Tristan Hughes

Exactly.

Well, shall we now kind of, let's say that Alexander the Great and his army has reached, let's say there's a Roman army opposing him, or like kind of reached Roman territory in Italy.

And of course this never happened and we welcome, I welcome, I'm sure we both welcome lots of comments to this video.

This is just our thoughts on the matter and we're going to delve through it.

But this was a big matter of conversation in ancient Roman educated circles, I guess, because who is this writer, this historian, who envisages, who tries to give us a scenario of what would have happened if Alexander had fought the Romans?

But is it also fair to say, Steele, when Livy's writing this, is he writing the first century BC, so a bit later?

Is that the idea?

And do you feel like, is he also being a bit of a popular historian?

Is he giving the people what they want?

Is this idea that this question was being thrown around by lots of elite Romans who greatly admired Alexander the Great, but still wanted themselves to be seen as even greater, this idea?

absolute king, absolute monarch versus Roman Republic, isn't it, at the same time?

Well, shall we go through Livy's digression bit by bit, theme by theme, and we can debate each part of it and then see how we end up at the end.

But still, I'm sure you probably know the text a little better than me.

I've got excerpts here as well to help us along the way.

But would you like to start us off?

I mean, how does Livy begin this digression?

What things does he focus on, first of all?

Alexander the Great.

Steel, that was a very, very fair assessment of those passages, and I see your points.

I'm going to start off by agreeing with you on a couple of things.