Show 71 - Mania for Subjugation

It's history for us, for us, for us, for us, for us, for us.

“Leo Vance. The secret case, sign in the words, "ish been I'm Dielina." Mr. Robert Shaw, carried down the shore, the drama.”

I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got an role, whether or not they are present or sick. It's hard core history. Like many of you, I am a fan of ancient mythology, the stories of creation, or how human beings came to be, or tales that involve gods and heroes and monsters.

And sometimes just regular people who go through interesting sorts of events or travels or whatnot.

And oftentimes these mythological stories are meant to impart lessons, which are supposed to learn something from them. To do what not to do, you're tempted to almost say at the end of all of them.

“And the moral of the story is, right? What are we supposed to learn from this?”

How to rest Thompson used to call it in his columns, "The Wisdom."

And some of my favorite mythological stories are cautionary tales.

Examples of what can happen if we're not careful. And one of my favorite versions of that kind of story, that kind of mythological teaching to is the famous story of Datalus and Ecarus. If you know your ancient Greek philosophy, you will recall that Datalus is a master craftsman and inventor. He can seemingly make anything. He's the one who built the famous labyrinth that held the Minotaur. And it was the king of Minoa, the Christian area on the island of Crete that had Datalus built this form. But at a certain point, he turns against Datalus and imprisons Datalus and Ecarus.

But of course, when you imprison one of the great inventors of all time, he's going to try to invent a way to get out. And in this case, he does. He creates wings for he and his son. Wings made of multiple different materials, including things like feathers and beeswax. And he and his son are going to be able to fly out of this prison. But Datalus warns his son before doing so.

He tells him not to get complacent and allow himself to fly too close to the water. Because if you're too low, the moisture he says from the sea will ruin the wings and you'll lose your power of flight in your crash. Conversely, he warns him about getting filled with hubris and forgetting how dangerous this is and allowing himself to fly too high. Because if he does that, the sun will melt the beeswax that hold these wings together and you'll plummet and fall.

“And of course, being an ancient Greek mythological tale, how would it work if everything just went fine?”

And of course, it doesn't. Ecarus forgets his father's warnings, gets taken sort of over by the enthusiasm that happens when a human being gets a chance to fly like a bird. It allows himself to fly too high and the sun melts the beeswax, the wings fall apart and Ecarus plunges into the sea and dies. The moral of the story that take away from all this is supposed to be a warning about ambition and allowing oneself to get too ambitious, right? Forget that there is a middle ground that everyone should shoot for.

In philosophy, this is sometimes called the golden mean and it involves things that are considered to be virtues when you have them in the right amount.

Right amount of courage is a virtue. If you have too little of it, it's cowardice and that's a vice.

But if you have too much of it, it's recklessness and that's a vice too.

“The question of ambition is an equally interesting one. It's a very gold-y-locks type concept, this golden mean, right?”

This porridge is too hot, this porridge is too cold, this porridge is just right. Well, if you're dealing with ambition and not porridge, where is the just right point?

It's not easy to pin down, is it?

The dictionary defines ambition as an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power. It's described as a character trait that involves people who are driven to succeed at lofty goals, right? It involves drive ambition, tenacity, the pursuit of excellence, the desire to be the best. The interesting thing about the desire to be the best, though, is that that's a competitive thing. It means you're competing with other people who also want to be the best. You're seeking distinction, right, fame.

You want to be seen as better than other people.

“There's an interesting one. Edmund Burke once said that fame is the passion, which is the instinct of all great souls, right?”

They seek distinction. And to a certain degree, this is positive, unless it gets to intense, to steal a phrase that was originally used for something else. ambition is a bit like fire, a dangerous servant, and a cruel master, and you can see what happens when it gets out of control. In the case of a mythological figure like Icarus, his overambition, or his hubris, obviously cost him his life. And in most cases where something like ambition is out of balance, right, where you have too much of it, it only burns the person who's trying to achieve the fame and distinction, right?

If you're a runner and you want to be the fastest human being in the world, maybe you cut corners, maybe you cheat, maybe you take performance and hand-sing drugs. But at the end of the day, the person who paid the price for that is you.

“But what if when Icarus' hubris gets the best of him and the son melts his beeswax holding the wings together, and he falls on a crowd of people?”

What if it isn't just about Icarus anymore? What if the area where you seek fame and success and distinction involves the lives and destinies of lots and lots of people?

That's when this question of this virtue of ambition or desire to be the best can become ultimately at times genocidal.

I mean, take, for example, a figure like Julius Caesar from the Roman Republic in the era, right? There's a great story about Caesar, and it very well may not be true. It's recounted in a couple of different sources, which doesn't mean it's true. The Roman writer, Soutonius, recounts a version of this tale as does the Greek author Plutarch. But they talk about when Julius Caesar was stationed in Spain. He was about 32 years old at the time. Soutonius says he's reading a history of Alexander the Great, Plutarch says he's sitting at the foot of a statue of Alexander the Great who lived a couple of centuries before Caesar.

Soutonius says he was sying and had a vexing look on his face, Plutarch says he's out now weeping. And when somebody says, "Why are you crying?" Caesar was supposed to have replied, "Don't I have good reason to?" At the age that I am now, Alexander the Great had conquered all these kingdoms and what have I done of distinction? Showing that in Caesar's mind, he's not just competing with the other August figures of his own era, right? The other great human beings who are pushing the envelope of distinction and fame and notoriety and power in the ancient Roman Republic, Julius Caesar's competing on a celestial level.

He wants to be the best that ever was, and when you're playing on that level of verified turf, you're up against people like Alexander the Great.

All their Tom Holland said about Caesar. He said Caesar's own ambitions were one day to consume the entire Republic.

“Well clearly that never would have happened if Caesar's ambitions had been to become the best flute player in ancient Rome.”

But he wanted to be the Great ruler, conqueror, empire builder. And when that's what you want to be famous for, it means you're going to have to kill a lot of people, the win the gold medal. In fact, if you look at the way the Roman Republic is set up, it's set up to encourage distinction between its greatest figures. And that worked for Rome for a long time. It was almost part of the plan, right? It's your greatest figures, desiring to outdo one another. And when they do great deeds, they pull the Republic with them.

There's also a built-in mechanism to keep it from getting out of control. It's sort of a crabs in a bucket dynamic where if any one figure starts to become too successful and almost climb out of the bucket, the other great figures, the other crabs pull them back down.

Until it doesn't, eventually somebody barbecues the Republic and that's Julius Caesar.

And the number of people who die because of that is Legion. The reasons for this are recognized by other people who tried to compete in this same kind of celestial historical event.

“There's a very interesting line from Napoleon Bonaparte written in the 1790s where he talks about the danger of ambition. And remember, Bonaparte's one of the few people that you could call a peer of a guy like Alexander or Julius Caesar.”

We were going to be tried in the celestial court of historical justice, and you had it have a jury of your peers. Napoleon could be one of those people sitting on the jury. And he once said that ambition, which overthrows governments and private fortunes, which feeds on blood and crimes. Ambition is like all in ordinate passions he wrote, "A violence and unthinking fever that ceases only when life ceases, like a conflagration, which fanned by a pitiless wind, ends only after all has been consumed."

The poster child for the dangers associated with outsize out of control ambition, right? The geopolitical real life example of an Icarus in global affairs is Alexander the Great.

This Icarus clearly failed at what he was trying to do if you're trying to fly across the water and instead you crash into the sea and die, that's not success.

“And Alexander's case measuring how well he did depends on what he was trying to do in the first place, doesn't it?”

It's trying to become eternally famous, achieve glory, conquer lots of places and write his name in the sands of time more deeply and enduring than anyone else ever, you might have to give the guy an A+ After all he lived more than 23 hundred years ago, and he's probably a biblical personages aside, the most famous, early figure in history that most people, if you brought a microphone and started asking them on the street of any major city in the world, that most people would recognize, don't you think?

The guy still has books coming out about him or some aspect of his life or career every year, regularly has movies and TV shows and all kinds of things like that coming out, podcasts too, it must be said. And he's fascinated people ever since his life, yours truly clearly also, there's a ton of reasons for this, first of all we should notice that he's one of the better examples you can use to prove something that historians have understood for a very long time, which is that you interpret people through the lens and the morality and the standards and ethics of the time that you live in, right?

Alexander has been seen any number of different ways based on who's doing the viewing, in some areas he's been seen as a almost philosopher king, in others he's been seen as a great representative of the idea of the civilizing force. We've used the term historical arsonist before in some areas, Alexander was seen as someone who had to come along to break the log jam that was keeping the world from moving forward, a great blender of civilizations, a great spreader of Hellenism or a butcher, depends on who's doing the viewing, right?

And it's the hierarchy, that's the best kind of nepotism if you're trying to start your career off with a great advantage, you mean what's the old line that, you know, they start off on third and think they hit a triple, don't you think a guy like Caesar or Napoleon or a jenghis Khan would have loved that sort of a head start, right?

“I think it's supposedly at the foot of Alexander's statue because he hasn't achieved as much by the same age as Alexander did, well Alexander had a huge head start didn't he?”

A lot of guys who have the words the great after their name fallen to that category, I mean you can look at a guy like Frederick the Great of Prussia, he had a father who did a lot of the heavy lifting of building all of the, you know, the edifice for conquest that would come later, he centralized a state, he, organized a taxation system, he built a bureaucracy, and oh yeah, he created a mosa roti of an army and then handed the keys to the sports car to his son to go off and do amazing things and then get the, you know, the title the Great added to his name, probably should have been his dad's title when you think about it, and you can say similar things for Alexander, Alexander's father was an amazing figure.

“He is such an incredible person that had Alexander not lived, we would probably know his dad's name instead, and maybe his dad would have been called the Great, instead his dad was called Philip II of a place called Macedonia.”

Quick word on pronunciation here or mispronunciation as the case may be, I'm one of those people who've long been a heretic on the matter and pronounced Macedonia with the hard C sound, instead of the more common in English soft C sound, I have a lot of reasons for that if you'd like to read a long-winded account of my thinking, we will link to a written article in the show notes about it, but I've been a heretic since I first encountered some of the history writing in the 1980s where some of those historians,

simply took the question out of the hands of the reader by substituting a K, for a C in the words like Macedonian or Skithian,

once you follow the tumbling etymological dominoes on this question, you might find yourself a heretic too, but if I'm mispronouncing the word in your mind, just know that I'm doing it intentionally,

“Macedonia though is an area north of Greece, and whether or not it's composed of people you should call Greek has been an ongoing issue from Philip II's time until now.”

For a different reasons though, in Philip II's time, you couldn't participate, for example, in the Olympic Games, unless you were considered Greek, and the Greeks during the time period had debates about this, and Philip II amongst other Macedonian kings worked hard to try to make sure he was, and his people were, considered, meeting the criteria that would classify them as Greek. These days the question is still an open one, but a lot of it revolves around all of the DNA that has moved into the region north of Greece over all the centuries since Alexander the Great's time, right, 23 centuries or more.

A lot of different people move into that area, how does that affect the ethnic makeup? Well, people still talk about it. One thing you can say though is that this area north of Greece in classical Greek times wasn't very much like classical Greece.

Classical Greece of course is the Greece of the Greek and Persian wars, the Peloponnesian wars, so think 500 BC BCE 400 300 that whole range populated of course by city states.

The famous ones, right, Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Argos, Thieves, all these places could almost be likened to small scale countries, you know, where the people were patriotic towards their cities, where the cities went to war with one another, they usually controlled a decent chunk of the surrounding territory and the people who lived there were considered to be sort of the members of a country, but the countries were small scale places.

All of these places tended to have thriving middle classes, the citizens up until a certain time period usually made up the militaries of these places and these city states fought each other.

These armies were often militia armies in terms of their organization. So if you were a farmer in thieves and a lot of a sudden you guys were going to go to war against Corinth, while you were going to go grab your armor from over the fireplace and it might have been the same armor your dad and your granddad used.

You go back home, put the armor back over the fireplace, grab the plow and get back to the farm.

“Things were very different though, north of Greece and Macedonia, where they really didn't have a thriving middle class and they didn't have any city states, they had villages and towns and hamlets.”

Instead of a thriving middle class, they sort of had a group that tilled the land, I'm not sure if you called them peasants that would be exactly right. Definitely had a nobility that was often referred to by a Greek word that's often translated to knights or barons and these people owed their allegiance to a king. Now even the idea of having a king to the Greeks of this time period was a sign, a mark of barbarism. Kings were what the Egyptians had with the Pharaoh. Kings were what the Persians had with their great king of kings.

“In the Greek city state, you often had all kinds of different governments, but kings weren't usually a part of it.”

And in one of the states that had kings, Sparta famously had two of them. Kind of takes the whole, you know, absolute ruler side of the question out of the equation, doesn't if you have two of them. It reminds me a little of the Roman republic's concept of having not one console but two consoles, right, divides the power and authority a little bit. But if you had a king, that was a sure sign that you probably weren't Greek, and if your king was polygamous, well that was another sure sign it probably wasn't a Greek place because in, you know, Greece of the time period we're talking about polygamy was another sure sign of barbarism.

“Add to that the fact that these Macedonians lived a much more sort of a rustic existence than your average cosmopolitan Greek city state cosmopolitan by comparison.”

You look at Macedonian royal society, and it looks more like a mafia crime family than anything you can think of. A mafia crime family, if you combine it with a daytime soap opera, a mafia crime family with some more homosexuality and sorcery than most mafia crime families are known for. I wrote down some of the adjectives used by historians to describe, you know, the Macedonian royal family situation, and they talked about assassinations, executions, civil wars, hostage taking incest, drunken murders, adultery, witchcraft.

Makes for great reading, but you might not want to live there. It does mean that the kings of Macedonia who came of age and managed to rule were in a sort of a Darwinian sense pretty tough survivors. In fact, Philip II had two older brothers. It's interesting to note that Philip II's mother gave birth to three sons, all three became kings, and all three died violently. One was killed in wars, fighting Macedonia's enemies.

Another was assassinated, which is a pretty normal thing to happen, actually two of them were assassinated. The Macedonia was a territory with powerful enemies all around them. They had the Elyrian tribes in one direction, which again, the Greeks considered to be barbarians. They had the Thracian tribes, and they were like 40 of different Thracian tribes, also to the north and the other direction.

What this meant was twofold. One, they were always fighting these people, but two, they were often intermarrying their royal families to try to cement deals.

There are strong strains of Thracian, Elyrian, and Eparit blood that runs through the royal families of the Macedonians. Traditionally, Philip II has seen as a guy who brings Macedonia to power from nothing. That is probably not true considering the newfangled histories about him, because one of the great things that revisionist historians have figured out in a lot of these cases is that any time the history sort of portrays someone has, you know, creating something from nothing, it probably wasn't true, that there were probably foundational things bubbling up under the surface that didn't make their appearance felt in the history books,

until someone was able to reach a critical mass, and that's probably the case with Philip II.

He was probably building upon, you know, state formation and development, that his ancestors had been able to sort of lay down, right?

The mazerati type situation that his son got to run with, and one of the reasons that Philip is so able to exploit these maneuvers done by some of his predecessors is the stability he brings to the leadership question.

I mean, that's the key issue if you look at it in hindsight that's keeping Macedonia from doing better, they can't keep competent leaders on the throne for very long.

“At one point before Philip takes over, Macedonia is going to have five kings in six years, and most of them die violently, that's a difficult situation to overcome, even with a lot of advantages and what sort of advantages are we talking about?”

Well, one is that Macedonia has got quite a bit of arable land. Compare that to the powerful Greek city states in the south, who are, you know, splitting up the land between all the different city states, right?

So no city state controls at all. They've been cutting down trees for hundreds of years in Greece proper, which isn't fantastic tree growing territory to begin with.

Well, Macedonia has got a lot of trees. In fact, the ancient sources record that the best and most important timber in this period, and remember timber is used for everything, including the building of navies, very important in ancient Greece.

“The best timber comes from Macedonia, they've got wonderful areas to farm, and to graze cattle and horses. They control important mineral and precious metal mines, and we'll get more of them.”

And they've also got a population that will prove to be very culturally and maybe lifestyle wise, good at fighting. This is sort of an interesting thing to examine compared to our modern era when people can kill other people with a push of a button from drones halfway around the world. But in an era where you actually have to kill people by shoving a knife into their throat or something like that, the way your brought up can influence how well you're able to do that. I mean, there's a big difference isn't there between somebody raised on a ranch, like a cow hand, whose slaughter and drives cattle, for example, and a kid growing up in Los Angeles playing Dungeons and Dragons. Now, the Dungeons and Dragons kid, with his video games and all that, might be very good at the drone strikes from the other side of the globe.

“One's going to think that when it comes to killing an animal or a person by hand, there might be some advantages to the one who's doing that on the farm, and in his book,”

by the spear, fill up the second Alexander the Great and the Rise and fall of the Macedonian Empire. Historian Ian Worthington sort of draws this distinction. He compares an Athenian to a Macedonian and compares their cultures and the way they grow up and the carrots and sticks in their societies. Something like that might actually have an effect on the battlefield when you don't get to shoot somebody from 100 yards away, but you actually have to walk up and shove a spear into them. What I'm going to mention talks about the Athenian lifestyle, probably the most, like the Los Angeles Dungeons and Dragons kids of this era, and he says quote, "The whole fabric of Macedonian society was alien to Greeks, and so abhorred by them."

The Athenian male was an entirely different animal from his Athenian counterpart, for example, who came of age in 18 was then eligible to attend the assembly, which is the body that debates and votes on domestic and foreign policy, he says, served in the army as and when required, was eligible for jury service when he turned 30, and if he came from a well to do family attended Symposia to engage in intellectual discussions before letting his hair down, and swapping talk for sex with the ever-present courtesans."

He then says, quote, "M Macedonia was utterly different, no one was allowed to wash in warm water except women who had just given birth. No man could recline it a banquet until he had speared and killed one of the ferocious wild boars without using a net to trap it.

A soldier had to wear a rope or sash around his waist until he had killed his first man in battle.

To achieve these expectations, he writes, "Voys from an early age were taught to fight, ride a horse, and hunt wild boar, foxes, birds, and even lions."

According to the ancient writers, there are all sorts of other things that the Macedonians have as part of their lifestyle that make them seem a little like Vikings.

“There's supposed to wear animal skins or bare belts, drink their alcohol out of big drinking horns, right, reminds you of Vikings, right there, doesn't it?”

The Athenians who, in a very cultured way, at their symposia where they're going to talk politics and all these sorts of things,

they would always take their wine and mix it with water, cut the strength down, you know, to make sure people weren't just passing out at their parties.

They could continue to have a nice, high-minded conversation. The Macedonians wanted their wine straight and unmixed. And they weren't going to have polite little sober conversations. They were going to have drinking parties, where they were going to have competitions to see who could drink the most wine. The fastest, right? You get two guys standing up there with giant terrains of unmixed wine, and they both go out at to try to see who can last the longest without just passing out at their feet. Different kind of culture entirely. And this is the kind of culture that Philip is born into, right around 383, 382 BC BCE.

“The murderous soap opera of Macedonian royal life is in full swing during his birth.”

And you don't know what to believe. The ancient sources are really hard on women, especially women of some power and authority.

The Romans and the Greek historians always treat them as kind of upady, your evil or borderline, malicious just by being powerful and assertive.

Adrian Golds were the the modern historian, suggest we not treat these stories specifically as though they're 100% true. But Philip's mom, a woman name you're really key, is obviously married to Philip's dad, but supposedly is in a sexual relationship. With her son-in-law, Philip's sister's husband, and they both plot against Philip's dad. The plot fails, and Philip's dad forgives them, and they may be go on to continue to maneuver behind his back, and then when Philip's dad dies, the guy who's checking up with Philip's mom is continually inserting his hands and trying to manipulate the kingship.

May have been involved by Hooker by Crook and the assassination of Philip's brother when he's a king.

So it's an interesting family dynamic to say the least, but nothing unusual given Macedonian history.

“Around the year 365 Philip is sent as a hostage to the Greek city state of thieves. Now the reason you sent a royal family member to another city state or a place like thieves is as part of a peace agreement, right?”

