on the left that's a violation you know it's 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 looptra 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 Lutra you have an irreplaceable number of Spartiates if Pemmonondis wanted to kill as many of those as he could so he created the head of the sledge hammer at Lutra aimed right at those people that's the best way to envision what if Pemmonondis' army looked like the Spartans looked like a long row like a railroad track like we said of you know eight to twelve ranked deep hop lights right so a long line of those people hundreds of yards long the Thebans looked more like a sledge hammer the head of the sledge hammer 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 Pemmonondis goes wild makes the formation 50 ranks deep he's going to face off against the Spartan hop light force it'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 Pemmonondis deciding to do this though means he has to weaken the rest of his army right we're to those 50 deep 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 sledge hammer well if you're worried about weakening part of your line because you don't want those troops to get smashed and run away if Pemmonondis does something unusual he angles that whole area away from the enemy so imagine the sledge hammer head is right up against the Spartans they want to smash but the handle of the sledge hammer is diagonally away from the rest of the enemy army so theoretically the sledge hammer 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 to Lucra the sledge hammer head of the Theban's ran into the Spartans killed 400 of the 700 irreplaceable Spartans and the Spartan king 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 Theban's and that was the battle that Lucra out but by changing certain key conventions of how people fought a Pemmonondis was able to destroy Spartan power and he would do it again at Matinee 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 a Pemmonondis was angling the rest of his army away from his enemies 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 a Pemmonondis 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 philangites 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 hop light heavy infantry element to the army the army had great cavalry they were called the companion cavalry maybe the best cavalry in the world arguably at this time period and it was 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 hop lights 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 pevonondis his development 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 allureans and peyonians and iterations in the meantime he also starts employing large numbers of allies I mean the the salient cavalry is going to be absolutely vital in the army of Alexander it starts fighting with philippa to certain point uses a lot of thrations employs light troops and skirmishers which is you know something that's been the development going on in Greece for the past several decades increasing importance and 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 philippa creating an army that is more tactically flexible depending on what you're facing he's got the troops for the job for 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 invade their charge philippa's troops to get you to you want to fight in bad terrain philippa's got the troops for that got his specialist core his agrainians people from the highlands think about like you know gerkas or something in the time period he'll weathe 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 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 lutes and and pillages and then leaves or maybe surrounds you and tries to wait you out philippa 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 philippa'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 philippa taking three towns in the 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 philippa is using in his army are professionals they're specialists they're engineers and more and more of his armies getting paid the mercenaries obviously get paid right away but he's starting to pay the guys in the pike failaxe 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 threshings for example a couple of famous mines 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 philipp 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 you know 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 philipp used this army though is that it was just one of his many tools and if you compare him to his son howlexander is going to be a lot more high-handed than philipp you know it's my way or the highway I'm going to tell you what to do how dare you you know try to negotiate or get me to haggle whereas probably because he had to philipp is a lot more clever and sneaky he'll 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 thieves to get a look at how their government functions and compare it to how his government functions right 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 philipp noticed this as a weakness that he could exploit right away and green rights quote philipp's training for power was proceeding along useful if unorthodox lines his experience as a member of the macaroni and 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 rights philipp took it as axiomatic that all diplomacy was based on self-interest and every man had his price events seldom proved him wrong in thieves 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 rights he began to understand how macaroni is 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 and quote philipp'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 deodoris is supposedly quoting philipp as saying that the expansion of his kingdom owed far more to money than to arms and then deodoris later picks up the story and just talks about how the bribes by philipp 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 water cash you know what are you going to do and deodoris writes quote nevertheless there was such a crop of traders 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 deodoris writes when philipp wanted to take a particularly well fortified city and one of the locals claimed that the place was impregnable he meaning philipp 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 gold so by using bribery to make sure that he had traders 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 and quote one of the historians that I was reading called philipp a warrior diplomat which I think is a great term very descriptive a good rundown of the things philipp 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 then we can do it that way if that's how you want to play it but also with a lawyer in tow right with the 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 sign sealed and delivered just like a brief case full of cash well philipp can do it that way too what's the little line that Malcolm X is supposed to have uttered right by any means necessary that's how I kind of see philipp the second by any means necessary gonna achieve his goals the question of what those goals were and how far-sighted philipp 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 so a couple of ways you could look at it though philipp could be a master opportunist somebody who sees his unexpected occurrences when they happen and becomes the beneficiary of them some dominoes some unexpected domino tumbles and philipp's right there jony on the spot to be the one who benefits and he's got some advantages in that regard we mentioned already the the form of government gives him an advantage right these other Greek states have to sit here in debate and have politics come into it and people try to