Show 74 - Mania for Subjugation IV

I've talked about since the very first hardcore history show and I've finally tried to get the definitive

“version down and that would of course include a long conversation about his father,”

the military, his father built the connection between the two and so there's quite a bit of backstory which is why we're on part four now. If you've heard the other parts and are ready to get started, we'll get right to it. If you've missed parts one through three and you want to know what happened to get to this point, well check them out and if you haven't heard those and don't care at all, well here we go. Part four of Mania for subjugation.

Be some of us seven, nineteen, forty-one. It's history. A date which will live in infamy. The events. The great thing about this time and play. I take pride in the words it's been. I'm the elite. Mr. Robert Shaw, tear down this word. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not they're presidents of the deep quest. I'm not strong. If we dig deep in our history and our

“doctor, and remember that we are not descended from a fearful man. It's hard core history.”

I was thinking the other day about when the role of Army Commander War leader,

General, whatever we want to refer to it as, when that started. What was the first one of them?

And I guess we would have to sort of lay down some parameters of what we were talking about. But in the way, I'm framing it in my head. I got to think Neanderthals had war leaders. And you think about the relationship when the military force that one of these people is commanding is small. I think of these Apache leaders like Mangas Colorado so Kuchia, Nagro, or Pezago Cabezone. These guys would have known all their warriors. And part of the reason they

are who they are is because there's this bond between them and trust and a whole bunch of other things. Easy to understand the relationship when it's amongst a small group like that where everyone knows one another. But as Army's get larger, it's not hard to see that that might be more difficult to maintain that relationship when you have 60,000 troops or something. I mean, and if you're white Eisenhower commanding the Allied forces in Europe and the,

you know, after D-Day, I mean, hard to have a personal relationship with the troops, even when you meet with them, you know, when you have these photo opportunities and they trust you to win battles for them and keep them safe and all these kinds of things. And so there's one level of connection there. But it's not the same as when you have this really special thing going on. And you see this in the in the great commanders when the armies get very large because they're rare. I mean, look at Napoleon's relationship with his

army. I mean, I don't know if it really happened this way because it's so freaking dramatic,

you just it's hard to believe. But I mean, remember when Napoleon comes back from his first

exile from the island of Alba and he lands in France with this small little bodyguard, they start marching and you know, you can almost feel the worm turning now and he's back and he's confronted on the road by

“I think it's a battalion of French troops whose orders are to stop him and they're there and they're”

armed and at one point they're pointing their guns and he gets instead of a battle breaking out he gets off his horse famously and, you know, let's hope truthfully and walks up to the line of men who are aiming at him and says, you know, don't you recognize your rampor or something like that? And there's this silence and instead of firing, they, you know, start yelling Viva Emperor and it's it's on, right? But I mean, that's a, that's a special relationship where he's got this connection

and none of those troops, I think they were all like recent recruits, too. It's not like they knew him from the, you know, the long wars and Russia or whatever. I mean, that's an institutional loyalty to a general or a emperor in this case. But you developed that. I said earlier in the story where we are in this Alexander the Great Tale that you could have won with his army. If you just let it go on autopilot, well, up to this point. Remember, even though he's fought with this

beginning to put his stamp on it and I don't know if you believe Aryan or not, but after the battle

“of the river Granicus, he's got Alexander sitting down with the troops afterwards and he says some”

famous things about him listening to their stories and letting them brag all they want and asking them about their injuries and their tales. And he, you can see a data point here where the relationship

that's going to propel this army to do amazing things for this man with this relationship is growing.

As I said, it's only been a year. But if you look at a timeline of this guy's career, I mean, he had all those battles already against the so-called barbarians, North of Macedonia. He had the destruction of thieves. Now, he's got this in a battle of the river Granicus under his belt and he and this army are beginning to know one another and unlike a giant modern force, you're not having people coming going all the time in terms of people being recycled through

“the forces so that new people are arriving all the time. Alexander is going to get reinforcements”

from time to time and send troops back home from time to time. But the majority of this core of

this army is going to stay the same. So the relationship that he's developing with these people

gets deeper and deeper because it's the same people. And as we move on in this story, the sort of tug of war between Alexander's father's generals, especially Parminio and Alexander and his new cabal of underlings that are his people is going to start to show. I mean, up till now one could make a case that there was almost an equal amount or, you know, 64-year relationship between Alexander and Parminio without Alexander at the 60 and Parminio at the 40. But this is going to

change and you can see it develop with a big victory like this, right? The credibility goes way

“up when you've done this. And he makes sure everybody back in Greece knows about it because he will”

send back a shipment to Athens. This is told in area into a shipment that has 300 suits of Persian

armor, battlefield spoils taken off the dead to be placed in the Acropolis as a sacrifice to Athena. And on it, it says according to area and this would have been there for a long time. Lots of people would have seen this. Alexander the Son of Philip and the Greeks except for the Spartans dedicated these spoils from the barbarians occupying Asia. As we said in the last installment, everything Alexander seems to do here is operating like three-dimensional chessies doing a lot

with a little. That one inscription will that place right into all of the propaganda that he's fighting this war against the Persians as payback for what the Persians did in the Greek and Persian Wars 150 years previously placed right into that. He sends the offering to one of the big two city states that sort of made their name in that war, right? It was Athens in Sparta. The Athenians fought the Battle of Marathon, so famously made a lot of hay with that ever since.

The Spartans, of course, had that, you know, made for TV, moment at the Battle of Thermopoli, where 300 of them are wiped out, but they hold off the Persians forever. It was more than 300, of course, but we won't talk about that. But that's a famous number associated with that. And how many suits of armoured Alexander send back to Athens 300. And who did he specifically leave out in the inscription for everybody to see for long the Spartans? Heikes, that's a turning of the knife right

there. The Athenians must have had mixed feelings because they would have loved. I imagine to have been honored and had the Spartans shafted by the same honor, but they don't like Alexander either, so mixed sort of feelings maybe. But Alexander's letting everybody know, we're here, we've won, we're still going. And he sends a bunch of the Greek survivors from the Battle of the Granticas who fought for the Persians back to Greece in chains as a message that this better not

happened again, because, you know, under the terms of our leagues of the Greek thing, we're not supposed to be fighting against one another. This is a war of Greeks against barbarians. Find on the other side, expect to die or come home in chains and be a slave. The good news for us after the Battle of the River Granticas is our two main sources, Aryan and Deodoris, who had such terrible disagreements about how that battle went, get back into line broadly speaking. And so we're on firmer ground

for what happens in this next part of the story. And Alexander's in a consolidation phase here.

I guess you could say have a Persian field army at the Granticas, but he's got to deal with now the

cities in Asia Minor, right? Anatolia, modern-day Turkey. It's a big area. And I can't help but notice if you zoom out and look at the big strategic situation. I mean, he's at a real disadvantage because he's got a lot of work to still do to make sure that Arya is subdued and it's going to involve, you know, wearing and tearing on the army and all this kind of stuff. Meanwhile, the arch foe, the one he knows he's going to have to deal with in some huge knock-down

drag-out battles, is free to sort of muster up a completely tan-rested and ready army in the interior of Persian to throw at him, you know, as soon as it's ready to go.

“Ali, the here's the thing, Alexander, I already noticed it. Maybe I'm previewing here, but you”

can already see the dude's energy and the speed. And the speed is exhausting. I mean, this is where we start to see a differentiation between, you know, the way Alexander operates and the way the King's some dude, remember who we talked about that last summer, the King Tommy boy, any other Macedonian King, you start to say, okay, what's different about Alexander? The pace, and if not now, then soon. I mean, and look, I'm a 21st century whimp, and I realize people in the ancient world walked

everywhere and they were much more used to this and that and the other thing, but already the march totals are exhausting to me. He's got these guys marching all the time every day. I mean, he'll go from one city to another and it sounds like he'll just, you know, taking a quick trip to this. It'll be four straight days of marching. He's going to go 167 miles

“between two places and just he didn't even think about it. But that's where and tear isn't it?”

And the Macedonian army is going to be absolutely wonderful at this for a very long time, but nobody's got this guy's energy. And again, this is part of what sets him apart. If you have four or five adjectives you're allowed to, you know, give each of the great leaders on the Napoleon, Alexander, type chart, speed, and energy. This guy, it's just already watching him move. As he moves and sends forces like Parminio and other detachments all around, at least the

Western part right now. Then it totally, it to take surrenders and submissions by cities. The capital of the entire region's sardis who has got massive walls and could hold up for a long time and also has the treasury for the region, just surrenders to Alexander. So there's some good fortune right there. Alexander quickly turns toward the coast and begins to go down the coastline. There were all those Ionian Greek cities are. The ones that were, well, let's be honest,

they're one of the main seeds in the entire story of how the Greeks and Persians first started

fighting each other all those centuries ago. Those are the, you know, they're the ones who kind of been asking for help. And they have rebellions. And I mean, there's Greek plays written about the suffering that cities like Miletus, one of these Ionian Greek cities have gone through under Persian rule that'll make you want to get a little payback right, liberate those people, save them. But as Alexander goes down the coast and his money problems are disappearing as more and more places

hand over the treasuries and start paying their tribute that they used to give the great king giving it to him instead. As he goes down the coast and he liberates these cities, it becomes a parent and the ancient sources spent a little time on it. So it's clear that all these cities are are factionalized in terms of their politics and can't we relate to that. But they have factions that'll favor a democracy, a faction that'll favor an all regard, factions that want to, you know,

stay loyal to the great king factions that want to come over to Alexander and it gets murderous

sometimes. I mean, he shows up at Ephesus one of the first cities that he goes into down the coast

and they're starting to kill each other in anticipation of Alexander coming, the faction that favors Alexander's killing the people, I mean, and in a move that Ariin says is one of the high watermarks of Alexander's morality, he comes in and he sort of settles things, he stops them from killing one another very gracious by later Alexander and standards and it's seen as almost humanitarian. He marches the army and full parade. We're told the city and everything. But then he keeps going

down the coastline and runs into malitis. And malitis is uncomfortable. It's an awkward situation.

“I think Amy Bosworth described it because here's the city that should most be the great”

propaganda coup for Alexander to say, here we are, we've liberated, you know, the city from Persian

shuts its doors to Alexander. Now a good number of histories from a long time ago to now

“suggest that the remnants, although it might have been a lot of the survivors of the battle of”

the River Granicus, are sort of fleeing. And when they get to these cities, they're, you know, locking the doors and stiffening their resistance. The adores has our friend, the Greek movie figure that the audience in Greece can relate to Memnon, you know, in the city of Melita's for five seconds before he flees to the next city, next big city down the coast. But no real proof of that. But when Alexander gets to Melita's and they shut the doors, I mean, this is a moment of,

well, it's a problem for Alexander. Let's put that way. And it's not a problem because he can't handle a siege. I mean, along with the greatest land army in the world, he's got probably the greatest

siege forces in the world at this time. Although, let's not rule out the Chinese, who are always

fantastic at that. But that's not going to concern him either. The problem is is Melita's like all these Ionian cities on the coastline, obviously have fantastic harbors. This is how they make a living from the sea, right? And the commerce and everything, it's going to be the kind of area where

“navies are important. And unfortunately, this is the area of Alexander's military operation where he is”

weakest. The Persians are not a seafaring people traditionally, but they rule over a bunch of people who are some of the best of all time. I mean, any of your top five seafaring peoples in history list is going to have the Polynesians on it. But it's going to have the Phoenicians too. And we'll get who controls the Phoenician fleet that would be the Persians. And the Cypriots, I mean, just all these wonderful seafaring people in an era where the little things, like how you row and handle your

ears and the timing, I mean, all that stuff, it is such a specialized art. But there's no way that Alexander's fleet, even though it includes a lot of Greeks who are also pretty darn good at seafaring,

are going to be able to compete with that fleet in a qualitative sense. And the problem is is that

they're absolutely dwarfed in a quantitative sense. Four hundred or so Persians ships allegedly to about 160 that Alexander has trying to deal with the cities around it on three sides by water. And we see Alexander and his proverbial speed come into play again. And the the hard thing when you're looking at it 23 or 24 hundred years later is we sort of give Alexander the credit for everything. I mean, his admiral moves quickly. So it's Alexander's fault. Well, maybe it is.

But his admiral takes 160 or whatever it is, ships. And what's the old civil war line gets their first dist with the most dist? Well, he gets their first dist with the least dist. And in the particular constraints of, you know, this area of naval operations, that's enough. Because there are a couple of key islands that sort of wall off access to the inner part of the port in the city and everything you would want to do if you wanted to come in as a Persian fleet and help your Persian city,

well, that area is going to be walled off by these islands. And Alexander takes possession of those

islands because he gets their first drops for 1,000 or so. Thracians on one of the main ones to make

sure it's occupied. And then takes his smaller fleet and faces it outward with the prowess sticking outward, sort of ship to ship to ship in a long line, barring entrance to that area. And in a way,

“if you want to visualize it, turning it into like a mini pass of thermopoli and the Persian fleet,”

bigger though it is, can't get into the key harbor area to do anything, to help, to resupply whatever and Alexander gets a visit from someone representing the leadership of the city, according to Harry and the mercenaries or part of the people in charge, and they offer Alexander an arrangement. And it seems like the perfect kind of arrangement if you're trying to save your skin from heavy duty punishment by the Great King. And at the same time, not be punished by Alexander.

They essentially do what the Great Voldemort heckle says is a neutrality proposal. How about we let you go into the city and use the harbor and let the Great King do that too. Alexander just says, go back in your city and prepare to be assaulted. Now, Harry and has a story that he tells that's supposed to happen right before Alexander meets with this representative of the city leaders. And of course, it involves one of those discussions with his top general,

disagree over what to do at the Battle of the Granicus. Remember, Parminio told Alexander to wait

“according to Harry and anyway, and Alexander said, we can't wait and full steam ahead.”

Now, the positions are inexplicably reversed, or maybe completely understandably reversed, depending on how you want to look at it. But Parminio tells Alexander, he should be fighting a naval battle. And Alexander says, no, a little bit of roll reversal there. But here's the way Harry and puts it in the Aubrey to sell and core translation of his work, quote, "The Persians had about 400 ships. But Parminio, in spite of their numerical superiority, urged Alexander to engage.

He did undoubtedly believe that a sea fight would go in favor of the Greeks, but the real reason for his confidence was a sign from heaven, an eagle, which had been seen on the beach just a stern of Alexander's ships." And, quote, "I love this because this is why we all love ancient history," right? But as we'd said earlier, these sources are so long ago, even though they're a long time after Alexander that they still all kind of believe this stuff.

So, this is a legitimate argumentative point for Parminio to make as far as Aryan's concern. Hey, son, eagle, man, what do you want him to do? But there are some practical realities too, Aryan continues, quote, "He," meaning Parminio, pointed out that a victory in present circumstances would be of great strategic advantage, while a defeat would not be very serious, as Persia in any case had command of the sea. He was fully prepared, he said, to go aboard himself and share

the parals of the day." And, quote, "I can't help but think of like athletes, you know, who,

I guess they never gave up the sport if we're using Parminios as an analogy here. But I'm thinking

of like these hockey players, like Gordie Howe or something, coming back at really heavy duty ages and trying to get in there and mix it up physically with the youngsters. Parminio's going to get on that sh-- I mean, these dudes were kind of amazing. But anyway, so he says to Alexander, "I'll go do it myself." And this time Alexander is the one being cautious and Aryan has him sang, quote, "Al Exander replied that Parminio was mistaken and that he'd wrongly interpreted the Omen.

Let me stop here and point out that once again it's an argument point. Alexander has to address the Omen thing. You got the-- you got the Omen wrong." Aryan continues, quote, "In the first place, this is Alexander talking, it was absurd to rush blindly into a naval engagement against greatly superior forces. And with an untrained fleet against the highly-trained Cyprian-infinition crews, the sea moreover was a tricky thing. One could not trust it. And he was not going to risk

making a present to the Persians of all the skill and courage of his men. As to defeat, it would be very serious indeed. And would affect profoundly the general attitude to the war in its early stages. Above all, by encouraging the Greeks to revolt, the moment they got news of a Persian success at sea." And, quote, "So some logical points, we would say, in addition to the Omen stuff, but then according to Aryan, again, who believes this too, Alexander goes back to

“the Omen. You know, don't get me wrong here. The Omen's important, but you've misinterpreted”

Aryan's quote. Secondly, having given his reasons for not risking an engagement, he went on to say that his interpretation of the Omen was different from Parminius. The appearance of the eagle was without doubt a favorable sign. But the fact that it had been seen on shore, surely indicated that it was his army, not his navy, which would render the Persian fleet powerless. He would, as it were, win his sea battle from the land." And, quote, "So this is kind of a cool and at the same time

controversial idea on Alexander's part to deal with the fact he doesn't have a fleet that can beat his opponent. Like, what do you do then?" Well, his ideas sort of revolves around ancient naval warfare

in a way that we need to take a second and understand it. The ancient naval warfare deals with the

“same thing, naval warfare always deals with, which is, you know, the range of fleet has, right?”

