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 · last 12 months

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

Now, Darius is a tinkerer and an inventor and like an endlessly curious person.

And at the time in fourth century Greece, there's nothing like a technical school or an engineering college or anything like that.

You can go and learn from a sophist.

You can go and learn from a philosopher.

There are plenty of chaps trying to sell you a course about the nature of reality or the meaning of happiness or the nature of the universe.

If you want to figure out how to build things or how to break things, then your choices are either apprentice with a craftsman or join the army and join the army of Philip II.

And this is what Diades does.

He enrolls in Philip's army.

Now, Alexander's father, Philip,

cultivated this image of like a one-eyed brawler and drinker and buffoon but he's actually almost always the smartest guy in the room he just really really enjoys everyone thinking about how stupid he is and continuing to think about how stupid he is until he's rolled up their territory and picked their pockets and basically kind of made off with whatever he wants to make off with

Philip basically throws every spare drachma he has at the army.

He takes this ragtag force, he professionalizes it.

He equips the infantry with these gigantic spears that turn them into the phalanx that rip through the Persian Empire.

He trains the cavalry into the companion cavalry, which Alexander led to victory against the great king of Persia.

But he also spends an absolute fortune on his engineers.

He has someone called Polyidas of Thessaly, who Diades studies under.

And they're not just building existing weapons.

They're trying to make new ones.

They're trying to make bigger catapults, heavier, just so many ways to basically knock down fortifications and kill people in horrible ways that had never been thought of before.

This is basically what Diades grows up in.

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