convince the public to go along with one of them you philipp 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 thieves decides they want to go somewhere 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 philipp'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 philipp is the guy who creates these opportunities 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 sees them absolutely but you can expect to have opportunities develop without knowing explicitly what they are in this sense then philipp 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 connection to thebes right as sort of an alliance with thebes keeps Athens and thebes 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 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 philipp 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 philipp the second one of one of the two whether he meant to do it that way or whether it just is a happy coincidence one thing you can say about philipp 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 of traditionally three pieces of good news the first piece of good news is that his general parminio has defeated the allerians which is always a good thing the second piece of good news he supposedly gets at the same time as 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 has 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 philipp then finally the third piece of news not necessarily in the order of importance but that Olympias has born philipp a son officially named Alexander the third 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 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 philipp has a dream that her womb is sealed up with a seal with an imprint of a lion on it philipp also supposedly according to Plutarch looks through a crack on the wall or the equivalent of a keyhole with one eye and spies Olympias 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 philipp and Olympias and then Olympias is 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 philipp 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 philipp to look narrowly to his wife that means watch your wife man but era standard of telmosis 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 his stout and courageous as a lion once more over Plutarch writes a serpent was found lying by Olympias as she slept which more than anything else it is said abated philipp'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 end quote 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 gods characters right they get around but apparently philipp 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 in Plutarch's quote philipp after this vision sent share on a megalopolis to consult the oracle of a polo at delfi by which he was commanded to perform sacrifice and henceforth pay particular honor above all other gods to amon who's 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 the serpent in the company of his wife and quote well he did lose the eye but a year maybe two years later in a siege so there you go so did 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 four runners 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 and quote famous queens who dreamed 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 you know 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 makes sense that the only real story that explains how this temple could be burned down right the home of a god is it the god wasn't there 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 were a war and all these things near the end of the book but you keep going backwards and the ratio of facts to myth sort of changes maybe that's a good way to put it ancient histories 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 father 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% cabinet it's 40% more low well by the time you get to the second world war you're probably at 80 20 right 80% facts 20% you know myth misinformation whatever you want to say the father 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 the pierbriant 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 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 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 gonna conquer a lot of territory his generals are gonna 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 they're claimed 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 macchiah valian 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 propaganda and chroniclers and all these kinds of people with him while he did everything he's famous for and they're not just catat log in what happened they are putting the most pro Alexanderians spin on it while doing so it's propaganda coming from the source Alexander wasn't just trying you know we're gonna 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 in a more pronounced big graffiti form on your history books and he's concerned about how you're gonna 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 there are earliest source they're using books based on I mean you 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 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 I'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 you're 60% Cabernet 40% Merlot split is more like a 60% lore 40% facts split and the fact that this Alexander's story is so well known and has influenced people ever since the stories that we can't prove are true and maybe think our 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 token-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 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 philips 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 it's seven years old I'm not saying it's impossible I might have done that because I'm Alexander but because I was goofy at that age and that's the kind of stuff I don't 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 or Greek who wrote in the Roman imperial era he's a wonderful lesson about how sometimes especially when you go into ancient history these sources dwindle down to almost nothing and sometimes you're you have certain historical facts resting upon a single work sometimes I mean Plutarch's one of these weird sorts of accounts 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 and answer something and say tell me that story again about when Alexander was seven and he interrogated the Persian diplomat and asked him about you know the condition of 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 the famous Alexander stories growing up like the one about taming the untamable horse that became his horse Busefilus 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 running seems to live in an era where the Roman attitude toward Alexander and that attitude changes over time right Alexander will be 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 is not a figure to be emulated right an example of some of the the downsides of power and corruption and ambition and all that and Plutarch might have been writing sort of a counter put 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 use them 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 Olympia doesn't come off nicely under the pan of Plutarch when you can't tell it 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 up at a 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 Philips gone what did we say he's a road dog he's out you know making the family fortune um taken 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 as who he's spending his time with as a young man and this is 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 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 around 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 