How far away from its base or between bases? Can it go? And you look at the whole need to annex territories all over the world in the late 19th century, so you had calling stations for your fleets, right? Well, in this era, they can't go very far at all. In general, these

night, pull the ships up onto the beach, the cruise would camp and eat and find water then. So

“if the Persian fleet, for example, wants to leave from Egypt to operate, you know, in the area”

that's now the Turkish coast, it can't go from Egypt to there. It's going to go point to point to point along the coastline all the way up, camping every night, you know, sort of it's on down. If you take away those areas where they can camp, well, they have to go farther and farther away, right? If Alexander's going to send forces to take all the possible areas that would be a good landing site for the Persian fleet, they have to camp farther away and the range between this new

camp, away from Alexander's troops and where you want that fleet, maybe right outside this city, Alexander's trying to attack, is too far. Can't get too and back to the base in time. I mean,

he's basically curtailed their available, you know, area of operations. And this is profoundly

demoralizing to the defenders in the city when they see it. And Alexander seems to have very

“little trouble with this city. If you go read a timeline of his career, the timeline always makes”

it sound like this siege lasted something like a month. But when you dive deep into what you realize, well, that's an assumption sort of made by the fact that it takes a month out of Alexander's, you know, sort of calendar here, but that doesn't mean the siege itself did. And you get a real sense when you read the sources that once he brought up the siege engines, it didn't take very long at all. And he's got all the good ones. He's got stone throwers. He's got ram. He's got underminingers.

He's got the towers where you can shoot down on the walls. It doesn't seem like it's going to take very long. Area and Deodora's both have accounts. Deodora says, Mimnon was there. So Alexander had to attack the city. Aarian doesn't mention Mimnon at all. But says that, well, why don't we just quote the Martin Hammond translation of Arian and let the, you know, ancient writer explained

“it for himself. And he says, quote, he meaning Alexander personally supervised the application of”

siege engines to the walls. And after quickly demolishing a section of wall and weakening a longer stretch, he brought up his army ready to go over where the wall had been broken down or shaken loose. All this was shadowed by the Persians from, he's talking about the fleet, right? That's now farther away because Alexander's forces captured all the good places to land. Who could be little more than spectators of the siege of their friends and allies? And he quote,

then he says that the Macedonian Admiral brings the fleet up close to the harbour when the people of Moleta see this. It sort of breaks their spirit and they start running. Quote, the Malaysians and the mercenaries were now threatened by the Macedonians on all sides. Some of them threw themselves into the sea and paddled on their upturned shields to an unnamed island facing the city. Others bordered small boats and desperately tried to outrun the Macedonian

tryraims. But were caught by the tryraims at the harbour mouth, most of them were killed in the city itself. And quote, now somebody else might have allowed the 300 or so mercenaries that had gotten onto a very, very difficult to attack island to just sit there and rot. But Alexander being Alexander's got to take it and he takes, according to Aryan, his boats with ladders sort of strapped to them so that they could swing the ladders onto the rocky sheer sides of these

islands to kill the last 300 mercenaries on there before Alexander decides they've been very brave. And maybe he should just offer to bring them into his army that people of Moleta show up

carrying olive branches, the traditional token of supplication, they're basically begging for their

lives. They have some things working in their favor, though, as several of the modern historians point out. The fact that, as we said, Moleta was so much a part of the reasons for this war and and they're suffering against the Persians have been so played up over the years that, well, they were forgiven, Alexander basically said, you're okay. They kill all the defenders, though. Did a deep dive trying to figure out how he did that. What's the mechanism for Alexander doing

something like that? And I couldn't find anything good. The Mongols supposedly, as we've said before, had a system. Every trooper gets several people whose job it is to kill, right? So maybe give 30,000 men 12 people each and to rather efficient affair and then you count the years afterwards to make sure it was all done. What I looked up seemed to suggest that maybe Alexander just used his army as a giant sort of executing mechanism, cornered enemy troops in a part of town or something,

and so wondering, you know, exactly how the physics of a giant mass killing occurred when Alexander

did it is something, well, that we'll wonder about again in the future. Bottom line, though, is, he takes Meletus, doesn't seem to take too long. It was fascinating to watch how the Navy situation was handled, and at this point in the story, Alexander decides to disband his Navy. This is one of the most controversial decisions of Alexander's career as Ullexander fans already know, and apparently was being questioned in antiquity. I mean, Deodoris is talking about it and that's

he wrote during a Julius Caesar's time, which is hundreds of years after Alexander,

“but you get the point. It's been debated a long time. Is this the right move or not?”

Modern day historians have different opinions too, and I honestly don't know what to think myself. I'm really, I mean, I'm just watching from afar because there's good arguments on both sides and without being able to get someone like, you know, tommy up here, on the stand, under oath, it's going to be difficult to figure out what it appeals to me in terms of, like, trying to sense what's going on is I was reading some of the good histories that I was, I'm using a sources here,

and they were talking about the difference between, you know, Alexander dealing with the Persian fleet close up when it's with him like at Meletus versus what happens if the Persian fleet just goes and causes trouble elsewhere. That's when you're going to miss a navy, for example. Right, what if they go start causing problems in Greece or what if they sort of go behind your flank and retake stuff you've already taken, which is actually what's going to happen?

But some of the other arguments have to do with the fact that what Alexander's fleet is heavily

“outnumbered, it's out quality as well. Do you just want to stay there until the Persians catch it and kill it?”

So a lot of arguments, but he dispensed the fleet and he keeps like 20 tri-reams and supply ships to sort of just, you know, for food and they carry the siege train. And then he keeps going down the coast. And this again is a problem with your navy also not being there. You're fighting a bunch of coastal battles and all these cities like Meletus have harbours and they're able to be resupplied from the sea and whatnot. And the next city he's going to run into the next

big ones going to be the same way, but worse, you know, like Meletus only more so, Aryan and Diodorus both say that he kind of takes some cities in, in between Meletus and Halikar Nasus, which is the big city in the distance, some of them come over to him. There's this famous incident with this, this queen who's been out of power comes to Alexander,

you know, on the road between cities and basically, you know, asks him to support her and being

restored. I mean, the story basically helps set the stage for Alexander putting a bunch of these local families that have long been in power in these regions, back in power. It's part of the political game you play here. How do you keep these cities and these regions loyal to you after you, you know, ripped them out of the Persian empire? Well, do what the Persians were famous for doing to leave the local royal family in place and then just have them be subordinate to you.

So this is a story about him doing that. And supposedly when he meets this queen, he's going to call mother among several women who are older than him in the Alexander story that he will basically refer to as like mother. But once she, you know, basically throws her support behind him over into these smaller cities come over to him and then he arrives at Halikar Nasus. Halikar Nasus is the birthplace of Herodotus. It's the capital of Caria. It is the Satrap,

you know, see the power in this region and the Satrap, the commander, the governor of this territory,

“the regional vice president. He's there. And with him is a whole mem nom of roads. Right?”

As we said, our one Greek character in the story that the Greeks can all sort of empathize with and get behind he either the anti hero or the hero on the anti hero side. But earlier we had talked about in the last edition, you know, whether his involvement and his importance had been sort of exaggerated by the Greek writers. But there's no denying the fact that he's very important here and now, because he's been putting command of the whole region by the Great King

Darius and given command of the fleet. He's sent his family back to the royal seat of power with the Persian king. And you know, the Greek sources make it sound like they're hostages. And maybe they are. But I love that a Voldemort heckle had pointed out something that's easy to forget. But in Halakarnasas are a bunch of people that hate Alexander, a bunch of people who are on sort of the naughty list so that if you ever found them, they're going to be in trouble.

And a bunch of people who've already seen what Alexander has done to people like them in this

story so far and who basically know that there's no running away from this in terms of

desperation in this Halakarnasas incident that would make a good movie all by itself. The ancient sources say that Memnon's been sort of topping off if you will, the already fantastic defenses of the city, making ready for an upcoming siege and the ancient sources don't tell us how tall the walls are. I was doing a lot of research for estimates. And if we said something, apparently, this is something that didn't apparently, they're sort of like expected

defenses for certain size cities. And the next level city is going to have a higher one. So about 45 feet though tall, maybe in some of the higher spots is not unreasonable with the same sort of design at the top of the walls that you see on a castle, you know, where there'll be an an outcropping and then a place to shoot arrows. It's all like that around the city. And a lot of

“these ancient cities, I believe Halakarnasas was the same way our built so that they're in multiple”

layers. So that the first layer is built lower than the second one, which towers over the first

and that allows there to be sort of a stepping stone ever higher, where as you advance as the besiege or you're actually running into even higher ground, right? Break open those first walls and run in and now you're staring at walls that are higher than the ones you just broke through and they're shooting at you. I mean, see, Sieges are a whole different thing for me. As a guy who got interested in military history as a kid, and I mean a child, Sieges are not the

interesting thing. But what you realize over time is how they alter, especially until cannons can knock down walls. It's walls and fortifications and stuff around cities is huge. And you can tell, you know, this fact is true by how long and how universe, how long we've been doing walls around the cities and how universal it is, right? You can go look at any ancient portrait of any city, any, I mean, there's walls, walls protect people, walls, sort of indicate power,

walls create equalizers when you're fighting armies that you could never defeat in the field,

like Alexander's, you know, the greatest army of his age and I'm going to defeat that in the field, probably. But once he has to fight the siege with you, everything changes. All those things that we've been salivating about as military history fans are nullified in a siege. For example, I love and you do to probably the formation that the Macedonians fight in. We've talked about it all this time right there. The close order, you know, heavy infantry failings with the long 1618 footpikes fighting,

you know, shoulder to shoulder is a solid block. That's not going to work over building rubble and walls that are crumbling and you're trying to shoot through holes you've made through. I mean, and what about the fantastic companion cavalry? What's that going to do? And you see what I'm saying, all of a sudden these things that we just terrify you? Well, and that we're so effective at the battle of the river granite, because that we just talked about, that stuff doesn't matter as much,

and the things that the Persian side does pretty well are sort of exalted. I mean, they've always been

good missile people, right? Lots of archers, lots of people who can do that. And Alexander would he approach is one of the outcroppings. These walls around Halikarnas is incorporated a lot of

“area and he'll come up to sort of one place. I think it's about 10 miles away from the city itself.”

And he'll come up to the walls and they're throwing stones at them. And it's interesting to try to conceptualize how these things worked. Again, for a guy who's always been fascinated with the field battle side of things, you start to realize what a different challenge the siege is are and how we can see Alexander's true extirability now come to the fore. I said in the last addition is we had talked about the Alexander's got this army, which can just do amazing things

without him. The siege is require all kinds of different, almost engineering ways of thinking about problem solving. And Alexander turns out to be really good at this and the energy that he's got is really helpful. But there's a big difference between using your sort of energy and dash. And you know, lead from the front sort of approaching that battle that at most is going to last the entire day and then have it be done in something that can grind on for days and days and weeks and weeks.

“It's a different sort of test of an army's endurance and staying power. And that's what you're”

going to get at Hellachannassas. I like the way that historian Ian Worthington and by the spear sort of sets up the Hellacharnassas challenge here and he writes about it by saying quote. Hellacharnassas was famous as the birthplace of the father of history, Herodotus, and the home of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the mausoleum, the tomb of mausoleus, Satrap of Caria, who had died in 353 and which was eventually completed by his widow

who happened to be his sister, Artemisia. Hellachannassas he writes was built on a hillside and was

battlements and a series of high towers for protection. In front of the walls was a deep note at least 40 feet wide and behind them were the main city and its two citadel's which the people could retreat to and fight on if necessary. The city's harbor he writes was well shielded from attack and the Persian fleet was now riding at anchor in it. Because Alexander had dismissed his own fleet the defenders could ferry and supplies or even escape unhindered if need be.

Whereas his own supplies were starting to run out and had to be ferried in from malitist

at least two days away and a quote. Now the Greeks always make it sound like Persian general

ships sucked which people like Pierre Briand and whatnot would point out ways you can figure out sort of that it didn't but they have no problem the Greek authors that is praising other

“Greeks and that's why you get a chance to see them openly talk about the quality of general”

ship that Alexander's going to face here in the siege of Hellachannassas is really coming up against Memnon who was not in control at the Battle of the Granicus but is in control here and the combination of this guy who was a fine enough general to sort of get the better of Parminios beachhead force you know when Alexander's dad was first landing on the Persian coast he was facing Memnon this guy is not a kid like Alexander doesn't have Alexander's you know genius but he's not

a kid he's a hard-bitten very experienced veteran who's brother by the way is also a general or was also a general he's going to be formidable and he's got a lot of mercenaries with whom who are professional fighters who do this for a living and who know because they've watched what Alexander did the Granicus they know what the you know league of the Greeks says happens to people that five

“I mean they know what's going to have their desperate to and they don't have to face the scary”

Macedonian pike failanks that Philip Alexander's dad designed specifically to destroy units of hoplights they don't have to fight that in the field they get to have a great equalizer and fight over rubble broken ground and in places where this becomes a much wide open fluid affair or where it's just crowds trying to find gaps to I mean this this benefits the mercenaries in a way that they would have fully understood this is their best chance to do something against Alexander

and when Alexander first shows up outside of Halikarnas he doesn't have a siege stuff with him

that's actually coming with one of those 20 or so ships that are you know left to him and you hope the Persian fleet doesn't intercept those and he tries to take a little I had to look this up it's a little port city like about 10 miles from Halikarnas is itself he thought if he could take that then we could just use that as a place to land the siege engines and Aryan has this great story about how Alexander finds out from some of the loyalist in the city

“remember there's all these different political factions and some of them favor of Alexander”

he hears that there's a plot you know show up with the army and the city will you know come over to you so he comes at night with you know picked for us but it sounds like it was pretty large flange I'd cavalry the holy shows up in the middle of the night expecting the city to come over to him and finds the walls all lined with troops and they're all bristling the spears and they're already being Alexander he attacks it anyway brings down a tower two were told before being

pelted with so many missiles and stones that they decide to back off and wait for the siege engines to show up once they do this siege kicks into a different gear and as we have talked about already Alexander's dad invented a secret weapon when it comes to winning conflicts and it is the siege train he has engineers a staff of them I've seen them called an R&D staff of people who've actually invented new weapons to be used in sieges people who would show up at something like this

helicopter NASA's siege and look at that as a challenge from a military history standpoint someone like yours truly can't help but notice that what makes this helicopter NASA's siege

seems somewhat different to me is the fact that both sides are basically going to be employing

artillery against each other because you only start seeing this happen anyway and like right around four hundred three nineties in the Greek world anyway things like bolt shooters and stuff and and you get different kinds of catapult's torsion instead of tension I mean all sorts of different things that really date from recent history here and now all of a sudden here we have a battle

towers quick little recap of how siege warfare goes for those who may not know we mentioned that

“walls are basically ubiquitous right going back to like prehistory well if you're in prehistory”

and you want to take a wall town how do you do it well the way that was the tried and true and easiest ways you just surround it and starve everyone out or you build something that acts as a ladder or a ladder to you know try to storm the walls it's sometime in prehistory somebody figured out sapping where you dig out the soil underneath the walls and create sort of a vacuum that the stone can then collapse down into bringing down the walls sometime in prehistory you get the

battering ram and we all know what that is by the Assyrian time period at the latest because you can

see it on the carved reliefs in one thousand nine hundred BCE they're using towers and engines of

one sort or another and the famous Trojan horse from the Iliad may be an illusion to something like a siege tower but half of everything Alexander's going to do in his military history sort of

