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

He's won some battles, but he's not got a reputation for being able to do advanced siegecraft.

And Tyre as well had a reputation of being thoroughly impregnable.

It happily waited out a 13-year siege during the Assyrian period.

So Alexander, as far as the Tyrians are concerned, is going to get bored or get dead long before they have to worry about letting him in.

So he goes to Diades.

And he's like, the conversation is not recorded, but you can imagine him pointing at Tyre and being like, fix this for me.

Well, you know, gonna need some help here.

Because the Tyrians don't just, you know, refuse to let Alexander in.

When he gets to Tyre, when he marches the army to the shore,

And he takes the mainland settlement.

He sends envoys across the water because, you know, he's looking over Tyre and he's getting a little worried and he's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, this might be more of a problem than I thought.

The Tyrians kill Alexander's envoys.

They kill them publicly and horribly.

They execute them and then they throw the bodies off Tyre.

the walls of Tyre, and leave those bodies on the shore until they're washed away by the waves.

Now, of course, in ancient Greece, this is a horrible way to die, because if you are just left for the seas to take you, if you're denied the rights of burial, then your soul will wander as a lonely ghost for the rest of time.

Diplomatic envoys also, by tradition as old as Homer, were thought to be immune from summary execution.

So the Tyrians don't just refuse to let Alexander in.

They do so in a way which is calculated to humiliate, calculated to debase, calculated to sort of perform their contempt for him, for the entire army.

Alexander, remember, is pretty insecure at this point still.

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