Malossians the descendents of a Killy supposedly right these wild people sort of witchy sort of scary 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 side of the family because normally the society Alexander's a part of really pays attention to the 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 side of the family's 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 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 the term that they used to use was mama's boy outdated what would you say that's for like the 1920s or the 1930s he said mama's boy well they old line when I was growing up was 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 says we we know something about because she's going to be a powerful person and after Alexander's off conquer in the world he's writing letters back and forth and she's a a player in the power structure of Macedonia often sort of in a tug of war with murderous you know experience professional generals I mean she's a fabulously interesting person and you can tell she has one of these personalities that just she's she's a very strong person she won't be denied she's not going to stay in the background um 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 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 the 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 it's calling it sister wise probably makes it sound more more 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 a absolute hornet's nest of danger for all these people and normally you would think to yourself okay Ali's and her if you look at his life during this time period is already being set up to be Philip's successor I mean the 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 where's the you know alternative candidates to the throne where's 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 Olympia's a little bit maybe Alexander has a brother round about his own age maybe a little older known to history as eradais sometimes called philip eradais you would think that this figure would provide a threat competitor to Alexander someone else who might be eligible to take over from philip after philips gone someday or the next king eradais is the son of a different one of philip the seconds wives and interestingly enough according to Plutarch she is another magical wife philip seem to have a thing for magical women 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 that those are his types if he has a type he either want you to be an enchantress or you know an amazon in this case eradais his mother's another one of these enchantresses were told and she's using her defensive spells to try to protect eradais from Olympias but it seems like Olympias gets him anyway because there's something wrong with philip eradais 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 philip eradais 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 uh 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 Olympias 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 Olympias 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 writing your dad is filled up the second 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 there's you know all the all that sort of stuff and well let's not you know suggest that their values or our values anyway we judge them on a different scale because you know look at how the rest of McAdoney in history looks they're not that outlandish graded on a curve but if mom is poisoning the other sons of your dad let's just say that it's an interesting household 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 sons inside man in Macedonia while he's gone and she's in power struggles with powerful murderous ruthless professional experience veteran generals she's an amazing woman but the lower part of her write the lower for example the idea that she poisons Philip Eredias to cause his mental disability the lower side of her sometimes matches that 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 lower that's history but she'll not just kill him she'll kill his wife too and that wife is the granddaughter of her former husband Philip II so she's fully capable of that sort of inter family type you know homicide but mom likes snakes and tells me maybe that I'm a god and that Phillips not my real father and who happily would destroy the mind of my half brother 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 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 up country than the rest of the McAdonians but there's also something a little you know dianne isick about her I mean it worked perfectly she's responsible for Alexander's early years which I guess is pretty McAdonian 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 maybe they've even been a relative he's like a drill sergeant type of character a molose in the 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 McAdonian veterans they're not going to take orders from some softy well your dad's already lost an eyes he's limp and he's got broken collarbones you know he's beating 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 dainty's or luxuries for him denying 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 in 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 Devote 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 are really us like if you thought about a later example if you're going to be a king and he's involved in the famous story where Alexander was 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 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 walk until 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 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 so to remember me before I was great well how do you like me now have some incense and then there's the 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 philosophies 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 his 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 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 arc 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 that 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 to 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 he 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 the 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 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 plutark where he publishes what he basically says is a letter from Alexander to Aristotle later in life when Alexander is conquering the world and has made good and when Aristotle's 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 described it in this nasty letter to his former tutor saying if you're given 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 it's 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 plutark is probably fairly put in into it of Alexander's kind of a philosopher king as we said earlier or even more interesting a philosopher in action and that's how he 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 and 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 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 when to be great to have a philosopher king you can almost hear it in some of the errors in human history where Alexander was seen that way 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 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 is 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 in 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 substitute it 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 him 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 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 access to grind over the errors can we get to any facts at all well maybe I mean one of the