“background is going to be siege stuff and it's sort of the other side as we said of what he brings to”

the table because he can't use the same skill sets that make him so useful at the granicus it's a different side of the brain if you will that's going to be employed in this and he has this engineering staff to work with and they look at the I try to look at I don't know what the right numbers but if we imagine to circumference of the city walls here being somewhere between four and five miles that's probably not too far off with the height of the walls at the highest point being like 45 feet as we said

maybe with a 23 foot deep moat so that's going to make the walls even seem higher and it's 40 feet wide it has towers it has a couple of citadel's it's going to be employing artillery on its side too and when Alexander's going to build giant towers to overlook these walls so that you can shoot at them from above and so that you can have platforms for your siege engines they're going to do the same thing on the other side and this siege of halakarnas is really a case of parian thrust in sort of

a fencing sensor a spy versus spy where Alexander the procedure does something and the people inside the city try to counter it we'll knock down a wall here we'll we'll rebuild a wall there I mean all the key element if you read the ancient sources though and it happens multiple times I'll

“try to add up the number of times in area and I think it's three but I might be wrong by a factor of”

one but at least three let's put it that way times that the people inside the city have a sort of a mad they opened the gates and have a mad rush with people who are carrying buckets of pitch and torches and at least in one case a bunch of guys who are armed and their job is to prevent the people who are going to try to stop the people that have the fire in the pitch and the people with the fire in the picture going to throw that onto the siege engines and try to light them all

on fire and this is gonna happen multiple times and there's going to be a significant amount of fighting at night it's hard to keep track of kind of but you do get this sense of over time remember this is days that you have stuff going on and like I said a very different rhythm than the normal battles in the ancient world that are over in a day this is something where you have people working all the time and I was trying to get a sense of the pace and I'm not sure I got the right one but

when you read the adores for example he talks about this happening in relay so imagine most of the army isn't working they're just sitting around watching again another aspect of ancient warfare that's different you know shells and bullets that can hit you from a distance you can be kind of close up and perfectly safe and watch maybe 5% of the army just throwing that out there is a one actually working on a piece of the wall at any given time while everybody else watches and they rotate

but it's a 24/7 job it certainly sounds like it because both uh area and the adores talk about it that there are uh prepared things that they put up to sort of shield the people who are working

so think of like wicker um mantlets or or something like a civil war rather than a first war war

trench situation where you put up things if you were a kid with a treehouse and someone was throwing dirtclots at you you might put up a board to keep them from being able to do that so you think about something like that because it's going to be a process as you begin to fill in the mode and you have to fill in the mode to get the siege engines close enough and well why don't I let deodoris pick up the story it's very exciting and the difference by the way between deodoris and area in

their accounts of this is that deodoris has it be a extremely difficult thing uh for Alexander

you how many people were injured and whatnot in any given situation you kind of go sounds like a big

“deal so um the real problem Alexander has is that because Halle Karnassus has a giant open”

harbor controlled by the Persian fleet and Alexander really doesn't have a fleet that that out he can't shut this city down deodoris uh in my sea Bradford Wells translation picks up the story with Alexander arriving right outside Halle Karnassus and starting the siege and deodoris is quote

Alexander encamped near the city and set in motion an active and formidable siege at first he

made continued assaults on the walls with relays of attackers and spent whole days in active fighting later he brought up all sorts of engines of war filled in the trenches in front of the city with the aid of sheds to protect the workers and rocked the towers and the curtains between them with his battering rams whenever he overthrew a position of the wall he attempted by hand to hand

“fighting to force an entry into the city over the rubble but mem non at first easily beat off the”

Macedonian assaulting the walls for he had large numbers of men in the city where the siege engines were attacking he issued from the citadel at night with numbers of soldiers and applied fire to the machines

fierce fights occurred in front of the city in which the Macedonian showed far superior prowess

but the Persians had the advantage of numbers and a firepower for they had the support of men who fought from the walls using engines to shoot darts which they then killed some of the enemy and disabled others and quote well if you read area and you see that there's a lot that is sort of you know covered in all that stuff that he's talking about but it's clear that Alexander's facing you know engines of war as they're called artillery as he breaks into these places

“once he knocks the walls down I mean that is literally overcoming all of the typical battle field”

advantages the Macedonians have and putting them in a really really tough situation this is where you get to see that they would be good and dangerous soldiers regardless of the formation they were using and regardless of you know whether or not they could use their giant long spears together because this is hand-to-hand stuff as I said with engines of war shooting at you

now in the area in version of this story he basically says it was no problem and then he

gives the casualty reports and it sounds like it wasn't all that easy he writes quote a night Sally from Halikarnassus to set fire to the towers and the other engines which had been moved up or were nearly in position was countered an easily beaten back within the walls by the Macedonian guards supported by other troops roused by the alarm about a hundred and seventy of the men from Halikarnassus were killed including Neo-Talamus the son of Arabayas the brother of

Amintas one of those who had deserted to Darious the losses among Alexander's troops amounted to 16 but some 300 were wounded as this was a sudden action at night and they were not wearing any proper protective armor and quote that from my Martin Hammond translation by the way but anyway you slice it that's a lot of injuries right this this wasn't such a minor affair and this will be done by the defenders several times if you believe the ancients some weird

crap happens with Perticus who if you recall some weird crap happened with when the besieging of thieves was going on a while back and in that situation if you recall it was Perticus's troops that attacked sort of without orders allegedly and dragged the rest of the army and to support them right so whole school thought out there that Perticus is sort of a whipping boy for any decision Alexander makes with the outcome is independently overwhelming somehow is Perticus's

fault and lots of analysis over the areas as to whether or not the bias of one of the main sources here tell me friend of Alexander one of his generals one of the successors the guy who started the whole dynasty and Egypt that was ended with Cleopatra he didn't like Perticus very much and so when he's doing the opposite of what Churchill was supposed to do Churchill said allegedly I know history will treat me kindly because I will be writing that history tell him he's a little like I know

history will treat Perticus unkindly because I will be writing that history so Perticus gets the short into the stick sometimes whether he deserves it or not he is a little like if you I mean you'd be forgiven if you were starting to see him as the Dennis the menace of Alexander

conquest and Empire describes the situation that happens here he says quote the most notable incident

“came when the walls were almost breached two towers and an intervening curtain wall had been demolished”

and a night attack developed when two drunken members of Perticus's battalion tried to scale the defenses in a fit of reckless bravado more of the battalion followed their example until there was a full-scale engagement the Macedonians he writes suffered heavy casualties and the defenders were forced back into the walls only after intense fighting the dead remained unrecoverable thanks to the raking fire from Halacarnassus and Alexander was compelled to parlay for a truce

a humiliation unique in his reign and quote he then writes about Aryan sort of finding a way to gloss over this reverse and he says quote most of this is slurred over by Aryan who focuses upon the Macedonian successes and represents the siege as a series of effortless victories the reality

“was very different even when the Macedonians penetrated the outer wall they found themselves enclosed”

by a secondary crescent shaped defensive brick and they became vulnerable in the flank and rear the defenders had even mounted a large wooden tower on the wall which housed arrow-firing catapults

despite the losses the attack was pressed home and the situation of the defenders became critical

end quote and this is where you get the final saline fourth of 2000 picked men according to the ancient sources this is the sort where the paked manner divided in half half of them with torches and pitch to light the siege engines on fire as I said like the third time they've tried this or something but this is the time where the other thousand are going to get into a closely packed bay lengths and attack anyone who comes and tries to stop the people from lighting the fires this is where

“the heads of the mercenary forces go out themselves I mean it's a little like a last”

stand situation because if this fails then what to show how the different sources handle this and where maybe the bias is is Aryan portrays this as easily sort of crushed because the the great veterans Alexander's old time it's almost like his father's old guard if you will these guys who are exempt from the grunt sort of work that would be most of a siege that they're brought into the situation to show the youngins how it's done and so no problem Aryan points out

but the adores in the in the more modern sources point out that the fact that the guard is brought in at all shows that it was a difficult situation that needed rescuing the Athenian head of the mercenaries here by the way is a man named Epialties and he's the one who leads this saline fourth out this last great effort to destroy the siege engines with the picked men right these professional mercenaries who know they've got you know everything to fight for because they don't win here

they're they're done for and in my Robin Waterfield translation of deodorous deodorous since quote Epialties therefore put together a force of 2,000 picked men half of whom were given lighted torches while the rest were to engage the enemy and suddenly opened all the city gates it was daybreak and emerging from the city with his men he had some of them set fire to the siege engines the flames leapt up straight away while he led the rest who were formed into a deep and closely

packed phalanx in an attack on the Macedonians who were coming to try to save the contraptions end quote now Alexander gets involved personally once again it's it's hard to emphasize how

and it may have been something a Macedonian king was expected to do but Alexander's always

Johnny on the spot he's right there he's in the front he's fighting and remembered this is a very dangerous situation for a king to find himself in in the mix of something like this and deodorous continues quote when Alexander realized what was happening he posted the foremost fighters among his Macedonian troops in front with a body of picked men to relieve them and then behind these he posted a third division all men of exceptional valor then he led this unit into battle with himself at the

head and the enemy who had thought that their numbers would deter opposition found themselves having to fight Alexander also dispatched men to put out the fires and saved the siege engines a great shout a rose from both sides at once and the trumpets sounded the signal for battle the soldiers fought with such skill an extraordinary determination that a ferocious struggle ensued the Macedonians managed

the strongest man on the field and everyone who came up against him lost his life the Macedonians were

also losing many men to the relentless valleys of missiles fired from the top of the recently built

“counter wall where the defenders had built a wooden tower a hundred cubits high I think I read that”

that was like 15 stories or something like that and filled it with bolt shooting catapults many Macedonians died and the rest were beginning to fall back under the onslaught of the countless missiles that were raining down on them and when Memnon brought his reinforcements into play and large numbers even Alexander had no real response and quote it's at this point deodoris says that the old guard is called in and they're going to show the youngins you know how it's done and they do

from my sea breadford well translation of deodoris quote just at that moment as the men from the city were prevailing the tide of battle was surprisingly reversed for the oldest Macedonians who were exempt from combat duty by virtue of their age but who had served with Philip on his campaigns

“and had been victorious in many battles were roused by the emergency to show their valor and”

being far superior in pride and war experience sharply rebuked the faint hardiness of the youngsters who wished to avoid the battle they then closed ranks with their shields overlapping and confronted the foe who thought himself already victorious they succeeded in slaying fielities and many others

and finally forced the rest to take refuge in the city night had already fallen as the

Macedonians pushed within the walls along with their fleeing enemies but the king ordered the trumpeter to sound the recall and they withdrew to their camp and quote I like the way Peter Green describes the tragedy that happens next as the tide turns in the battle and and you see this in some ancient battles where the people in the city start panicking because the troops that have just defeated your defenders are close on their heels when do you shut the gates to keep out the bad

guys right well often this is missed time and Peter Green in his Alexander of Macedon writes quote in a matter of minutes the whole Persian assault group crumbled and began a stampede back to the city there was savage hand to hand fighting by the curtain wall while so many men crowded onto the bridge crossing the moat that it collapsed the defenders inside the city gate panicked and in their eagerness to stop the Macedonians forcing an entry shut out considerable numbers of

their own men some were trampled to death in the rush the rest died by the spears of their Macedonian pursuers by now night was falling and Alexander had the retreat sounded in the circumstances he was lucky to escape to victory at all the Macedonians withdrew to their camp Alexander knew when not to press his luck and quote Aryan says about a thousand of the defenders from inside the city had died to only about 40 Macedonians by the way but some named people that were

remembered by their names by the ancient authors and as Alexander pulls back for the night memnon we are told decides it's time to pull back permanently and he pulls the equivalent here of

“like a Dunkirk type maneuver remember the Persian fleets had anchored in the harbor and they just”

take memnon and a lot of the soldiers and a ton of the cargo apparently and maybe even a bunch of the city dwellers and they leave nothing Alexander can do about it because he disbanded his fleet and right after this time period he's going to reconstitute it so maybe he decided he needed it after all but there's no fleet here so nothing to stop memnon and everybody from leaving and in the morning when Alexander you know steps into the city it's smoking and burning and the main people who

were fighting him are gone they did all the damage they could do to him you know having him have to assault a citadel and now they've left to fight another day they set fire by the way to the hundred cubit that's a hundred fifty-fifth tower that had all of the artillery on it that the defenders were shooting the Macedonians with its burning they burn a bunch of the buildings and if you believe airy and Alexander then steam rolls the entire city Peter Green thinks this is unlikely

he'd already promised it to that old lady who he was calling mother you don't want to turn a bunch

of ruins over to her but who knows the bottom line though is that there'll be Persian defenders

hold up in the citadel's there and it's going to take Alexander's garrison like a year to

and if we zoom out and try to look at the situation here and see all the pieces moving into place

“by now the Persian king is somewhere down probably in the area of Iraq bringing together an army”

memnon takes the fleet and begins to go to a bunch of islands offshore you know some of the ancient authors make it sound like he's going to go back to Greece and he's going to work with the Spartans and he's going to start a war back at home looks more like i mean Pierre Breon makes a very good case that what he's really doing here's operating nearby on these islands offshore and in some cases they're going back and retaking the places Alexander's already taken and moved on they

go back and retake maletus for example behind him and you can see this memnon's going to be a problem unfortunately for the great king he catches something during a siege of a city off on one of these islands off what's now the Turkish coast and dies the ancient world after all that can happen but the Greek authors make it sound like this is like the nail in the coffin for the poor

“Persians because they have no good generals themselves and now they lose this wonderful Greek”

general who was you know who would held off Alexander's father and now is holding off Alexander and with him gone what are you gonna do but meanwhile while this is going on Alexander splits his forces sends parminio to some areas in the region and he goes to the others and he's essentially as we had said earlier consolidating his winnings here and he is accepting the surrender of a lot of these cities and towns i had to go look up like sizes to give myself at least sort of a ball park

idea what we're talking about and if any of this is to be believed i like that disclaimer don't you but helicarnasses might have been like a 40,000 person city a sardis the even bigger city might have been 50,000 some of the so-called large city states in this region might be 10 to 15,000 and there's a lot of like 1000 to person little city states and so Alexander for example would be in one region

“and it would be like 30 of these cities that sort of surrender to him or accept you know his”

king shipper would have you so those are small places though the problem is is that some of these

places resist and this is a hidden part of the Alexander story when you try to figure out you know what's going on in between the big data points how's he filling his time between all the big battles he's filling his time with a bunch of little ones and these are asteroids in his career but if you try to imagine what it's like for the people on the other side we'll now you start to see some of the points of view from the historians from the Alexander as butcher school

and their perfect example is recounted for austerity and deodorous as work where he talks about one of these people that decides to resist Alexander and attacks his baggage train when he's passing through their neck of the woods so he goes to punish them it's a couple of days with the sea engines before those people realize they're doomed and then deodorous tells the story about the young men and it sounds like there's about 600 warriors so this gives you a sample size maybe

of the community and the warriors who are the young men deodorous says go to the old men and say what do we do and the old men say surrender to Alexander under the best terms you can get and this they refuse to do they will not compromise their freedom so the elders say well if that's going to be your position we recommend that you kill your wives you kill your children and then you try to break out of the city and make for the nearby hills they decide to do this and so deodorous

says they decide to hold this last grand evening with their loved ones the best food and drinking and enjoy them for one last time before you kill them but they decide they can't kill them so they decide they're just going to keep them hold up at home and then light everything on fire he says their homes became their tombs and then the 600 warriors break out and run away but I mean this give you an idea right there magnify that by a lot because Alexander's whole career is going to

be attacking this hill people there and this river people there and this forest tribe there and I mean it starts to add up right and pretty soon you're talking real numbers of human beings here and for them it's this massive worst thing that's ever happened in there you know people's history for Alexander it's on the way from this place to that place but if you look up the pace of this winter

of 334 3333 BC BCE it it basically everything you'll read will tell you that he's in constant motion

it is a and that these people are marching and some of this is really you know you're beginning to get to be terrible to rain through mountain passes and rain and I mean this is a heck of a pace already and one of the things we can say about Alexander will say at this whole time is he's not

bear the brunt of all this he's right there sharing every hardship trying to be the first among

“equals and this is clearly very important to him so when he fights even these little battles against”

these people who are nobody he's right there in the front it's crazy it's during this time period between helicopters and and reaching Gordium more on that in a second where Alexander at one point sends a bunch of the young men who've been fighting with him home to get married right and have children and to send back reinforcements so we said earlier that unlike a modern army where there's reinforcements and people rotating out all the time there are just intervals where this happens and this is

one of them so some people go home several thousand men will arrive pretty soon to help bolster the

ranks of the people who've been fighting all this time and then during this little interlude that we're

in right now we get that fabulous story of Alexander running into the Gordium knot the Gordium knot story

