Chapter 1: What are the early life events that shaped Alexander the Great?
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You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to this brand new series all about one of the most formidable military commanders of all time, Alexander the Great.
Now, many of you might know that I have a particular interest in this area of ancient history, the tale of Alexander, but also that of what happened following his death, the chaos that followed his early demise.
And one of the things that really drew me to this area of ancient history is the stories, is the fact that we have so many amazing tales surviving from the age of Alexander concerning Alexander himself, but also, this is what I really love, concerning the figures that surrounded him, that made Alexander the conqueror, the legendary figure that so many of us know of today.
Now, also, I must mention that a lot of you have been clamouring for us to do an episode, to do a series, a deep delve into the story of Alexander, and that is what we're now going to give you. You can imagine that when the team gave the green light for this project, I was very, very excited. But I couldn't have done it alone, and so we have, for this series, we've got a special guest.
We have the one and only, the fantastic Dr Adrian Goldsworthy, who will be joining us for this series from beginning to end, covering the whole life of Alexander. My producer Joseph and I, we headed over to Adrian's house about a month or so ago and we recorded this entire series in a day. We did so much.
We delved into so much detail that we have split it up into four separate episodes that I'm delighted we are now sharing with you. I know I say a lot. I really do hope you enjoy. But with this one, I really do. I hope that by the end of the series, you will be just as fascinated by Alexander and his story and the story of those that surrounded him as I am.
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Chapter 2: How did Alexander's education under Aristotle influence his leadership?
Now, without further ado, let's get into it. This is episode one. It's the evening on the 21st of July 356 BC and a wonder of the world is aflame. Amidst a great forest of marbled columns, a blazing inferno is spreading through the colourful fabrics and wooden supports that adorn the inside of this mighty temple, gutting the building of its beauty.
Soon enough, the flames have climbed up to the roof and orange glow illuminates the darkening sky above. Situated at the city of Ephesus in Asia Minor, east of the Aegean Sea, this stunning temple is renowned for its size and splendour. Its construction harks back 200 years to the time of the legendary King Croesus, a monarch famed for his countless riches.
But now, it is engulfed in fire, victim to a deliberate act of arson by a man seeking to immortalise his name. The arsonist watches from the shadows as the fire destroys this ancient wonder, captivated by the terrible sight. Herostratus is his name. Immortal infamy would be his legacy. Herostratic fame.
The goddess Artemis, the temple's divine protector, has not been able to save her sacred house. Herostratus picked his night well, so the legend goes. Because Artemis is absent. That evening, she is hundreds of kilometers away. watching the birth of a royal prince. A boy favoured by the gods, destined for greatness. Destined to be Greece's greatest ever conqueror. The boy's name was Alexandros.
Chapter 3: What role did King Philip II play in Alexander's rise to power?
Alexander.
He will become one of the biggest names in history, the king who conquered the superpower of the time, the leader who built one of the largest empires the world had yet seen, the warlord whose story has been told and retold for over two millennia, whose tale has become entwined with mythology, whose legend has been embraced everywhere from Iceland to Iran, inspiring titanic figures throughout history for better or
or for worse, Alexander. From his beginnings and rise to power, all the way through to his early death in Babylon, battered, bruised and blighted by megalomania, we'll be taking you through his action-packed story over four episodes.
In this first episode, we'll explore Alexander's earlier years, his rise to the kingship, the crucial achievements of his father, King Philip II of Macedon, and so much more. Welcome to our brand new mini-series about the life and legend of Alexander the Great. This is Episode 1. Alexander the Great. The Rise to Power. Adrian, what a pleasure to have you back on the podcast.
Thanks for inviting me. No problem at all. Thank you for agreeing to do this series with us. So you're going to be a regular guest, our guest, for this new series on Alexander the Great. We're going to cover his story in four episodes, from his beginnings to his ultimate demise in Babylon, aged 32.
And the very fact that we can fit four whole episodes in for the story of Alexander, and maybe even that's not enough, it's testament to how much material there is surviving about this figure. It is in some ways, and yet there are other large gaps in his life.
Compared to people in the ancient world, we know quite a lot about him, but we don't know so much about his society, what Macedonian royal court life was like. In a way that, say for the late first century BC Rome, we've got Cicero, we've got Caesar, we've got lots of traditions that give you a bit more of an idea of how people thought about marriage, childhood, education.