questions I've asked before is what if I'd exited 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 and 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 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 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 and this time we've mentioned that it's almost certain that Alexander's father's tomb has been found and that is partially cremated remains measured somewhere between like five foot six inches and five foot eight 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 five foot six five foot seven 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 Albanian 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 throw away lines that are in the sources also notice you remember there's 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 blonde and tausled 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 rights which carries instant conviction he had a somewhat high pitched voice which tended to harshness when he was excited his gate was fast and nervous a habit he had picked up from old the drill sergeant from Malossia 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 and the quote the mentioned about Alexander's voice being higher than one would expect is not uncommon with great generals actually it's same as true for example of general George Patton you wanted 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 you know pedestal and say that they smell extra good but Alexander you're 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 like try to you know figure out why that might be historian Ian Worthington in his book by the spear or 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 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 you 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 Isis in 331 one of the captured Persian noble women mistook the taller hefestian 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 around 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 tauteled 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 I 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 gate look hair color all that sort of stuff we should reflect to 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 mazerotti 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 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 they'll run into the myths 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 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 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 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 round about 340 BC BCE and while Alexander is running the show while Phillips 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 from his dad goes up there conquer some you know exiles them from their city repopulates the city the same way dad would have done and renames it Alexander droplets just like his dad would have done to his dad would have called it a philopolis of the sun just named it this will be my first city I'll name for myself 16 years old got my first city Alexander droplets 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 um 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 region for 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 learn in the ropes and so his fortunes sort of dovetail with his dads 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 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 right 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 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 Phillips upcoming face off with the powers that be in Greece is starting to sort of crystallize and shape up Phillips 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 to most of these 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 a 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-ethenian 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 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-macadonian camp and an anti-macadonian 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 as he's funding division in Greece right he's he's deliberately trying to create disunity and hostility among the major powers and 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 to make us a more divided society that might be an imitation of what Philip has been doing in Greece and you can 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 the mothinies 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 status quo and guys like Demastinese who's considered to be one of the greatest orators in world history let's 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 and 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 um Demastinese again warrants about Philip and these are long tracks if you read them but if you take pieces of it out you can see the church chilean 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 but Demastinese isn't looking to lead but he's certainly looking 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 if he takes over is going to take away one of the things that Demastinese 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 for 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 um but from from about the middle of the piece or you know 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 you know the the demands on their own precious time um 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 they're you know 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 that 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 Peloponnes to road 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 and 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 Caranilla the Battle of Caranilla 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've been moments where one Greek city state like a Sparta or an Athens or a Thieves 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 Caranilla 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 in the premarrow 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 Democides had been warning about forever was finally upon them deodorous of Sicily deodorosiculous rights about what happens when as tensions are sort of heating up Philip makes a surprise move and sees as the initiative that puts Athens in a precarious position and then the people in Athens find out about it and deodorous rights 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 deodorous rights arrived one night in Athens with news of Philip's occupation of Alade and have 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 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 peace a fearful silence gripped the theater none of the men who usually addressed 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 de-Mastinese end quote so de-Mastinese says we got to get thieves working with us thieves and Athens joined forces raised their militaries rushed to this caronia site in the area around thieves you know Biosha 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 caronia happens in 338 this reform of the macaroni and army that philips started to pursue when he took over his king it's been going on like 1819 years and this army's 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 thiebans and the Athenians who are going to raise these militia armies that have generally a small core like in the thiebans army they have the thebans sacred band professionals but there's 300 of them it's nothing and then maybe they hire some mercenaries 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 be devils 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 like 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 philipus opposed to have been have marveled in the fact that the Athenians could