“for those of you who can see a lot of similar ones around history it's the ex-caliber sword in the”

stone story isn't it I mean well the sword in the stone is not really ex-caliber but you know the story I mean it's the ex-caliber from the lady of the lake later but that's neither here nor there but in terms of the Gordium knot the one who is able to solve this problem is destined to rule the world or what have you there are a couple of different stories blue tarctels both of them the the less satisfying one is that he's confronted with this knot that you can't see the ends of

that's hitched to like a yoke on a wagon and people have been trying to untie it forever and nobody can even figure out what to do and so Alexander's you know surmising the situation and the less satisfying answer uh Aristobulus uh blue tarcts says gives this answer is that he simply pulled out uh the the yoke part that was holding it all together and it just sort of came apart which seems a little easy and very unsatisfying the other tradition is that he just pulled his sword out

and chopped it which of course is sort of significant about concerning the methods by which he's going to secure Asia right it's a little like the sword in the stone situation if you just decided to take a jackhammer to the stone I'll get that sword up I eliminating the stone itself I was reading one historian who had an interesting line and he was tying it to one of the ancient historians but he was saying that this is a new rationale for why Alexander is involved in this war right we need

to change the rationale this whole idea of making the number one reason we're doing all of this is to liberate the Greek city states of bionne is getting well getting kind of tired now that Alexander's

basically done that never mind to become quest of some of these cities on the coast basically though

if that's your reason for the war why would you go on from here well if another person who's able to deal with that guardian not situation is the one destined to rule all of Asia well there you go there's your rationale right there and we should point out that based on what the Greeks knew of the world I mean as far as they're concerned ruling all of Asia is a little like that deal that the Spanish and the Portuguese got from the Pope where the Pope basically told them you know

from this line this way and from that line that way you guys on the world when you didn't even know

“what was in the world you have claimed the territories you haven't even discovered yet that's what”

the guardian not telling Alexander if we buy that rationale but clearly if the Pope can do it and the age of discovery it's not a new idea right now there's some things that happen during this little interlude when we are sort of collecting our winnings as I said in what's now modern day Turkey and the clash the inevitable clash that's coming when the army that the great king of Persia is raising in Babylon which is in modern day Iraq you know comes northward to deal with that

Alexander Alexander as we said it's fighting this whole time and at some point according to the ancient authors but it would make total sense the great king puts a huge bounty on Alexander's head one of the ancient sources says it is a thousand gold talents which if true that sounds like a crazy Persia so rich you can't believe it kind of exaggeration because that's like the you know money that nation states have I mean that's just that level of money if we you know have it by 75

percent it's an outrageous amount of money still for an individual to have that assumes of course

and there were some stories that occurred during this interlude period right we're in early 3333 BCE which kind of show the precariousness of the life of a great conqueror right there they're a little to me like those little sea turtles that have to hatch on the coast and they can't be a great conqueror until they deal with all of the things that might kill them or derail their career or what have you before they reach the safety of the sea how many great conquerors were there

who would have been as great as Alexander and Napoleon but they died along the way killed in combat assassinated felled by disease Alexander's in danger of all three of those things I mean let's just talk about assassination for somebody puts it a thousand gold talent bounty on your head it's a real danger anyway and we described the Macedonian royal court as having a

“sort of mafia crime family type feel so getting whacked is not unusual let's recall that's what”

happened Alexander's dad and Alexander always blamed the king of Persia for his involvement in that

and listen I mean what are the odds as we said you're gonna kill the greatest man of his age and his kid's gonna be bigger than he is maybe you just keep doing that till you get a loser till you get lemon Alexander gets a letter from his mother according to deodorous and remember you know Alexander's mother is a character that different people play with differently but there's a game of thrones kind of feel to the way she handles things and she's back in Macedonia fighting

with one of the two great generals that Alexander inherited from his dad right once Parminio and he's here with Alexander doing all this stuff but he left the other one in charge of you know home base

right antipeter these guys are ancient and antipeter and Olympius are always sort of fighting

with each other and her letters back to Alexander often complain of antipeter and sometimes his letters complain about her but she got to be careful kind of be careful insulting the king's mother when he has a special relationship with her but deodorous says she sends a letter with all kinds of useful information including the warning about you know needing to be careful of antipeter's son-in-law

“who's with Alexander who commands an important unit and who's uh by all accounts a great man and a”

great leader but she tells him to be careful and so we arrest him and takes him around with the army for a long time in captivity they usually torture people in these situations but we should recall that Alexander's already killed this guy's two brothers killed him when he became king on charges that they were involved in his dad's assassination so I mean what you start to see here is a combination of the normal amount of what did we call it earlier pruning that a Macedonian king does on his family

tree because it's been proven over and over how dangerous your close relatives are to you in that system but somewhere along the line and you know intelligent folk may differ on the exact point we're going to go from a reasonable amount of pruning and suspicion to an unreasonable amount of paranoia but that old line that it's not really paranoia if they are out to get you totally applies to Alexander and a thousand gold talent bounty on your head's going to you know give a lot of

incentive to a lot of people to try to get you and it creates all sorts of suspicion within the

“ranks doesn't I mean there's going to be another sign of just how precarious life is in the ancient”

world for someone in Alexander's position where we're told that as he's marching through some of his areas it's beginning to be the summer of 333 and it's hot as heck and he's in full armor we're told and he decides to jump off a bridge into a river that looks very inviting and full armor by the way supposedly and he had been warned that this river's water comes directly from sort of the snowy mountain heights and it's ice cold heat in listen he jumps in boom we have a disaster our hands

he starts like having convulsions and he's cold cramped up and cold and they fish him out of the river and they take him in and within they make it sound like it's virtually immediately but within a day or two he's got something welcome to the ancient world you can get this now but in the ancient world there are some thoughts that maybe it's malaria these sorts of health things are going to follow

Alexander around but it's a sign of just how amazing it is any of these guys live very long with all

the things out there Alexander has a doctor as we said before some of these ancient people didn't seem to have a whole lot of names in their baby books because we keep recycling the same ones the same name is his dad a doctor named Philip and the story is that none of these doctors want to treat Alexander because they're scared to death that if he dies they're going to get blamed

Alexander apparently a long time Philip he prescribes this you know concoction that's going to be

apparently really hard on you but then you'll get fixed and Alexander says he's going to take it and the story is that he's mixing up the concoction just as a no derives from Parminio saying be careful of this doctor you know implying that he might be in on the 1000 talents trying to assassinate you and the doctor hands the potion to Alexander Alexander hands the letter from Parminio warning about the doctor to the doctor as the doctor's reading the letter

“containing the warning Alexander drinks the concoction looking him right in the eye that's how”

you do it in your movie by the way if you're planning on framing this but this is part of why you know the part that we like about this guy those are the and you don't know if they're true or not but continually there will be things like this that suggests that this is the guy's personality he's got a flare for sort of this kind of thing or the people who wrote the history about him have a flare for setting up such such situations I'm not even including by the way

we just do this is like a footnote I'm not including all the romantic stories about Alexander

which could be plausibly true too but I mean there are always stories about him like he and

the army come to this one area where the water is like bashing up against the cliffs and there's no room to march there's no beach but you know the wind changes in Alexander's able to like Moses parting the red sea the sea holds back from hitting the coastline so that his army has space to march I mean I don't know what to do with some of that stuff but there's a ton of romance and magic and other things that come into the Alexander story from time to time and there's a

twilight zone between the reality and the magic where it could be true and it's difficult to know how to deal with it and as we've said many times in many shows a lot of this stuff can affect reality even if it's not true if the people in the story think it is magic as we've said if you believe it it has power so this sickness of Alexander's is significant I mean the ancient authors talk about it it lasts for a while and he's not the kind of guy who sits down and rests whatever this

was it was serious enough so that there's suggestions maybe in the Persian court according to the ancient authors that maybe this guy will die could be problem solved he recovers we're told and then if you pay attention to an element to his life that's worth paying attention to you'll note that even when it's almost seemingly like we're between things happening in the story Alexander's actually

“out in the field fighting I mean don't mention a week long it seems like I think that's that's”

labeling it correctly gorilla campaign that Alexander will fight in calica as he's on his way down to what sort of we would call it just north of Syria today that area but he'll leave most of the army to sort of rest take a picked force of men spend about seven days in the hill trying to chase down calicaan gorillas and again he's in the front rank you think about well first of all

I always figure he's killing at least one person on all these expeditions personally so there's

single combat going on there was an old boxing line that I read once where was a trainer talking and he said something to the effect of keep track of the wear and tear I keep track of the damage as it begins to add up right there's a cute damage like you get hitting the head and you're unconscious and you're affected for the rest of your life a cute damage but then there's the accumulated damage right this is where we talked to a couple of installments ago about possible

CTE building up over time there's a lot of fighting and Alexander's in the midst of it he there's something going on where either he feels compelled to be there or he couldn't stand the idea of not being there or he there loves it or feels like to be the guy he has to be he has to be seen to be in the front rank or maybe a combination of the two right expectations and his own enjoyment of it because I I have to believe it would have been okay from time to time for him to say

listen we just got here I'm gonna meet with the men and do some strategizing send a little force out

“there and deal with those collegian gorillas and the hills but you have to do it yourself it's”

going to be an interesting aspect of this guy at least I think it is but keep track of the wear and tear between the big battles speaking of big battles by this time summer of 333 BCE as Alexander still probably feeling the after effects of this illness and recovering the great

this in that I've done a show where I've talked about what's about to happen here before and some people have heard me talk about it before and some people haven't and I need to talk about this in a way that satisfies both of those different groups but I'm gonna use one line because

I've always found it so amazing that I know I used in kings of kings 3 but it's about how rare this

event is to the people in this region right to see the great king leading the royal army into this neck of the woods Pierre Brayada that it was said hadn't happened in the 150 years now that's

“fascinating to me for any number of reasons I mean the first thing that I think about is I do the”

math I mean the Persian Empire is only 200 years old at Alexander's time period but if you haven't seen a royal army in 150 years that means you haven't seen a royal army throughout most of the history of the Persian Empire in that region means nobody living has ever seen one you really emphasize it doesn't this idea about how it's sort of like a company that runs each of its different

districts with its own regional vice presidents and there's no interference from the royal government

unless there needs to be and in the Persian Empire and I believe we mentioned this in one of the earlier installments the Persian Empire is kind of like an apex predator look a fat and happy apex predator one that might not be able to defend itself against another apex predator but it doesn't have anybody like that they face problems with revolts they face problems with satraps going

“rogue they face problems with you know the dynasty and the royal succession and civil wars”

and stuff like that but they don't face and have not faced throughout their entire history somebody threatening their existence and existential threat from another state until now and it said about this time that even the people who've delayed the longest suggesting that the Persian king is not taking this seriously now understand that he is and there have been people who've been suggesting he's been taking it seriously the whole time and because you don't know

things like when the Persian army departed from Babylon you know to head up to where Alexander is you know north of modern day Syria it's about 600 miles because you don't know when that army left there's a lot of other things you can't figure out I was reading my Alexander the Great and the logistics of the Macedonian army by Donald W. Engels and he said that the trip was made by the Persians in like 48 days which is crazy fast but in conquest and Empire AB Bosworth said

it took at least three months which is much more what you would expect from the Persians the Persian army is notoriously slow to muster it is notoriously slow moving but it is like a giant ship or something right takes forever to get to where you wanted to go but one of the arrives there it arrives with a ton of force and mass and weight behind it and the things the Persians don't get enough credit for by people who focus and you know I'm probably one of those

people too and ordinantly on the battlefield day of the combat sort of a version of what turns up that morning and doesn't focus enough on all it takes to get that army to the battlefield right up to that point think about the supply dumps that the Persians would have set up an advance at at locations designed to meet the march totals for each day so that when the army arrives there's food and there's everything it needs to repair anything it got broken I mean the Persians

are fantastic at this stuff and this is what allows you to get armies of incredible size because

otherwise you know when you find them and this has been an interesting sort of aspect of ancient warfare that's been looked at differently more recently than it did when I was a kid when I was a kid you used to talk about ancient bar so-called barbarian armies of 150,000, 200,000 these two tones and these camberies coming down from the mountains how would you feed them right even if they stayed in a place for five minutes they're going to be like locus what allows you to feed large armies

as hands-up rooks said so long ago are the logistics are providing the food and what they need

“and that's what the Persians one of the things they were so good at but even being that good they can't”

leave a large army sitting in one place for too long it has to continue moving even if it moves slowly because it seems to bring everything with it it reminds me a little of the way the Mongol cons although they came from a nomadic empire until it settled down obviously but I mean it was they had a sort of an empire on the move but the Persian king brings like a treasury with them and his relatives and there's concubines and everything you need the soldiers all have assistance and

but in the ancient world in the modern world too but in the ancient world and in the east especially

“this is a display this the army on the march serves a lot of purposes doesn't it and one is to”

sort of reinforced royal authority and Alexander and the Macedonians would use their army for the same thing but in the Persians since it's exalted and the Greek authors love to make the comparison by the way because it plays into their wonderful we would today call it a racist sort of approach to this whole thing where you know the Greeks are one level of humanity and these barbarians are beneath us and one of the ways you know that they show this is their their wealth is turned into ostentatious

displays and lots of the references to to women whether it's makeup or clothing or whatever

whereas the Greeks and you know it's really the Macedonians but these Greek authors like to make it the west versus east thing they're just into their weapons and their poverty and the and it's it's part of the trope right I mean if we were ourselves being the Persians today we would say what are you talking about this is our wonderful kit we're showing off I mean this is a

“sign of our dominance the fact that we're covered in jewels right I like the way and remember”

this is all filtered through a bunch of people that are trying to you know throw crap on these easterners for there uh womanly ostentatious ways but there's a different way to view it and that's I mean this is as Alexander will say later this is royalty and Quintus Curdius who probably has no idea what one of these really looked like but he gave you the standard rundown and some of this is going to probably be close to true remember as we said if you haven't had a royal army show up

in 150 years when one does show up well you hope it impresses right and Quintus Curdius has an army description of the Persian king on the march that is by any standards you want to use impressive and in my john yardley translation Quintus Curdius Rufus writes quote it is a tradition among

“the Persians not to begin a march until after sunrise and the day was already well advanced”

when the signal was given by trumpet from the king's tent above the tent so that it would be visible to all a representation of the sun gleamed in a crystal case the order of the line of march was as follows in front on silver altars was carried the fire which the Persians called sacred and eternal and quote let me stop you here this is part of the Persian religion right

uh who remas does rastronism this flames never supposed to be extinguished and you know like the

Olympic torch of the John F. Kennedy eternal flame I mean you just eat you carry it with you it's a sign and all the people on the march are gonna see it too and they're gonna tell their grandchildren about it Quintus Curdius continues talking about the people whose job it is to sort of oversee the flame they're religious people the magi quote next came the magi singing the traditional him and they were followed by 365 young men in scarlet cloaks their number equaling the days of the year

then came the chariot consecrated to Jupiter drawn by white horses followed by a horse of extraordinary size which the Persians called the sun's horse and quote now typical of ancient writing they assume that their gods are the same gods everybody else's worshiping just under different names so Quintus Curdius is Jupiter is Alexander's Zeus is Egypt's Aman and is Ahuramazda from the Persians as far as these people are concerned they obviously did not worship

Jupiter per se Curdius continues quote those driving the horses were equipped with golden whips and white robes not far behind were ten carts amply decorated with relief carvings in gold and silver and these were followed by the cavalry of twelve nations of different cultures variously armed next in line were the soldiers whom the Persians called the immortals some ten thousand in number no other groups were as splendidly bedecked in barbarian opulence

golden necklaces close inner woven with gold long-sleeved tunics actually studied with jules after a short interval he writes came the fifteen thousand men they call the king's kinsman this troop was dressed almost like women it's extravagance rather than its fine arms catching the eye and quote so here you go right we're gonna slam them now for their feminine like qualities

eye makeup that the Egyptians used to wear to the coal around the eyes all this sort of stuff

“struck the you know the western Greek world as a feminine they'll find that they like it later”

but at the moment it's bizarre and strange and it allows them to sort of explain you know to their audience why their weak culture fell under the masculine virility of the west and he continues by pointing out you know that this is a partial fashion show and says quote the column next to these comprised the so-called i don't know how to pronounce this word looks like dorifoe or dorifoe the men who usually looked after the king's wardrobe

and these proceeded the royal chariot on which road the king himself towering above all others

both sides of the chariot he writes were embossed with gold and silver representations of the

gods the yoke was studded with flashing gems and from it arose to golden images each acube at high of nineus and bellus respectively between these visit consecrated eagle made of

