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

Diades once again uses this remarkable siege craft to take what should be an impregnable city and defeat the Persian governor, Battus, who had thought that he would be able to kind of slow Alexander's advance down.

So yeah, Diades is the man who solves the problems that Alexander would never be able to solve on his own.

And he's put to work doing that throughout the rest of his campaign.

So he's the hero of every mechanicus, every siege engineer in the ancient world.

We don't have time, but the history of siege warfare in the centuries after Alexander is

ever more elaborate and wild.

I mean, if you thought Diades' promontory and siege towers were outrageous, like some of the contraptions that are built by Alexander's successors and by some of their engineers are just even beyond this.

So blueprints, which allegedly were by Diades, find their way into ancient manuals of siegecraft.

and some of them are more plausible than others.

Of course, calling a catapult an original Dyades is like calling a painting an original Leonardo for ancient siege engineers, because he's sort of the hero and in many ways the founder of the profession.

So we see his designs and we see his battles talked about by ancient engineers and his designs put to work and modified and elaborated all the way through the Roman period.

So, yeah, Diades is, if you've heard of him, you've heard of him in the ancient world.

And for every Roman siege engineer, for every kind of mechanicus in a field somewhere in Germania trying to get a catapult to work, Diades is absolutely the hero of the profession.

I would love to talk about that with you sometime.

It is about Alexander.

It's called Alexander God King Man and is out with Lunsbury now.

Thank you so much.

It's such an honour.

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