come up with like ten good generals a year because that's how many they had to elect he goes what I've only found one good one in my whole life he was talking about Parminio 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 core 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 philips 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 Mazorati secret weapon here is the fact that these generals provide a ton of institutional memory and they're all very good and a bunch of them will actually as we said earlier go on just 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 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 that's rather desperate if you're pulling the 50 year olds out to the battlefield to face you know the young killers in the McAdonian army 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 valk storm 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'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 McAdonians 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 into 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 McAdonians because even if a bunch of older guys and you know we should think of mixed units is 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 screen writers lifted it from one of the classical sources I couldn't find it that doesn't mean it's not there but maybe the the script writers wrote it it's fantastic though spoiler alert it has Philip after the battle of carolina after he's defeated the Athenians and he's walking around Athens amongst these defeated Athenians passed all the fantastic classical statues that all look like Olympians right with the fantastic fantastic muscular sure 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 carolina now let's talk a little about the battle though in terms of what we know such an important battle you think we 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 are 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 a hundred years handstyle brooks 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 deodorosiculous 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 the grain assault you should take it with the whole big ol barrel assault 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 carania in 338 quote the Greek coalition troops numbered 30,000 infantry and 3,800 cavalry and were commanded by the Athenian generals carus, licecles and strata clays and the theban general theogenes theosia provided 12,000 hop lights including the elite sacred band and the Athenians 6,000 citizens soldiers to age 50 and 2000 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 2000 cavalry composed of 24,000 Macedonians and the rest from Thessaly and focus or foscious end quote the ador ascolic is the main account of the battle and he makes it sound as though you know the second that deMosthenes goes to convince thieves 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-macadonian position who 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 that he didn't have to face us but eventually of course it comes down to the battle and this is how deodorosiculus has it set up and how it goes i'm using the excellent robin waterfield translation of deodoros by the way and the author has deodoros saying quote at day break 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 beotians and taking command of the other themselves and quote then deodoros has the battle happening and Alexander 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 deodoros writes it was philips turned 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 de moththenes ran away they were driven through a narrow pass a couple thousand dead amongst the thiebans 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 deodoros gives and then another historian who's not even as good on this as deodoros 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 a hundred years and the ones in hand style brooks from more than a hundred 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 was in del brooks time two is the supposed back stepping of philip and the philips 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 they other stays still leaving a gap or simply destabilizing because it has to move the formation in front of them that philip in 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 hand style brokoy 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 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 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 if this is in the footnotes where dogbrook is arguing with his fellow German military historians about this question and he writes quote since the above words were written cron mayor 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 roll off another historian has proved in the work already cited and even 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 philips phalanx pulled back 600 meters without making a turn he's quoting the other author now an individual man del brook 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 we're 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 backstep it is particularly characteristic that chrome mires idea of an orderly backstep movement by a close mass formation of 15,000 men is not just a possible accidental slip but the author sought to justify his grotesque concept in detail and quote it's an example though of how wonderfully heated 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 the will derand one where he sums up the stakes of what just happened and says quote the results of carania 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 hellus meaning Greece the aftermath had shown sparta incapable the Thiban hegemony in its turn had failed the wars of the armies in the classes had worn out the city-states and left them too weak for defense under the circumstances derand writes they were fortunate to find so reasonable a conqueror who proposed to withdraw from his scene of his victory and leave to the conqueror to large measure of freedom indeed philip and Alexander after him watchfully protected the autonomy of the federated states less than he one of them by absorbing others should grow strong enough to displace macadon 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 end quote derand kind of makes philip the second sound a little like the 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 uh stereotyp well philip the second is not an actor playing that stereotype philip the second is the cowboy and after the battle of caronia 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 at 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 rant some your dad or rants some your prisoners which is a huge deal I said earlier I think that a couple thousand the events and a couple thousand Athenians died the ancient sources put that close to two 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 de mausthenes 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 he's 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 being 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 should probably be called the league of the Greeks which I think is closer to its contemporary name this is philips vehicle for control in Greece and there are multiple different ways to look at it because if you are worn out by essentially civil war for you know 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 macadonia all turn against the ratio up on the battlefield with their soldiers and you know chastise them back into you know 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 to most of these can paint philip out to be this you know alcapone like figure whereas if you're a small city state in Greece and you don't care one wit for who's wrestling