What sort of seals the deal you don't want to go back in the peace agreement, only a bunch of your royal family members with us? Think about the phenomenon of pages in the middle ages. It's not that dissimilar. Philip would have been treated nicely. It wasn't like they threw them in a dungeon, but it's in thieves that supposedly Philip learns a lot of important things about warfare. Because he's in thieves at a very specific time in history, the time in history where thieves is for a short period sort of the kings of the Greek scene.

Because they've recently, in 371 BCE, defeated and broken Spartan power. And a famous battle called Luke Tra, maybe the greatest Greek general up until this time period. The guy named Epemenondas was the guy in charge, and he was doing really interesting things militarily. And Philip is housed with one of his generals. And so he's learning things things that he will, well, at least the tradition holds build off of. He's going to create an army that builds on the foundation that he's taught when he's in thieves. The other thing that happens in thieves is Philip is exposed to all sorts of high-minded things. I mean, the guy he stays with is a follower of the Pythagorean sort of lifestyle, the vegetarianism self-sacrifice.

A whole bunch of things that Philip really wasn't personality-wise, but he's getting a chance to really see how city states operate, how their government works, and to be exposed to these sorts of philosophical ideas that maybe wouldn't have been to common for a bear skin, wearing drinking or using barbarian. Meanwhile, Philip's oldest brother is assassinated during a war dance. His next oldest brother recalls Philip from Thebes.

The first thing to say about Philip is you just don't know much about him that you can depend on because like his son Alexander, he is the subject of an immense propaganda campaign.

And the Athenians in this time period, who were his enemies, are the best propagandists in Greece. They have some of the best orbitors and speakers going. One of them's named Themosthenes and Themosthenes. I mean, he'll write a bunch of arguments against Philip known as Thephalypics, and much of what we know about Philip comes from Thephalypics.

“The entire design and approach of Thephalypics is to make Philip sound like he's Darth Vader or Soron breathing down Athens's neck, so maybe not exactly a realistic or fair account of the guy.”

He always loved the way Historian will Durant Gosh. I mean, I want to say it's almost 100 years ago now writing about Philip describes him, and it may not be a fair description either, because some of the modern day historians are much kinder to Philip in terms of treating him as a more cultured man, a more well spoken man. His style historians, but Will Durant, gives a quick rundown that just describes how amazing the guy is, both in pro and cons, and this is what he has to say about the personality of Philip the Great, or the man who maybe should be named Philip the Great, in his book The Life of Greece.

He had all the virtues except those of civilization. He was strong in body and will, athletic and handsome, a magnificent animal trying now and then to be an Athenian gentleman.

“Like his famous son, he was a man of violent temper and abounding generosity, loving battle as much, strong drink more, unlike Alexander he was a jovial laffer, and raised to high office a slave who amused him.”

He liked boys, but liked women better, and married as many of them as he could. He continues a little farther. Most of all, he liked stalwart men, who could risk their lives all day and gamble and carous with him half the night. He was literally, before Alexander, the bravest of the brave, and left a part of himself on every battle field. And quote, Durant continues, quote, "He had a subtle intelligence capable of patiently awaiting his chance and of moving

resolutely through difficult means to distant ends. In diplomacy, he was affable and treacherous. He broke a promise with a light heart and was always ready to make another.

“He recognized no morals for governments and looked upon lies and bribes as humane substitutes for slaughter, but he was lenient in victory and usually gave the defeated Greeks better terms than they gave one another.”

All who met him except the obstinate Demosthenes, liked him, and ranked him as the strongest and most interesting character of his time, end quote. And Demosthenes, who really didn't like him, still had to say, quoting Demosthenes, "What a man! For the sake of power and dominion, he had an eye struck out, a shoulder broken, and arm in leg paralyzed."

And quote, "To personality wise, we're not sure what can be said about Philip. Here's what you can say for a fact, though.

This is a guy who took the field with his army every single year of his 23-year reign except one. And the one where he didn't, it was because he was recovering from wounds of which he got several. As Demosthenes said, he's a guy who sacrificed multiple body parts, and that was not any sort of a lie. I mean, the man by the end of his reign is crippled. He loses an eye. He has a collarbone broken. His hand is supposedly completely mangled. He takes a spear through his thigh, his lower leg both bones broken at the same time.

He walked by the end of his life with a pronounced limp. But he took part in 28 campaigns, 11 seedes, Demosthenes, as he captured 45 cities. This is how you build an empire, right, or something that's going to be an empire. And like his son and like Macedonian commanders before him, he fought in the front.

As the battles going on in real time and move forces around and send in reserves and counter march your forces to match what the enemy is doing.

“These are people who set things up in advance. They build the military forces.”

They pick the commanders. They position them on the field before the battle starts. And then before the fighting actually commences, they put themselves in the front rank. You know, a whole mary kind of style, right, a hero king and they command. And when you do that and you fight, you know, 28 campaigns, you're going to get wounded.

And the number of times that Phillips troops thought he was dead on the battlefield is numerous.

In 1977, to just take a little break from all these, he said she said kind of historical accounts from the past and all the propaganda. And archaeologists found a tomb in northern Greece or the area where Macedonia was during this time period the traditional Macedonian Heartland. It was under a mound, a hill, a man created a hill, a towel. And in the tomb, they found multiple bodies, but in one specific tomb, around a bunch of armor and magnificent materials. They found a golden box where they Macedonian star etched into the top and purple cloth, purple being the royal color.

Inside the box were bones.

The way that Macedonian royalty was often treated after death was what we might call today a partial cremation. Because unlike today's cremations where you're left with ashes and bone ships, very small bone ships. In a lot of the funerals during the time around Phillips lifespan, it was common to have a fire that was only hot enough to burn the skin off. And then the bones would be taken washed in wine and put into container of the sword that in 1977 was found in this tomb. So you can still look at the bones and analyze the bones. And in addition to the bones there were things like armor.

For example, a specific sign that maybe we're dealing with Philip II's bones in this tomb are grieves that were found. Grieves are the armor that goes on the shins. And these grieves were shaped differently, one in particular, shorter than the other, shaped for a person who suffered a bad leg injury. And in '77 they thought it might be Philip II now.

“I think about 90% of the people that are the experts in the field would say it's pretty close to unanimous.”

Maybe not quite. Would say that this is Philip II. What that means is you can get some hard concrete stuff about the guy. He was between five foot, six and five foot, eight, for example. Which might seem a little short to us today, but historians often say that that's not that uncommon for the people of the time period. Of the time period in this area.

Although if he were a little shorter than the average Macedonian, that would sort of jive with his son's height too. Who was also shorter than the average Macedonian, so maybe Alexander got it from his dad. The skeleton also shows the wounds, including the most obvious during his lifetime that no one would have been able to avoid the fact that an arrow had struck him in the face. And took out an eye. Actually it's worse than that it didn't take out the eye because a physician had to scoop out the eye with what amounted to a spoon.

And when you think of someone doing that to you without any sort of real anesthesia or anesthetic, it boggles the mind to consider the amount of pain we're talking about here. I got that rundown of Philips campaign record from historian Richard A. Gabriel, who wrote a book called Philip II of Macedon, greater than Alexander. And he ran down how Philips' state craft was much more oriented towards results than perhaps Homeric glory and sword play, and he writes quote.

“In a very important way, however, Philips' view of war as distinct from personal bravery was decidedly unhomeric.”

Unlike the Iliads heroes, this great warrior king who took the field every year of his 23-year reign saved one when he was recovering from wounds. Who took part in 28 campaigns and 11 seedes who captured 45 cities if one can trust amongst the knees, and who was seriously wounded at least five times never went to war for its own sake, or only for personal glory.

The retarition, Paulianius, observed that quote, "Philip achieved no less through conversation than through battle, and by Zeus he prided himself more on what he acquired through words than on what he acquired through arms."

“End quote, and then Gabriel says, "This clouds withcy and view of war led Philip to become the greatest strategist of his time."”

War is a continuation of politics or policies by other means, but for Philip II, this applied to all sorts of things including marriage.

He is far from alone, after all, royal marriages for diplomatic reasons, right to cement alliances, or connections between powerful families, or to wed states or kingdoms or locations, more closely together, isn't just common, it's almost the norm. But the Macedonian ruler has a huge advantage over a lot of these other royal families that do the same thing. After all, if you're Henry VIII of England and you're marrying for diplomatic reasons, it's kind of a limitation isn't it if you can just marry one wife?

Philip didn't have any sort of limitation like that at all. One of the things that Greeks used as evidence that the Macedonians were barbarians is that they were polygamous. And Philip could marry as many wives as he wanted to to cement his diplomatic and political goals.

“I mean, he's going to have seven or eight wives during his lifetime and have multiple of them at the same time, and the women that he married are interesting characters if the ancient sources are to be believed.”

For example, he will marry an allerian wife or two, and the allerians are the problem children of that whole part of the world exceedingly dangerous, responsible for the death of Philip's older brother and 4,000 Macedonian soldiers right before Philip takes the throne, so it makes sense to marry an allerian princess, but they seem to be the ancient sources can be believed quite the handful. And supposedly, allerian women could be trained to fight in combat as men with swords, spears shield armor and on horseback, and there will be a strain of the allerian DNA running through the Macedonian royal line, where mother is supposed to continue the tradition of teaching the daughters how to fight like this, and it is a fascinating thing to consider.

Very wonder woman, Amazonian element to the whole thing, and it's interesting to think of Philip marrying a woman who could kill him in combat, but that's hardly the extent of Philip marrying interesting and potentially dangerous women.

“When he marries magical women, if you believe the sources, I'm going to say if you believe the source is many times here, because one's not sure what to make of them and remember especially when dealing with women they are far from fair.”

I use the term magical, some of them might say witches instead, and Philip is supposed to have married at least one of these magical princesses, maybe two.

One thing you can say is that by the time Philip marries the woman who will be Alexander the Great's mother, one wonders whether or not as a young couple Philip would have been in his 20s, and Alexander the Great's mother or woman named Limpius would have been in her teens. One imagines that you could have looked at them at a party and said, I wonder what kind of children those two people will produce, because one has to look at a teenage Olympius and say that you can sort of divine how formidable a person she was, because as a teenage girl, she can handle this guy, right?

First, for a medieval person of his time, a figure that the ancient Greeks to the south of him had all kinds of trouble with, you just heard, you know, Professor Gabriel describe his qualities, you heard, will deramp describe his qualities and yet this teenager from a place called Malosea in Epirus can handle him, and she may have even scaried him a little,

Right if you're going to claim descended from a god at some point in your genetic line, why not make it the king of the gods? Who could you possibly marry who's going to bring enough, you know, cache to the marriage to compete with something like that? Well Olympius's family and Malosea claimed descendant from the greatest hero of the most important Greek story to most Greeks growing up during this time period, the Iliad Olympius's family claimed descent from Achilles, which means that when they have a child together, this family who claims descent from Heracles and through him Zeus, and this other family who claims descent through Achilles,

you're going to have a kid who mixes the blood of Zeus Heracles and Achilles, and somehow the great god Dionysus manages to get involved in this whole affair to and creates this fusion in the child that they're going to have, that impacts that child's life for its entirety.

“To this day, historians still try to argue and debate how important these three figures were to Alexander and like so much of his life are trying to disentangle true contemporary things, you know, things that were part of his life.”

From the many fables and stories and romances are just plain bad histories that cropped up after his death was he really into Achilles the way the later sources say, some people say no, Dionysus very hard to figure out, Heracles is the least controversial since Alexander definitely put the figure of the hero demigod on coins and whatnot, but there are other historians that will make a much more closely connected case. I mean, there's a whole book about Alexander's connection to Dionysus and Dionysus is in my opinion, this is one of those opinion comments, but is the most interesting and hard to get your mind around of the Greek deities.

“In part because he rules over those parts of humanity and humankind that are themselves hard to get ones mind around, right? The subconscious, the hidden sides of one's character, the psychological dark areas.”

There's a book called Alexander the Great, the Invisible Enemy by historian John Maxwell O'Brien and it's all about this connection between Alexander and this particular god Dionysus and he describes Dionysus in the most interesting of ways.

Dionysus is officially the god of wine, but wine itself is a weird sort of a concoction that can be both positive and negative, which is kind of how the god can be too.

“Here's how O'Brien describes Dionysus and he says quote, the god of everything that blossomed and breathed Dionysus could surface in the moisture on a rose,”

bellow majestically through a raging bull or imperceptibly shed old skin for new in the guise of a snake. He was the divine patron of the theater with an empty mask as his emblem, the god of a thousand faces, who epitomized metamorphosis and could transform mortals at will, armed with ecstasy and madness, this paradoxical deity would smile at human determination and laugh at logic.

In league with death as well as life, his realm reached beyond the grave to the murky waters of the Netherworld, and quote.

O'Brien points out that Dionysus wasn't really so much the god of wine as he was the wine itself and through the drinking of the wine humans could commune sort of with the god and all the prose and cons that the drinking of alcohol or intoxicants because there are interesting theories about the intoxicants that might have been used as part of the religious rights connected to Dionysus to induce different sides of human behavior and traces and all those kinds of the subliminal or unconscious sides of humanity and O'Brien rights quote.

Dionysus profored himself through wine and mortals revealed his personality as well as their own through drinking and drunkenness.

A number of the gods epithets describe his attractive attributes or praise the benefits to be called from his precious gift.

He is a disturber of the soul, a mind breaker, a bestower of envy, a dispenser of anger, a chaser of sleep, a noise maker and a liar.

“The visible effects of the wine, O'Brien rights, unmasked the fundamental ambivalence of the god and revealed a kindred quality in mortals.”

Wine exalted the spirit, but it also had the capacity to unleash primordial impulses. Under its influence, a veneer of sophistication might disappear abruptly and civility could be transformed into uncontrollable rage. The wine God disclosed reasons uneasy sway over emotion and served as a chilling reminder of bestiality in its core and quote. Alexander's mother Olympius was a devote of Dionysus, an initiate if the sources are to be believed in the mystery cult of the god, and it's a mystery cult because nobody knows what goes on in the various rights connected to the god.

Although if one believes the Greek playwright, Yeripides, who was spending time hanging out in Macedonia, he wrote in his play The Baca about it. He says that the women met in sacred areas just amongst their own kind and tore live animals to pieces and devoured them. They participated in magic rights, carried ones and worshiped and kept snakes, which is another thing associated with Olympius. She's supposed to have kept snakes. Maybe even in her bedroom, and it's long been a part of the Alexandria tradition, maybe written to make her sound just a bit more weird and interesting that this freaked out, Philip II of Macedonia, in his wonderful classic work on Alexander from the early 1970s, historian Peter Green wrote about it this way, quote.

In the autumn of 357 Philip married his eaport princess, and for the first time in his life found he had taken on rather more than he could handle.

Olympius, though not yet 18, had already emerged as a forceful, not to say eccentric personality. She was, among other things, passionately devoted to the orgiestic rights of Dionysus. And her manantic frenzies can scarcely have been conducive to peaceful domestic life. One of her more outtray habits, unless, as has been suggested, it had a ritual origin, was keeping an assortment of large, tame snakes as pets. To employ these creatures on religious occasions could raise no objections, but their intermittent appearance in Olympius's bed must have been a hazard calculated to put even the toughest bridegroom off his stroke.

And, quote, "Now it's always a mistake to assume that people from other cultures and earlier errors would react the same way to circumstances and stimuli that we would.

I'm just going to say that personally, though, if I'm laying in my bed and all of a sudden crawling through my sheets and on my sleeping form is a large serpent, because that's how it's described in the sources, that's going to freak me out a little bit.

“But it's a whole new sort of reptilian spin on the idea of love me, love my dog, doesn't it?”

But I'll say this about Peter Green in 1970. He's a lot there to Olympius and the ancient sources, or even the early modern ones. I mean, the 1920s is one of those errors where there's a lot of writing about Philip and Alexander and Olympius, and the writers and historians from that era are just as harsh, maybe more so, on Alexander's mother and Philip's wife than even the ancients. I mean, listen to the way science fiction author, but also popular historian H.G. Wells describes Philip's wife Olympius.

And you get this sense that she's practically demonic.

“And he first extols all the wondrous qualities of Philip II, right?”

Very similar I would say to the way Professor Gabriel describes Philip, right greater than Alexander. If not for Philip, there is no Alexander, but he has this tragic flaw. He's joined, you know, like a ball and chain to a dangerous demonic force, who eventually destroys him, and limits Alexander's ability to be as great as his father.

See if she doesn't sound very much like something, you know, out of a dark horror movie.

Wells writes quote. It is necessary now to tell something of the domestic life of King Philip. The lives of both Philip and his son were pervaded by the personality of a restless and evil woman, Olympius, the mother of Alexander. It then talks about how Philip and she were married and then says quote, it was not long before Olympius and Philip were bitterly estranged. She was jealous of him, but there was another engraver source of trouble in her passion for religious mysteries.

We've already noted that beneath the fine and restrained Nordic religion of the Greeks, the land abounded with religious cults of a darker and more ancient kind.

“The aboriginal cults, with secret initiations, or geostic celebrations, and often with cruel and obscure rights.”

These religions of the shadows, he writes, these practices of the women in peasants and slaves gave Greece her orphic, dionicyc and demeter cults, and they've lurked in the tradition of Europe down almost to our own times. The craft of the Middle Ages, with its resort to the blood of babes, scraps of executed criminals, incantations and magic circles, seems to have been little else than the lingering vestiges of these solemnities of the dark whites. There's Olympius was an expert and an enthusiast, and Plutarch mentions that she achieved considerable celebrity by use of tame serpents in these pious exercises. The snakes invaded her domestic apartments, and history is not clear whether Philip found in them matter for exasperation or religious awe.

These occupations of his wife must have been a serious inconvenience to Philip. For the Macedonian people were still in the sturdy stage of social development, in which neither enthusiastic religiosity nor uncontrollable wives was admired and croaked. So according to Wells and a lot of other people writing in the 1920s, Alexander's father is one of the great men in history, his mother's a witch. Neither of those things matters very much if not for the creation of the tool that leads to the fame of both of those people and their child.

The military mazerati that Philip II will create the Macedonian army. The Macedonian army, by the way, is arguably the most important part of this story. You can make a case that without that, none of the sorts of things that get Philip II and more importantly, his son Alexander in the history books happens.

“I mean, it's the tool that creates all the opportunities for conquest, right?”

In my head, I always try to switch the battles around and imagine Alexander instead of commanding what is almost certainly the best army in the world at the time period.

He's commanding it probably the best army the world that ever seen. I try to imagine Alexander having to switch sides with the general he's fighting, right? Why don't you give Darius the Macedonians and you take the Persians and this big bottle and let's see how that goes. Might have gone fine. Alexander probably, you know, really good general knows what he's doing, but I mean, he was fighting with the best army in the world when he did what he did. And so it seems like the real important decisive moment in the history of the story is Philip creating this amazing army.

Because Philip made the Macedonian army and then conversely it's safe to say that the Macedonian army made Philip. Where the heck did he get the idea for it?

“Well, we should talk a little bit about the Macedonian army, Philips influences and even kind of more important ancient warfare and how it worked and what we know and what we don't know,”

because trying to figure out how the army that Philip created worked is in itself a speculative kind of in the fair, which is weird when you think about it.

First of all, let's just talk about what he made. The Macedonian army, I can't, it's like a boxer who's never lost.

And you then you try to imagine what it would have taken to beat them, right, whereas if you have a fighter that has lost even once, you can say, well, you know, we saw a Buster Douglas broken down. That's the strategy for, you know, beating this guy.

So the army was that good. Now remember, the entire world is not connected during this time period. So armies from far, farong areas generally didn't fight each other, right?

“So the great armies of China in this same era are not fighting the Macedonians, so we just don't have a comparison when we say the Macedonians were the best in the world, well, they didn't fight the Chinese.”

And of course, no one in the Americas was fighting anyone from outside the Americas, so we don't know how they would have done. But I'm just going to say if we're betting and we're having the Macedonians fight any of those contemporary armies from anywhere in the world.