“gold and represented with wings outstretched and a quote then he talks about the king and this is the”

the the weird sort of dichotomy of these ancient western writers and the dichotomy is that they want these people to be cowardly but at the same time magnificent deadly what do we say in the last installment right the Persians are all like storm troopers or guys in red shirts and star trek their their nameless and faceless and they don't matter except is you know it matters to the Greek side of the story except for one character on the other side the real bad guy

theming the merciless the Darth Vader in this case it's derias and grintus courteous writes quote the sumptuous attire of the king was especially remarkable his tunic was purple interwoven with white at the center and his gold embroidered cloak bore a gilded motif of hawks attacking each other with their beaks from his gilded belt which he wore in the style of a woman he had slung his simitar it's scabbard made of a precious stone his royal headdress called a

cadarus by the Persians was encircled by a blue ribbon flecked with white 10,000 spearmen carrying lances chased with silver and tip with gold followed the king's chariot and to the right and left he was attended by some 200 of his most noble relatives at the end of this column came thirty thousand foot soldiers followed by four hundred of the king's horses end quote now that's not the whole army that's just sort of his on to rise

now while courteous can give us sort of a sense of sort of the grandeur and the opulence and the all inspiring nature of something like this a measure we can trust him on the details you don't get a sense of the numbers that you can trust from any of these ancient authors i mean area in a blue tarq say that the army that the great king is leading here's like six hundred thousand men the adores has a more like four hundred thousand courteous says it's like two hundred and fifty

thousand infantry and sixty two thousand two hundred cavalry which is rather specific but none of those numbers can be right i mean there's a reason that we don't as i believe we said there's a reason we don't have armies of six hundred thousand men marching around even if your army has that many men right you break them up what an opulence teaches over that matter the Mongols right you break them up into smaller little armies and and have all of those things sort of take

“parallel pass and then converge on the target i mean that's what modern warfare kind of”

well modern warfare since the polyans or the Mongols time teaches but back in these days it was one big clump right and well six hundred thousand men how do you feed that clump like that no matter how many supply dumps you station along the way and it's fascinating i mentioned angles his work earlier i believe Alexander the Great and the logistics of the Macedonian army and he describes i mean it's a whole science we don't think about as much anymore the science of how you choose

paths for your army to take and the paths have to have enough stuff along the way to feed them right grain growing water uh angles was saying it was a hundred thousand gallons a day he estimated the Macedonian army needed he was talking about their trip from where the Gordian knot was cut to where this battle's going to happen and he said that i think it took like a month and he said

it's it it ate up eight million pounds of grain let's four thousand tons he said

and if that's what an army of something like forty thousand or so forty five thousand maybe

but it's a lot whatever it is by the standards of the day it's a lot if it is a much more credible

“hundred or hundred and twenty thousand uh men in the Great Kings army that's a ton”

i like the way historian George Cockwell and his famous work the Greek wars the failure of Persian written in the 1980s late 1980s he pointed out though that you don't need to have tons and tons of people to be able to have extremely effective and let's be honest deadly militaries and he writes quote in general the great invading armies of antiquity were not it would seem to modernize large Hannibal set out from Spain according to polybius with fifty thousand foot and about nine

thousand horse by the time he reached Italy they were down to twenty thousand foot and six thousand horse and yet with these for sixteen years he remained undefeated for the great attack on

Antiochus the third in 189 the Romans had an army of about thirty thousand and were confronted by

seventy thousand of all sorts of troops from all part of the salute could realm including the most

“eastern peoples Alexander Cockwell writes began his invasion of Asia with something like forty three”

thousand foot and sixty one hundred horse and confronted the might of Asia at Galgamella with about forty thousand foot and seven thousand horse and quote and we should recall that like a lot of armies especially the Persians who traveled the opposite of light there's a lot of hangers on and people who take care of things and servants and I mean it's a virtual town I loved the way angles described it he said basically and he was talking again about Alexander's army not the much larger

one the Persians are leading he said that if you take this army and just look at it in terms of its numbers

it is one of the largest cities in the world and it's moving around and needs to be fed and it's larger than almost any of the cities it's going to sort of hang out by. So, if Alexander's army is forty five thousand men that is a large ancient city isn't it the great kings army is a hundred and twenty thousand men that is a massive city in the ancient world it's interesting to think about it that way isn't it but the need to feed these people is a huge part of the deal one of the ancient

authors I don't remember who it was but it gets quoted by the modern authors quite a bit had said that this army I think they were talking about Alexander but again equally applies to both that it could not retreat if it had to retreat through the territories that it had already passed

“through because they were denuded of any food right so if you have to go back home or retreat from”

this battle you have to pick a different path one that hasn't been scoured by locus yet fascinating I mean heck I love the way Donald W. Engels in his book actually points out how less efficient the farming yields and methods were back then so that when he says the Macedonians required 4,000 tons of food to get from Gordium to the battle site here it's even harder for the ancients to come up with that 4,000 tons of grain that it would be for the people in that region today using modern farming

methods and whatnot so the question of food is paramount I mean Hitler talks about it in mine comp because he's still a man of the previous areas when instead of looking at something like oil he's looking at what people have worried about forever food and one of the national security advantages that some states have over others as we said and it's a hands-down book going back to hands-down Brookline but I mean the ability for a civilization to create the ability to feed larger forces

and put them in the field and especially when people like the Assyrians can then project power over distances because you can feed these armies over distances that's a huge advantage of for people to can't do that there's a direct connection isn't there between power projection and logistics I find it interesting that as large as this Persian army is and as long as it's taken to put it together it still doesn't have all the units from its version of the far east and

far northeast frontier some of their best units aren't going to be at this battle because they didn't make it in time or they weren't even called by the king because the king knew they wouldn't make it in time Alexander running to those in another battle but it means as large as the Persian army is it could have been larger but no matter what the size the actual army of the Great King was whether you want to take some of the higher numbers of all the way down into the Delbrookian minimizations

and start talking about 50,000 manner whatever from the relative standpoint this is going to be one of the greatest largest battles up to this time I was hoping I could say that it was you know

same time and of course since we don't know how many people fought in any of these battles before

“this time including this one I mean how do you compare a bunch of numbers you don't have to begin with”

but it would have been an all-inspiring event and one of the things I try to get my mind around as somebody and I know many of you are the same way who finds military history fascinating is there's a huge difference between seeing what wars like in a relatively modern era versus someone who could have gone to the battle that's shaping up here as a pure spectator

I mean if you look at people like Winston Churchill or out of Hitler who both were in the first

World War I mean when Churchill had his failure deliberately he goes and commands some troops in in the war and Hitler of course was a runner both of those guys saw what some of the first World War was like right from their vantage point from their part of the front there I mean but they didn't see the entire first World War heck they didn't see the entire battles they were associated

“in those were such large battles you can see to the end of the battlefields right there miles”

but you could watch the battle of Isis that's about to take place here you know from a hill and you know watch the whole thing start to finish might take a day might take the amount of time it takes to watch a movie and a movie theater that blows my mind and anybody else who even saw one of these armies passed by saw the greatest thing they were ever going to see like I said about the you know earlier the showing off of the army to sort of cement one's rule you'll tell

you're grandchildren about this you'll write books about it I mean these guys that we're using as our primary sources in air quotes here because they're you know 400 years after the event or 400 years after the event and they're still talking about it so made an impression right if you're looking at how these armies maneuver though it's it's fascinating and it's through

an interesting area basically the best way to think about it you can actually go they don't know

exactly where the battle that we're about to talk about happened but it's within a narrow little area so you can kind of say well it either happened at this river or a little farther back at this river but it's a narrow coastal plane right between the sea and some mountains and once you get past sort of that it broadens out into a larger plane the larger plane is Syria right the northern part of Syria where it abuts Turkey and the area that Alexander's passing through is sort of this

area where the south west of Turkey and the northwest of Syria kind of come together

“and the maneuvering because let's remember that's a enormous part of general ship always and especially”

maybe even more so in Alexander's time because once he puts himself in the front rank you know he's not going to be able to influence the battle as it goes like an Napoleon would be a much higher percentage of what he does and importance is handled in things like pre-battle maneuvering is he going to go out into the plane to fight the Persians out you know on a big old wide expanse or are you going to have them come to you and try to fight you in this area between the sea

in the mountains it's about two miles wide at its narrowest and then that becomes part of the maneuvering

but first Alexander he's got his army separated doing the bunch of things and eventually

the Persians show up and you know I was reading some things that I hadn't read that before it's interesting this Persian advance is so slow and so well known that people back in Greece are talking about it I guess Demosthenes was saying you know the investigators are going to get trampled the Persians are coming so I mean if the Star Wars is ominous Darth Vader music is playing and we can start to feel the tension and the you know suspense it's going on for a long time

but somehow catches Alexander off guard anyway I like the way Adrian Golds were the in Philip and Alexander sets it up and he writes quote a narrow strip of coastal plane led into Syria freenched by mountain ranges that an army could only cross via one of three routes Parminio had gone ahead to secure the entrances to these taking with him most of the non-Macadonian troops Alexander busy themselves in Kalikia clearly feeling it's safe for his army to be divided

for the moment until news arrived that Darius and his army were at Soki in Syria far nearer than he had suspected and not far from the past near the pillar of Jonah Golds were the continues he hurried to reunite the army and then together with Parminio's men he advanced to Issa where a depot was established for the heavier baggage and the wounded and sick left behind

them or to advance and all seem to have favored aggression this meant taking one of the three passes

“and Alexander decided to head to the southernmost perhaps because this would keep him by the sea”

for the longest allowing bulky or supplies to be brought by water and to quote the supplies again and it's partly why we spent some time on it are going to determine what these armies can do I mean if you can sort of stop the enemy from moving they have to figure something out because they can't just stay there because of the supply problems and this plane that the Persians want to fight in isn't adjacent to the sea right it would be better if it was then they could be

supplied by sea but that's the area Alexander's blocking so this maneuvering which is such a large

part of general ship is happening and once Alexander gets back to you know his army and pulls it all

together and chooses this southernmost route and expects to sort of ambush the Persians who I was reading you know they were making some estimates of how long the Persian line along the road if you

“caught it in column would be and you have to imagine Alexander's army just waiting for him in battle”

formation and the Persians show up stretched out in a four or five six person wide column 30 miles long or something but you could see how that would be a huge disadvantage but apparently Alexander's hoping to catch the Persians in the situation like that and instead in a moment that you know when we're talking about one of the greatest generals who ever lived maybe number one on the list

is mind boggling Alexander's told all of a sudden that the Persians are behind him and only about

12 and a half miles away boom what how does that happen Alexander has to send he doesn't believe it all the Persians say he doesn't believe it in my Aubrey to sell in court translation of airy in an area usually pretty forgiving about Alexander's shortcomings are redeceled in court has airy in saying quote Alexander not trusting the report that derias was in his rear dispatched a party of his companions in a galley with orders to sail back to Issa and find out for themselves whether or not

it was true the coast by Issa's airy in says is deeply indented and this fact enabled the party in the galley the more easily to see what they wish to see that the Persians were there so back they went to Alexander with their news derias was indeed at hand and quote speaking of hands there's in tradition a couple of the ancient sources refer to one aspect of it or another of Alexander fighting out that the Persians were behind him when some of his own men

some of the sick and wounded he left behind you know in the town of Issa's show up at his current location you know minus their hands having had their hands chopped off recently and categorized and they show up and say the great king did it he took the whole supply depot you left behind killed or tortured the people you left behind and sent us to tell you about it one source has that wonderful trope and you see it all throughout the Greek conversion wars a couple of Persian kings are supposed

to have done this so either they did this routinely which is a possibility or this is just one of those tropes you see all the time that they it's a combination of depending on how you want to look at a confidence or hubris where the Persians you know will take the spies and instead of just killing them out right we'll just say hey you wanted to see what our army looks like let me show you and you know show the vastness of it cut off their hands because they are spies after all send

them back to you know in this case Alexander but whomever and say you know we don't care what you tell him tell him how big the army is that's coming for him but all that makes Alexander do what I read once about Joe Fraser that he looked at opponents is something good to eat in the boxing ring that's how Alexander looks at this he wants this that's the difference the great king had gotten different information supposedly by the way just before this time did Alexander wanted no part of him this is

part of the explanation that the ancient sources give for why the great king came up peer into the narrows to begin with because it's a long-standing question if you have such a great position for your army and your cavalry in northern Syria why leave and go up in the narrows where Alexander is well because maybe you think he's not coming down this is supposedly part of a debate

“and all of our major sources have it where when Alexander's sick remember after the Gordian”

not thing he had malaria or something there's this delay it's uncharacteristic arian other sources here point out that the great king was wondering what the hell's going on where is he why didn't he come in and his flatterers arian talks about this is yes man his bootlickers

of the east of bootlickers are just saying because he's afraid of you he's delaying because he doesn't

want to face your greatness in our cavalry and all these and the only people of course as usual

“now the men on his dead you have to find some other Greco Macedonian source who can be the one who”

gives the great king the only competent advice out there and there's a couple of people it's actually one person but the different sources give it a different name and a different background but it plays the same role this Greco Macedonian in the Persian court he's the only one who could be trusted to give halfway decent advice and the decent advice is don't move stay here this is a good spot and don't cage yourself he's not afraid of you the minute he knows where you are he's coming for you

and a typical fashion they are brushed aside or they are ignored or in one of the stories they're actually killed for insinuating that the Persians are a bunch of women and the great king heads up north now this brings us to the other situation that has been talked about for thousands of years did the great king mean to outflank Alexander or was that an accident and you will find very good people on all sides of this question Alexander fans will get into

fist fights about it putting words into the mouth of people like the great Pierre Breon but

they're always defending the Persian side from the typical sort of slurs they would get from the

fact we have the Greek sources but I mean I can see them saying if Alexander had outflanked the Persians we would have no problem saying aha look at his operational brilliance here look what he's done but when the Persians do it it's an accident and maybe it was but here's the way I look at it

“just so you know my own biases you should understand where I'm coming from but I find it hard enough”

to believe that if the Persians are running with an army of 100, 120,000 how that can get within 13 miles of Alexander and he not know about it gotta wait till a bunch of guys with no hands show up to tell him with parminio operating you know with scout cavalry all through those passes that's

hard enough for me to believe but then you're gonna tell me that the Persians with an army as we said

of 120,000 tons of light cavalry tons of scouting operating in their own land where they would expect of course get all kinds of extra information from the locals they're unaware of a 40 to 50,000 man army within 13 miles of them I don't know maybe it's just me that seems like a lot but just no historians have debated that forever it's an open question in one way or another the Persians are on you know Alexander's line of supply which one would think is a negative and yet maybe he would come back

“with the counter argument that yeah but I got him out of northern Syria maneuvered him out of that”

area now they're in my neck of the woods the narrows where my army size isn't a problem and their army size is speaking of that probably worth updating Alexander's army size here or at least the range that can be expected far more consistent and realistic than Persian numbers depends on who you want to choose of course but the range is much more narrow anywhere from like 35,000 men to just under 50,000 is the sort of acceptable range in there out of that there's probably

something like 25,000 sort of of the close order heavy infantry types a lot of them for landjights but more hop lights than you might think. Mercenary hop lights allied hop lights is about 3000 or so of the hypaspists that are sort of a combination of guards and sort of specialists eight to 10,000 sort of light infantry you've got your thrations and your lyrians who are a little like going and getting your native troops in the colonial era I got to have some

of the people who are used to fighting in broken country and tracking signs and and they're just maybe from the Alexandria in point of view a little cannon fodderish but you got to have guys like that then you have that a thousand guys who are the agranians and the archers that Alexander loves his Gurkas and special forces and he uses them all the time they've become elite. So they weren't elite before they're elite now just by experience alone and then something like

five thousand cavalry or so a decent number of them the core of them are those heavy cavalry lancers the Macedonian companions and sort of their mere images the the salience and normally they're equal numbers you know just under like two thousand of each of them and when I was a kid we used to think of these as almost ethnic units but more the modern histories want you to see especially since Alexander's dad's time where he was taken just almost like free booters and

deserve it when there was an Arthurian night of the round table kind of view of it if you want to