over the top dog hegemony position thieves 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 is not somebody who believes that old phrase justice delayed is justice denied he's fine getting them for what they did a hundred and fifty 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 in force peace go get the Persians will all be rich half slaves and 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 and unquestioningly Greek person to play the role of philip that they'll take what they can get what it's 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 you 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 in a moment like this because at this point there's not much that can stop what philips 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 you know 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 they have ramifications for the entire rest of history it's crazy how you can get a sort of a you know real kings of Macedonia kind of you know real Beverly Hills housewives kind of field of 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 real politics 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 as his personal life and his family life and who he sleeps with probably 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's 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 you know 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 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 you know goals accordingly nobody knows what philips 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 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 is it's I mean Adrian Goldsworthy writes about the prospect of philip 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 one 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 struggle to cope with playing a supporting role he knew that his future depended on his father end quote unless something happened to his father which is when philips 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 but it's portrayed me deodorist 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 the teenager is the way the ancient sources like deodorist Portrayid her name is Cleopatra not the Cleopatra the fool around with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony that's way in the future but Cleopatra is a very common traditional macadonian name in fact Alexander the great sisters 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 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 a important macadonian named Atholus and Atholus is from a old family and lower macadonia the sort of people that if philip wants to make sure the home front remember macadonian history is safe while he's gone away to Asia maybe for years on this endeavor but then it's nailed down well maybe you want to marry your family into some of the powerful barons of lower macadonia 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 Olympia's 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 a complaint to his dad once before about fathering children you know saying something like you know what about being 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 has seemed pretty good between father and son but then Philips personal life comes into the picture again this time 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 geo politically speaking it's hard to get your mind around how important it might have been and you you do try to resist the temptation to you know keep Dionysus out of this but this is what Dionysus does right the God comes in and messes with stuff and and he manifests you know a reality maybe that in normal times people would want to keep hidden and secreted you know there are certain things you just shouldn't say in polite company especially the people they're about but then Dionysus loosens your tongue through the unmixed wine and all the sudden you're saying crap and a party that is so important to future geo political histories that we're still talking about it more than two thousand 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 Adelis 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 Terrians over their head and drink wine I made it sound like maybe they could just sip it and the first one who couldn't handle any more stopped these are chugalug contests these are like you have to breathe while you're chugalugging 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 brides uncle Adelis 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 you know 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 and a fine wedding dinner like this but that's not how Alexander perceived it and he threw his cup at Adelis and in this room of stunned intoxicated warriors dignitaries and friends said you villain are you calling me a bastard and everything is about to go to hell on a hand basket 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 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 in the whole Alexanderan 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 an ancient history it's relatively safe that some sort of rift develops between Alexander and Philip at this point and via Alexander also Olympias but whether or not the stories that a guy like Plutarch tells to explain how it happened or 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 may be happened most important drinking cocktail party ever maybe 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 some accounts sort of suggest that what really happened is that Philip told Alexander to apologize to Adelaise 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 take an already kind of suspicious guy Alexander may be and make it 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 an 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 Adelis 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 Ipirit or Epirit 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 north west of them is you know melosi in those places and the Macedonians are just a sniffy and prejudicial and biased and bigotry in 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 Adelis did imply that wouldn't it be nice to have a hundred percent Macedonian king to follow you know Philip I'd imagine that that might play well among Adelis 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 where does he go up to you know his mother's country and then from there to the Elyrians 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 so it'll look like you're backing up the point of Adelis saying you know where's the first place this half melosi and goes when the you know going gets tough to melosi it doesn't stay here so where is real loyalties right but Philip has allowed and then 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 grease 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 this feed is beginning to just blow away who talk tells a story of a Greek friend of philips 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 you know 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 suggestion here is that it's your own fault too which maybe it is 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 macadonia 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 to what's really going on here is Alexander and Olympia's 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 their 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's 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 so 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 iparis aparis aparis 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 two Alexander of iparis and he is the full uncle of his bride and like his sister maybe had slept with philip the second himself which is part of the macadonian if you were a genealogist