Dr Adrian Goldsworthy

speaker

584 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 26 Feb

Dr Adrian Goldsworthy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.

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The Ancients · The Invasion of Persia | Alexander the Great · 12 Feb 2026 podcast

And then you get the two versions of Alexander coming up that when he's faced with it,

Either he works out that actually you can take the yoke out and then undo the knot sort of that way, or you just grab your very sharp, well-honed sword and slash it open, which always sounds very Alexander.

But frankly, both of them, either the working out, seeing, oh, there's another way of looking at this.

I can do it that way.

Or the, I can't be bothered with this.

I'm just going to cut it through.

Again, it's so famous, we talk of it to be used in press stories today, you know, the Gordian, some insoluble problem for politicians faced with.

We only know about it because of Alexander.

So that makes it hard to know if it really was such a big deal at the time or has turned into a big story because he goes to this and he decides to make it and gets his...

He has with him all these historians and effectively it's press corps who are pitching his version of this expedition and are writing it up.

So you've had another point where the waves are supposed to bow down to him and all this stuff.

There's an interesting story about the Roman Emperor Augustus that he realized how Alexander's policy in this way backfired because he had such flattering historians talking about him.

that people said they don't believe anything.

So that was why he went to the Horaces and the Virgils and the people like this who did their thing, but did it with great artistic merit rather than just boasting because it made Alexander ridiculous.

He didn't need these boasts given what he does, but he couldn't resist.

He was obviously flattered by some of this stuff that was being churned out.

And of course, with the advantage that people would be reading this so far away, they wouldn't really know, oh, was this really an Asian tradition that people believed in this?

It's also that's where the best land is.

It's where the best stores of food are as a result.

It's politically, it makes political diplomatic sense as well.

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