I'm taking the Macedonians because they're undefeated, basically.

And what Philip does is invent a style of warfare that is going to become the Cadillac style of warfare in the entire region for like 175 years.

“For the next almost 200 years, if you're going to have a top flight army in the Mediterranean, you're going to have a pike failanks, probably.”

And when in a couple of centuries the Romans and their manopold legions throw the failankses on the Ash heap of history, it's worth questioning whether they were even fighting the same sort of army that Alexander and Philip had developed it all.

A lot of evolution and changes and adaptations and maybe even, you know, devolution going on in the Alexanderian system of fighting over the 175 years it was dominant.

But Philip develops a troop type that makes all the difference in the world and he developed the pike failanks. It's interesting to think about one guy developing this because normally weapon systems are cultural in the ancient world that develop as a part of, you know, what's going on in society and a lot of people fight connected to the land and the kind of enemies they face and the terrain and all sorts of things. I mean, who invented the hop-light, right? Sometimes in the 700s maybe BCE the hop-light just sort of appears in a bunch of places. There's nobody you can say that guy came up with the idea, but Philip invented the pike failanks.

And the Macedonian pike failanks is kind of a hop-light killing machine. It takes the, you know, best parts of the hop-light failankses and so the supercharges him in a way that makes him better hop-light failankses. He gives him a much longer spear. He packs the human beings even more closely together. He makes the formation deeper. So if you have a bunch of hop-lights probably about eight ranks deep, sometimes four, sometimes 12, but usually about eight ranks deep, with their 7 to 9 foot spears smash into a 16 rank pike failanks with 16 to 23 foot spears.

Well, you can see how one is almost built to overcome the other. A lot of advantages in the pike failanks. So if this is the key thing that Philip invented, because we'll talk about the rest of the army in a bit, but if this is the key thing Philip invented, where did he get the idea for this?

“Right. If this is the moment of development that's going to impact everything he does, Alexander does, and a bunch of armies for 175 years do, where did the guy come up with it? Was it just he dreamt it?”

And so, you know, you can start down this path of imagining where Philip incorporated, you know, brainstorm kinds of material. A deodorous, ridiculous, ancient historian says that one of the things that gave Philip the idea for these pike failanks is was the Iliad. And I find this fascinating to think about, 'cause if it's true, let's just play with this for a minute. If it's true, and it is true, the Iliad was a huge book in Macedonian society. I'm sure everyone, Philip Alexander, all those people would have read it. Alexander was supposed to memorize it, and why not? He's supposed to be descended from my Achilles. He takes a lot of pride in being descended from Achilles. Well, Achilles is the lead superhero in the ancient version of a mass movie blockbuster, you know, the Iliad. That's the Achilles story, right? So you're going to know that story backwards and forwards.

In fact, you know, there's a lot of historians who will call Macedonian society during this time period, Homeric, meaning it kind of has a Homeric value system. And all that may be even Alexander's desire to be the best, right? This ambition, this thing at the core of his ambition, that may be a Homeric value. But it's so weird to think about, because, and of course, it reminds me of the Star Trek episode, original series, the one where a very imitative society on another planet got a hold of an earth book, a history book that was left behind by an earlier earth expedition.

And then they modeled their whole society on it, so that when the earth ships come back a while later, the entire planet looks like, you know, Al Capone.

“And guys walking around with some machine guns and talking like, you know, gangster era Chicago.”

It's a little like, if this is true, you just imagine Macedonian society with their one book, and they modeled their whole society on the values of a people that if they existed, existed in the late Bronze Age. Right, if there was a Trojan war of the kind that the Iliad talks about, it happened in like 1100 BCE somewhere around there. And then people would have talked about it in oral historians would have transmitted the tale for hundreds of years before a guy or a group of people, we don't know, that we call Homer, consolidated all that into sort of a written form.

The could then be passed down for hundreds of years more, so by the time a guy like Alexander or Philip II is reading it, this is material that's been written down for like 500 years.

And when it was finally written down, it had already been transmitted early for three or four centuries before then.

So, if Philip II really gets this idea for Pike Faylanks's from reading about the Ikeans in the Trojan War, using block formations of troops with very long spears, that's wild to me. And the fact that this formation then goes on to dominate the battlefields from Philip's time forward for almost another 200 more years. Well, if you really got that idea from the echoes of the late Bronze Age, I'd love to think that was true, I'm going to pretend that that story is true.

“There are some more logical candidates though, how about the Athenian general of friquities and his famous reforms?”

You ancient history, military nerds out there know that a friquertis is one of these guys who sort of looked at the traditional hoplight heavy infantry and decided they'd be better if they weren't so heavy. He lightens them up, gives them a small wicker shield instead of the big heavy wood one lighter equipment, less armor, gives them some, you know, javelins to throw all so they become a much more flexible force on the battlefield, much more useful. Maybe not as good if you'd get him into a slogging match with the old fashioned hoplights, but probably better at everything else.

Oh yeah, and this is maybe how, you know, it really plays into Philip supposedly doubles the length of their spear.

“So if a hoplight spear is 7 to 9 feet, you know, he's rocking more of a 14 to 18 foot spear on his hoplight held past mix, can we call them?”

And it's interesting to imagine what that might actually mean, you know, if you're one of these guys facing a hoplight and all of a sudden your spear's twice as long as theirs, I mean, trying to imagine how you might use it is interesting, but you can certainly see some advantages and you're being able to stab them, and they're not being able to stab you back, can't you? And if Frick were teased by the way, it was active in Macedonia right around this time period, so there's hardly one degree of separation involved, so he certainly could be an influence on where the heck Philip gets this idea to create this new thing on the battlefield, which becomes dominant, right this great idea.

And then of course, the odds on favorite for big influence on Philip that you read just about everywhere is what he learned during his time as a hostage when he was a teenager in Thebes. This is always shown in the sources to be an important part of Philip's development because well, how could it not rub off on him, basically he was staying in the house, I guess, of a noted leap in general, and according to some of the ancient sources, he has access to this general's library and he's being encouraged to read up on all the latest knowledge of cutting edge Greek warfare, and he was probably interacting and certainly very close to him.

The phenomenon does the theme in general, the guy often given credit for things like, oh, I don't know, smashing Spartan power in a way that it was never the same again.

Stuff like that, maybe the greatest Greek general of all time, so Philip's interacting with a guy like that during the time period when themes is sitting on top of the world for a relatively short period of time in the hierarchy of Greek city states. You smash Spartan, you're kind of left as the big dog, and it pemin on disfamously, defeated the Spartans at Lutra in 371 BCE by breaking all the rules.

The kind of things that he did to break all the rules, once they work, everybody adopts them, but somebody's got to be the visionary that decides to roll the dice and really take a chance and try some new things on the battlefield.

“And that's what a peminon does did. And of course, you know, by defeating the Spartans, he basically hit the jackpot, right? He rolled the right roll on the dice when he rolled them.”

But what makes his bets so gutsy is that in the ancient world, the punishments for having your innovation fail are massive. Nowadays, of course, we're accustomed to making constant updates and changes in more for a new equipment, new tactics, new approaches, new technologies, all kinds of things involved. So that even over the course of a short war, we can expect to see all sorts of innovations and changes in what not. But this is a relatively modern development, and it's connected to the opportunity costs and the dangers of innovations going sideways on you.

So if you look at the first world war, which is one of these wars that you really is the first time you can look and you can just watch technology.

Having a leapfrogging effect as the war goes on as sides, you know, continually try to out-improve and out-invent one another. You see it in the air war in the first world war, for example, where every six months, you know, either the allies of the central powers create some new engine or airframe or way of fighting or weapon or something that allows them to get the jump. On the other side for like six months until a new invention or innovation on the other side flips the coin. You can see new technology in ways of fighting introduced all throughout that war. Look how the British introduced tanks.

Built him up in secret for a while, and then finally in one battle, they throw out enough of them to make a difference and they sort of see what happens. And when it's not war-changing and they really didn't expect it to be war-changing in that battle, they then sit down and figure out, "Okay, how did it go?" That was a good experiment. "Well, can we do different next time, you know, what worked, what didn't work?" But it doesn't lose you the war.

And that's the difference in the first world war, you can try these things out, and the failure for your innovation not working isn't enormous.

Whereas in the ancient world where most wars are decided with one or two battles, having your innovation go sideways and costing you the battle could easily cost you the war. So the penalty for failure is huge, and the incentives to be conservative are overriding. So when a guy like Epamananda throws the dice on something like breaking all the rules of Greek warfare, you've got to admire his moxie.

“But that's how you beat the Spartans, right? So for those who don't know, and it's only important to know, because a lot of what Apamananda does after he breaks the rules are going to be the kind of thing,”

Philippine corporates into his way of fighting, right?

The first rule of Apamananda's breaks has to do with something, you know, I'm going off on tangents on tangents now,

but has something to do with the way human beings fight when they get on a pre-modern battlefield, especially in these hop-light closed formation type deals, and it's a fascinating part of what I like to call the physics of the ancient battlefield. But because this happens, there are certain conventions of Greek fighting that were in place before Apamananda. So we have to talk about what's going on in the battlefield. Did you know, because it's kind of interesting, that when you get two lines of hop-lights facing off against one another,

we try to imagine what this would look like visibly from the air, think about railroad tracks, and you have the two tracks facing each other, those are the lines of hop-lights on both sides, and an intervening space between them, and at some point when a battle happens, one or both of those lines of hop-lights, crosses the intervening space and starts bashing into the other one. But what's interesting is when you get a bunch of men, you know, in long lines, maybe a hundred, maybe 200,

maybe 300 yards long for maybe 12 ranks deep, when they're all lined up shoulder to shoulder, with a spear in the right hand and a shield in the left hand,

“did you know that the formation drifts to the right, and it's so reliable the Greeks count on it?”

Imagine a ripple going through the entire hundred to 300 yard line of men, as everybody just sort of scooshes a little bit to the right. They say, "Well, what's going on?" Well, the sources indicate that men in these sorts of situations either, while they're standing there waiting to advance or while the advance is happening or both, tend to move a little to the right, because to the right is where the shield of the guy next to them is,

and they are almost unconsciously or maybe consciously trying to scooch over just a little bit more behind the protection of the guy next to them,

And if your whole line's moving to the right, and the enemy you're facing's whole line is moving to their right,

“then your lines are moving sort of out of alignment with each other and going to overlap on each side.”

So what these armies did in an attempt to control what was going on on their right, and to have the troops that were the least likely to be prone to this drift on the right, you put your best troops on the right. And this became almost a great convention, and the sources will say things like, "Make it clear that the right wings expected to be victorious,

and the left wings of both armies expected to kind of lose." And that was just the way it was, until the payment on Disney didn't do it that way. At Luke Tra, he put his best troops on the left.

That's a violation, you know, it's don't do that.

He put his best troops up against the Spartans' best troops. The guys who made the Spartan reputation the Spartiets. There were 700 of them at Luke Tra and a Spartan king. During this time period, any of you Spartan fans know that the Spartans were having issues keeping up with the numbers of Spartiets that they would normally want,

and the culture in the society and a bunch of trends were making Spartiets rarer and rarer. So when you have 700 of them at the Battle of Luke Tra, you have an irreplaceable number of Spartiets. The payment on does wanted to kill as many of those as he could.

So he created the head of the sledge hammer at Luke Tra, aimed right at those people.

“That's the best way to envision what a payment on business army looked like.”

The Spartans looked like a long row, like a railroad track, like we said, of, you know, eight to 12 rank deep hop lights, right? So long line of those people, hundreds of yards long. The Thibons looked more like a sledge hammer. The head of the sledge hammer was made up of the one professional force

the Thibons were known to have in their infantry, the famous sacred band. Three hundred strong professionals. Some of the sources indicate maybe homosexual lover pairs that were devoted to each other. That'll improve your unit cohesion maybe. But they were joined by a block of troops, wait for it.

Fifty ranks deep. Now the Thibons were known to fight deeper than most other Greek city states traditionally. But in this battle, a payment on this goes wild makes the formation 50 ranks deep. He's going to face off against the Spartan hop light force. It's probably about 12 ranks deep.

So think about the difference if we're talking about the physics of human, you know, mass and movement and weight and depth and all that stuff. The difference between a 50 rank closed formation running into a 12 rank closed formation. Now, if Pavanund is deciding to do this though means he has to weaken the rest of his army. Right? Where do those 50 deep units take from, right? You pull from the rest of the lines.

The rest of the line significantly weaker. It's like the handle of the sledge hammer. Well, if you're worried about weakening part of your line because you don't want those troops to get smashed and run away, if Pavanund is does something unusual. He angles that whole area away from the enemy. So imagine the sledge hammer head is right up against the Spartans they want to smash.

But the handle of the sledge hammer is diagonally away from the rest of the enemy army. So theoretically, the sledge hammer head could destroy the dangerous Spartans before the rest of the Thibon line, even came into contact with the troops across the way from them. And that's what happened in Lutra. The sledge hammer head of the Thibons ran into the Spartans,

killed 400 of the 700 irreplaceable Spartans and the Spartan king. And when the rest of the Spartan army saw what happened to those guys, the super heroes of the battlefield, they decided they wanted nothing to do with the rest of the Thibons, and that was the battle that looked around.

“But by changing certain key conventions of how people thought a Pavanund is was able to destroy Spartan power,”

and he would do it again at Matania, loses life there. But the entire affair involved things that would be a staple of Macedonian warfare,

where the things where a Pavanund is was angling the rest of his army away from his enemies,

“that oblique order battle would be a constant in Macedonian warfare.”

And of course, if Philip is hanging out with a Thibon general, with access to his library and making some cocktail parties with a Pavanund, this is the kind of stuff he might have absorbed. About the time Philip becomes king though, and around the time he's marrying Olympius,

that seems to be the time period where if he was going to create a new military system, that's when it was going to start, and it might be an ongoing process. But by having these phalanjights, these pikes, phalanx troops, to act as a solid core for his army in the middle of his battle line,

he's addressed the real weakness of the Macedonian armies that existed before him.

They never had a sort of a hop-light heavy infantry element to the army.

The army had great cavalry, they were called the Companion cavalry, maybe the best cavalry in the world arguably at this time period, and it was great, but it was all they had. So when Philip comes to the throne, he gets that, the wonderful Macedonian cavalry,

and then creates the missing element that allows them to defeat people like Greek hop-lights. He creates this phalanx, and then he adds all sorts of other elements to his army. He's often credited with the first European combined arms force, although one can make a case that was also a pendant on this his development. But to this Macedonian cavalry that's great,

and the Macedonian phalanx that's missing ingredient, he adds mercenaries, for example.

“Extra important during this time period where he's introducing these military reforms,”

'cause you need some professionals to handle the load,

and keep you from getting overrun with your leorians,

and peorians, and tracens in the meantime. He also starts employing large numbers of allies. I mean, the Thesalian cavalry is going to be absolutely vital in the army of Alexander. It starts fighting with Philip at a certain point.

He uses a lot of thracens, employees, light troops, and skirmishers, which is something that's been the development going on in Greece for the past. Several decades, increasing importance and new ways to use them, I mean, there was a Spartan unit that was destroyed by light troops in recent memories. So all these sorts of elements allow Philip to create an army

that is more tactically flexible, depending on what you're facing. He's got the troops for the job. If you're facing someone that wants to smash right into you, and punch you in the mouth, he's got great troops to punch you back. If you don't want to punch those people in the mouth,

“because you don't want to get that close to him, because they scare you,”

and you're going to try to stay away to distance and throw things at them, and then evade their charge. Philip has troops to get you too. You want to fight in bad terrain? Philip's got the troops for that.

Got his specialist core. His agranians. People from the Highlands think about, like, you know, gerkers or something in the time period. He'll weedle you out of the bad terrain.

And if you hide behind the walls of your city,

he and Alexander are going to bring the first,

really awesome siege troops in Greek history. All the times when you hide yourself behind the walls in Greece, the enemy army just ravages your fields and lutes and and pillages and then leaves. Or maybe surround you and tries to wait you out.

Philip and Alexander go through your walls, and they come and get you. And that changes things too. I mean, they're going to be years in Phillips. Timeline where he'll take three Greek city states in a year.

That's like warp speed. I mean, famously the Trojans were able to withstand a 10 year siege in the Iliad, right? And if that's a little long, maybe by most historical standards, Philip taking three towns in the year is

crazy short, crazy quick. Changes the entire equation between, you know, the reliance that a town or a city state would have on its walls. And fortifications to keep the bad guys out. And part of what makes all this possible is more of these people

that Philip is using in his army or professionals. They're specialists. They're engineers and more and more of his armies getting paid. The mercenaries obviously get paid right away. But he's starting to pay the guys in the Pike failanks

eventually and he's capturing. I love this part about, you know, ancient economics could be so interesting sometimes when he needs money. He goes out there and takes silver and gold mines from other people. It takes it from the Thracians, for example, a couple of famous mines.

And then all of a sudden the money which comes right out of the earth, like an ATM machine goes right into his hands. I was reading one historian that said that neither Philip, nor Alexander for that matter were anything like economists.

When you needed more cash, you just took something, right?

“I mean, you racked up credit card debt, maxed out all of the credit lines.”

And then when you conquered some new territory, you paid off the credit cards. And you know, got right with the bank and started all over again. One thing you can say about the way Philip used this army though, is that it was just one of his many tools. And if you compare him to his son, Alexander is going to be a lot more high handed than Philip.

You know, it's my way or the highway.

I want to tell you what to do.

How dare you, you know, try to negotiate or get me to Haggle, whereas probably because he had to, Philip is a lot more clever and sneaky.

“He'll stab you in the back and then he'll give you a good deal when he doesn't have to later.”

I mean, he's, he's working every sort of slick clever angle. And one might suggest because he has to. He's paying off people. I mean, I love the way again Peter Green describes this because not only is he utilizing all these tools, but he's spent enough time now in one of these Greek city-state thieves

to get it look at how their government functions and compare it to how his government functions. He's a king. He can do certain things that they can't do in these governments where politics is a thing. And you've got different factions vying for leadership and well, we can sort of relate today to how you might be a little inefficient with the way you conduct long-term policy and a representative system. Something a, you know, autocratic system might not have to worry about.

And Green points out that Philip noticed this as a weakness that he could exploit right away. Right away, and Green writes quote. Phillips training for power was preceding a long useful if unorthodox lines. His experience as a member of the Macedonian Royal Household had given him an understandably cynical view of human nature. In this world, murder, adultery, and usher patient were commonplace as liable to be practiced by one's own mother as by anyone else.

In later life, Green writes, Philip took it as axiomatic that all diplomacy was based on self-interest. And every man had his price, events seldom proved him wrong. In thieves he saw, too, the besetting weaknesses of a democratic city state, constant party and trig lack of a strong executive power. The inability to force quick decisions, the unpredictable vagaries of the assembly at voting time. The system of annual elections, which made any serious long-term planning almost impossible.

The amateur ad hoc military levies.

For the first time Green writes, he began to understand how Macedonia's outdated institutions, so despised by the rest of Greece,

might prove a source of strength when dealing with such opponents. Throughout his life, he gained his greatest advances by exploiting human-cupidity and democratic incompetence, most often at the same time, and, quote, "Philips willingness to throw bribe money all over the place in large amounts seems to almost tie directly into one of the tragic flaws of the Greek city-state experience during this time, and that's that bribs were really effective."

The ancient historian, Diodorus, is supposedly quoting Philip as saying that the expansion of his kingdom owed far more to money than to arms, and then Diodorus later picks up the story and just talks about how the bribs by Philip could completely undercut any sort of Greek attempt at unity or a united front against this Darth Vader in the North, exerting more and more pressure on the freedom of the Greek city-states.

“Yeah, but he comes calling with a big watercash, you know, what are you going to do?”

