Dr Adrian Goldsworthy

You know, he arrives, he suddenly finds that there's a depot almost, a hospital area where he finds Macedonian wounded and sick that are recovering.

And he overruns that.

But again, these are two boxes in a dark room.

They don't have all the advantages of modern intelligence gathering.

They don't know where the enemy is.

They hope that as they get closer, you'll notice from reports, from signs, from the big plume of dust that the marching feet will throw up.

But it's...

The whole, you know, Issus is a battle that largely occurs by accident when Darius ends up behind Alexander.

Because he's fed up of waiting for Alexander.

Yeah, well, he can't stay in one place.

No ancient army can.

It becomes a nightmare to feed yourself.

And also, this is something that, again, was a very good book on Marathon by Jim Lacey, where he points out another thing with an army like this.

What do you do with all the waste?

Hmm.

that everybody's producing because it's they might not know why but they're going to realize that if you live around a lot of animal and human manure you're going to get sick and it's not very pleasant anyway so you can't stay in one place the other thing is he doesn't know where alexander is so if he just waits for him alexander might be off to goodness knows where hundreds of miles away and you'll never catch him before the summer ends so it's it's a clumsy campaign

And then Alexander finds out from reports that the Persians are behind him, doesn't believe it at first.

They have to go and check.

And then thinks, OK, well, I better do something about it.

So turns around and marches towards Darius, who realizes he's there and takes up a sort of, again, he's chosen his ground.