in macadonian 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 iparis was a young man sort of like a Batman Robin relationship if that weren't entirely straight philip may have you know fooled around with him so he fooled around with Olympias obviously and begat Alexander maybe with Olympias's brother and now he's going to marry off his full daughter with Olympias to Olympias's 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 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 sounds like a music great food entertainment the whole thing and it's ostensibly for this wedding so everybody's choreographed and do 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 know take a breath here after a whole career of just toil and enjoy the moment and deodoros says that he first goes to the great oracle at delfi apollo's oracle and of course apollo speaks through a female prophetess the the pithia 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 field 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's his empire fortunately and you would think stories like that would give ample warning to a guy like philip who goes to the oracle and the pithia tells him when he says should I attack Persia quote the bull is wreathed its end is nigh the sacrifice er 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 there's 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 deodoris 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 Olympius to Alexander the king of Iperus and Olympius his 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 curseses deodoris 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 Macadon 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 extra dited to him by means of this spontaneously prophetic utterance deodoris says the gods were clearly indicating as though by divine foresight that a plot was imminently to be launched against philip's life and quote here is the thing about a guy like philip we've mentioned the word mafia and organized crime a lot to deal with the macadonian 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 hitmen come in and machine gun you all at the table while you're reading post and smoking cigars and having a nice kiyati what's about to occur is the prototype for all the great conspiratorial multi-layered who done it heads of state assassination stories for the rest of time i mean the junef kennedy assassinations nothing but a pale shadow of what's about to happen in this 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 we'll move the needle in terms of the way history breaks like a wave 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 handsome or 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 islands you're going it's a major life change 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 okay well that's not all that surprising if i said that they got rid of girlfriend number one for a younger you know version of her that you probably think to yourself okay this is just a good gossip colony story for you know my tabloid newspaper i'm gonna sit down 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 in 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 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 macadonia or these macadonian nobles are harbidden 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 um 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 um these are men's men but that can mean numerous things can't they yeah the point is as 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 macadonia there wasn't a lot of um 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 Olympias 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 his named posthinias as yet another wonderful example that the macadonians need more names in their baby book the person in the story besides posthinias is also named posthinias so both of these lovers of Philip are named posthinias I had said he had a type with women right he likes his warrior women and he likes his enchantresses well with guys he likes his posthinias so posthinias one is the original guy that Philip is having the affair with and he's thrown aside for posthinias too so he runs around spreading malicious gossip about posthinias too we would call it slut shaming today and once again it's hard to figure out where the line between okay 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 posthinias one says you know awful things about posthinias too to our modern minds we would be going wait a minute didn't posthinias one just do those same things nonetheless it was so mortifying to posthinias too that he went to someone he was apparently close to the bride Cleopatra's uncle the guy that Alexander threw the cup at atlas 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 we're philipous fighting his old enemies the allarians and the allarians are about to kill philip and instead posthinias too jumps in front of him takes all of the you know 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 atlas who then wants to get even with posthinias one for putting posthinias to in a position where posthinias to and to throw his life away and so atlas involves posthinias one two you guessed at the place where they could have a little wine and this is where the sources diverge a little bit some suggest that atlas already had a sexual affair or sexually abused posthinias one in the past some of the sources suggest that he gets posthinias one drunk at this get together and rapes him here and now and maybe 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 boy 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 macadonian facebook page or whatever right my space page probably way back then so everybody knows right so if posthinias two had to throw his life away because posthinias one said a few are probably not true slurs about him how's posthinias one feeling now right where's his reputation so he goes back to the old boyfriend philip and ask for redress of grievances atlas did this stuff to me what are you going to do about it and the source to say philip admitted it was wrong and he felt bad about it but he needs atlas maybe that's why he even married his daughter ready 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 macadonians go and establish a bridge head over in Persia 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 posthinias's demands on how severe he wants him to be on atlas without screwing up his long-term conquest goals here so he tries to sort of buy posthinias off right gives him precious gifts were told and stuff promotes him to higher positions of authority maybe even body guard which may explain some of the story coming up a little bit but the sources say that this isn't enough for posthinias aerostronal writing a near contemporary just it's a blurb from his treaties politics just mentions this quote the plot hatched by posthinias against philip arose from the latter's allowing posthinias to be sexually assaulted by atlas and his men and quote even though it may sound like it that's not saying that posthinias is blaming philip for allowing him to be sexually assaulted he's blaming philip for not doing anything about it afterwards for letting atlas and his men get away with it laugh about it afterwards and posthinias is out for vengeance we are told it's also possible that this revenge needed to be public but the people that posthinias had been shamed in front of reputationally we're going to be the kind of people that would be you know what a public event and it's important maybe that they know that he was the one involved there's a story where posthinias is supposed to have asked his professor once what the best way to become famous was and the professor is