“look at it in a high-minded way a 1977 Oakland Raider's viewpoint if you want to look at it”

another way or so all the castoffs and all these people you can't find elsewhere and in addition to those guys you probably have a thousand fifteen hundred other Greek or other light cavalry that is a large very large army by ancient sort of Greek standards but if we're looking at this in terms of you know some of the largest battles in the ancient world which the battle of this is going to be somewhere on the on the list this is a pretty nimble army I mean size wise

you don't feel like it's going to be some gigantic immobile force the Persians as we said I mean you

could go the numbers can be anywhere from fifty or sixty thousand which of those are the numbers

it's a whole different situation than everybody's been looking at to something more in the eighty thousand hundred you just don't know we did mention that the Persians are going to have some units now with the royal army that they didn't have at the granicus because that wasn't a royal army and there's two groups specifically I'd like to bring up because they're worth talking about because their impact units are at least there's a lot of them in some cases the impact units

are you get some of this heavy cavalry the guys we used to call them in war gaming extra heavy cavalry men who have armor all over them in horses who have a lot of armor not quite the

catafrax of the partheon or the sassana dara but very armored comparatively and again you don't

armor people like that usually to have them ride around and shoot you from a distance because it slows you down these guys are more meant to carve their way through enemy cavalry mainly certainly to go after enemy leaders or what have you these guys were not around at the river granicus and then you have an interesting troop type these so called cardacis and there are arguments forever about who these guys are but the reason that it's worth pointing out that they exist

is because there are allegedly a lot of them at this battle maybe 60,000 of them they seem to be a hop lights maybe the Persian attempt to recreate a troop type that traditionally they were weak in they didn't it didn't generally manufacture hop lights of the Greek style and if you look at the enemies they usually thought they didn't need to when if you're fighting scithians on your

“northeastern border remember the Persian Empire almost the size of the United States if you're”

fighting a bunch of scithians on your northeastern border there are a bunch of horse archers what do you want you want archers yourself you don't need a bunch of hop lights but against hop lights you do and so the Persians have been hiring them at this battle they allegedly hired 30,000 of them now there's a lot to unpack here and it's important because these 30,000 Greek mercenary hop lights or however many they're actually are forms sort of the heart of the great kings at

least infantry portion of his army here I mean they're the spine he sort of builds the battle line around so they're kind of important and you will see people argue about the numbers all the time and the historians run the gamut I mean and it's a wide range from those who believe you couldn't find 30,000 mercenary Greek hop lights for higher across the entire Mediterranean world during this time period to those who think you would be no problem when everywhere in between

does seem pretty clear that the great king was recalling and scouring the Greek hop lights he already had in his service from everywhere else they were busy I mean part of the reason that memnon is idea to take the fighting back to Greece or at least the Greek islands is supposed to have stalled is because the great king took all the mercenary hop lights he was using the problem back so they could be here for this battle at this is you know in late October

early November 333 BCE so however many there are he clearly put quite a bit of effort and sacrifice quite a bit of progress in other areas to get them here but 30,000 would mean that they would probably slightly outnumber Alexander's heavy infantry contingent all by themselves

“and remember his heavy infantry contingent probably only has about 12,000 let's just say 12,000”

or so actual flangeites the rest being hop lights like these guys and I remember one of my professors saying not all hop lights are created equal even if we think so in our head there could be quite a lot of difference between a hop light for example who is a citizen soldier mostly

of the year keeps the armor above the heart if necessary and maybe a few times in his life actually

“has to put it on and really go out there and fight big difference between that guy and these people”

who fight professionally for the great king because this is all these people do they aren't part time warriors and they aren't any time farmers their professional soldiers their officers usually have tons of experience a lot of times these units are actually enrolled in the service of their employer as whole units so they're used to fighting together at least on the unit level these are probably as good as hop lights get the problem for them is that Alexander's

full-angeite phalanx was designed by his father specifically as a hop light killing machine we talked all about that in the early installment of this series but if that's still the best heavy infantry the great king can get his hands on what are you going to do and as far as what these

“cardices are well majority opinion has leaned for quite some time that they are the home as we”

said homegrown version of a Persian hop light but there's still a significant minority position out there that may be that they may be some other kind of troop type maybe a hybrid light and medium and heavy infantry hard to know all I can say is this if they were anything like that to put 60,000 of them in front of Alexander on the battle line is um well you're going to get what you deserve then and finally besides you know this heavy infantry and the large numbers

of Persian cavalry which is their their war-winning or their at least battle-winning arm of their army

you have the innumerable and the ancient sources always make it sound innumerable but it's not

hard to believe that they could bring out all kinds of people with bows with slings with javelins

“just as many as you want who can just run around skirmishing so they have tons of those people too”

now the first thing we should know before we talk about the night before this battle is that in order to get to this battle Alexander has to retrace his steps and turn around as we said and what that means is when you look at a schematic of this battle or if you're looking at it from a satellite image the battle looks like it's upside down or backwards and reverse the Persians look like they should be where the Greeks are in vice versa but that's because both sides

have kind of turned around right one got behind the other then they both reversed facing so the Persians look like they're where the Greeks should be in vice versa the Greeks are facing north the Persians are facing south they have a river between them we are not sure which one is I mentioned but whichever one it is it seems to be more of an impediment or an influence on the battle than the Granicus was and interestingly enough at least to me we are told that in the

places where the river is more affordable right the parts where it'd be more likely to get troops trying to run across at the Persians have placed defenses now is a long time owner of a Persian war gaming army I love this idea I want as many defenses as I can get when I'm facing Alexander's army but Aryan who should have one would think no better since he comes from the Roman era and who builds more fortifications when they're just sitting around with their army

than the Romans do but Aryan says that basically the Macedonians when they saw that there were

fortifications took it as a sign of weakness they knew that the Persians were beaten from the moment they saw that no spirit but what these fortifications were exactly how they were laid out is not exactly known a lot of speculation I have three versions of Aryan in front of me all use and we will two of them use the word stockade to describe the fortifications the panelist version calls it a palasade in his book in the path of conquest the great Baltimore heckle calls it an abatis which I

had to go look up seems like they're all variations though on the you know get yourself a tree trunk sharpen both ends of it stick one sharpened end in the ground at an angle stick the other end out and then put a bunch of in a very similarly carved tree trunks next to it might resemble a sort of frontier era fort but to me that looks like a great idea as we said Aryan who comes from the Roman era where Mary as his mules were a thing well that was the Republican era he's a little later

than that but in me Julius Caesar's guys were building fortifications if they said it around for five seconds but the Persians are women for one a fortifications these fortifications by the way will come in handy

even sure which of three rivers it is but none of them probably looked the way this one did this

“one was probably deeper wider faster flowing higher banks all that stuff”

right once you start damning things up once you start needing more water once things get whatever I mean it's just probably the case in all the rivers in that area might have been a little bit more natural during this time period and between dealing with those kinds of banks the riverbed the rocks the steepness of the of the sides and the fact that the few natural places where you would want to sort of use his pathways up the other sides bank those are going to have the

stockade or palacade or abatis blocking the way now we should recall because we're going to deal

with the night before in a second because I'm fascinated with the night before and the night before

an ancient or medieval battle is somewhat different than the night before one in the first of the second were a war for example and we talked about this with the river grant a case and we discussed it before it's the stakes there were just so few battles in wars in the earlier histories than there are later that each battle took on greater significance I mean a lot of ancient wars it was one battle and you're done and the battle took the afternoon entire dynasties and

the fate of kingdoms and everything rested on a day so imagine what the night before that's like I'm not trying by the way to denigrate or downplay what it's like for the British Tommy waiting for the kickoff of the battle of the Psalm the next morning or anything like that it's a very different sort of hellish foreshadowing for that guy than it is for Alexander's troops but you know well God forbid the Persians think about them similar but different right the same but different

in the case of the Tommy he's gonna wake up is gonna be a lot of shelling that goes on for a

long time ahead of time that'll get you ready then you have the hellish first day of the Psalm

which was terrible but the fact that you survived that doesn't mean you survived because then you get to try to sleep because you're gonna be exhausted in the whole thing and do it the next day right so if you don't die the first day you have plenty of days in the future to die it's different for Alexander's troops because if they're gonna die it's probably gonna be tomorrow for the Persians if you're gonna die it's probably gonna be tomorrow so the thoughts that must be running

“through one's head as you think about where you will be 24 hours from now well that's what I think about”

they say that Alexander's doing some significant religious sacrificing and I bet the Persian King is too because after all what they say there's no atheist and foxholes well in this period very

few atheists anywhere and even if the great king didn't believe this stuff and he probably does

he's got a show to put on for his troops because what they're gonna look for all the help they could get in the same is true for Alexander's and nobody wants you know even if you don't think the gods are gonna help you sure his heck don't want him against you and there's a significant amount of activity we're told the night before in the early morning hours I'm just thinking about how tired these guys are gonna be once they get to the battlefield because you know the

night before a Aryan talks about all this by the way and this is becomes one of the great early military conflicts in history where we get all kinds of details that are hard to come

“by before this era that's why when we started this entire conversation about Alexander”

installment to go we mentioned that this is where military history starts to blossom out a little bit and we get some of the nuts and bolts stuff I mean you're gonna see it in Alexander's approach to the battlefield here where you get a chance to see the march order and and how he maneuvers troops to deal with difficult terrain I mean it's gonna be very insightful and part of it is Aryan's talking about you know Alexander's getting his troops together the night before it like

three in the morning they sort of march down into this other area he lets him rest for a while at forty fifty thousand guys rest for a while on some rocky outcropping and then you know in the very early morning hours before the sun comes up they're out there getting their act together because they've got you know three or four miles of marching to get to the battlefield and hours of deployment in front of them I love the way that AB Bosworth the great late great AB Bosworth the Australian

he sort of runs it down but Aryans the one who gives us the broad information for this although courteous also does this where they go into depth now about how Alexander's going to approach the battle because the Persians are waiting for him Aryan by the way says in order to sort of keep Alexander from messing with him while deployment is happening he throws out 30 thousand cavalry and 20 thousand light troops so his screening forced to sort of just mess with Alexander and just you

remember Aryan has the Persian army in multiple hundred thousand of men so what's fifty thousand

as a screening force the way Alexander approaches this battlefield is he's coming up from in

“like a narrow if you imagine the battlefield from Alexander's point of view remember reversed”

it's a funnel shaped and he's coming from the narrow part of the funnel and as he advances it's broadening out what he's trying to do is not have a flank that's where the Persians are deadly right with their cavalry if it gets around your flank well that's the whole point of wanting to have the battle in northern Syria right in those great open planes so that the Persians can outflank the Macedonians here Alexander has got him in the narrows but there's still some art in making sure they don't

outflank you here and that's the art that Aryan and courteous both sort of point out because what happens is Alexander is continually lengthening his line right taking from depth from a column depth and as the land allows it expanding to the side so that he covers the entire distance from the sea on one side to the mountains on the other and as the land gets wider so does his battle line and he

“allows there to be no flank and those are his orders and Bosworth extrapolating the courteous”

and Aryan information in conquest and empire rights quote at dawn the Macedonian army moved

down to the plane first infantry and then cavalry the process of filtering through the narrows

was of necessity slow and took up most of the morning as the plane widened the infantry were able to deploy itself into battle formation at first 32 ranks deep then 16 finally eight it was a gradual process files would move up to the front as space is opened up for them and the failanks would gradually expand in length and contract in depth consequently he writes Alexander had a battle line capable of facing and repelling any cavalry sortie during his advance

to the battle there were he writes inevitable delays as the army crossed the ravines and the streams that intersected the plane but as the afternoon began the Macedonian line closed on the

Persians and quote Aryan and courteous talk about the many halts that the army makes in order

to sort of dress its lines and let everybody catch up courteous says that Alexander is stopping and and making everybody slow down he's writing in front of the lines slowing everybody down so that they maintain the integrity of the formation rather than allow any gaps to develop because they're worried about the Persian cavalry right so just dress your lines and the Persians aren't moving you know they're sitting there waiting on the opposite side of the river

so there's no pressing need to really hurry up but this takes hours the part we forget same thing like if you look at your Napoleonic battles right something like water these take forever to get everybody where they're supposed to be and then there's the speeches and I'm combining it because the Aryan says that there are speeches the night before then there are speeches before the bat these speeches are hard to figure out because there's sort of the stock in trade of

all these ancient authors and before we condemn them too much for potentially likely making up all this you know speaking type stuff we should point out two things thing number one is they weren't

“necessarily asserting that this was exactly what we said I think take a little dramatic”

license point number two we do the same thing heck you think any of the dialogue and any of the Alexander the Great movie I mean you see what I'm saying and if the dialogue from those movies is true they're taking it from here so take all of it with the grain of salt but what's more useful perhaps is the general gist of what was said and if you're asking by the way where any of this could come from like why would we assume that any of it might be true one of the famous

sources for some of this stuff is a guy named Claitarcus and he went around after the Alexander wars were all over and interviewed veterans got stories war stories if you will but depending on how high up some of these people were and how much they remembered although let's be on some of the stuff is going to be the greatest thing in their lives he might have a little bit of the gist for what this stuff was but as we said some of this stuff is typical stock stuff in the

ancient literary world some of it is material that Aryan wants to transmit to the reader and this is a good way to do it again we still use that in movies and film entertainment today don't it's a vehicle it moves the story along right but what is a vehicle for the writer here because

dialogue for the king of Macedonia whether or not he said it it's become part of the known

“legend of this guy and they included in the movies I mean I can remember Richard Burton uttering”

some of the same lines from Aryan I'm about to utter to you it's fabulous and so I'm going to quote it at length from the Aubrey de Selin court translation for example he says quote Alexander now sent for his infantry and cavalry commanders and all officers in charge of allied troops and appealed to them for confidence and courage in the coming fight remember he said that already danger his often threatened you and you have looked at triumphantly in the face this time

the struggle will be between a victorious army and an enemy already once vanquished god himself or gods moreover by suggesting to derias to leave the open ground and cram his great army into a confined space has taken charge of operations in our behalf let me just stop here is this the ancient

“Macedonian version of god mitons Aryan continues in Alexander's voice we ourselves shall have room”

enough to deploy our infantry while they know match for us either in bodily strength or resolution will find their superiority in numbers of no avail our enemies are meads and Persians man who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives we of Macedonia for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war above all we are free men and they are slaves there are Greek troops to be sure in Persian service but how different is their cause from ours they will be

fighting for pay and not much of it at that and we on the contrary shall fight for Greece and our hearts will be in it as for our foreign troops tracians pionians allurians and gradians they are the best and stoutest soldiers in Europe and they will find as their opponents the slackest and soft

“just of the tribes of Asia and what finally of the two men in supreme command you have Alexander”

they derias and quote how can you not love that whether not Alexander said that he should have

then the next stage and again we're the quoting in full talks about you first you appeal to

them on that level right where they're fighting for freedom you know the the Greeks and then with a stoutest men and all that kind of stuff and of course then what would a good sales person do after that you tell them what they're gonna get after they beat these weak people and a fight that won't be worth anything because it's you against them and me against him and from my Martin Hammond translation of area and the next part of the great speech tells everybody what's in it

for them quote after listing all these factors which made for Macedonian superiority in the coming contest Alexander went on to emphasize the great value of the prizes which they stood to win the victory this time would not be over derias is satraps right his corporate vice presidents not over the cavalry raged at the granicus or the 20,000 foreign mercenaries but overall that was of any worth among the Persians and the meds and all the other nations in Asia subject to the

Persians and the meds and over the great king himself who was there in person nothing would remain for them to do after this contest except to assume rule of all of Asia and put it in to all their long hardship and there was more let me just stop and say isn't that what they

always say in those infrasts and there was more he reminded them of what they'd already achieved

for the common cause so brilliantly citing individual acts of conspicuously noble bravery and naming the man as well as describing the deed and in the most tactful way he touched on his own record of dangers faced in their battles end quote now some of this is the sort of thing any general is going to do and area and even says that later on we'll say and and several more such things as generals do so I mean everybody understands that speeches to the at least people

down to the officer level is normal and expected but this is also how the great ones fuse their sort of personality and charisma into the loyalty of their army I mean when you talk about Napoleon coming back you know from exile and the troops that are sent there to kill him throwing down their arms you know and raising their hands and saying they've let emperor this is something

but with the institution itself and that's what all of this is a data point towards doing