And Diodorus writes, quote, "Nevertheless, there was such a crop of traders," so to speak, at that time in Greece, that it was impossible for Athens to check the impulse of members of the Greek cities towards treachery. There was a story that once Diodorus writes, when Philip wanted to take a particularly well-fortified city, and one of the locals claimed that the place was impregnable,

he, meaning Philip, responded by asking whether the walls were unscalable by cash. Experience had taught him that anything that could not be subdued by force of arms could be overcome by gold. So by using bribery to make sure that he had traders inside the cities, and by calling those who took his money, his guest friends, and familiar,

"One of the historians that I was reading called Philip, a warrior diplomat," which I think is a great term, very descriptive, a good rundown of the things Philip brought to the table, but I would add one more term, a warrior diplomat fixer, because in my mind I envision him showing up to these negotiations and these diplomatic affairs, you know, dressed in full military regalia, armed to the teeth, right?

“Then we could do it that way if that's how you want to play it.”

But also with a lawyer in tow, right, with a notary public, and basically ready to negotiate some deal, right?

Sign on the dotted line, my lawyer, notarize it, and we're good to go. Has to die, but if you're just the kind of person that would rather not have anything so obviously signed, sealed and delivered, just like a brief case, full of cash, we'll fill up can do it that way too. What's that old line, Malcolm X is supposed to have uttered right by any means necessary? That's how I kind of see Philip II, by any means necessary.

I'm going to achieve his goals. The question of what those goals were and how far-sighted Philip was in seeing those outcomes. Well, that's a debatable point, right?

“That's the kind of thing that doesn't come down to us from the sources, all these centuries later.”

So a couple of ways you could look at it though. Philip could be a master opportunist. Somebody who sees his unexpected occurrences when they happen and becomes the beneficiary of them. Some dominoes, some unexpected dominoe tumbles, and Phillips right there, Johnny on the spot to be the one who benefits, and he's got some advantages in that regard.

We mentioned already that the form of government gives him an advantage, right? These other Greek states have to sit here and debate and have politics come into it and people try to convince the public to go along with one of them. Philip doesn't have to do any of that. He just orders it.

He's also got a professional military by this time, which means it's basically standing ready to go,

whereas if thieves decides they want to go somewhere or Athens does, they've got to get the guys to grab their spears and their armor and their shields and get out to the fields and start to muster the forces and be by the time they get their act together, you know, Phillips moved already. He's occupied the key strategic point. He sees the opportunity whatever it is.

“So he's particularly set up to be a beneficiary of opportunism, if that's how it goes.”

But another way of looking at it is that Philip is the guy who creates these opportunities. That he's a chess master, he's setting up a checkmate down the road, and each one of these milestones that he achieves is one more connect the dots toward the ultimate goal. Now, do opportunities that are unexpected happen and does he seize them? Absolutely, but you can expect to have opportunities develop without knowing explicitly what they are. And this sense then Philip is a master strategist setting up the kinds of an outcome that he wants, and every step of the way, pursuing that goal relentlessly.

One of the things he obviously does is keep the major powers in Greece from uniting against him. He's had a problem with Athens since he pretty much took over the throne.

Athens and Thebes are the key most powerful Greek city states. He keeps a close connection to Thebes, right?

It's sort of an alliance with Thebes, keeps Athens and Thebes from realizing that they have more of an interest in preventing him from gaining any more power and being any more of a threat to them. And keeps them focused on fighting the third sacred war and all these other things. And this is a time period where Greece famously will bleed itself of treasure and human beings in these many wars that they fight with each other, making them all the weaker when the final, you know, Darth Vader versus the Republic conflict happens.

And it's very interesting too, because it depends on how you want to view this thing, but the Greeks portray this entire eventual showdown with Philip as Greek liberty against, you know, someone coming to snuff it out. But at this point in time, the Greeks can't focus on their collective liberty. They're too busy fighting one another, and that's working exactly the way Philip II wanted it to, whether he meant to do it that way, or whether it just is a happy coincidence. One thing you can say about Philip is that he's out there in the field working tirelessly to make this stuff happen and giving up, you know, the use of major body parts along the way, I mean, he's the ultimate road dog.

What do we say that was one year where he wasn't out in the field, and he may have been recovering, you know, from some terrible injury inflicted upon him by some enemy. But while he's on the road, in 356 BC, so a year after he marries Olympius, and maybe only a year or two after he actually takes over as the king of Macedonia, he gets some good news while on the road.

The second piece of good news he supposedly gets at the same time as that his horse has won in the Olympic Games in a competition.

And this has a deeper meaning than the way it might sound, the fact that a Macedonian king has allowed to take part in the Olympic Games is a sign that the Macedonians have met the qualifications, the minimum qualifications to be considered as Greeks, which would have been a big deal to fill up, then finally the third piece of news,

not necessarily in the order of importance, but that Olympius has more than fill up a son, officially named Alexander III, but we know him as Alexander the Great.

“Now, there are some things that have gone on, at least that's what sources hundreds of years later say, that would include any, you know, tooth saer, or Oracle worth their salt that this was going to happen.”

You don't have these great figures born in history without a lot of signs from the heavens, and they're out there according to people like Plutarch. Plutarch says that Olympius has a dream of lightning striking her womb, fill up has a dream that her womb is sealed up with a seal with an imprint of a lion on it. Fill up also supposedly according to Plutarch, looks through a crack on the wall, or the equivalent of a keyhole with one eye, and spies Olympius, converting with a god, perhaps in snake form, and then of course there's a temple that burns down, because supposedly the goddess wasn't there to protect her own temple.

She had to be there for Alexander's birth. Here's the way Plutarch hundreds of years later writes about this stuff. For example, he talks about the marriage consummation between fill up an Olympius, and then Olympius is dream that happens right afterwards, and Plutarch says quote.

“The night before the consummation of their marriage, she, meaning Olympius, dreamed that a thunderbolt fell upon her body, which kindled a great fire, whose divided flames dispersed themselves all about, and then were extinguished.”

Then fill up Plutarch writes, sometime after he was married, dream that he sealed up his wife's body with a seal, whose impression as he fancied was the figure of a lion. Some of the diviners interpreted this as a warning to fill up to look narrowly to his wife. That means watch your wife, man. Alexander of Telemusus, considering how unusual it was to seal up anything that was empty, assured him the meaning of his dream was that the queen was with child of a boy who would one day prove his stout and courageous as a lion.

Once more over Plutarch writes, a serpent was found lying by Olympius as she slept, which more than anything else it is said, abated Phillips passion for her, whether he feared her as an enchantress, or thought she had comers with some God, and so looked on himself as excluded. He was ever after less fond of her conversation.

And, quote, "Commerce with a God means fooling around with a God, and if you know Zeus's history, by the way, he's always fooling around with mortal women."

You know, if he showed up in snake form or Dionysus did or something like that, well, that's just in keeping with those God's characters, right? They get around, but apparently Philip saw some of this according to Plutarch, and you get punished for spying on a God having sex with your wife, I'm just saying in Plutarch's as quote. Philip, after this vision, sent Sharon, a megalopolis to consult the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, by which he was commanded to perform sacrifice, and henceforth, pay particular honor above all other gods to Amon, who's also known as Zeus.

And, was told that he should one day lose that eye with which he presumed to peep through that shink of the door when he saw the God under the form of the serpent in the company of his wife.

“And, quote, well, he did lose the eye, but a year, maybe two years later in the siege, so there you go, so did you get for spying on Zeus or whomever in the snake form with your wife?”

What were you thinking? And then, of course, the story of the Temple of Diana, Ed Ephesus, burnt down, and Plutarch says, quote, "The Temple," he says, took fire, and was burnt while its mistress, the goddess, was absent, assisting at the birth of Alexander. All the Easter and Suthseiers who happened to be then at Ephesus, looking upon the ruin of this temple, to be the four runners of some other calamity, ran about the town, beating their faces and crying, that this day had brought forth something that would prove fatal and destructive to all of Asia."

The verifiable fact of the Temple of Artemis, or Diana as the Romans would have known her, really being destroyed around the time of Alexander's birth, but then human beings being what they are, noticing that there really are no coincidences and doesn't it just makes sense that the only real story that explains how this temple could be burned down, right? The home of a God is that the God wasn't there and where the heck would the God be? Well, you know, that's right around the time Alexander was being born. Folks, this is the sort of stuff that those of us who love ancient history, this is what we love about it, right?

This is a place in your legitimate history books, right? I mean, if it's a history from the beginning of time to now, you're going to have, you know, the founding of the UN and the Second World War and all these things near the end of the book, but you keep going backwards and the ratio of facts to myths sort of changes, maybe that's a good way to put it.

The history where facts and historical data and archaeological discoveries intersect with things like legend and myth, maybe the proper word here is lore, right?

There is lore in your legitimate history books. The farther back you go, the more of it you get. It's a little like blended wine, right? You go and you get it. It's 60% Cabernet and it's 40% Milo. Well, by the time you get to the Second World War, you're probably at 80 to 20, right? 80% facts, 20% you know, myth misinformation, whatever you want to say. The farther back you go and history, the more that ratio changes in lore's favor. The interesting thing about the lore part is that while it is not true, you can still learn a lot by studying it, can't you? It's like that line that Pierre Briont used. It was a Leo for air quote or whatever.

“Where he said, even if it's not true, you have to believe in ancient history. We use that line before, but it's just so wonderful because in your legitimate history book, right?”

Based on facts and archeological discoveries written by historians and experts in PhD, you're going to have these stories about Alexander if it's a detailed enough book.

Are they real or are they stories at a certain point? It doesn't matter because that is a part of the lore of Alexander, which affects a lot of people later. Let me say about magic. Magic may not be real, but if people believe it's real and act on it as though it's real, it has real work effects, right? Well, so does this lore stuff take two examples. Example number one, when Alexander's dead and gone, his giant empire that we all know, right? It's not a spoiler alert to say he's going to conquer a lot of territory.

His generals are going to rip up all that territory and take off huge chunks for themselves and start dynasties where they're the first king and then they have tons of descendants after them.

They're claim to legitimacy rests on Alexander, right?

“And the more Alexander is deified, the more it seems like you have the stamp of approval of the very highest authority that he should have conquered the world and that you should have had your piece of it afterwards, right?”

So it serves a political purpose. A Machiavellian political purpose of legitimacy and tying yourself, you know, maybe through a degree or two of separation to a deity somewhere. I mean, the closer you are to Alexander, the better it is for you and the greater Alexander is, dido. And number two point here is that some of this misinformation or some of this legend creation or some of this lore may originally have come from a ground zero level from Alexander himself. Alexander took propaganda and chroniclers and all these kinds of people with him while they did everything he's famous for.

And they're not just cataloging what happened, they are putting the most pro-Alexandrian spin on it while doing so.

“It's propaganda coming from the source. Alexander wasn't just trying, you know, we're going to find out more about this side of him as we go, right?”

I plan for the long historical game. Of course, he's concerned about his own time period and how people in the world he's operating in will view, you know, his propaganda. But this is a guy writing his name in a more pronounced, big graffiti form on your history books and he's concerned about how you're going to see him. He's talking some of this propaganda for you and for me, which is crazy. And the way we get it is like third hand, right, because if Alexander's pushing this propaganda in his own time and people writing close after his own time use it in their history books.

Some of this stuff makes stand all the way back to Alexander and the people that worked for him originally. And so the point is is that that's how by studying the lore, which may not even be true and maybe probably isn't true, you still maybe get closer to elements of the truth in an oblique kind of way.

“I understand why people who love the second world war in the first world war in the 20th century stuff where there's so many documents to look at and you can compare and contrast different accounts.”

I mean, I can understand why it'd be hard for them to maybe get their mind around this, right, because they don't have a whole lot of prophecy going on in their story or oracles or, you know, snakes that are really gods, you know, having sex with the wife of historical kings.

I mean, I get it. You don't like a lot of King Arthur in your, you know, battle of Okinawa story.

But that's precisely what those of us who love ancient history love about it is that, you know, by the time you get back to Alexander's time, you're 60% Cabernet, 40% Marlowe split is more like a 60% lore, 40% facts split. And the fact that this Alexander story is so well known and his influence people ever since the stories that we can't prove our true and maybe think our false are still stories that have to be included in the legitimate history book, which is crazy.

“You have to tell the story of the lightning bolt on Alexander's mom and this, I mean, this is history, it's crazy because it's lore, right? It's it's Tolkien-esque.”

And the reason this matters to where we are in the story right now is because when you look at the few stories you have about Alexander, the great growing up, right, young Alexander, they all sound like part of this lore.

Most of it is geared towards showing that, you know, the signs were all there as Alexander grew up that he was going to be this amazing figure, so they're all sort of looking back with prophecy.

For example, there's the story of Alexander at like seven years old talking to the Persian ambassadors that show up in Philip's court and contrasting, you know, the story contrasts how a normal seven year old might question a Persian diplomat, you know, saying things like, "Tell me about the wealth of the king of Persia, tell me about the great king."

“Alexander is asking instead for distances between where they are and the Persian capital. And what is the condition of the roads and the morale of the Persian army? And, you know, it's seven years old.”

I'm not saying it's impossible, I might have done that because I'm Alexander, but because I was goofy at that age and that's the kind of stuff I wanted to know. Nonetheless, you turn back on it and look at it from, you know, later and you go, "Wow, boy, you could just see this Alexander was kind of for greatness, can't you?" And a bunch of the stories are kind of like that.

And the vast majority of these stories about Alexander's youth come from Clutark anyway, so you're kind of relying on a normal single source for some of this stuff.

He's a wonderful lesson, by the way, Plutark, a Greek who wrote in the Roman Imperial era. He's a wonderful lesson about how sometimes, especially when you go into ancient history, these sources dwindled down to almost nothing. And sometimes you have certain historical facts resting upon a single work sometimes. I mean, Plutark's one of these weird sorts of accounts where you don't have a bunch of stuff to compare and contrast it to. And you can't measure Plutark's accuracy on some of these subjects that he talks about next to some of his contemporaries because we really don't have them.

We do have other people that write about Alexander, but they usually talk about politics and his campaigns and his conquest and all that kind of stuff. Plutark's like a screenwriter for A and E's biography. He's interested in different things. He's going to a family member, you know, an answer something and say, tell me that story again about when Alexander was seven years old, and he interrogated the Persian diplomat and asked him about, you know, the condition and morale of the Persian army. Those are the kind of facts that Plutark liked and because of that, he's our main source for a bunch of this stuff. The famous Alexander stories growing up, like the one about taming the untamed bull horse that became his horse.

Busephalus, that's another one of those Plutark stories. The good news is there's a lot written on Plutark and a lot of scholarly work on dissecting his writings, but you know, Plutark was a guy who was supposed to be an Alexander expert lived hundreds of years after Alexander, but he's an expert. He's a fan and he's read all the documents in the library and he probably had access to firsthand stuff. memoirs of people who campaigned with Alexander stuff like that. So he's kind of a facts-launderer or a data-launderer for us today.

He's a fan of Alexander. He seems to live. I was reading something about the time period in which he was running. He seems to live in an era where the Roman attitude toward Alexander and that attitude changes over time.

“Right, Alexander will be a popular philosopher King type figure in one era and then a bad guy in another and it goes back and forth.”

And Plutark lives in an era where most Romans are looking at Alexander maybe is not a figure to be emulated.

Right, an example of some of the down sides of power and corruption and ambition and all that. And Plutark might have been writing sort of a counter put to that. Well, let me, you know, I'm an Alexander expert. Let me highlight some stories from his life that shows you. He's not the kind of guy you think he is. And he freely said that he had all these stories to choose from knowing Alexander as well as he didn't use them to sort of, you know, paint a picture of a different sort of guy than much of his contemporaries.

Thought of his Alexander. So we're getting maybe a very positive view of the guy.

Because Plutark is one of those rare sources though, his importance is inadvertently exalted which means his positive view of Alexander often becomes our sort of default starting position as we're assessing the guy. We have a mildly positive view of him starting out and that's probably due to Plutark. And some people get, you know, as they say, kissed by Plutark as a historian's treatment and some people get screwed. Poor Olympius doesn't come off nicely under the pen of Plutark. And you can't tell if that's just because she suffers from the way women are often treated in ancient history, not very well, or because Plutark himself didn't like up at the powerful women and she was all that.

Or because she actually was this kind of person and unlike a bunch of these sort of legendary queen figures Olympius, you know, veers between the lore and the facts part of history. So there are things that you can say with reasonable certainty that she did. And once you hear about the things that she with reasonable certainty did, well, then nothing's off the table. She'll do those things. She'll do anything she's accused of.

And she plays into this story in a way that most women in ancient history don't Alexander's got two incredible parents.

This is where you sort of see Olympius come into the story big because Philips gone. What do we say? He's a road dog. He's out, you know, making the family fortune. Taking city after city on a campaign every year, coming back a little worse for where every time, but not a lot of time at home, which means Alexander's with mom and with mom's people.

“And this is where I, you know, when I try to immerse myself in the story, I have to remember, Alexander's only half Macedonian.”

And when it really counts as who he's spending his time with is a young man. And this is traditional. I was reading and growing up when you're Macedonian. When you're a kid, five, six, seven, you spend a lot of time around mom. That's normal. But Alexander's mom and the people around who are not Macedonian either. And I love the way that where they're from sort of is seen by the Macedonians, everybody in all of these neighborhoods, right, has their stereotypes about other regions. The Greeks have their stereotypes about Macedonia. The Greeks and the Macedonians both have their stereotypes about these areas that are now around the modern nation of Albania up in that area.

And this is where Alexander's mother's kin come from. The Maloseans, the descendants of Achilles supposedly, right? These wild people, sort of witchy, sort of scary. And I was reading some good historians who were pointing out that you can tell how different Alexander is with the way he associate with his mother's side of the family. Because normally the society, Alexander's a part of really pays attention to the father's bloodline. That's the one that really matters. But Alexander's an exception to this. And it comes up all the time. This Achilles connection and all these other things. I mean, there's Alexander's connection to his mom, sort of the family's unusual.

And his relationship to his mom might be too. As we've said before, and we'll say again, Alexander is multitudes. He's been seen so many different ways that, you know, you can pick and choose the various aspects of the story.

“If you want to go into psychologically breaking down this guy's character or anything. For example, there's one tradition of Alexander is sort of the term that they used to use was mom as boy.”

Without dated what, would you say that's for like the 1920s or the 1930s? He's a mom as boy. Well, they old line when I was growing up was Alexander a mom as boy.

And after Alexander's off conquering the world, he's right in letters back and forth. And she's a player in the power structure of Macedonia, often sort of in a tug of war with murderous, you know, experience professional generals. I mean, she's a fabulously interesting person.

“And you can tell she has one of these personalities that just she's she's a very strong person. She won't be denied. She's not going to stay in the background.”

She's going to be proactive in some cases. And this is the part of the story where, you know, Philip is obviously this August person. He's doing all these historical things. She don't even have to be told that he must have been this interesting intense human being.

But this is the part of the Alexander story where you get to see the contribution of his mother to the whole genetic makeup here. She is herself an intense interesting person.

And under Plutarch's pen, malevolent, interesting person, very dangerous. I mean, the internal family structure of the Macedonian royal family, we said earlier there's a mafia style feel to some of this and the survival of the fittest sort of feel to it. And Philip has all these wives, right? And what do we say? Olympius is third fourth or fifth depends on what you read. She's in the middle there. One of those wives, which means there are more I mean, it's calling it sister wise probably makes it sound more Mormon than it really was, but what do you what do you describe the intense relationship both competition and otherwise that all these wives are going to have with each other.

“They're all married to the same guy. They're all capable of producing an heir to that guy and then your heir will be in competition with the heir of one of your fellow wives.”

I mean, it's a absolute hornets nest of danger for all these people. And normally you would think to yourself, okay, Alexander, if you look at his life during this time period is already being set up to be Philip's successor.

But the wheels are already greased. He's ready to go and you're looking and you're going wait a minute. That doesn't seem very Macedonian.

Where's the alternative candidates to the throne? Where is the threat of assassination or rebellion or I mean civil war? How come Alexander's so obviously chosen to be the successor here? Why is he the prince in waiting? Well, it's a good question and it involves Olympius a little bit maybe.

“Alexander has a brother around about his own age, maybe a little older, known to history as Eradayas, sometimes called Philip Eradayas.”

