Mary Beard

I was going to say that I thought you read that out just to annoy me, Tom, really.

Oh, kind of.

You can't deny...

that Alexander the Great is worth looking at because so many people have, so many people have copied him.

He's become such a mythic figure, not just in Western civilization, but actually throughout the world.

Well, he appears in the Koran, amazingly.

Yeah, exactly.

So the idea of me being sniffy, as I'm quite tempted to be, but I'm resisting it, the idea of being sniffy and saying, oh, I don't, you know, a young drunken butcher,

That isn't good enough.

I think we do have to press at both the truth and the myth of Alexander the Great, actually.

I dread to think of the fate of this country if we start using Alexander the Great as a role model.

I'm looking for someone who's got a kind of bit clearer idea of what cooperation and collaboration might be.

We're all going to follow our dreams like Alexander the Great.

I think that's being generous to Macedon, actually.

But you're right that Macedon was on the northern margins of what we call ancient Greece.

And until the reign of Philip II, it wasn't much to write home about.

So, in fact, its turning point comes in the reign of Alexander's dad.

And there persist in being issues, you know, right up to now, but going back to the ancient world of whether we really thought, do we really think that Macedon is part of Greece or isn't it?

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

Yeah.