“and you add victory after victory to that well my goodness it's not just a guy who talks a big”

game it's a guy who's promising things and who's delivered every other time he's ever done that previously right his track record is perfect the last part of his speech has Alexander comparing his army to xenophones famous army of a previous era if you've ever read xenophones anabasis the 10,000 Greeks who were in Persian service fought on a Persian civil war and made it all the way back safely with the Persians at their heels the whole way it's very famous all these Greeks and

Macedonians would have known it well and he points out that if xenophon could get out of Persia with

the Persians nipping at his heels you know for an extended period of time without all of the combined

arms that the Macedonians have with fewer people etc etc why shouldn't they do far better it's a great argument me then in a more cover all the bases sort of sense says that Alexander then added

“all the usual encouragement which a brave commander gives to brave troops at a time like that right”

to firm their resolve so in other words Alexander's giving the usual speeches but he's got some specific she throws in there I love that in the courteous version of this speech which happens right before the clash of arms right that's so there's a difference in the timing of some of this stuff Alexander actually turns to like the allereens and the thrations and and courteous showing his own

biases says that since those people make a living by alluding Alexander tells them to go and

look at all the you know gold and purple on the other side right look at all the stuff you can loot over there so everybody's got their motivations sort of tailored to their proclivities right set up the incentives differently for different folk now as Alexander approaches and he's not going to get right up to the Persians you know running just the opposite side of the river because that is too

“close that is within missile range and the Persians are a missile army that's what we used to say”

in more giving the Persians are a missile army if you like you know bow fire and Javelin the Persians are your army not necessarily your you know handhand army but you don't want to get too close to them and Alexander doesn't the Persians sort of sit there too because when you have a very large army in a very constricted space and you have them laid out just the way you want because didn't we say Alexander's taking hours to get to him and dress his ranks and do all that

well the Persians have already done that they're in place why move they're looking um Adrian Golds where he says they want to win on both sides they certainly want to win on one side and that's where they placed a ton of cavalry you know their best troops sort of maybe not like the guard troops around the king but their best arm and it's over on the very seaside side of things because once the river sort of gets near the ocean in this battlefield it branches out and sort of forms

a little beach and you can have cavalry operating that kind of terrain so that's where the Persians put all their cavalry as Alexander approaches he will have been out flanking himself and that's because as he gets nearer to the river the hills on his right begin to become closer in the foothills sort of encroach and there are troops all over those hills and the foothills were in a range right up to the mountains and they're crammed with Persians light troops

historians don't know whether these are just archers and javelin years and slingers or whether there are more formed troops there also it's not going to be like hoplights and close sort of landjights or anything they can't operate in that kind of terrain but it could be tribesmen are the same kinds of things Alexander uses his gyrka type of grains for but lots of them he will leave area and there's like 20,000 of them up in those foothills that's a modern division I'm not going to

think the 20,000 of them are there but since area has the entire army at like 600,000 20,000 a miniscule tiny detachment by the way I should point out that according to area in this 600,000 people are all there they're just in depth so it's like a giant army of orcs that are behind the front lines so we talk about the entire Persian deployment here all we're talking about is the little crust on top the layer and that is far back if you could drone this thing and look from

above as far as the eye can see it's just orcs off into the horizon right the defense in depth if you will but all these light troops up in the foothills on Alexander's right is going to cause problems the ancient authors say if you look at the Persian deployment it resembles well they use a letter of their own but for us it would be like an upside down owl and the

where the light troops all are they're on Alexander side of the river they're on his right there's a minority opinion though that the river itself flows up into the mountains and that the Persian deployment isn't the light troops pushing forward but is instead just the natural extension of the Persian line you know up into the foothills either way what do you do about that and as he moves forward he is outflanking himself more and more so his deployment is going to

reflect the fact he has to deal with that threat and as he approaches the river I was reading several different accounts as to how far away he would have wanted to sort of halt the Persians were just sitting there watching all this and Adrian history history and golds where they had an interesting point which reminds us of exactly what happened with Alexander way back when he was facing the allurians and he was able to scare the crap out of him just by doing drill in front of them Adrian

Goldsworthy says that the order and the precision of Alexander's slow advance which they would have been able to watch for hours was in itself he says eerie and intimidating so think about the psychology now this warfare here you have hours to think about it you know the year the night before and you're wondering where you're going to be in 24 hours and then you get there in the

morning and you're anticipating and you're anticipating and then the first thing you would have seen

his clouds of dust then you would have seen Goldsworthy said this and I didn't think about it but

“it's a perfect movie scene too then you would have seen the tips of the pikes remember 17 18 19”

foot tall and when they marched they were holding the pikes straight up so the first thing you would see is these this like forest of pikes appearing getting longer and longer as the troop get closer and Goldsworthy was saying with the nature of the land there you know with its dips and dead zones and and so to think the troop that you're watching will disappear for a while and then all of a sudden they come over the rise then I mean the psychological building of fear would be fascinating

and at some point in the march both of these armies are now going to be you know formed or forming and completely visible to one another this was the same thing that we mentioned during the siege earlier that this is a strange aspect of pre-modern warfare where the killing distance is so short that you can watch in relative safety from pretty close by in this case these armies

“could be a few football fields apart from one another but remember the scene this is either the first”

or second largest battle in the Greek world in air quotes that's ever happened up to this point

it's either this one or the battle of Plateia 150 years previously where the Persian king invaded Greece take your choice I mean when the two armies can actually visibly look at each other and remember whatever size they are this confined space is going to crowd them together more so it's going to look incredibly dense we've harped endlessly and maybe even too long on the physical and involuntary things human being sometimes due in times of extreme

fright and the ancient Greek playwrights would elude to it sometimes right the chattering of the teeth that's audible the losing control of one's bowels and the funny thing about it is you're going to have people on this battlefield that aren't really afraid at all fearless people parmini of for example in Alexander they're they're they're not worried but amongst this vast crowd of people on both sides are are the less sure the more frightened the ones who are experiencing

the moment that someone in the first world war who's waiting for the whistle to be blown so that

they go over the top of the trench into the storm of steel I mean that's the feeling that person has and so there's going to be this moment where you see the enemy in front of you and what's more you see if you're Alexander your counterpart the head of state of the empire you're trying to topple on the other side because they're going to both the Alexander and Darius ostentatious about their look they want their side to see them can you imagine what it must have been like for the

Persians you know the people in this area haven't seen a royal army in 150 years will they sure his heck probably haven't seen the king either and the Persian king is not a feiro he's not a god in

“king but he's it I think it's safe to say you could call him in your god king a demigod king”

if you have this idea that god is with you in this battle well having the Persian king here would be the next best thing how could you lose with this guy here surely you can't but to quote another very confident maybe even arrogant self assured blonde guy to be the man you got to beat the

and if you can see him this is what we used to say about modern combat tank combat if you can see it

“you can kill it if you can see the king on the other side of the battlefield who's empire you want”

you can kill him and Alexander continues to march forward we don't know how far away from the Persians he stops but as he's advancing he's deploying at some point he decides to punch the light troops up in the hills what did we say it's like if you believe Aryan's numbers it's a modern day infantry division a modern day reinforced infantry division up in the foothills you know going up into the mountains Alexander sends some troops notably his special forces

a grainy and javelin men and some support troops up there they punch these light troops in the

nose they quickly go scurrying back up the hills they want no part of that and Alexander determines

that if he puts a couple hundred cavalry over there in some light troops those people in the hills won't bother him very much and he was right but as he begins to finish his deployment there

“will be and you Alexander fans know about this already a famous shall we put it in air quotes last”

minute adjustment on Alexander's part he will look on the other side and the Persians you know to avoid confusion we should not do left and right flanks as much as just saying the mountain side of the battlefield and the seaside of the battlefield and it sounds like the Persian king it had plans to put some cavalry up against the mountains on his side right his left and then when they got there determined it was terrible cavalry country so he moves them over to the seaside where

he already has the hammer head of his hammer blow stationed and turns the hammer head into a

sledge hammer head he's got basically what would you say I was just say all but most of his cavalry

over there and it's at least 10,000 could be 15 we don't know how many in a confined space that's an overwhelming sort of sledge hammer it looks like Alexander was planning the exact same idea in reverse in a mirror image because he was going to put his hard core striking cavalry on the far right up against the mountains and then when he saw what the Persians did he determined that he better call an audible better just send about half of the cavalry that he had on his

side the far right send them all to the other side because otherwise you're going to have that entire sledge hammer head of 10 how many per thousand Persian cavalry facing you know a few hundred Greek allied cavalry well that's not going to work so Alexander sends the the salient cavalry arguably is good as the companion cavalry but as I said arguably and you will get punched in the nose if you say that to the wrong people Aryan says that Alexander told the the salience to make

this maneuver this you know going in motion from right to left from mountain side to sea side behind the big block of human beings that is the failanks so that the Persians won't see it but it still means that when they get there the entire Persians sledge hammer has to be held off by a mere 2425 hundred cavalry that jobs sucks and you wouldn't want to be the guy that has it and the guy that has it is Parminio the only great general Alexander's dad ever found he said

one of the two jackalolane macadonian generals that are still around both approaching 70 years old the other ones and tippeter back in macadonia ruling in Alexander's stead and getting headaches from Alexander's headstrong mother but if you recall Parminio was only recently volunteering to lead a ship assault in person in the front rank so holy cow approaching 70 years old and now his job is to hold off tens of thousands of Persian cavalry out number three or four or five to one

Alexander will do some other finagleing putting troops in different places and by the time he's

“done it looks something like this and remember when you see historians creating maps recreating the”

deployments here they all look a little different from one another because everyone's reconstructing it from Aryan who's got some ancient source and well who knows right but the way it looks is as we said there are some light troops and some tribes in it a little bit of cavalry holding off any possible sortie by those Persians that had been driven back up into the heights up into the mountains on the far right as Alexander would see it so now on the far right of Alexander's forces are in the

position of honor by the way the companion cavalry normally he's with them and he may be traditionally he is with them in this battle but there's a growing sentiment amongst many modern historians that he may indeed have been with the units of the left of the companions the 3000 elite high passports

will get into the arguments for why Alexander might have done it in this battle but traditionally

most historians have had him again with the cavalry in the front rank tip of the spear all that kind of stuff the high passports to the left of the companion cavalry all kinds of roles capable of anything can fight with anything I mean just fantastic troops they are normally the hinge between the fast charging cavalry of Alexander on the far right and protecting the flank of the giant block of human beings to their left the failangs the failangs is the center of the Alexandria battle line it is the

“most awe-inspiring unit I can think of remember Alexander's dad is as far as we know the first”

person to ever create a true pike failang 1617 18 foot whatever pikes as we said a lot of long spear failangs is going back to say Mesopotamia in a 12 foot whatever this is a whole different animal and you know how effective it is because human beings will be using it up until gunpowder becomes really effective I mean the whole era called the pike and shot era involves pike failangs is 2000 years after this time period and Alexander's pike failangs is only a few decades old by this

time so interesting and important weapon system I would love to see it from a drone from the air I mean if the high passports in this battle line at the battle of this is take a look to the left they can see it reportedly 12,000 men strong if it's at full strength eight ranks deep that can vary we're told a rank steep in this battle which means it would have stretched the better part of a mile long anywhere from like you know I did the map point eight miles to one point two miles

whatever you want to say it's a long distance of human beings holding giant pikes to create the equivalent

of a no-man's land a dead zone for many feet in front of their unit seeing it would be incredible

165 years after this battle of Roman general saw his first version of a Macedonian failangs and proclaimed it the most terrifying thing he'd ever seen in his life the failangs is broken down into smaller units call them battalions call them regiments whatever you want access I think is the Greek name and each of those battalions are commanded by famous people people who made it into air and whose names are recorded and when I try to imagine you know how

“crazy it is that unit commanders would be famous like this I tried to remember that for the ancient”

peoples like the Greeks they didn't fight far-flung wars with many armies out there like we didn't the world wars where we'd have these famous commanders in charge of theaters their famous commanders were the equivalent of unit commanders and their wars were often fought on battle fields so when they have an amontus or a tally or a purtica's commanding the units and we question why their famous today well what if we just change their name a little and imagine one battalion

of the failangs is commanded by Patton and another by Eisenhower and the one to the left of them by Douglas the situation MacArthur and all of a sudden it doesn't seem so strange does it but a lot of valiant killer not scared of anything human beings in the officer corps of this failangs and they're ready to go to the left of them we are told some more light troops maybe

“some more tribesmen to the left of them are the 24/25 hundred cavalry with parmenia we just”

mentioned and behind all this we are told a reserve made up of the mercenaries a battle cry if you believe the ball get tradition deodorous talks about it we'll ring out from both sides echoing off the hills tens of thousands of human beings you know screaming their war cries at the same time

and now let's just picture the scene for a second if we will historian Arthur Ferrell says

the battle lines about two two and a half miles long estimates are that the time of day is the late after noon based on how much marching has already occurred to get us to this point are their ferrell says figure four p.m. he also says in this part of the world in this time of year sun starts setting at five it's pitch black at six thirty what that means is we've got an x to fill in for the algebraic equation that are the unknowns about this battle that starts at four

and it's pitch black at six thirty it's not lasting all that long the date is anywhere from no member fifth to no member twelve you'll find different dates three thirty three b.c.e. Alexander's army has been marching since at least three a.m. and who knows what kind of a sleep they had the previous few nights before that lots of stopping starting dressing the lines it's probably warm and by the time you get there and you're all set up and it's four p.m. I would think you would be tired

the versions have been sitting around waiting they may be scared but they shouldn't be worn out

“and Alexander will ride you know the stories say and any movie is going to have this up and”

down the front line he's still out of misarranged so no problem you can be that close to the enemy and you're perfectly safe ride up and down the battle line pick out individuals he wants to you know tell hey you did great in the last battle you're gonna do great today all that kind of stuff and then after that last stopping and dressing of the lines or so still outside a missile range the last advanced start it starts at a sort of a marching normal pace everybody's trying to

sort of stay stay together the line unbroken everybody go at the same pace but as soon as they get to the area that you would call if we were talking about artillery the beaten zone where the missiles can hit you the farthest range missiles that would be the are the Bowman once Alexander gets to that point everybody's supposed to go double time and the running starts or at least the

“cantering this is where things will start to get funky though because imagine between 30 and 45”

thousand men and horses trying to stay in any semblance of order when beginning to move at this pace while under fire the under fire part well who knows where that starts would just say 50 yards certainly but 75 yards maybe away and once that begins to happen this is the wild card in all of the attempts to recreate ancient warfare I've seen some wonderful recreations lately

uh by basically scientists who get people out in the field they train them for years they get

them out there and they're working on things like crowd dynamics and how routes work and it is fascinating but what it can't show are the the things that would get people hurt or worse if you try to recreate them in a modern sense and one of the things is what the missiles do and if they don't hurt or kill you they require you to react to them for example if you got the high pass pists right to the left of the companions and they're trying to keep pace with

the companions who are moving quick because they want to avoid all the missiles but the inventory has to you know sort of hide behind their shields they have to try to create a sort of a close bond with all of their shields to protect themselves from the missiles even if they're trying to do this on the run it's going to slow them down it's going to impact the ability to move fluently on the field and I still and you know you're getting the damn Carlin version of this story but you've

gotten everybody else as if you're an Alexander fans of why not get mine but I'm still trying to figure out how one's Alexander and his forces get to this river how the heck they don't get shot to heck trying to cross it you ever seen a sporting event where they start throwing beer or something at a participant or referee or something like that and you just see unbelievable numbers of these things flying out from the rafters on this person well that Alexander is going to be

“everybody's favorite target and you have to imagine instead of you know beer or bottles or”

something being thrown at a modern sporting event those are javelins and as Alexander's cavalry approaches the river the volgate tradition as it's called would like you to see Alexander is this

force of nature hitting the river clashing it and engaging with the Persians the problem is as this

is the sort of river if you believe the historians who are writing about it and why wouldn't you that sounds like it is made to order for breaking your horses legs and recall and you know people don't think about this very much but all the sources talk about the fact that the Persians had massive amounts of scouting forces out there as Alexander approached you know what did they say more scouting forces than Alexander had troops if you want to believe aliens ridiculous numbers

but what that means is those scouting forces prevented any of Alexander's recon forces from checking out the battlefield and advancing reporting back Alexander gets to find out and we said this at the at the grandkids also didn't we Alexander gets to find out what this rivers like when he steps in it and if he charges into it with 1,800 or 2,000 cavalry you know this is a river that's supposed to have you know the same steep banks as the grandkids brambles all over

reinforced with the stockade of spikes you know cut into tree trunks and big boulders some of the historians believe big boulders in the river itself so doing that with thousands of missile weapons I do enjoy how some of the ancient authors portray it it's a bit of a trope but I wonder what it

ancient authors say which they said there's so many missiles in the air that it's actually

