Dan Carlin
speaker
2,006 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Jul
Dan Carlin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And you can tell, you know, this fact is true by how long and how universe, how long we've been doing walls around cities and how universal it is, right?
Go look at any ancient portrait of any city anywhere.
I mean, there's walls.
walls protect people walls sort of indicate power walls create equalizers when you're fighting armies that you could never defeat in the field like alexander's you know the greatest army of his age you're not going to defeat that in the field probably but once he has to fight a siege with you everything changes all those things that we've been salivating about as military history fans are nullified in a siege for example i love and you do too probably the formation that the
macedonians fighting we've talked about it all this time right there the close order you know heavy infantry phalanx with the long 16 18 foot pikes fighting you know shoulder to shoulder as a solid block that's not going to work over building rubble and walls that are crumbling and you're trying to shoot through holes you've made through i mean and what about the fantastic companion cavalry what's that going to do and you see what i'm saying all of a sudden these things that would just terrify you well and that were so effective at the battle of the river granicus that we just talked about
that stuff doesn't matter as much.
And the things that the Persian side does pretty well are sort of exalted.
I mean, they've always been good missile people, right?
Lots of archers, lots of people who can do that.
And Alexander, when he approaches one of the outcroppings, there's, you know, these walls around Halicarnassus incorporate a lot of area and he'll come up to sort of one place.
I think it's about 10 miles away from the city itself.
And he'll come to the walls and they're throwing stones at them.
And it's interesting to try to conceptualize how these things worked.
Again, for a guy who's always been fascinated with the field battle side of things, you start to realize what a different challenge the sieges are and how we can see Alexander's true extra ability now come to the fore.
I said in the last...
addition as we had talked about that Alexander's got this army which can just do amazing things without him the sieges require all kinds of different almost engineering ways of thinking about problem solving and Alexander turns out to be really good at this and the energy that he's got is really helpful
But there's a big difference between using your sort of energy and dash and lead from the front sort of approach in a battle that at most is going to last the entire day and then have it be done.
in something that can grind on for days and days and weeks and weeks it's a different sort of test of an army's endurance and staying power and that's what you're going to get at halicarnassus i like the way that historian ian worthington and by the spear sort of sets up the halicarnassus um challenge here and he writes about it by saying quote
Halicarnassus was famous as the birthplace of the father of history, Herodotus, and the home of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the mausoleum, the tomb of Mausolus, satrap of Caria, who had died in 353, and which was eventually completed by his widow, who happened to be his sister, Artemisia.
Halicarnassus, he writes, was built on a hillside and was seemingly impregnable, with enormous six-foot-thick defensive walls, on top of which were fortified battlements and a series of high towers for protection.
Showing 321–340 of 2,006 · page 17 of 101
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