supposed to have told posthinias 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 of the people that matter have been invited and are waiting for some sort of a statement they think the statements are 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 de Adoris Portrae's it is almost sacrilegious to have 12 ivory and gold statues made of the principal Greek gods and the Greek pantheons 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 your 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 and 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 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 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 deodoros 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 right he's 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 on to and writing about it 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 modify him over what happened with that oh let's listen I know it's bad here take these precious gifts and I'll make you 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 deodorist 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 macadonian empire I like the way he he puts it into words and then intersperses deodoris 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 days events they were soon greeted by a grand procession in which first appeared statues of the 12 Olympian and then a splendid one of Philip as if he were quoting deodoris 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 Alexander's 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 deodoris 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 bodyguards pausanius of aristus rushed from his position and before the horrified stairs 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 pausanius 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 pausanius's bloody corpse Philip the second was dead his white attire crimson with his blood the theater Worthington writes dissolved in depan demonium 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 is deodoris that suggest that the assassination happened before Philip got to the center stage area right he's about to make his entrance in the assassin leaps out of an alcove and gets him but it's all only made possible because philips 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 pausanius also has horses waiting right the ancient history version of the famous gangster get away car and at least some of the sources say multiple horses so the conspiracy and tenas 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 fk assassination look 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 makadoni it just goes back to what it was from before philip right civil wars assassinations dynastic crises um and all rebellions all the things that were part of what kept makadoni 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 antipiter 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 grease what's going to happen to the you know 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 kui bono to this whole thing right who benefits there's a lot of possible people pulling the strings of pausanius if pausanius is just a patty they 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 blue tarq 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 circus dances here you did the kennedy assassination one like a historical madlibs look how 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 deadly Harvey Oswald afterwards that would be really weird wouldn't it and some sources have Olympias putting a crown on the corpse honoring the I mean just it looks weird and that's not to even mention the fact that the killer of Philip II just likely Harvey Oswald is you know wiped out so that there can be no long term uncomfortable questions asked I mean in Oswald's case it was you know a day or two later Phillips assassin is dead maybe before Phillips 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 Poussiniest number one has just been Jack Ruby 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 a enormous difference needless to say but then there are the Greeks I mean if you just lost a battle where you had 35 thousand people and lost one or two thousand of them at the battle two thousand 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 to most the knees 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 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 the most of these 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 we're starting to be seen as potential regions 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 in in fact some of the people that will be put to death rather quickly afterwards 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 of 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 bridge had 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 him 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 Achaemenad Persian Empire and if they did that here it would surprise nobody later in this career Alexander's 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 the second cease 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 to Philip the seconds 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 the second 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 effusion of army and leadership that's rarely been equaled you know those two things sort of meeting in a perfect instrument which is awesome if you happen to be on the same side as the perfect instrument 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 your 20 if you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar Dan and Ben would love to have it go to Dan Carlin dot com for information on how to donate to the show so this is supposed to be the T's 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 where he comes from and is upbringing and all that but if you think about a 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 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 know you take over the family business from dad build 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 levels that it belongs at the level of greatness is of a different sort it takes a different skill set to build it from scratch then 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 you know rear end kissing versus I mean whatever it takes Alexander's going to be much more high handed he's it's his way or the highway he knows he's got the great army he's not a big compromiser and he takes offense pretty easily a 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 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 unstoppable ability 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 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 and life by virtue of who his parents were but from here on in he's on his own how would you like to receive an email whenever a new hardcore history show is released just sign up for Dan's sub-stack newsletter we'll send you a note when a new show drops and whenever there's something worth telling you about it's free and it's easy just go to Dan Carlin dot substack dot com wrath of the cons Punic nightmares Apache tears and of course ghosts of the aust front just a few of the classic hardcore history titles available from Dan Carlin dot 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 just sort of stick your toe in the water and see if there's much of a demand 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 we will provide updates as they become available on the sub-stack page for free of course at dancarlin dot substack dot com but if this is something that would interest you well keep your ears open we may be coming to a city near you and as usual thanks for coming to the first four shows