Tristan Hughes

So why feed them?

Why pay for them when he can take away?

Because the other thing he's doing is taking troops, another way of calming the situation, taking men from the regions that have been rebelling against you and giving them the opportunity to go off and fight on your behalf and win gold and glory against other people.

And that's, again, another way that powers have tended to work throughout the centuries, where you take away the sort of wilder young men who've got nothing else to do and send them up and go and get them to fight somebody else on your behalf.

And they do it very well.

Everybody's happy.

It's areas where the Persians have now and again been able to assert themselves and claim power, but that was only really when the local powers were too busy fighting each other and left weak as a result.

They never really established.

And there is a

There are fanciful elements within the traditions about what happens in India that you don't quite get anywhere else.

you know all this this kind of new world that's opened up to you when you get there it it is staggering because it's again a place where civilization is more ancient than greece so so there are roots back although it's not necessarily any technologically more sophisticated when you get there this is a very very ancient culture with its own way of doing things but more than one because it is not united it's there are different areas so it's

There is a sense of wonder and strangeness about it all.

Whether there's partly in the stories as well, the sense that it's even more exotic to explain why they don't in the long run stay there quite so long.

You have to wonder.

But again, in other respects, it's the same pattern as you come across, you approach people and you want them either to submit to you or if they would submit to you, you'll fight them.

It's an interesting thing.

You've got King Porus, who's got a large army that includes not just men on foot and horseback, but lots of elephants.

And that's something, there've been a few of these at Gaugamela, but they're not really mentioned.

He's got lots, and this is an army that, you know, is used to fighting and using war elephants.

They know how to use them.