So with Alexander, you have to guess.
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Chapter 4: What significant events led to Alexander's first military experiences?
And although we have lots of information about him, the thing we've always got to bear in mind is almost none of it's contemporary. Yes. Or even written in the lifetime of somebody who knew Alexander. So in most cases, you're dealing with stuff written down four centuries later for the fullest account, the Arian, the Plutarch. They're writing under Hadrian, early part of the second century AD.
So more than 450 years after Alexander's death. So it's a little bit like talking about Henry VIII now as if without the contemporary sources. What's the tradition? So you've got to be careful in using it because Alexander had come to mean so many things to so many different people. It's the Romans who dubbed him the great and think in those terms.
So it's great in some ways, but it isn't straightforward.
so much of his story is mythologized and it's actually trying to figure out who was the real alexander what's the fact what's the fiction and especially for stuff which is not directly associated with his conquest of persia and so on like his early life i mean the first episode we're doing recovering from his you know his birth all the way to him taking the throne and more and that's more than 20 years and that's more than two-thirds of his life already
I mean, it's not that unusual for the ancient world that we don't know much about anyone until they become famous. They're suddenly in the limelight. They're on the political, the military stage. But it's worse for Alexander because we don't know much about society. Now, the big problem is we talk about the Greeks, which is meaningless. There wasn't a Greece.
There are lots of Greek communities who see themselves as Hellenes, their common language. The Macedonians are on the fringes of that.
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Chapter 5: How did Alexander demonstrate his military prowess at the Battle of Chaeronea?
There's an ancestor of Alexander, namesake Alexander I, wants to compete in the Olympic Games, we're told by Herodotus, and there's a debate over whether or not he's a Greek. And eventually he gets in because his family claimed to be descended from exiles from Argos in the Peloponnese, big rival of Sparta, and therefore the royal family are officially declared Greek, and he's allowed to compete.
But that suggests that they're not sure. Later on, by Alexander's father Philip's day, he's putting chariot teams into it and it's no problem at all because you're big and powerful enough. You can't be ignored. But a lot of what we think when we say the Greeks think this about how children develop, about...
families, about romance, this sort of thing, actually relies on a relatively small pool of information all focused around Athens and the elite of Athens. And then we generalize from that and say, oh, well, this is what they'd be doing. But there's not much basis for that. It's just we don't have anything else.
So you don't have context to fill in with, well, this is what would be normal for an aristocrat, for a royal prince at this stage of their life. So that's the other big problem is that We're trying to understand something where until Alexander comes along, we hear very little about Macedonia.
Even Philip, who is the man who sets up the Macedonian kingdom, begins the war against Asia that Alexander will lead and will take him all the way to India. There are large parts of Philip's life we don't know where he was or what he was doing. We can't pin it down. That's never the case with Alexander.
But Philip doesn't get that attention, which means even comparing Alexander to his father, who's better documented than other Macedonian kings, is a problem. And that's, without any story, understanding history, you need that context, that sense of just how unusual is this. And clearly, in a lot of respects, Alexander's story is incredibly unusual.
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Chapter 6: What were the political dynamics in Macedon during Alexander's early reign?
He becomes the ultimate hero, the ultimate conqueror.
Plenty of Roman emperors, whenever any of them even vaguely looks eastwards towards Asia, the poets start talking about Alexander and how this, you know, whether it's Gaius Caesar, whether it's Crassus, Mark Antony, Augustus himself, Trajan, Julian, later on in the fourth century, everyone starts saying, oh yeah, this is going to be the new Alexander. You know, we'll get to India.
We'll do all the things Alexander did. And of course they don't. So that, again, it's like anyone who becomes so famous. How do you get to the real Alexander, the real Napoleon, any of these people? Partly because they were making their own myth as they went along as well, very consciously, which doesn't help.
I feel even in this first episode where we're exploring his early years, we'll still be exploring certain stories that have become mythologized over the time, whether it's his birth or the taming of Bucephalus, his horse, or so on and so forth. But let's set the scene first off. So Alexander, he is born in 356 BC. July is normally said either the 20th or the 21st of July.
And Macedon at that time, you've already hinted at beforehand, it's been very much on the periphery of the Greek world. But what's happening at that time? It feels like that power balance is starting to shift. The golden age of Athens and Sparta has gone. And there's an opportunity here for Macedon. It's very much so.