You would think that this figure would provide a threat, a competitor to Alexander, someone else who might be eligible to take over from Philip after Philip's gone someday.

The next king, Eradayas is the son of a different one of Philip II's wives and interestingly enough, according to Plutarch, she is another magical wife. Philip seemed to have a thing for magical women and Olympius is just one of the magical women he married. They're marrying magical women or like Amazon's from Wonder Woman. These women who fight with sword and spear, so that those are his types. If he has a type, he either wants you to be an enchantress or you know an Amazon. In this case, Eradayas, his mother is another one of these enchantresses were told, and she's using her defensive spells to try to protect Eradayas from Olympius.

But it seems like Olympius gets him anyway, because there's something wrong with Philip Eradayas. He's not a genetic competitor against Alexander as a potential candidate for the throne, because he clearly isn't up to that kind of job, something's wrong with Philip Eradayas and the historians. They don't disagree, nobody knows what was wrong with him. It seems he had some sort of mental disability. One of the ancient sources and maybe Plutarch also said something to the effect of when he was all grown up, he was still like a child.

Plutarch makes it sound like this guy didn't start out this way. Perfectly normal child gifted was going to be just fine, and then somewhere in his early life, his mental health goes sideways. Plutarch says it's because of Olympius, that she practices something, the Greek word is related to pharmacology or pharmacy, but it could mean potions, drugs, magic, whatever Olympius gets him.

Now I don't know if Olympius really did something like this or not, but if she did think about the whole different sort of spin that puts on the nature versus nurture debate.

“And how important that is to how a child turns out as an adult, if this is your mom, writing your dad is filled up the second.”

These are really interesting people to have the one setting the table for you as a child, literally, right, infusing their values and their ethics, their conduct, their morals, all that sort of stuff. Well, let's not suggest that their values or our values anyway, we judge them on a different scale because, you know, look at how the rest of Macedonia and history looks, they're not that outlandish, great it on the curve. But if mom is poisoning, the other sons of your dad, let's just say that it's an interesting household, she's an interesting woman and for the at least first part of Alexander's life, she has an inordinate amount of influence on it.

And it's an amount of influence that will continue to some degree for the rest of Alexander's life and he will be writing letters back and forth to her as he's conquering the known world.

“You know, chastising her, helping her, getting information from her, she sort of her sons inside man in Macedonia while he's gone and she's in power struggles with powerful murderous, ruthless, professional experience veteran generals.”

She's an amazing woman, but the lower part of her, right the lower for example, the idea that she poisons Philippe Radeus to cause his mental disability, the lower side of her, sometimes matches it pretty well with the stuff most historians considered to be factual. I mean, the woman who's accused of poisoning her sons half-brother will eventually kill him, that's not lower, that's history, but she'll not just kill him, she'll kill his wife too, and that wife is the granddaughter of her former husband filled the second.

So she's fully capable of that sort of interfamily type homicide, but mom likes snakes and tells me maybe that I'm a god and that Philips not my real father and who happily would destroy the mind of my half-brother is a whole new meaning to the term maternal instinct, doesn't it? And the one thing that I liked in the movie that Oliver Stone did was his Alexander film.

And I didn't like this movie when I first heard about it, I was completely wrong about it was casting Angelina Jolie in the role of Olympius.

She was perfect for it because there's that there's a little bit of the exotic stuff going on where she feels a little bit more like she's from up country than the rest of the Macedonians, but there's also something a little, you know, Diane nice sick about her. I mean, it worked perfectly. She's responsible for Alexander's early years, which I guess is pretty Macedonian anyway, five, six, seven year old kids.

Usually spend time with her mom and Alexander and his mom are together a lot and she is the one who sets up his first tutor.

She gets this guy from her home country, maybe even been a relative. He's like a drill sergeant type of character, a molosi and a hard ass.

“Like comes in there and he's going to whip the young pampered prince into shape, right?”

You want to command a bunch of killer Macedonian veterans, they're not going to take orders from some softy. Look, your dad's already lost an eyes. He's limp and he's got a broken collar bones. He's beaten up all over leading the charge from the front. You better toughen up a little king boy. And so the first guy traditionally Alexander talks about, you know, how he would search his luggage to see if his mom had hidden any little danties or luxuries for him. Then I am food, march him all night, then march in the next day. I mean, sort of toughen up his body.

So the next guy is the one that traditionally, the sources always say, taught Alexander his letters, so I guess to read and to write in the basics like this.

He's sort of an austere character and reading between the lines, one gets a sense that he's almost like a guy like a stoic philosophy devote who's sort of teaching Alexander to comport himself more like a king.

More Marcus are really as like if you thought about a later example. If you're going to be a king and he's involved in the famous story where Alexander was a kid who's supposed to go up to the altar, where you throw the expensive incense on the fire as a sacrifice to the God.

“And young Alexander in front of this teacher is supposed to grab two giant handfuls of incense and the teacher, again, this is one of those stories, right?”

One of those examples of showing that we knew Alexander was going to be something special when and he throws these big handfuls of incense on the fire and the teacher advantages him and says something to the effect of listen. That's expensive stuff. When you're the one earning the money and buying the incense, you can throw as big handfuls as you want, but till then, you know, take it easy. And in one of the aspects that's kind of fun in some of these stories is there's the before and after.

“You knew me when version of this story where after Alexander's made good and he's outclocking the world, he sends back to this professor showing that he didn't forget that incident.”

Caravans, tons of the expensive incense back to him with a notation not to be parsimonious meaning, you know, don't be selfish when you're offering sacrifices to the God. There's almost like that little idea of hey, if you'd have been the one throwing the big handfuls to the gods, maybe they would have favored you and you'd be here instead of me.

Why the sort of a remember me before I was great? Well, how do you like me now? Have some incense. And then there's the famously the third teacher of Alexander.

And this is a rock star himself. Alexander is a rock star tutor. It's before his heights of rock stardom in the world of philosophies, sort of an up and comeer when fill up the second, entices him to come up and teach his son when a small group of friends, several of whom turn out to be kings.

“Interesting class. How do you pick the valedictorian of that small group of people?”

But the tutor that filled the second manages to convince to come up to the cultural backwater that is Macedonia, though he's trying to spruce it up intellectually, is Aristotle.

Famously of the school of Plato, right? The student of Plato who was a student of Socrates, and that's, you know, now you're getting to the fountain heads of Western philosophical traditional thought, right? This is like almost like secret knowledge. There's an element to the teaching of philosophy in this period that has a raiders of the law stark kind of feel to it, like hidden knowledge, like stuff no one knows. And that's one of the things that Aristotle supposed to bring to the table here.

But the deal, and this is, again, from the sources, that fill up the second offers two Aristotle to get Aristotle to come up to Macedonia, is literally one of those deals only a king could give you.

And that it would probably be foolish to say no to, but in addition to money and all the other things, fill up the second promises to Aristotle that if you come up and teach my son for a few years, I will restore rebuild and repopulate your home city. Because it had been destroyed. That's a heck of an offer to make. A little bit of pressure, maybe, from the neighbors to, you know, maybe get this deal done. We'd love to have our city rebuilt. Now, the twisty part of the whole offer, though, is that the guy who destroyed the city in the first place was fill up the second. So he's basically saying, I know I destroyed your city.

I'll come work for me and I'll rebuild it repopulated. That's just a side benefit. I'll pay you to and, you know, all kinds of good things. But you know, hard to say no to a king anyway. So Aristotle famously goes up to Macedonia, hold these classes for several years between Alexander and a couple of his friends. And I guess that it's a distinguished group of guys. There is a suggestion that one of the group in the class wrote something about it, like on the education of Alexander that would have been in all your fine ancient libraries and that some of our sources may have been able to read. So maybe one degree of separation from, you know, class stories without Alexander in high school.

But when we look at the subjects Alexander supposedly learned, this is where you start to get to this side of Alexander, the differentiates him from your average run of the mill, drunken mass homocidal killer. There's a lot of conquerors in history, but there aren't a lot of conquerors in history with as much education in some of the key foundational academic disciplines that most college curricula 50 or 60 years ago would have considered mandatory.

The secret knowledge, by the way, is something we know about because it was written about the clout art where he publishes what he basically says is a letter from Alexander to Aristotle later in life when Alexander is conquering the world and is made good. And when Aristotle is a philosophical rock star and apparently is publishing his work, right? So you can buy it, but he's including in the publishing of his work, the secret stuff, right? They hidden Shaolin priest secret readers of the law star acknowledge that gives you an advantage over other men if you know it and they don't.

“Kind of how Alexander described it in this nasty letter to his former tutor saying, if you're given away this kind of information, how am I supposed to have any advantage over other men?”

Now it's interesting to think about what secret information might have been involved in the philosophical teachings of a guy like Aristotle, which came from Plato, which came from Socrates, I mean, there's an intellectual tradition here that goes back to somewhere really interesting. But the way we should think about it, is that Alexander has all of this as part of his makeup, right? All of this philosophical and educational learning and culture could recite the Iliad and the plays of the Greek playwrights often sort of by memory, by heart.

I mean, this is an interesting kind of guy and there's a whole tradition out there, and Plutarch is probably fairly put into it. A valixander is kind of a philosopher king, as we said earlier, or even more interesting a philosopher in action.

“And that's how he sort of portrayed sometimes as a guy who the philosophers of ancient Greece in this great time period, where you have all these interesting people, the Socrates is in the Plato's and the Aristotle's and all those guys.”

They're creating these ideas to debate and writing and reflection and argument and all this, but they await a man of action who can take those ideas and put them into practice.

It's all theoretical until somebody tries it right, and Alexander is that lightning bolt flash moment when the rubber meets the road in terms of philosophical thought being transmitted into the hands of somebody who can implement it in the real world, a philosopher in action. It would love to see a more rational, more intelligently run, more deeply thoughtful world that is almost addictive to think about that happening.

It brings a tear to your eye, it brings out all your utopian sensibilities, hopes and dreams, right? Wouldn't it be great to have a philosopher king?

You can almost hear it in some of the areas in human history where Alexander was seen that way that this would have been the dream of some of the people back then. They were living in a time period where the idea of a philosopher king didn't have a lot of the baggage that it has today, although the fellow exander is a philosopher king. He's probably wouldn't you think the philosopher king with the highest body count of any of them, although philosophers kings can kill us a prizing number of innocent people, but Alexander's got to be right up at the top, don't you think?

“Maybe there's a couple of key questions that we should throw into the mix when we're discussing this issue of Alexander is a potential philosopher king, what sort of philosophy are we talking about?”

I mean just because you say it as though it's a high-minded humanitarian sort of philosophy that we should all be looking towards something to be proud of and emulated in a sign of human progress doesn't necessarily mean that at all, right? Philosophies can be evil too, so maybe he's pushing an evil philosophy, we substituted a more modern word ideology, well we wouldn't have any problem would we assuming that it might be something negative, and then there's the impact of the body count on the philosophical point at all.

I mean let's imagine it's a wonderful philosophy meant to spread kindness and humanity and all the things we would love to think of as coming into the world and getting a chance to thrive, but what if he kills 50 million people to implement it? Is there a number there where it doesn't matter how great the philosophical ideas are, it killed too many people to implement them so it doesn't matter, I don't know the answer to that, this is part of the great unknowables with Alexander and the fact that he's got so many centuries of propaganda that's overlay the original issue, good luck getting to the heart of that.

Well maybe I mean one of the questions I've asked before is what if Alexander the Great had a podcast trying to imagine how wonderful it's going to be for all those historians 500 years from now.

“Delving into our time period and the fact that they're going to have all these podcasts and blogs and and Instagram accounts and everything that they can mind and look at maybe more info than they want right be careful.”

We have now haystacks and needles everywhere for future historians but just give me one podcast with Alexander the Great in it right his podcast and I'm going to learn so much the first thing that's going to be obvious though is we're going to know what the guy looked like and wouldn't that be heck of a question to answer.

But the descriptions are actually more consistent than anything you're going to get about his philosophical viewpoints.

The way historians by the way come up with these descriptions is they will read the various sources and pick out any little thing that seems to refer to his appearance and there'll be little clues here and there's a post to somebody describing him.

“With five or six adjectives in a row you'll find out little tidbits of things that will allow you to assemble a picture. So for example one of the tidbits that's often used is at one point in his career.”

Alexander will capture the throne of his adversary and he'll sit on the throne and his feet won't touch the ground right it's remarked upon that he's too short to be sitting in the seats so they bring him like a footstool but you start to add up the height references and you come up with a person who seems to be a little bit shorter than normal.

Which brings up another question of course, which is what is normal for this place and this time.

We've mentioned that it's almost certain that Alexander's father's tomb has been found and that his partially cremated remains measured somewhere between like five foot six inches and five foot eight inch tall.

“So does that mean that's an average height for Macedonian in which case Alexander might be a little smaller than that or is Philip himself a shorter than normal Macedonian in which case five foot six five foot seven could be Alexander's height too.”

I looked up the skeleton measurements from this area in this time period I wasn't able to find Macedonia but I found Greece and in standard Greece this appears to be a standard height. So Philip would be around the average height of a Greek male. So what does that put Alexander at? Well here's Peter Greens description from around 1970 and I find it hard to improve on that. I will say that the blonde hair question isn't open one because Greens says that he has blonde hair he has the color of a lion's mane and if you've looked at a lion's mane there's a number of different colors in your average lion's mane.

Some of them are more blonde but a bunch of them are sort of a darker color with like golden highlights and you'll still see that color hair all over northern Greece and Albanian those areas today maybe with a little bit of like a red orange tone thrown in. I'm painting in the sun all the time and you're going to get a certain look so here's the way green describes Alexander as the composite of all the various appearance throw away lines that are in the sources also notice. But there's a Kim car and song once she's got Betty Davis eyes well Alexander's got like Ziggy star dust eyes listen to this description quote.

He was already like his hero Achilles a remarkably fast runner his hair blonde and touseled is traditionally said to have resembled a lion's mane and he had that high complex in which fair skinned people so often display his eyes were odd one being gray blue the other dark brown his teeth were sharply pointed like little pegs. Says the Alexander romance and uncarracteristically realistic touch green rights which carries instant conviction. He had a somewhat high pitched voice which tended to harshness when he was excited his gate was fast and nervous a habit he had picked up from old.

The drill sergeant from Malosea is the name of the person and he carried his head bent slightly upwards and to the left whether because of some physical defect or through mere affectation cannot now be determined.

The mentioned about Alexander's voice being higher than one would expect is not uncommon with great generals actually it's same as true for example of general George Patton.

He wanted to sound like George sees Scott in the movie Patton but that's not what he sounds like higher than normal voice higher than what you would expect and something interesting and you don't know whether this is just something that's made it down in the sources because you know maybe you want to put the great human figures in history on a special you know pedestal and say that they smell extra good but Alexander is supposed to have smelled really good.

“So good in fact that the smell would linger on his clothes and he just had a really good sentence some ancient historians like try to you know figure out why that might be.”

Historian in wordings in his book by the spear gives a different account of Alexander's look and points out that even this could be a product of all the propaganda and even Alexander's ability to control the sort of stuff because he said to have liked certain. certain statues of himself and not other ones and said that you know the guy you made the statue that he liked is the only guy you can make statues of him now so he may have controlled how we see his look but here's how Ian. Worthington described it quote.

Alexander was a short man after the battle of business in 331 one of the captured Persian noble women. Miss took the taller he festion for Alexander and when he sat on the royal throne in the palace of Susah his feet did not reach the ground.

“His actual appearance wording and rights is controversial depending on which ancient account is read.”

He was said to have a lopsided face because his neck inclined to the left around chin along thin nose. A bulging forehead above watery eyes, one of which was apparently light blue and the other brown. Very sharp pointed teeth, a high pitched voice and a thick towsled mane of blonde hair. If he really did look like this, were they in rights, then his later portraits were deliberately softened to make him more handsome. These busts also depict Alexander with his blonde hair in ringlets with a central parting and against the tradition of the times beardless.

Roman images he says like the one on the Alexander mosaic were likewise idealized as they feature Alexander with dark curly hair and sideburns and quote. The sources say that Alexander was strong, that he was athletic, that he was a very good fighter and horseman, a very fast runner at one point. And he suggested to him that he should compete in the Olympics. He's so fast and he said he would if he could only compete against kings, which is a very Alexandria and sort of line. There's a couple of things we can infer and then we can know about this guy. The first thing is we know he's young and it's not being a thing to say, but we have to remember.

This is like Bob Dylan's forever young concept here. This is a guy who's never going to get old.

And so when we talk about how one should imagine him, height, weight, gate, look, hair color, all that's little stuff. We should reflect the fact that he's going to be young and when he starts he's going to be very young. We've got an 18-year-old or something or a 19-year-old when this guy is going to be leading this Macedonian Mazarati of an army at some point.

“Can you imagine having tons of responsibility at 18-19-20 years?”

So this is a young guy. He is a person we are told who has a temper that can get on a control at times. He is somebody that is clearly a superior fighter because if you look at the life of Alexander, he's a person who fights all the time. This is not a general like Napoleon or someone like Caesar who's back behind the lines making sure everything's where it needs to be. And troops are going where they need to go. Alexander is leading the pack.

And the number of times that he's going to jump over a city wall that they're besieging first, you know, that he'll run into the midst of the enemy with his body guards trailing behind him.

And the sheer fact that he doesn't die in these encounters that happened over years and years and years is a sign that he's quite capable of taking care of himself and being deadly. I mean, if the guy is like five foot four or five foot five, he's a deadly monster of a five foot five, right?

His dad still got to do what his dad's got to do, right, making the family fortune, conquering new territories, besieging cities, becoming more and more powerful.

But, you know, it takes time and Philip is continually hurting. He gets hurt again in another campaign in the not too distant future. So badly he'll never be able to walk without a limp again.

But he leaves in this time at 16 years old. He leaves Alexander in charge, round about 340 BC BCE. And while Alexander is running the show while Philip's away, a rising up or some sort of insurrection occurs up north of Macedonia amongst a tribal people. So Alexander takes what forces he's been left from his dad, goes up there, conquers him, you know, exiles them from their city, repopulates the city the same way dad would have done and renamed it. Alexander drop a less, just like his dad would have done to. That would have called it a falopolis of son just named it. This would be my first city, I'll name for myself, 16 years old got my first city.

“Alexander drop a less, what would you have named it?”

This also is presented like a milestone in this guy's life, right? First battle is commanded. I'm trying to think of 16 year old Alexander again, whatever we want to think of this guy, he's clearly a kid out there in his first battle as the world.

As the one in charge, I'm sure he's leaning on the very powerful, very dominant personalities of these generals heavily, but at the same time.

This is a guy who at 26 years old is going to be able to say I've been out there on the battlefield for a decade, that's crazy. But after Alexander has a chance to be a region for a little while for his dad while his away and command some troops and have a little agency in terms of command. It sort of marks the end of his formal education in this period in his life where he sort of is dad's right hand man, where he's working for pop and the family business, learn in the ropes.

“And so his fortunes sort of dovetail with his dad's for a while and this is an interesting period in his dad's career.”

First of all, there's an undercurrent of public opinion, maybe you could say out there during this time period, that it's difficult to divorce from the fact that we know what's going to happen. So it's tough to put maybe this sort of information in its proper perspective, but there is an undercurrent, maybe starting around 345346. You know, when Alexander only would have been 10 or 11 years old, maybe his dad being seen as the guy who's going to stop all this terrible warfare of Greek's killing Greeks.

And you night the Greeks together in a crusade against Greece's historical enemy is the way that this was portrayed the Persian Empire, right, who invaded Greece 150 or so years before. And is still awaiting payback for that. And so if we could only stop fighting and killing each other and draining the treasuries of rival city states, we could unite and go take the treasuries of this historically super, over wealthy empire and they can be our slaves and everything will be better. Probably 345346, there's a famous philosopher who issues sort of a public plea to Philip to be the guy who does this.

And he'd already chosen a couple people before Philip in the time period where those people look to be like the great unifier, but once Philip starts to really assert himself in that role. If you were going to see a person who might unify Greece through force and violence in the middle 340s Philip is your guy. The reason that this undercurrent of discussion about Philip leading a crusade against Persia matters is because when Philip is no longer with us, it's going to be this desire, this goal, this outcome that his son will adopt his own.

