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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And this is a battle which, you know, Alexander is expected to lose.
Even most of his army expect him to lose.
He's wildly outnumbered and he's been outthought and outmaneuvered by Darius in the lead up to the battle.
He's been...
on the coast of Asia Minor, searching for this gigantic Persian army.
The Persian army, meanwhile, has snuck up behind him, has caught him unawares, has cut him off from his baggage train, has helped itself to his food supplies, has killed a lot of his wounded and has sent a lot of the survivors back to Alexander with their hands amputated.
And it looks like Alexander is about to be just wiped off history.
But then, of course, at the Battle of Issus in November 333, he changes the world.
He essentially walks straight into Darius's trap and turns it around on him.
He traps this giant Persian army in a very narrow coastal plain, so between a range of mountains and the sea, so that the gigantic numbers cannot be used against him.
They're essentially all stacked up
and can't surround him and can't overwhelm him.
And he uses this Macedonian army, which had been trained at vast expense by Philip and then is led by him with this kind of reckless brilliance to essentially carve up Darius's force
Darius himself, when he sees Alexander and his companion cavalry charging at him, turns his chariot, runs for it, flees the battlefield.
And so confident was Darius that he didn't just have his vast camp and his gold and his jewels and his carpets and his wine and his special bathtub and everything.
just ready within striking distance.
He had his wife, his son and heir, his mother, his entire family.
And Darius loses all of them.
Alexander captures them.
And this is a defeat such as basically no great king had survived before Darius.
Showing 101–120 of 621 · page 6 of 32
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