Professor Edmund Richardson

speaker

621 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Professor Edmund Richardson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Ancients · Alexander the Great's Mad Scientist · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

For all they know, it could have been a fluke.

For all they know, there could be a much larger Persian army just about to descend on Alexander.

Certainly, Persia is still the world's superpower, right?

Alexander is still outnumbered, overmatched.

There's no real likelihood for the Tyrians, and indeed for most people, that Alexander will destroy or conquer the entire Persian Empire.

Indeed, there's very little reason to believe that that was Alexander's own objective at this point in his campaign.

If you actually want to decapitate the Persian Empire, if you actually want the Persian heartland, then you pursue Darius.

You follow him when his army is broken, when he's defeated, when he's running for his life.

You follow him.

And Alexander could have been at the gates of Babylon in a few weeks after the Battle of Issus.

There's no force that could have stopped him.

But the Tyrians probably think that Alexander is going to get swept into the sea, or he's going to do what a lot of Greek expeditions in Asia Minor did at this point, which was you land, liberate, supposedly liberate a few cities, you grab as much gold as you can, and then you run for it.

You get the heck out of there before a Persian field army arrives.

And

You declare victory and you sacrifice to the gods.

And meanwhile, all the people who welcomed you, who opened their gates to you, who cooperated with you, are getting hunted down by the great king and are meeting very sticky ends indeed.

So the Tyrians are like, this is not a long-term investment.

This is a terrible idea.

So they decide they can wait him out.

Alexander has not really got much of a reputation for sieges at the time.

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