That is again assuming that Philip hadn't had this idea himself already, didn't need some Athenian or some philosopher giving it to him. Maybe he thought to himself, I'll take Persia. Let me just make sure I don't have any hostile Greek cities in my rear when I do,

“which is what's going on around the time Alexander first gets to command troops, right?”

He's about 16 years old. Philip's upcoming face-off with the powers that be in Greece has started to sort of crystallize and shape up.

Philip's big enemy has always been Athens and even when they're at peace, it's kind of a cold war kind of peace.

even when Athens wasn't at war with Philip, Philip was still at war with Athens,

implying that there's always a jockying for maneuvering for advantage here until the next hot war starts,

but Philip has been controlling the whole situation in Greece for some time. Now by having the Thibons or the other great city-state that are historically the anti-athenian city-state during this time period, having the Thibons as his allies, right? So you sort of checkmate the Athenians in that situation. What changes that leads to a showdown is the position of Thibons.

They start to see Philip as a threat too. And what we should recall here, and it's partly what makes Greek politics so difficult to follow, but also with the same time, so vulnerable to a king operating in a system with one person making all the decisions, you can see how that affects these city-states where public opinion is divided.

Athens has a pro- Macedonian camp and an anti- Macedonian camp and so does Thibons. And Philip can work angles like that. One of the reasons he's getting the Thibons angry with him and the Athenians are already mad at him is he's funding division in Greece, right? He's deliberately trying to create this unity and hostility among the major powers.

And he's devoting a lot of his money to that cause. I mean, if there are Russian troll farms now trying to get people in the west to have each other by instigating online combat and all that sort of stuff to make us a more divided society, that might be an imitation of what Philip's been doing in Greece.

“You can understand why the Greek city-states might take offense after a while, right?”

It's in his interest to keep Greece destabilized. And well, it's not so fun to live in a destabilized place.

The most in the Athenians will always portray this as a war for Greek liberty when they're dealing with Philip.

And Philip is the empire and the Athenians and friends because that's maybe how the Athenians would see them. That's the Athenians and all these other people are supporters. Even if they're major cities, the Athenians cast themselves in the role of the plucky, beleaguered republic, right? Fighting to maintain the old ways, the tradition, the greatness of Athenians traditionally,

and of course, you know, the status quo. And guys like Demas Thanese, who's considered to be one of the greatest orator's in world history, let's this fear and warning about Philip to overcome his entire career.

“I think for like 10 years straight, all these writing about is the danger of Philip.”

We need to do something before Philip gets us that kind of thing.

And his third Philipic, which is usually considered his best in 341 BC BCE.

So that would be when Alexander is the year before Alexander takes over for that regency. Demas Thanese again warns about Philip, and these are long tracks if you read them. But if you take pieces of it out, you can see the churchelian comparisons come pretty easily, right, where Winston Churchill's warning about the Nazis for all this time before they finally take over, and then he's brought to lead, you know, against the foe that he saw before anyone else.

But Demas Thanese isn't looking to lead, but he's certainly looking to warn the Athenians that their freedom is at stake. And it's really interesting the way they define freedom and a lot of modern historians pick up on this too. The Greeks want the freedom to basically fight each other. We would today say they want the freedom to make their own foreign policy, knowing full well that a large part of what they think of as their foreign policy is the struggle for her gemony against other Greek states,

“right, the freedom to fight our adversaries in Greece, and that's what Philip, if he takes over,”

is going to take away one of the things that Demas Thanese points out. Hey, you want to be able to control your own foreign policy, better not let Philip get in charge. And so at one point the third Philippic he has this, I looked at this paragraph for two. And I pulled it up from the web, and it doesn't say who translated it. So thousand apologies if that person still alive today, but from about the middle of the piece or two thirds of the way through,

he kind of gets to this moment where he's blaming the Athenians for all this, that they don't want to put forward the effort and the money and the demands on their own precious time that it would take away from whatever it is they want to do to stop Philip and yet they're going to pay a price for this. They're not the men that they're, you know, grandparents and great grandparents were because they would have done what needed to be done,

"So it is men of Athens with us, while we're still safe with our great city, our vast resources, our noble name, what are we to do?"

“Perhaps someone sitting here, meaning the assembly where he's speaking, has long been wishing to ask this question, "I and I will answer it."”

And I will move my motion and you shall carry it if you wish.

We ourselves in the first place must conduct the resistance and make preparation for it with ships that is in money and soldiers.

For though all but ourselves give way and become slaves, we at least must contend for freedom. And when we've made all these preparations ourselves and let them be seen, then let us call upon the other states for aid, and send on voice to carry our message in all directions, to the Peloponnese, to roads, to chios, to the king, meaning the king of Persia. For it is not unimportant for his interest, either, that Philip should be prevented from subjugating all the world, that so if you persuade them, you may have partners to share the dangers and the expense, in case of need.

And if you do not, you may at least delay the march of events. For since the war is with a single man, and not against the strength of a unified state, even delay is not without its value.

“And quote, that's a pretty cool ominous line, right?”

I mean, if you're really just fighting one guy as opposed to, you know, the next guy in line who can take over, because they're not for seeing Alexander, they figure Macedonia is just going to fall apart without Philip and anything could happen to one guy, right? Well, that Philip was giving Athens yet another warning, a full three years before the disaster that's in their future, the disaster that is the Battle of Carania. The Battle of Carania is one of those battles that everyone who's familiar with ancient Greek history knows, because it's very famous, it's super important,

it's not one of those battles that's gotten a lot of publicity outside, you know, the narrowest specific ancient Mediterranean genre.

“But the reason it's important is this is the time period where really the first time in hundreds of years,”

since the Greek city states first arose on the scene that they get leashed by an outside power.

There have been moments where one Greek city state, like a Sparta or an Athens or a Thieves, dominates the other ones, but it's always been a Greek city state involved in the process of controlling other Greek city states. The Battle of Carania is between Greek city states and an outside power. And it is one of those battles where everything is on the line, it's very typical of battles in the pre-modern world, the ancient world, where a single battle can decide the whole war. So think of the stakes here.

Lose here, lose everything, win here, and see what happens. To get a sense of the dread, though, in the feeling that overcame the Athenians when they realized that the Darth Vader figure that people like to masa these,

it's been warning about forever was finally upon them. Deodorous of Sicily, deodoriciculous rights, about what happens when, as tensions are sort of heating up, Philip makes a surprise move,

and sees as the initiative that puts Athens in a precarious position, and then the people in Athens find out about it, and deodorous rights quote. Given that the Athenians were unprepared, there was, after all, a peace treaty in place between them and Philip, he was expecting an easy victory, and that is exactly what transpired. Some men deodorous rights arrived one night in Athens, with news of Philip's occupation of Alade, and have his imminent arrival in Attica with his forces. The Athenian generals had not been expecting anything like this, and in a state of shock, they summoned the trumpeters and told them to keep sounding the alarm all night long.

By the time word had spread to every household, the city was alert with fear, and the first thing in the morning the entire population converged on the theater, without waiting for the customary proclamation by the Archons. When the generals arrived, they introduced one of the men who had brought the information, and after he had set his peace, a fearful silence gripped the theater. None of the men who usually addressed the assembly dared to offer any advice, and although the harrowed called repeatedly for people to recommend courses of action that might save them all, not a single speaker came forward.

So demosthenes says, "We've got to get thieves working with us, thieves and Athens join forces, raise their militaries, rush to this caronyous site in the area around thieves, you'll be OSHA that area, and they get to have it out for all the marbles with this.

“Amazing figure of a man who is commanding an army now that we should pay attention to is not the same army of 20 years ago or almost 20 years ago.”

By the time Karinia happens in 338, this reform of the Macedonian army that Philip started to pursue when he took over his king has been going on like 1819 years, and this army has been fighting continually, and he's been adding new elements and innovations and applying learned lessons from battlefield encounters into reforms.

I mean, this is an army now that is terrifying.

Especially to these armies like the Thiebons and the Athenians who are going to raise these militia armies that have generally a small core like in the Thiebon army, they have the Thiebon sacred band professionals, but there's 300 of them. It's nothing, and then maybe they hire some mercenaries too to help because there's a lot of mercenaries running around, but a lot of these troops are guys, as we said earlier, who you know put on the armor and grab the traditional family weaponry and show up there as the militia to do battle with a bunch of professionals.

“Then you add the command factor, one of the things that just be devils a person who's interested in Greek military history is that so much of the political side of places like Athens,”

and blood into things like military command, their political system essentially like to elect generals, and then keep moving them around all the time, and you know, don't let anybody get too powerful, but there's a famous line quoted, I forgot which of the ancient sources mentioned it, but Philip is supposed to have been, have marveled in the fact that the Athenians could come up with like 10 good generals a year, because that's how many they had to elect, because what I've only found, one good one in my whole life.

I'm talking about Parminio, but when you add the fact that they're going to have a professional army facing an army that has a lot of people who are not professionals in it, you're going to have them commanded by people with tons of experience, the Macedonian core of generals reminds one of like the guys around Napoleon, you know, all of his great general staff people. Alexander's got a similar thing, and in this era Philip's got him with him, and they're going to survive him and they're going to help Alexander, this is sort of the hidden part of the Alexander Maserati secret weapon here is the fact that these generals provide a ton of institutional memory, and they're all very good, and a bunch of them will actually as we said earlier go on, just found dynasties, where tons of their descendants will rule for centuries.

“And these are very August people, and they're contrasted with people who are, as we said, elected political, I mean, it's, that's a washout too, right?”

And you know, when we talk about these professional versus militia armies or these armies that fight all the time versus the kind that only get called up, you know, once a decade, Athens hasn't done a lot of fighting with their citizen militia in a while.

I use a lot of mercenaries, but according to the sources, Athens raises its age where they want you to show up at the battlefield to 50 years old for this battle.

I'm going to say that that shows a level of concern, that's rather desperate if you're pulling the 50 year olds out to the battlefield to face, you know, the young killers in the Macedonian army, that's a little scary, and here's the thing, scarier in the ancient world than now. I mean, if you told me that we were going to put together a Volk's term of 50 year old plus guys, but you were going to arm them with high power rifles or something and send them out there to do something, that's a force that can do something.

Maybe one could argue that some of the predominantly bow-armed armies in the world, I mean, the Persians use a lot of bow for example, maybe those people could get out there and fight at 50 and be effective.

But both the Greeks in this period and the Macedonians, they get at you.

I mean, it's physical, there's going to be, you know, close range stabbing and fighting and wrestling and martial arts and the whole thing. Both sides go into this battle, expecting that. And when that's the case, while a lot of the ancient sources talk about the value of having the older guys in the unit, right having them in the failanks,

But at certain points in this battle, again, the sourcing for this battle is going to make it really tough to piece together, although that hasn't stopped generations of people from trying.

But there are accounts where it suggests that it was a very long drawn out battle, and that this was totally to the advantage of the Macedonians, because even if a bunch of older guys, and you know, we should think of mixed units is going to be younger guys too.

“But even if a bunch of older guys can still manage to bring it like they used to for a certain period of time, if the battle goes on a long time, this is a physical fitness war at a certain point.”

And some of these 50-year-old 49-year-old guys are going to tap out after a while, and if only one size used in 49 or 50-year-old guys, well, okay, I see a problem potentially right there.

There's a great line from the 1950s movie about Alexander the Great, starring Richard Burton as Alexander, and I tried to find the line in my history books figuring that the screenwriters lifted it from one of the classical sources. I couldn't find it, that doesn't mean it's not there, but maybe the script writers wrote it. It's fantastic, though, spoiler alert. It has Philip after the Battle of Kerenia. After he's defeated the Athenians, and he's walking around Athens amongst these defeated Athenians, passed all the fantastic classical statues that all look like Olympians, right, with the fantastic musculature.

It's like perfect human specimens, and in the movie, the actor playing Philip looks at the defeated Athenians, emotions to the statues and says, "Where were all these physics at Kerenia?"

“Now, let's talk a little about the battle, though, in terms of what we know. Such an important battle, you think we know more, and you can pick up a bunch of history books and feel like you know quite a bit, unless you compare them to each other.”

That's when you realize, wait a minute, these guys have completely different takes on this battle. What's more, they've been arguing about some of the key points that are, well, still argued about for over a hundred years. Hansel Brooks got it in his book, and I love the way he actually breaks down one of these central questions about the battle, just as relevant today, by the way. But the main source is deodorous, sickulous. He's writing it more in a adventure sort of tone, as opposed to giving us a sense of, okay, tell me where all the units were. Let me get an idea of the terrain, that sort of thing.

Ian Worthington in his book by the spear sort of sets up a best guess at the numbers in ancient history, battlefield numbers, and army strength is something.

“Well, you shouldn't take it with the grain of salt, you should take it with the whole big old barrel of salt, but, you know, sometimes you know, even if it's not true, you must believe in ancient history, right?”

Here's how Ian Worthington sort of sets the stage for this pivotal, one of the most important battles in the history of ancient Greece, Battle of Carinaia in 338.

The Greek coalition troops numbered 30,000 infantry and 3,800 cavalry, and were commanded by the Athenian generals, carous, lysocles, and stradocles, and the Thibian general Theogenes. But at 12,000 hoplights, including the elite sacred band, and the Athenians 6,000 citizen soldiers to age 50 and 2,000 mercenaries, Demosthenes who had the phrase "good luck," which sounds a little sarcastic, I've read also, "good fortune." The legend in gold letters on his shield was one of the infantrymen in the Athenian contingent, Philip commanded 30,000 infantry, and 2,000 cavalry composed of 24,000 Macedonians, and the rest from Thessaly and Focus, or Fosius and Quote.

And he makes it sound as though, you know, the second that Demosthenes goes to convince thieves to join the alliance with Athens, that it was on in the battle happened right away, but it was several months of jocking and Philip still trying to pursue diplomacy. So we're trying to take a pro Macedonian position, who you might say, "Hey, Philip kept trying to make a deal." Didn't want it this way, whereas the people on the allied Greek side would say Philip was trying to pry us apart, so that he didn't have to face us, but eventually of course it comes down to the battle.

And this is how Diodorus Seculus has it set up and how it goes. I'm using the excellent Robin Waterfield translation of Diodorus by the way, and the author has Diodorus saying, "At daybreak, the armies were drawn up for battle. Philip posted his son Alexander on one of the wings. He was only a teenager, but was already well known for his martial spirit and forceful energy."

The Athenians, for their part, divided their forces by nationality, interesting one wing to the beotians and taking command of the other themselves. End quote. Then Diodorus has the battle happening in Alexander's sort of having the initial success, which he says prompted Alexander's dad to then compete with him, "Well, judge for yourself, but here's how the actual account of the battle in the best account that we have of the battle describes it."

“A fearsome prolonged engagement ensued, so many men fell on both sides that for a while the battle allowed them both equally to anticipate victory.”

But Alexander was eager to put on a display of valor for his father, and he was in any case excessively ambitious, and besides, there were many good men fighting alongside him in support, so it was he who was the first to create a breach in the enemy lines. He slew so many of those who were ranged opposite him that the line was wearing thin, and since his companions were being just as effective, the enemy formation as a whole was constantly endangered being breached. The bodies were lying in heaps, by the time Alexander was first able to force the troops facing him to turn and flee. Next, Diodorus writes, "It was Philips turned to bear the brunt of the fighting, refusing to yield the credit for victory even to Alexander.

“He first drove the enemy back by main force, and then compelled them to turn and flee. Victory was his."”

Like many of the Athenians at the battle demosthenes ran away, they were driven through a narrow pass.

A couple of thousand dead, amongst the Thieven's, a couple thousand amongst the Athenians, probably more taken prisoner, and one of the most consequential battles that have ever occurred in Greek history is over. Now, from that meager description that Diodorus gives, and then another historian who's not even as good on this as Diodorus, the entire battle has been mapped out by some historians.

“The arguments over what the tactics were, and how it played out have been going on for well over 100 years, and the ones in Hanstall Brooks from more than 100 years ago, I think I still like the best.”

If I had to name the number one controversy, and it's still the number one controversy today, it wasn't Del Brooks' time to, is the supposed back stepping of Philip and the Phaylanks.

What they mean by that is there's a tradition that in order to destabilize the Athenians, either by making their line separate, right, one part of the line moving forward while they other stays still, leaving a gap. Or simply destabilizing because it has to move the formation in front of them that Philip and the Phaylanks backed up on the battlefield during the fighting. There's a lot of historians who will believe this, and I'm in no position to contradict them, but I am going to cite the wonderful Hanstall Brooks, I love so much because he was able to arm his students with these weapons and drill them on the field and see how things go and sometimes he just won't accept nonsense.

I do think he understands the capabilities of our ancestors to some degree and that some of what we know now about how the Romans functioned and some of these armies and the Chinese. I mean, I think he would find some of that intriguing and he'd have to, you know, modify some of his beliefs, but there are certain bedrock, hardcore logic from a German military perspective before the first World War that just brings to these issues where you just find it hard to argue with.

And here's what he says about the idea that Philip and the Phaylanks backed up on the battlefield while the battle was going on and he says quote.

And by the way, if this is in the footnotes where dogbrook is arguing with his fellow German military historians about this question and he writes quote. "Since the above words were written, Crone Mayor has studied the topography of the battlefield and based on that study has attempted to make a more exact reconstruction of the battle in the above-sided work. His reconstruction effort, however, completely failed. As roll off another historian, has proved in the work already cited, and Ivan Stern has also recognized. For the attempt is based on not only a completely insufficient and unreliable source materials, but also on the monstrous idea that Philip's Phaylanks pulled back 600 meters without making a turn he's quoting the other author now.

An individual man Delbrook writes can hardly move backwards 600 meters on good ground without stumbling. A Phaylanks that tried to do that he writes in the open field were very quickly end up with its men lying on the ground, one on top of the other.

but the author sought to justify his grotesque concept in detail, and it's an example of how wonderfully heated these. What really happened in this ancient battle sort of conversations can get.

“And at the core of the issue, how ultimately unsolvable it all is, because we don't understand the physics of the ancient battle field more on that later in this story.”

The history of ancient Greece to the history of Philip Alexander, Macedonia and everything that's going to happen from this point out, my favorite account of this is again also, I guess I love the old classics, the will derand one where he sums up the stakes of what just happened and says quote. The tyranny were endless. The unity that Greece had failed to create for itself had been achieved, but only at the point of a half alien sword. The Peloponnesian War had proved Athens incapable of organizing hell, meaning Greece.

The aftermath had shown sparta incapable. The thieban hegemony in its turn had failed, the wars of the armies and the classes had worn out the city states and left them two week for defense. Under the circumstances, derand rights, they were fortunate to find so reasonable a conqueror who proposed to withdraw from his scene of his victory and leave to the conqueror to large measure of freedom.

“And Philip, and Alexander after him, watchedfully protected the autonomy of the federated states, less than any one of them by absorbing others should grow strong enough to displace Macedon.”

One great liberty, however, Philip took away the right of revolution. He was a frank conservative who considered the stability of property and indispensable stimulus to enterprise and a necessary prop to government. He persuaded the synod at Corinth to insert into the articles of Federation, a pledge against any change of constitution, any social transformation, any political reprisals. In each state, he lent his influence to the side of property and put an end to confiscatory taxation and quote.

Derand kind of makes Philip the second sound a little like the Reagan era Republican there at the end of that quote, maybe he's in the supply side economics too.

“But you know, Reagan sort of had a tough guy image sort of portraying a John Wayne style character.”

And John Wayne, of course, was another actor portraying a cowboy character right as self-reliant tough but fair wouldn't want to mess with him or get him mad at you kind of an American stereotype.

Well, Philip, the second is not an actor playing that stereotype. Philip, the second is the cowboy.

And after the battle of Karinia, he treats the two main opponents that he just defeated quite differently. Athens gets treated lovely. They're so scared after the battle were told that they're ready to arm their slaves, conscript every guy up to 60 years old, it frantically trying to get the defenses in order. And then Philip shows up and Alexander's the one who actually brings the ashes after a while and says, we're not going to rant some your dad or rant some your prisoners which is a huge deal.

