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

And I think Pertikas is a great example.

And, you know, you've done such wonderful work on Pertikas, such a huge fan.

And yeah, Pertikas just unceremoniously murdered after basically his first defeat.

And Alexander has to play this really carefully because even the people in his army who are normally unquestioning supporters of him, people like his soothsayer, Aristander,

are clearly turning on him because Alexander subsequently says to his man, the army, well, Tyre will be captured within the month.

And there's this just low, bleak chuckle from the men because it's the last day of the month and Tyre is clearly a long way from being captured.

Alexander has to full on rewrite the calendar to add a couple more days to the month in order for this prophecy not to kind of rebound on him immediately.

But one thing Alexander is very good at doing is adapting to horrible situations.

Like when we were talking about the Battle of Issus a little earlier, that great victory against Darius III started out looking like a hideous defeat.

Alexander had been ambushed, he'd lost his baggage, he'd lost his wounded, he'd lost most of the people he was meant to be keeping safe.

And so that generally looks like a king who's about to be defeated and an army which is about to turn on their king.

But Alexander gets his man to hold on there and he turns it around.

And the same thing happens here.

Alexander

You know, when you look at the story of his campaign, this is not someone who never gets anything wrong.

This is not someone who never has horrible things happen to him.

But this is someone who's extremely good at adapting and sort of improvising and figuring out how to think his way and fight his way out of these problems.

And this is what he does.

He gives Diades time to actually bring down the walls of Tyre.

So he makes a plan which is rather more complex and rather more subtle than Alexander's just go in the front gate approach.

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