Dr. Graham Wrightson
speaker
123 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Graham Wrightson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah. As you say, this rotation of kings and the Game of Thrones and all the assassinations and all that different stuff, even within the successes, even the first 10 years or so is just a crazy, exciting period. And then it sort of tails off a little bit when they all start dying and you get fewer power players involved.
For those who don't remember your school education, but you have the Greek city-states never unified as one country of Greece. So you have Athens and Sparta and Thebes, your three main ones at the end of the, or the beginning of the 300s through the mid-4th century.
And Alexander's father, Philip II, took over, took Macedon as this little kingdom, and then progressively, over his long reign, conquers all these different regions, mostly the Greek city-states and the areas they controlled. At the Battle of Chaeronea in 338, he defeats the Theban-Athenian alliance and then takes rule of Greece as hegemon, as leader, and creates the League of Corinth.
And rather than necessarily conquering Greece, Macedon is the forcibly elected leader of an amalgamation of Greek states. And for Philip, the invasion of Persia, which he plans and begins, is this propaganda to cement his role as leader of Greece that he's going to then invade Persia. So that's the Greek context. Rome is doing its own thing over in Italy.
And you have the Greek city-states in Sicily that are connected but separate. And then you have the Persian Empire that is the biggest in the world at the time, controls most of Western Asia and Egypt. And Macedon have been in contact with Persia for a while, as have the Greeks and all sorts of different background stuff that we won't deal with.
But Alexander begins the invasion of Persia as a continuation of his father's policies to cement his new position as the forcibly elected ruler of this League of Corinth empire.
alliance of Greek states and the Greeks are not happy to start with so he has to put down the revolt of Thebes almost as soon as he becomes king and destroys the entire city and enslaves everybody except for Pindar's house, the poet, because he loves Pindar and so that sort of keeps the Greeks in line and he forces them to send him 7,000 soldiers as their contribution to the campaign army and then they go off and invade Persia and so it's initially planned as a punishment for the Persian wars against Greece
But Alexander just keeps on going and he conquers the whole Persian Empire and refuses Darius's offer of splitting the kingdom and marriage with his daughter and all this other different stuff that goes on early on. And he conquers and there's a split in the scholarship as to whether he chooses to turn around in India or whether he's forced to turn around by his own soldiers.
I'm on the choice side because my supervisor... is the main proponent of that, Waldemar Haeckel. So he, in my view, rightfully continued the argument raised by others earlier that Alexander, if you go around the borders of all of Alexander's empire, he goes about two kilometers, I think it is, out past the Persian army and then makes sacrifices and then changes direction.
He does the same thing in India and there's various other different arguments. So Alexander conquers Persia and goes a little further to make his empire bigger. And then he turns around and has his new plans. When he comes back to Babylon, the center, the just new center of his new empire, as opposed to Persis, which was the center of the Persian empire.
He specifically chooses Babylon as his to connect with the, the hanging guns, Babylon and all the Babylonian history of Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi and all that stuff. And then he dies when he's in there. So he, He dies very shortly after finishing his Indian conquests. But by the time he dies, you know, Egypt. Western Asia, they've been ruled by the Macedonians for over a decade by this point.
So they're not necessarily close to leaving. He's founded cities in all these places. He's implemented Greek settlers in all these places. So he's begun the process in his Western conquests of integration of conquered peoples with the Hellenistic culture that comes around. So when he dies, there's no real...
threat in most places anyway of separation from alexander right and part of that is his propaganda presenting himself as the savior of these places he modeled himself on cyrus the great who famously freed the babylonians from their evil uh persian dominance even though he's doing the same thing and he you know you get cyrus cylinder where he claims that he has
He was welcomed in as a friend to Babylon without a fight and all this other propagandistic, ridiculous concepts. So Alexander does the same stuff with his personal historians, saying that he's the savior, freeing the people from Persian dominance. But now you have a new... And you're just not supposed to realize that point. So in most of those areas, it's fine. In India, it's newly conquered.
But because it's newly conquered, they still have the same loyalty to the people that Alexander put in charge for the most part. And obviously, he's left garrisons and new cities in all these different places that he's been to. So when he dies in 323, it creates a vacuum, not...
that leads to separation of the whole empire, but a vacuum for who's going to rule the empire instead, because his one illegitimate son is a child and his wife is pregnant still with what turns out to be his legitimate, only legitimate son. And so his generals, who've been the ones fighting for him, obviously they didn't expect him to die so young.
And they didn't expect this power vacuum at the very top of the kingdom to appear. And in all Argiad history, it's a whole history of civil war, violence of brothers killing brothers and all sorts of fun stuff going on in the early Macedonian history. And that was when it was a small kingdom. So now it's a massive empire. It's even more to the fore as to what's going to happen.
And so the cultural context is that he's begun the integration in these different places with all these cities he's founded. And that remains through the Hellenistic period, especially in Asia and Egypt. The one problem area was Greece, which we'll come back to. But his generals have to decide... What are we going to do? Do we favour the illegitimate son that's already alive?
Do we favour the pregnant wife? Or do we favour his brother, who happens to be older but is not trusted because of his epilepsy or whatever other... He's got something which means that he can't rule without help.
Yeah, just like Henry VI in England, for those British folk who know that stuff, he has bouts of...
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