I said earlier, I think that a couple thousand demons and a couple thousand Athenians died. The ancient sources put that close you to a thousand each with about double that for prisoners. So that's a lot of money that Philip is turning down to make a good impression on this state that he just defeated in battle. And the Athenians are so touched that they apparently put up a statue honoring Philip, which is a weird thing to do to a guy who just killed a thousand of your citizens. And that Demosthenes has been comparing, you know, to the guy who's going to snuff out Greek freedom, which he just kind of did, but we'll put a statue up to him.

But he's playing the long game here, right? These, these people all kind of work for him now and he wants a little, you know, trying quality amongst his employees and by working for him, I mean, he's going to create this league, that includes all these people as members. Thebes is not going to be treated as nicely as Athens, by the way. They were seen as allies who treacherously turned on the Macedonians. So Philip was tough on them and he's sort of sending a message here, right? You be my friend. You cooperate with me. I can be very lenient and fair.

But you turn on me. You go against my wishes. You work against the, you know, collective cause here of the group and you'll pay. The new group is called the league of current. Philip invites everyone. The Spartans don't show up, but at this point in Greek history, nobody cares.

But this league of current, which you'd probably be called the league of the Greeks, which I think is closer to its contemporary name.

“This is Philip's vehicle for controlling Greece. And there are multiple different ways to look at it because if you are worn out by essentially civil war for, you know, decades and decades and decades,”

anybody who keeps the peace and protects all the Greek city states from all the other Greek city states is a hero. And that's sort of what this new arrangement requires. By the way, it's a wonderful example of in history, which don't often get of collective security being imposed. Where the deal that everyone agrees to is that if anybody gets out of line and starts fighting tries to conquer something anything like that, the rest of the city states and Macedonia all turn against them, show up on the battlefield with their soldiers and, you know,

“chastise them back into, you know, peaceful coexistence, collective security. It's a little like a NATO alliance if a NATO alliance were run by an authoritarian dictator.”

But as we said, I mean, to pens on your point of view, to most of the knees can paint Philip out to be this, you know, alcohol like figure, whereas if you're a small city state in Greece, and you don't care one wit for who's wrestling over the top dog, a Gemini position, thieves, Sparta, Athens, what does it matter to you? You just don't want to get your city rolled over as part of the wars. What a guy like Philip is finally promising you is that it's going to be peaceful around here and safe, and because he does this almost instantly, I mean, first he establishes the league and have the league votes him the boss, and then he essentially makes the plan of the league to go and launch a revenge war against the historic enemies, the Persians, you know, Philip is not somebody who believes that old phrase justice to lead is justice to nine.

He's fine getting them for what they did 150 years ago and he's going to use this league as the tool that creates a collective effort for that goal.

“I mean, this is the dream of the people who advocate pan Hellenism forever, right?”

United Greeks enforce peace, go get the Persians, we'll all be rich, have slaves, and you know, Greeks won't be killing Greeks, and Greece will be ruling barbarians the way it's supposed to be. And here it is, it's not a perfect situation, I'm sure a lot of these pan Hellenic philosophers would have preferred. And unquestioningly Greek person to play the role of Philip at the take, what they can get, would it? Durant call him a half alien, but Philip is about to embark on this endeavor at 45 years old, sure he's beat up, sure he's likely to be involved in a lot of physical fights still to go, but this is a guy you could live quite a bit longer.

Most Macedonians would want the greatest king by far in their history probably to get a chance to live quite a bit longer, but that might not be a universal feeling and wouldn't that be a very Macedonian thing too. In this case, it's worth asking what Alexander's feeling at a moment like this. Because at this point, there's not much that can stop what Philip's about to do here, he's poised to create a higher level of history than anyone from his part of the world has ever done, not much can stop him, but his personal life can.

About to happen in this story is proof positive that the personal lives of people in the past can influence even the largest events, and you can see it all the time when you run into places where power is highly concentrated, especially between a single individual. In that single individual's life intersects with global geopolitical events, you know, they have ramifications for the entire rest of history. It's crazy how you can get a sort of real kings of Macedonia kind of real Beverly Hills housewives kind of feel the whole thing.

To destroy Philip is not some enemy that can contend with his general ship or his, you know, machinations conducting real politics or his economic base that he's built over, you know, decades now ruling what's going to hold Philip back and eventually destroy him as his personal life and his family life and who he sleeps with probably.

Having a father about to do what Philip is about to do here is a mixed blessing if you're looking at this from Alexander's point of view.

I mean, Philip is in his mid 40s. He can live quite a bit longer, even, you know, battling from the front and even sucking up all the injuries he sucks up. This is a guy that doesn't necessarily have to go anywhere. Adrian Goldsworthy has a really interesting point in his book. Philip and Alexander that at this point, you know, Philip has never said what chastising.

“Persia is going to mean here. I mean, what is payback for the Persian wars 150 years ago, 145 years ago, is it the freeing of the Greeks who live on the coast of what's now modern day Turkey? Is that enough?”

Or is it taking all of what's now modern day Turkey or maybe the coastline around Syria and Lebanon and all I mean where does it stop?

Maybe you want to take all of the west of Persia or maybe you just want to fight some battles against the Great King of Persia and see how it goes and adjust your, you know, goals accordingly. Nobody knows what Philip's trying to do here. And nobody knows whether Alexander is a part of those plans or not. Can you imagine if Alexander gets left at home to be the region who rules Macedonia when nothing's going on in Macedonia as his father goes out and conquers the world? In Philip versus Alexander, Adrian goals were the puts it this way. And you just imagine how much money a counselor or a psychologist who could get this son father and mother anywhere near his psychiatry couch, how much money.

I mean, that's a twice a week problem right there. Maybe three times a week because it's, I mean, Adrian goals were the rights about the prospect of Philip. You know, going out there and conquering the world, and maybe even leaving Alexander at home, quote, Alexander was bound to resent this. The 19-year-old Prince was impatient, quick tempered, determined, and obsessively competitive. All of his future career testifies to these traits, as well as a strong streak of suspicion and jealousy. Whether or not the story is true of his regretting each success won by his father as one less victory he might win. Alexander's relationship with Philip was made all the more complicated and tense because both craved glory.

Even by the standards of their age, goals were the rights. They were fiercely competitive. The father because he'd already done so much and craved even more. And the son because his father's deeds had set the bar for being the best even higher than before. For all his prodigious talent, we should not expect exceptional emotional maturity from the young Prince who struggle to cope with playing a supporting role. He knew that his future depended on his father, end quote. Unless something happened to his father, which is when Philip's personal life makes a situation that seems so well set up on his part established a better sand.

“That's the marriage for love. If that's really what it was, but it's portrayed. My deodorous straight-up says she was too young for him. It's almost portrayed like a man having a midlife crisis, right?”

In his mid 40s, about to launch this giant expedition at the top of his game, though, already nobody's even done what I've done already. The primal life poised it, you know, build on this and he falls in love with a teenager, is the way the ancient sources like deodorous portray it. Her name is Cleopatra. Not the Cleopatra, the fool around with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. That's way in the future, but Cleopatra is a very common traditional Macedonian name. In fact, Alexander the Great Sisters name is Cleopatra, and Philip takes this wife supposedly because he loves her.

“She's likely a teenager. Richard Gabriel thinks she might be as old as 22, but if she's 22, why is everybody making a big deal about her age?”

A 22-year-old queen would not raise anyone's eyebrows. She's probably a teenager.

She is also probably his seventh wife, the number of wives that Philip has is always a little bit hard to pin down, but teenage seventh wife.

And if he really married her, for love, that would be unusual for him. This is a guy who usually marries to cement diplomatic relationships or to finalize peace treaties or to blend his important family with other important families.

And Athalus is from a old family and lower Macedonia, the sort of people that if Philip wants to make sure the home front, remember Macedonian history, is safe while he's gone away to Asia maybe for years on this endeavor. And it's nailed down. Well, maybe you want to marry your family into some of the powerful barons of lower Macedonia, so maybe that's more what's going on here, but it's portrayed as a guy who, you know, wants to buy a Ferrari and, you know, get a new trophy wife.

“He doesn't have to get rid of his old wives. That's the difference between Philip and someone today. He can keep them all.”

And this is certainly make him happy, though, and Plutarch has this marriage to this Cleopatra teenager.

Get a limpious angry. Plutarch says that she puts ideas into Alexander's head.

“Worries him about what this means. And you know, in a situation where it doesn't matter to us, it's easy for us to look at this and say, what on God's greener, if what Alexander have to be worried about here.”

So his father's going to marry a teenager. She's going to maybe give him a child. It may be a son, right? So already there's a bunch of babies.

But if it's a son, Alexander's like 19 almost 20 years old, this kid's not going to be a threat to him for quite a long time. Why would you care? But he cares. He supposedly complained to his dad once before about fathering children, you know, saying something like, you know, what about being his father said back to him, what about you, you know, be the best and you'll get the job. And if they're better, they should have the job, that kind of thing.

“But there could be other reasons why you don't get the job. So far, everything has seemed pretty good between father and son.”

But then, Philips personal life comes into the picture again this time with one of the more famous drinking parties in history. If this drinking party really happened and if it really unfolded the way it's come down to history, G.o. politically speaking, it's hard to get your mind around how important it might have been. And you do try to resist the temptation to keep Dionysus out of this, but this is what Dionysus does, right? The God comes in and messes with stuff and he manifests, you know, a reality may be that in normal times people would want to keep hidden and secret.

And you know, there are certain things you just shouldn't say in polite company, especially the people they're about, but then Dionysus loosens your tongue through the unmixed wine and all of a sudden you're saying crap in a party that is so important to future geopolitical histories that we're still talking about it more than 2,000 years later.

But Philips has a drinking party to celebrate the marriage and he's there and Alexander's there and the uncle of the bride adolescents there.

When we talked about the tendency of the Macedonians to have drinking parties a little earlier, I think I undercut what I was trying to say about the way the drinking parties go and made it seem like two competitors who want to have a drink off against each other could sit there with terrains over their head and drink wine. I made it sound like maybe they could just sip it and the first one who couldn't handle any more stopped. These are chug-a-lug contests. These are like you have to breathe while you're chug-a-lugging and the first person that falls to the ground past out loses or dies sometimes you could die.

So these are serious drinking contests which means Dionysus has a serious chance to get involved in the proceedings and Dionysus loosens the tongue. We're going to assume it was not meant to come out. Of the bride's uncle Atlas at the feast he offers a toast and the toast is that the gods provide a legitimate heir, a Macedonian heir for the throne of Macedonia, which might have just gone into the room and passed by everybody and just been seen as a normal toast for a You know, uncle of the bride to make it a fine wedding dinner like this, but that's not how Alexander perceived it.

And he threw his cup at Atlas and in this room a stunned intoxicated warrior's dignitaries and friends. He said, "You fill in, are you calling me a bastard?" And everything is about to go to hell on a handbasket. The room is going to explode. Philip gets up off the couch, pulls his sword and goes after Alexander and then falls on his face. It's interesting to go and read about the various theories of how debilitating Philip's various maladies were, but he certainly had at the least a limp. Maybe it was even worse than that and he had to swing his leg around just to move.

There are a lot of ways to view something like this. First of all, we should ask the obvious history detective kind of question is, did it ever happen?

It seems relatively safe, you've got to say that about each detective, relatively safe, that some sort of rift develops between Alexander and Philip at this point. And via Alexander also Olympius, but whether or not the stories that a guy like Plutarch tells to explain how it happened or true is anyone's guess. The problem is when you have so little to go on, you still analyze the stuff even though you don't know whether you can confirm it or not. And people have dissected this public event that maybe happened, most important drinking cocktail party ever maybe.

“That's what really happened and they've dissected it and tried to figure out what it means. What does it mean when Philip draws a sword goes after his son?”

Well, some accounts sort of suggest that what really happened is that Philip told Alexander to apologize to Adilis, he refused to apologize, which is like defying a direct order from the king, so Philip drew on him.

But there's a lot of legitimate questions historians have pointed out. I think it was David Ogden who said, basically, you know, why wasn't there more public support by Philip at the time?

Right, if somebody makes some claim about a legitimate heir in front of the legitimate heir or the perceived legitimate heir and his dad and, you know, a whole bunch of dignitaries wouldn't the dad say right there and then now wait a minute, we have a legitimate heir or something. And by not doing that, you take an already kind of suspicious guy Alexander may be in making more suspicious and then if he wasn't suspicious enough to begin with, he's got a mom who can perhaps act as a little gasoline thrown on that fire.

“A lot of ways you can see this. If I was going to try to see it from a fierce devotee of Dionysus, which maybe his mom was, I would say that Dionysus was showing you the minds of your adversaries, right?”

He was ripping away the masks of these people who want to hurt you and via the drink, he had them expose their ambitions and their plans and their schemes to you. That's the way I like to see it because it's the better story, which brings us to another great way to see this. Just as likely as any of the rest, I suppose, it's the one several ancient historians latch onto, which is that what's about to happen to fill up is going to be because he messed with maybe the one person in this story strong enough to resist him.

Olympius.

“If this drinking party did happen, it is afterwards that the part of the rift that seems pretty safe to say happened happens and Alexander for whatever reason leaves Macedonia with his mom.”

They go together back to the old homeland, which might be more significant than I've made it out to be because some of the ways that this nasty toast by Adelis has been interpreted is that he's sort of implying that Alexander is not really a full Macedonian and it may be Macedonia would be better off with a full Macedonian.

And here's the thing, he's not wrong.

It's easy to forget that Alexander's half Eparit or Eparit or a pirate take your choice and from his mother's people stems from a different location. And what's funny about sort of cultural superiority and prejudice and bigotry is that the Greeks can feel that the Macedonians to the north of them are barbarians and culturally backward and uncouth and all these sorts of things. And the Macedonians can bristle at that. But then from the Macedonian perspective, farther north west of them is you know, Malosi and those places and the Macedonians are just a sniffy and prejudicial and biased and bigoted towards those people and almost with the exact same adjectives about them as the Greeks are about the Macedonians.

So how wonderfully human is all that. But if Adelis did imply that wouldn't be nice to have 100% Macedonian king to follow, you know, fill up, I'd imagine that that might play well among Adelis and the other barrens from the very very Macedonian part of lower Macedonia.

So to look like you're backing up the point of Adelis saying, you know, where's the first place this half Malosi and goes when the, you know, going gets tough to Malosi, I doesn't stay here, so where is real loyalties, right. But Philip has allowed and the ancient sources are hard on him. Philip has allowed his personal life here to completely undercut his geopolitical goals that he's been working for forever. I mean, he finally gets Greece where he wants it, right, united, not fighting amongst itself, going to support him now on this mission to Asia.

“But this is the crowning glory moment of this guy's life and the sand from the foundation underneath his feet is beginning to just blow away.”

And Tartel's a story of a Greek friend of Phillips from Corinth showing up around this time period and Philip asking him whether or not they were getting along well in Greece, now that he's, you know, created the conditions where it will be fatal to not get along anymore in Greece. And again, he's, you know, friends says something to the effect of it doesn't look good if you're asking whether or not the Greeks are all getting along when you've got dissension and catastrophe in your own family, when the implied suggestion here is that it's your own fault to, which maybe it is, I mean tradition has him sort of having the midlife crisis falling in love with the teenager and that messing everything up.

Just another story, winded of a powerful man who gets, you know, undercut by his less than logical choices shall we say, especially sexually or this marriage to this young bride from lower Macedonia might be exactly what the country needs and just as much a political and diplomatic act and coup as the earlier marriages that Philip was involved in.

“The potential exists in some historians bring this up to what's really going on here is Alexander and Olympius just freaking out over essentially nothing.”

But the bottom line is it doesn't matter what it is if a real rift has occurred, Philip has to fix that.

And so he does invite Alexander back and apparently organizes a royal wedding to sort of reestablish the relationship. If you know how some people will get second marriages to sort of renew their vows, well, Philip doesn't do that, but he does the next best thing with Olympius. He marries off their daughter that they have together. Cleopatra's her name as I said, and she's Alexander's full sister and so there's going to be a royal wedding where, you know, the unhappy couple Philip and Olympius sort of come together for a wedding of their daughter.

“And just to keep it in the family and make sure that we show that it's not just no hard feelings against Olympius, it's no hard feelings against you people in Malosea either it's going to be a royal wedding with the king of that kingdom.”

The king of Epirus, Apparise, Pyrus, Choose Your Name, who also confusingly enough because they seem to have never enough names in the baby book in any of these ancient societies. His name is Alexander II, Alexander of Epirus.

And he is the full uncle of his bride. And like his sister, maybe head slept with Philip II himself, which is part of the Macedonian,

if you were a genealogist in Macedonian society, you would just be driven crazy by all the affairs or alleged affairs. There's a lot of gossip in the royal house, so who knows, but when Alexander of Epirus was a young man, sort of like a Batman robin relationship if that weren't entirely straight, Philip may have, you know, fooled around with him.

So he fooled around with Olympius obviously and began Alexander and maybe with Olympius's brother. And now he's going to marry off his full daughter with Olympius to Olympius's brother.

I mean, again, genealogists, head explodes, but you can see how a royal wedding of this caliber would be huge and so Philip invites everyone. Ever been to one of those parties where everybody's allowed to invite people themselves, but Philip wants everybody there. He's going to throw a massive festival multiple days, sounds like music, great food, entertainment, the whole thing. And it's ostensibly for this wedding, so everybody's choreographed into it and plays a part, but it's really going to turn out to be more of a festival for Philip.

And to sort of bring the Greeks on board like now we're all on the same side. Let's celebrate. We'll renew our vows to each other is, you know, League of Corinth this whole thing and then we'll go, you know, conquer Persia.

Indeed, Doris says that he first goes to the Great Oracle at Delphi, Apollo's Oracle and of course Apollo speaks through a female prophetess, the Pithia and famously you want to be careful about your interpretation shall we say of what an Oracle tells you.

Often are much more accurate after the fact, right, when you look back and you go, oh, I see what they meant. They were right again. There's a magic eight ball sort of field to some of them.

And famously, for example, when the king of Lydia asked the Oracle if he should attack the Persian Empire, the Oracle told him, listen, if you attack the Persian Empire, you will destroy a great empire, which he took to mean, yeah, go do it and he did it and he did destroy a great empire, but it's his empire, fortunately.

“And you would think stories like that would give ample warning to a guy like Philip who goes to the Oracle and the Pithia tells him when he says, should I attack Persian?”

The ball is reefed. It's end is nigh. The sacrifice is at hand. End quote. Now, in hindsight, that looks like an accurate magic eight ball prediction, but ahead of time it might have looked more like, you know, one of those things all signs point to yes or something a little bit more amorphous. I'm not sure I'd roll the dice on a unclear prediction like that. But Philip takes it in the best possible way assumes that the bowl means the Persian king and they're ready to be sacrificed and he's the guy at hand to do it. And so he organizes his party in the endorses does all these sacrifices after the Oracle gives him the good news and writes quote.

He, Philip, therefore lost no time in performing magnificent sacrifices to the gods and celebrating the marriage of Cleopatra, his daughter by Olympius to Alexander the King of Eeperis and Olympius's full brother, as well as honoring the gods, he wanted as many Greeks as possible to enjoy the festivities. So he laid on splendid musical contests and spectacular banquets for his friends and intimates.

From all over Greece, he invited those who were closest to him and he told his friends to ask as many as possible of their acquaintances from abroad to come.

For he particularly wanted to show favor to the Greeks and to repay the honor they had granted him of supreme command with the appropriate courtesy's. The adores continues quote. The upshot was that large numbers of people poured in from every quarter to the festival. The contests and the marriage took place. He mentions in the capital in Macedon.

“And Philip was awarded golden crowns, not just by distinguished individuals, but also by the majority of the important cities.”

Athens was one of them, he says, and when the herald proclaimed this crown, the last thing he said was that anyone who plotted against King Philip and sought refuge in Athens would be extradited to him. By means of this spontaneously prophetic utterance, deodorous says, the gods were clearly indicating as though by divine foresight that a plot was imminently to be launched against Philip's life. And quote. Here is the thing about a guy like Philip.