Southern Greece is where the quintessential Greeks, as we remember them, that's where they've developed. It's the land of city-states, and it's the land of Athens, Sparta, and then Thebes, the other great rival.
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Chapter 7: How did the assassination of Philip II impact Alexander's succession?
Corinth as well, but Corinth falls away. The Athenians and the Spartans have led the resistance against the Persian Empire when the big invasion, first of all 490, but then you get the big one under Xerxes in 480 BC, Thermopylae and the Onadas and 300 Spartans and all of that. The Athenians have helped them win at Salamis, the Spartans at Plataea, the land battle.
But after that, it's quite scary, but in barely a generation, the Athenians and the Spartans are at each other's throats. And not only that, but after their golden moment of standing up to the great evil empire from the east, they both want Persian gold to help fund their war against their fellow Greek neighbors.
And the Spartans end up victorious at the end of the big Peloponnesian war, as we call it. But their dominance lasts a few decades. They get hammered by the Thebans in battle, their populations declining, their societies in all sorts of difficulties. Thebes is again dominant for a decade or so, but then the Thebans, their main leaders die. And they're
Philip is born into that period of dominance, Alexander's father, Philip II of Macedon. He is even a hostage in Thebes for a while in his teenage years, something, again, unimaginable for Alexander. But when Philip returns and becomes probably regent in 359, when his older brother. One brother's been king and got murdered.
The second one gets defeated by the Illyrians and killed in battle with most of his army. The Illyrians in the Balkans. They're sort of, yeah, Albania, that area, and to the north. You've got, think of it this way, you've got southern Greece, which the Greeks consider, this is real civilization, this is us.
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Chapter 8: What myths and legends surround Alexander's early life and achievements?
Fringe peoples, the Thessalians are a bit less Greek, but they're still Greek. The Macedonians, yeah, we're not sure about them. Then you get to the Thracians, the Illyrians, Paeonians, people like that. These are true barbarians. These are people whose language sounds like gibberish, who are just not as good as you.
not inclined towards civilization and all the sort of the themes you'd have with the Cyclops in the Odyssey that they, Cyclops is they don't have a city, they don't have laws, they don't farm, they pastoralists and they live in villages are scattered and they're generally angry and violent.
And this irrational fear that if they actually did ever band together all of them, that they would be able to like wipe through, you know, sweep away Greece, but because they're so uncivilized and barbaric, that would never happen. It's the sort of thank goodness, because otherwise they are ferocious and they're cruel and they're savage.
And yes, you sometimes say, well, yeah, they're not really disciplined, but they still scare you. And you don't want that organization. Macedonia is in between. And in some way, it's a bulwark against that forces of chaos beyond there. But also, Philip takes over a Macedonian kingdom that is being preyed upon by the Thebans, by Thracians, by Illyrians. It's got divisions within the royal family.
It's really weak. And Macedonia as a kingdom has had periods when it's been strong, but they've tended to be brief. The royal family has convinced everybody that only someone of the blood can rule. But they tend to have a lot of children and there's no real clear principle of the oldest succeeds or clear succession.
So basically anybody from that royal family can become king if enough people will back him. Nearly all the Macedonian kings we know about die violently. And quite a few get killed in battle, but even more get killed by other Macedonians, get murdered, get assassinated. So Philip inherits this weak, fragile kingdom that's often the victim. And he is starting at this stage to turn it round.
And he's won some victories. He's defeated the Illyrians, the Thracians. He's got rid of challengers from within his own family. He's defying the Athenians that have always had a keen interest in that area because the big advantage with this part of the world is that compared to southern Greece, the resources are greater. You've got gold mines, silver mines. You've also got timber.
Lots of wood, yes. Lots of wood. And you need that. You think of the great monuments we see in Greece now. You forget how much timber was needed to build them for roof beams, but also for the scaffolding to get up, but particularly to keep them. And then you think of Athens, whose power rested on its fleet of wooden ships built from timber that's primarily coming from this area.
So Macedonia is potentially rich, which is why everybody's after it all the time and trying to get in on the action. Philip by 356 is turning things around, but he's only been ruler three years, possibly king for only two. He may have been, say, regent at first. And he's still young. He's only in his 20s.
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