“We've mentioned the word mafia and organized crime a lot to deal with the Macedonian royal dynamic, but this guy is like a mafia don.”

He's powerful and he's feared and he's in danger at all times, and sometimes some of the most satisfying moments in life can come right before the hitmen come in.

And machine gun you all at the table while you're reading pasta and smoking cigars and having a nice kiyanti. What's about to occur is the prototype for all the great conspiratorial, multi-layered, who done it, heads of state assassination stories for the rest of time. The John F. Kennedy assassination is nothing but a pale shadow of what's about to happen in this theater that's been deliberately set up paid for and established so that this affair can happen and Philip can have this moment in the sun that is long awaited for much deserved.

But once again, it's very possible that unlike major geopolitical events that we expect will move the needle in terms of the way history breaks like a wave.

And in this case, it may come from Philip having a relatively common, it sounds like sort of homosexual affair with a young man and then deciding he liked some younger Hansen or man instead.

“Now, this is partly what makes ancient history so fun. There's an old line from a play I think it was that the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. It's a great line.”

But some countries are like Canada and others are like Easter Island, right? Canada, they do things a little differently Easter Island is going to it's a major life change. If I told you that some general some four star general head of the joint chiefs of staff or major world leader was having an affair head of a sexual affair. I would say, okay, well, that's not all that surprising. If I said that they got rid of girlfriend number one for a younger version of her, you probably think to yourself, okay, this is just a good gossip columny story for, you know, my tabloid newspaper, I'm going to sit down get some popcorn and read up on what's going on with them.

The homosexuality angle, though, is what turns this into a story that just makes it part of this time in this place and it's hard to get your mind around the sexuality situation anyway because sometimes you'll run into sources that make it sound like things are frowned upon other times like that they're common.

“So I can't figure out when one line is crossed or another one isn't, but there are some weird things about the better way to phrase it would probably be homosexual behavior or pan sexuality in this period.”

And if that it mixes elements, you don't see very much anymore, for example, the kind of people we're talking about involved in the homosexual acts when we talk about the king of Macedonia or these Macedonian nobles are hard-bitten killers hand to hand killers. These are alpha males if we want to use the parlance of our time. Extremely masculine, major drinkers and party animals and comrades who are toughest nails and who make up almost certainly the greatest army of their time, one of the greatest armies in the ancient world, one of the most famous armies in history.

These are men's men, but that can mean numerous things, can't they? The point is you don't normally see the equivalent of your four-star generals or chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or whatnot involved in some sort of a homosexual love triangle, but you know the past is a different country and they do things differently there and in Macedonia there wasn't a lot of reaction to Philip having these affairs.

I mean, you don't see Olympius being too angry about them, right? It's not bothering her.

“In fact, if you're looking at this from an Olympius viewpoint, I like looking at it from multiple viewpoints. Again, I'm seeing this all working out towards my benefit and Dionysus is looking after his own, right?”

This is why you pray to a God like Dionysus because when you need him, he comes through and there's going to be another incident involving wine that leads to a chain of events that one could see as working out very well for Olympius and Alexander II. This guy that Philip is having the affair with is named Posse Nius. As yet another wonderful example that the Macedonians need more names in their baby book, the person in the story besides Posse Nius is also named Posse Nius. So both of these lovers of Philip are named Posse Nius. I said he had a type with women, right? He likes his warrior women and he likes his enchantresses with guys. He likes his Posse Nius. So Posse Nius I is the original guy that Philip is having the affair with and he's thrown aside for Posse Nius II. So he runs around spreading malicious gossip about Posse Nius II.

We would call it slut shaming today and once again it's hard to figure out where the line between okay behavior in the minds of all these people versus something that should be ridiculed is. Sometimes it can even involve, you know, sexual position. So I'm going to leave that to people who are more intelligent and well-versed on the subject than I am. It is interesting to know though that when Posse Nius I says, you know, awful things about Posse Nius II to our modern minds we would be going wait a minute. Didn't Posse Nius I just do those same things.

So I'm going to go prove that I'm not an awful person that I'm an admirable honorable person. And he goes out into a battle where told where Philip is fighting his old enemies, the Eulerians and the Eulerians are about to kill Philip and instead Posse Nius II jumps in front of him takes all of the, you know, slings and arrows meant for Philip dies heroically.

“But it's really like a suicide to prove that he was a good man and this upsets Atlas, who then wants to get even with Posse Nius I, for putting Posse Nius II in a position where Posse Nius II had to throw his life away.”

And so Atlas involves Posse Nius II, you guessed it to place where they could have a little wine, and this is where the sources diverge a little bit. Some suggest that Atlas already had a sexual affair or sexually abused Posse Nius I in the past. Some of the sources suggest that he gets Posse Nius I drunk at this get together and rapes him here and now. And maybe let's his friends also do it. And then all the sources say that after he rapes him or just gets him dead drunk he throws him to the stable boy so that they can all do that to him.

“And of course, you know, telling everybody's friends doing the equivalent of posting it on the Macedonian Facebook page or whatever right my space page probably way back then.”

So everybody knows right so if Posse Nius II had to throw his life away because Posse Nius I said a few probably not true slurs about him house Posse Nius I feel in now. Where's his reputation so he goes back to the old boy friend Philip and asked for red dress of grievances, Atlas did this stuff to me, what are you going to do about it and the source to say Philip admitted it was wrong and he felt bad about it, but he needs Atlas. Maybe that's why he even married his daughter right he needs this guy this guy is going to be one of the commanders by the way who right around the same time period goes and essentially in a very sort of laid back quiet way starts the invasion of Persia 10,000 Macedonians go and establish a bridge head over in Persian society waiting for Philip and the rest of the army to follow so that's how close that invasion is to where we are in the story right now.

Philip is in a position here where he can't satisfy Posse Nius's demands on how severe he wants him to be on Adelis without screwing up his long term conquest goals here so he tries to sort of buy Posse Nius off right gives him precious gifts were told and stuff promotes him to hire positions of authority maybe even bodyguard which may explain some of the story coming up a little bit.

But the sources say that this isn't enough for Posse Nius, Aristotle writing a near contemporary just it's a blurb from his treatise politics just mentions this quote.

The plot hatched by Posse Nius against Philip arose from the ladders allowing Posse Nius to be sexually assaulted by Adelis and his men and quote. Even though it may sound like it that's not saying that Posse Nius is blaming Philip for allowing him to be sexually assaulted he's blaming Philip for not doing anything about it afterwards for letting Adelis and his men get away with it laugh about it afterwards and Posse Nius is out for vengeance we are told.

It's also possible that this revenge needed to be public that the people that Posse Nius had been shamed in front of reputationally.

We're going to be the kind of people that would be you know what a public event and it's important maybe that they know that he was the one involved there's a story where Posse Nius is supposed to have asked his professor once.

“What the best way to become famous was and the professor is supposed to have told Posse Nius by killing somebody who is famous.”

Right then you forever link your lives together right at any time they bring up the famous person.

They'll bring up the person who ended the famous person you become part of their story. Well if you really wanted your revenge to get attention there just happens to be a party going on in a theater where all of the people that matter have been invited and are waiting for some sort of a statement.

But maybe the statements going to come from a different direction.

We are told that Philip had the audacity, the adores portrays and is almost sacrilegious to have 12 ivory and gold statues made of the principal Greek gods in the Greek. Pantheons that they could be part of the ceremonies and he has a 13th ivory and gold statue matching the 12 gods made of himself. Maybe something like that is a little like Icarus flying too close to the sun maybe you're tempting fate there. There's a wonderful tradition that they supposedly practice during Roman times where whenever a Roman got to celebrate a triumph right one of those moments in their life where they were honored and parades and all those kinds of things that there was a.

“The system whose job at these things was to whisper into the ear of the person being honored with the triumph remember that your human to.”

Just to keep his feet a little on the ground keep him from getting little to carry the way with himself remind him that you know we exist here and now at the pleasure of well make your choice the gods or fate or chance. Or maybe you exist until your enemies can get to you. And the event that is about to occur here is so famous so salacious so interesting from a conspiratorial angle involves one of the greatest figures of his time. The father of one of the greatest figures of all time who only becomes the king because his father dies and this is the event where his father dies.

I mean this is such an enormous moment that you would think you'd have several different first hand contemporary accounts to go by and compare and contrast with each other.

“I mean if nothing else, Philip has invited the entire gliderotti here all the journalists all the taste makers all the important people.”

I mean there you would think would be a lot of people who'd sit down but to these playwrights whatever and write this stuff down and instead we have the usual suspects. You know writing hundreds of years later hopefully using sources closer to you know the time and place.

The adores is the closest to the one I've always liked because it's the most cinematic and weird and puts Philip in this strange situation where he's almost thrown his own assassination party.

He's he's created an event that's highly choreographed tons of symbolism with himself sort of at the center of the whole thing.

“In a form of kind of blood theater where the star of the show Philip has apparently not been given the last page of his script right doesn't realize he dies at the end he doesn't realize this is blood theater until the blood starts flowing.”

The idea that his killer might have been a jilted lover involved in a sexual crime is the sort of thing one can see every TMZ like gossip columnist for 2,400 years or something. Latching on to and writing about and yet again the sources are not plentiful. And there's the fact that it's possible that the assassin is only in a position to do what he does you know to have proximity to Philip here because it might have been one of the things that Philip threw it him as a way to modify him over what happened with that.

And I listen I know it's bad here take these precious gifts and I'll make you bodyguard or I'll give you a backstage pass come right down on the theater stage with me you know when I'm given all the gold crowns right so you put the assassin in the position to do what he did. The deodorous version of this is the one that turns this into a giant cinematic event and I like the way historian Ian Worthington in his book by the spear Philip II Alexander the Great and the rise and follow the Macedonian Empire

I like the way he he he puts it into words and then intersperses deodorous a little bit into his narrative and he writes quote. The spectators began cramming into the theater at dawn and settled down in excitement over the days of events. They were soon greeted by a grand procession in which first appeared statues of the twelve Olympian gods and then a splendid one of Philip as if he were quoting deodorous and thrown among the twelve gods.

We're thinking calls this the performance area. It's kind of like center stage. The two Alexander's doodifly removed themselves to their seats so that Philip dressed all in white occupied center stage to the shouts and applause of all present.

“The king turned to his personal body guards and told them to fall back so that he could, according to deodorous quote, show publicly that he was protected by the goodwill of the Greeks and had no need of a guard of spearmen.”

Such was the pinnacle of success that he had attained and quote, "We're thinking continues." Suddenly, as Philip stood alone basking in all the glory, one of his body guards, Hosseinius of Arrestus, rushed from his position and before the horrified stairs of the people stabbed the king in his chest and fled.

Rousing themselves from their shock, writhington rights, some of the other body guards tore after him while others hastened to where Philip had collapsed.

In his rush to get away, Posseinius fell over a vine and three of the pursuing guards without hesitation, speared him to death with their javelins. By the time they returned carrying Posseinius's bloody corpse, Philip II was dead, his white attire crimson with his blood. The theater, Worthington rights, dissolved in the pandemonium, as Alexander's friends grabbed their weapons to protect him in case he too was a target of assassination.

End quote, "There are other accounts probably not as close to good source material as deodorous that suggests that the assassination happened before Philip got to the center stage.

Jerry, right, he's about to make his entrance in the assassination, leaps out of an alcove and gets him, but it's all only made possible because Philip's body guards are not where they're supposed to be.

“And they're not there because he dismissed them, it's an interesting thing, isn't it?”

Posseinius also has horses waiting, right, the ancient history version of the famous gangster Getaway car and at least some of the sources say multiple horses, so the conspiracy and tennis, you know, go straight up on your head and you think multiple horses, right? Multiple horses if there's one assassin, and so begins this, like I said, it makes the John F. K. assassination look straight forward by comparison, because there are a lot of people that would like to see Philip dead either because of what they would gain or over what they might not lose, right?

Philip was poised to come and get some people and it would be in their interest if, well, he wasn't around to do that.

And you could be forgiven if you're anybody in the world at this time period who thinks that without Philip, Macedonia just goes back to what it was from before Philip, right?

“Civil wars, assassinations, dinastic crises, I mean, all rebellions, all the things that were part of what kept Macedonia down before this unbelievable singular figure, you know, took control will probably return, right?”

And right, the status quo, anti Philip, which is why Alexander being hailed almost right away is really important and there's a general and tipter who right away will sort of raise Alexander's hand. And this makes a huge difference because if this descends into some kind of succession crisis, all hex going to break loose, right, without the puppet master, what's going to happen in Greece, what's going to happen to the, you know, I had of 10,000 troops already in Persian territory, ready for the invasion. I mean, there's a lot on the line here.

But not permanently helped Alexander. But if you start applying the Roman legal idea of Cuibano to this whole thing, right, who benefits? There's a lot of possible people pulling the strings of Posseinius if Posseinius is just a patsy. They might not be. I mean, the idea of a jilted lover angry trying to get his honor back. That could be true. But the stories, and of course, Plutarch would be one of them. He's not the only one in this case that have Olympius honoring the dinosaurs and afterwards. I mean, if you try to apply this and plug in all the circus dances here, you did the Kennedy assassination, one like a historical madlips. Look how weird it gets right away. I mean, JFK would have had to have been having a homosexual affair with Lee Harvey Oswald,

dump Lee Harvey Oswald for some younger, cuter, you know, more exciting assassin, potential assassin, and then have Lee Harvey Oswald kill him for that reason. And then, if you had, think about how weird this would be, if you had Jackie Kennedy going and honoring the deadly Harvey Oswald afterwards, that would be really weird wouldn't it? And some sources have Olympius putting a crown on the corpse, honoring the, I mean, just, it looks weird.

Oswald's case, it was, you know, a day or two later, Philip's assassin is dead. Maybe before Philip's heart stops beating, I mean, two to four minutes later, and anybody who could answer any questions about what just happened here isn't available anymore, convenient.

“Posseinius number one has just been Jack Ruby, but in the sources, Olympius has always been sort of highly suspect our Jackie Kennedy in this story often has the finger of potential blame pointed at her.”

She once again establishes her credentials as the most potentially dangerous person in this story, if she just knocked off the King somehow, and all of a sudden she and Alexander go from potentially frightened endangered members of the royal family who may be soon to be sort of cut out of the succession to in charge, which is an enormous difference. But then there are the Greeks. I mean, if you just lost a battle where you had 35,000 people and lost one or two thousand of them at the battle in 2000 more, I mean, and all the money and time and effort that took from your state.

If you could just wipe out your problem with one loan assassin, we'll think about how cost effective a move that would have been.

What was the line to most of these was supposed to have used when talking about, I think he was referring to themes, but about the value of even delay here, because this situation revolves around one person and the longer you string this affair out the more time there is for, well as my grandmother used to say, for fate to have an opportunity to intervene.

“Sickness can happen, death can happen, death did happen.”

So if the Greeks were behind trying to eliminate the guy who eliminated their freedom, so they could get their freedom back, well, that wouldn't have surprised anybody would it.

You think Demosthenes might have been enticed to donate, you know, a few gold coins to that cause. There are also sides of Alexander's family that it was rumored we're starting to be seeing as potential regions for Philip who could have a new son with the new wife, Cleopatra, but somebody's going to have to guard the son while he grows up, and that's what this other son of the family might have done in which case. You could throw Alexander aside now if you don't need him if he's becoming too much problem if he's a pain in the rear and you want to get rid of him and his troublesome sorceress mother.

Well, maybe this other son of the family is the answer, so they're often implicated and in fact some of the people that will be put to death rather quickly afterwards are those family members, but of course if you're Alexander you might have wanted to kill them anyway.

“To finally become King you're going to settle a few scores whether or not they killed your pop.”

And then there's the Persians. The Persians wouldn't have been looking to gain something from this. They would have been looking to prevent loss because this expedition that Philip is, well, he's already launched it by 336. He dies in like July is the estimated 336 right when Alexander's about to turn 20. It's not theoretically he's going to attack Asia. He's already there with his bridge had already attacking cities in Persian territory. So if you get rid of this guy and the traditional problems that keep Macedonia divided and unsettled and weak get back to normal well you just dodge to bullet right you don't want to see the Greeks.

You knighted for any reason and if they are united you want to meet our against Macedonia. They have them all working together in this League of Corinth is your worst nightmare. Fortunately nobody is better at throwing money around to achieve geopolitical goals than the Aquaman of Persian Empire. And if they did that here it would surprise nobody. You're in this career. Alexander is actually supposed to have confronted the Persians via a letter directly about involvement in his dad's assassination. That could be propaganda too. So you can't trust it.

But one gets a sense that if Philip the second cease to exist the Persians might be pretty happy about that after all what are the odds that's not going to be better for you.

They've got a 20 in blackjack and they're pretty certain it's a good time to stick wouldn't you? What are the odds that someone's going to get a 21 and then someone does get a 21?

“All of a sudden instead of Philip the second you have given the keys to the most dangerous mass killing machine ever produced right the Macedonian Mazzarotti to a guy who is”

perhaps abnormally eager to make history with it. It is always interesting to speculate how this story might have gone differently if a man of lesser ambition or lesser ability or both got a hold of that army because it was a nasty enough army to have done damage and just about any competent persons hands. But instead it gets fused with a level of leadership, a fusion of army and leadership that's rarely been equaled. You know those two things sort of meeting in a perfect instrument which is awesome if you happen to be on the same side as the perfect instrument.

Lot less awesome if you're in the crosshairs of the instrument. I mean what happens if you have endless ambition and nobody can beat you.

And you're 20. If you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar, Dan and Ben would love to have it. Go to DanCarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show. This is supposed to be the T's for part two and what you've heard just now is clearly part one of a multi part series on Alexander the Great and we are more than four hours into it and we've mostly talked about his dad and his mom where he comes from and is up bringing in all that.

“If you think about a biographical narrative, those are kind of important things. Are they especially when it is such a key component of creating this unusual figure?”

You've got to have parents like that and they deserve a part one of a multi part series all to themselves. I would think we are as we always say addicted to context around here though.

And what would Alexander's story have been without Philip? I mean Alexander's a classic case of the second generation corporate CEO or whatever right? I mean a good one, not Tommy Boy or something but you take over the family business from dad, dad built it from nothing. It's a little bit different when you sort of inherit a going concern even if it's going to require greatness from you on your part to take it to the next. Levels that it belongs at the level of greatness is of a different sort. It takes a different skill set to build it from scratch than to keep it going.

And the difference in the styles between Philip and Alexander sort of exemplify this, whereas Philip is whatever it takes kind of dude. Clever, deception, diplomacy, rear end kissing versus I mean whatever it takes Alexander's going to be much more high handed. It's his way or the high way. He knows he's got the great army. He's not a big compromiser and he takes offense pretty easily. It's a bit of a different style, a little bit more entitled if you will. But while almost anyone may have done well with that army, especially with the generals that come with it, it's Alexander's ambition.

That's the great historical wild card here because we set at the end of the conversation just now. If nothing can stop you, where do you stop? If you're only 20 years old when you start your conquering career,

“gives you a lot of time to keep conquering. What if there are known natural limits to how far you go?”

But of course, the question of Alexander's unstoppableity is still in the future. As Plutarch says about his career, at this moment when he succeeds, his just murdered father, he faces quote, "great jellacies, terrible hatred and danger everywhere." He may have inherited a lot, but it's going to take an extremely formidable individual to hold together what Philip built. After the earthquake that was Philip's death shakes the entire budding empire to its foundations. Alexander has a lot of benefits in life by virtue of who his parents were.

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“It's a message here about speaking to us. We did one recently in 2024, and it was a stickier toe in the water and see if there's much of a demand. They went really well. So we're going to, I think, do some more cities down the road.”

If it's something you might be interested in, we will provide updates as they become available on the sub-stack page for free. Of course, at DanCarlin.substack.com, but if this is something that would interest you, well, keep your ears open.

You may be coming to the city near you, and as usual, thanks for coming to the first four shows.