“counterproductive because the missiles are all firing sort of at the same unit so imagine Alexander's”

companions are drawing thousands of missile fire troops to shoot at it the the missiles actually the ancient authors say collide with each other in the air so a bunch of it is actually nullified by the fact that there are so many but if there are so many how many are getting through and if Alexander's managing through whatever devices for personal protection he has to not get hit by one of those how the heck is the horse surviving which brings us to the other possible way this all could have

gone down maybe Alexander's with the high passpests this theory only at first time I ever encountered

it was in the 1980s when Arthur Ferrell wrote about it in his history of war and he wrote about it so that he could sort of take the opposing viewpoint but since then a bunch of historians have come to the conclusion for a lot of the reasons I just mentioned that Alexander likely would not have afforded the river and been the tip of the spear in this situation with cavalry his father often fought with the elite infantry in this case if Alexander did fight with the elite lead infantry a lot

of things start to make sense other things make less sense the things that makes sense is all this missile fires much more survivable if you're with the heavy infantry you guys with the big shields fighting his hop lights hop lights are traditionally not very vulnerable to missile fire anyway you could cross the stream at kind of a walk holding up your shields over your head and then when you get to the far bank instead of a horse trying to clamor up over a stockade of sharpen spikes you can begin to fight over

that the problem with this idea comes later because we know there's going to be a cavalry charge with Alexander at one stage in the battle and if you buy into the idea that he's fighting on foot with the hypaspers here at some point he has to mount up so we'll get to that in a minute

but it's either the hypaspers that cross first without Alexander leading them or the companions

that cross first without Alexander leading them but the infantry in front of Alexander freaks out

“remember it was always said that the battle field is ruled by phobos and pan right fear and panic”

and if you've ever been in a crowd that panics maybe that's a little bit like what the feeling is when you know he said you could see this whole battle if you're on some high vantage point but if you're not and if you're right down in it oftentimes like in a panic to crowd you don't know what's going on but when people start running often you do too you don't know what they're running from you just know that whatever they're running from is right behind them and in a minute it's

going to be on you and when people start to run it's contagious and this is why you know when people

say why don't you just mobilize the whole population to swamp Alexander with half a million men

that's because you're bringing a bunch of people more likely to run and that's more likely to make everyone else run routing is contagious trying to figure out what happens here is difficult there are lots of theories I say that all the time one is that there were a bunch of light troops and archers sort of at the edge of the river in front of whatever the formation of the the cardices represented and those the guys in front of Alexander you know that he's going to have to

run into and they're supposed to be most people think kind of hop lights so heavy infantry that would be a very bad group for Alexander to charge uphill coming from a river through the brambles up a sheer cliff when they're facing downward in other words this is the the setup that the Persians should have had at the granicus right instead of putting their cavalry on the edge of the river bank put your guys with long thrusting spears looking downward at the people trying to

charge up into them and be suicide unless the infantry with their long thrusting spears at the edge of the sheer river wall were disordered they'd lost their formation if they were confused if they were pressed together and if phobos and pan got a hold of them one of the theories is that the light troops that were in front of those cardices those hop lights from Persia that they panicked to turn around and ran without Alexander's either cavalry or high pass

but right behind them and they disordered the Persian cardices now even if that didn't happen somehow they panicked they got the other where you'll hear sometimes a shaken a unit of shaken

“and there's a whole theory on cavalry warfare that says that that's what they do to infantry”

that they don't ever charge for them to infantry but they sort of fake it it's like a giant game of chicken or if you've ever played the game of you know made you flinch the cavalry charges you

they don't panic if they stand fast the cavalry wheels away at the last minute but even if that's

“something you can do on a nice flat field of battle what the heck's going on here this is broken”

country I can't see that kind of maneuvering and what that means is if Alexander's really with the cavalry and he charges that infantry hoping that they're going to flinch what happens if they don't that's a heck of a rule of the dice if however he's with the high passmas even if they don't flinch you have a good chance of beating them it just might be more of a slogging match regardless of what happens either and again different theories either they run away before Alexander even

contacts them or basically there's two seconds of contact and everybody runs away on that flank

he fans of the famous xenophon work the analysis he talks about fighting in a Persian civil war and the Persians that he and his Greek mercenaries were facing ran away before they even got within a bow shots range you imagine they get within like a football field of view a unit of thousands of Persians an oblong formation he described in them and then they get a good look at you and turn around and run away war gaming screws people up mentally from accepting this reality too

because very few rule sets make it as common as it was for troops to just run away because who wants to play that game get everything set up paint your figures put it out on the floor

it's spent all day set up your army against your buddy you're gonna kick his rear end in your

army runs away but it happened more often than people like to talk about and a lot of it has to do in this ancient period with our natural unwillingness to face cold steel this is very similar by the way in my mind to the whole idea that unipolyonic fans and you American civil war fans already know all about it's the myth of the bayonet charge the idea that people would charge into each other wielding the pointed ends of the blade at the end of a musket and fight each other

“with it as though they were using spears we used to think that's what happened and historians have”

disproven that by looking at the cause of death in all these wars and finding out that very very very few people were ever killed by bayonets and the majority of those who were were often more of finishing off sort of deal I mean I think the numbers are in the civil war I think it's less than it's one percent or something and that if only on a course it's like two or three percent it's nothing but it indicates something it shows you that when confronted with cold steel

in a line of hundreds of human beings holding cold steel those people figure out they've got better places to be and if they can't figure it up for themselves Bobos and Pan help them to understand it and in this case one way or another no one stood around very long and that works out wonderfully well for Alexander but then again that was the plan it has to it's everywhere else where Alexander's troops are being put in positions where well I can't think of any troops that

would be expected to win in the sorts of circumstances that oh say the phalanx finds itself in right here because the phalanx has been splinched broken is a word that usually means routing and running away but when applied to the phalanx sometimes you will read accounts where they will talk about how at this point in the battle the phalanx is broken meaning the 12,000 or so men that make up this giant block of human beings has gotten separated from itself and now it has to cross this

“river and remember the Persians have fortified it in places so rows of tree trunks that have been”

sharpened and that bonded together in parts of the river or right when you're getting out of the river and these guys have 17, 18 foot spears that they're holding straight up over their heads and their real value is that they're so close together in a pin cushion but they can't be a pin cushion in the sort of circumstances and there's a steep wall of you know river side in front of them and a bunch of guys as we said with long thrusting spears pointed down at them and brambles and

what's the thinking here? As you might expect it gets very hairy and the late great A.B.

Bosworth who is by the way a proponent and always has been that Alexander charged at the head of his

cavalry this is his account I'm going to give earrings account in some other ones and they all kind of start if you don't mind is going a little chronologically backwards for a second usually right before Alexander makes the charge and here's the way a Bosworth puts it quote. Darius stood firm behind the panaris river leaving the offensive to the Macedonians. It was carefully launched a measured advance in slow time to preserve the alignment of the

failanks and then at missile range the charge led by Alexander himself. His cavalry was attacking across a stream and its momentum cannot have been enormous but even so the lightly armed

towards Darius who was in the center of the Persian levy surrounded by his personal guard elsewhere things went less well. The failanks could not keep pace without Alexander's charge he writes and a gap opened between infantry and cavalry. What was worse the cohesion of the infantry line broke down while they were forcing the river and further gaps developed. The mercenary hoplights in Darius's service could then insinuate themselves between the lethal serissa the pikes

“and attack the Macedonians from the side where they were most vulnerable. It was attacked a key”

rights used by the Romans to destroy the Macedonian armies in the second century BC and it isus.

The failanks was more closely challenged than any other time in the reign, meaning his kingship. There was a real danger of it being dislocated and routed. But at this point in the Alexander movie well no Alexander movies actually come at the battle of business which is interesting considering it's the nearest run thing to disaster Alexander ever had but at this point in the battle there are two ways of looking at it normally in our movie where Alexander's the hero here

you're worried this is a moment of great danger it could go both ways but if you're looking at this from the time period from the point of view of anyone or most people in the Persian Empire

and a lot of people in Greece and a lot of people elsewhere end to most in the easing people in

Athens this is the opportunity to destroy the person oppressing you you're rooting for the Greek mercenaries just like the great king is rooting for his Greek mercenaries and they are fighting for

“their lives remember what Alexander's doing to Greeks who fight on the other side even though the”

other side is really for Greek freedom in the case of people who would have been from places and Greece that don't like Alexander's thumb how about if you're a feeben and he destroyed your whole city you're hoping the mercenaries here cut the Macedonian failanks this invincible Macedonian failanks into pieces and this is the best opportunity you're ever going to see anybody ever have

of doing this to be honest and they give it their best shot it's unclear where they are sort of

in relation to the steep wall we're told and the fortifications the fortifications I'm envisioning you could envision it your own way that what they did here was do it to channel them in places where the crossing may have happened they can put these you know tree trunks that are sharpened and create sort of narrow channels that the failanks then has to go through where you know the Persians are waiting for them including and imagine at all the tons of missiles that are flying through the air

the Persians are known for this so every bit of operation you're trying to accomplish here with all the other things that are impeding you including that 18 foot spear and the fact you can't have a big shield and they're throwing the airs filled with this stuff but very quickly the casualties mount in the failanks as the mercenaries somehow get their way into the flank of it and the officers are getting crushed the leaders in the failanks are actually getting crushed the eyes and how

are as MacArthur's and patents that are fighting in the failanks are getting crushed you know famous names go down quickly mentioned by name is the son of Salukus one of Alexander's good friends and a successor who founded a multi-generational dynasty in the Middle East his name

“talamine no confusion there but let's remember talamine is a little like Mike or Dan for that matter”

in the ancient world his son talamine just happens to be the unlucky guy the unlucky officer who's in command of the failanks battalion that gets hit in the flank by the Persian kings Greek mercenaries and every account of this battle you will read is somewhat different from each other I like the way historian Frank Niden in soldier priest and God describes this moment when talamine's failanks battalion gets speared in the flank by the the hoplights of the great king

and there'll be using a nine to twelve foot spear which I love has is described as a short spear by Niden but that is relative compared to the 15 to 19 foot pike of the macadonians and Frank Niden writes quote talamine now stood some dozens of yards away from the Greeks he marched to the right of his men hurrying them along conspicuous in his purple cloak the Greeks smashed into them their short spears haha caught the macadonians in the side as the macadonian officer stepped forward

to rally their companies they made themselves targets and were stabbed talamine fell dead so did one officer after another when junior officer stepped forward to reform the companies the Greeks speared them to square by square the companies disintegrated most of talamine's hunter saw officers were now slain fatally wounded or trampled to death end quote

well didn't happen at any point in Alexander's career and while all this is going on

“you could drive yourself crazy diving down the rabbit hole trying to figure out what's going on”

to the failanks is left right the people you know at the sea with a big Persian sledge hammer you know is waiting to fall on poor parminio and his cavalry and some thrations and some marchers and a bunch of people who shouldn't be able to deal with them what's going on over there no good luck figuring it out you will find yourself being confronted at some point with polibious as math which is you know then interpreted by a guy like hands-on broken others where

they're trying to figure out how many cavalry you can even get into this space and if you're

cramming a bunch of cavalry in there which is used to these flowing battles and backs and forth and

you know looking like kind of a dance between large formations of cavalry well what do you do if you don't have any space for that I mean here's the delbrookian calculation of polibious as numbers of how many you know how much space just to be near 5,000 cavalry would take and all the ancient sources have quite a bit more cavalry than that in that zone and delbrook writes quote polibious estimates 800 horsemen per stadium that's a unit of ancient Greek measurement

with the deepest normal formation of eight horses and therefore six feet per horse with intervals it is also probable however that they were sometimes drawn up deeper and they may very well have

been much closer together 5,000 horsemen he calculates eight horses deep with six feet to a horse

would extend even without intervals more than a kilometer a kilometer is something more than a half

“mile so if that's what 5,000 horsemen on one side is going to be like well do the math that's”

how he's crushing sorts of guys from 100 years ago figured out their battlefield situations and the math doesn't add up to a lot of movement on that flank and maybe the best way to view it because something doesn't happen there how about that that's your wee bearish something doesn't happen there and it becomes one of those Sherlock Holmes dog that didn't bark sort of deal and you start asking yourself if the Persians have this mammoth numbers advantage maybe even a qualitative

equal with the Macedonian side why aren't they blowing through here like the sledge hammer head should be doing and it's possible that it's because there's an echelon sort of deal happening here we mentioned it in another battle didn't we were reset it like a wave crashing on a beach and the wave could be breaking way down the coast where as it's still cresting down by you and maybe

“Alexander's winning the battle on the far mountain side of the flank here before the sledge hammer”

of the Persian assault really gets going but if the middle falls apart none of that matters the middle needs to call for help and apparently does there's a 911 red alert put out in the form of a trumpet that also according to Frank nighten and he writes about the moment where the failanks calls for help and he's his quote surviving officers sounded trumpets calling men to regroup and other units to help Alexander's nearby strike force

heard the call better than Parminio's wing Alexander halted his advance under riots and turned to observe the fighting some hundreds of yards behind him seen this or coin us commander of the front half of the failanks turned and watched also he was closer to the beleaguered regiment in the Persian army a man in coin us as position would have waited for orders from the king not in this army as Alexander watched coin us gave the order for his regiment

and those beside it to turn around and head toward the fighting once coin us arrived on the scene he positioned his men so that they could hit the Greeks on the side with the Greeks had done to tell me coin us now did to them and quote now when nighten is referring to what Alexander is doing by this time Alexander is beginning with a couple of units of infantry failanks guys too to make his way slanted towards the great kings charried in the middle this is where as we said earlier

the problem with the theory that is with the hyperspace and not with the companions right on foot instead of by cavalry at the initial part of this battle comes into play because where's the time for the grooms to bring all the horses right thousands of horses at least a thousand closer to two across the river behind Alexander's foot advance so that they can now mount up against space is a priority here and we're dealing with a crowded situation at this point I was looking

up because I was fascinated by it whether there was a kind of law of thermodynamic hydro dynamics

and the term connected with this I thought it was a fascinating term is that crowds behaved like

“thinking fluids and so the people back into the small space are a key component in what's going on”

for example when you think of Alexander pushing the Persians at the front and how a maneuver like that would ripple like an accordion all the way down the ranks and people would get shoved backwards and the ancient writers in military affairs in lots of different battles would talk about how often the crowdedness would get to such a degree that people couldn't raise their arms you know you're in such a packed group of people and we've all been in crowds like that you

couldn't get your arm up if you wanted to and if you did get it up you couldn't get it back down again well how would you use a weapon this is actually part of what armies want to do sometimes to each other means shove them so close together that they become useless as fighters the Roman legionaries just have to have something like six feet of space around them to do what they wanted to do so you can see how something like this would be an impediment and I'm trying and I've

never been able to mentally envision it trying to imagine how a horses play into all this because

where are they in the crowds and I mean the the whole thing has always been tough for me to envision but I'm trying to imagine that as these crowds are coming together that people are slowly making their way through them I mean again if you were in a crowd of people and somebody needed to get to the front of the crowd to deliver a message think about how they would work their way through its slowly but surely now if they were killing the people in front of them as they did it well

that's another dynamic entirely too and that seems to be what it's like it's like carving your way towards a destination in this story the destination is the great king of Persia and the person

carving his way inch by inch towards him is Alexander and he is so conspicuous in his

dress as the great king of Persia is too we explain that they want to be conspicuous but that means everybody sees him if you have been having a little jablin in your hand you're not using at the moment when you fling it over there I mean it's crazy to think about how long you're caught in this crowd and people are after you but at a certain point he's approaching the great king and we come to the interesting part of this story where as we said earlier you got the

the actual head of state right there in front of you I mean the the wars between you know the the president of one country today and the prime minister of another will hear they are facing off Churchill and Hitler yards from each other and in the vulgate tradition the deodorases and the courtyuses and stuff they like to get much more sort of descriptive about it all tropes and everything

“else so remember and you know these guys weren't there some of this stuff is standard fair but”

it does color it up for us a little bit in my wonderful Robin Waterfield translation of deodorous deodorous explains colorfully what this moment is like and says quote the officers in command of each unit led from the front and by their example stiffened the resolve of their men the scene before a spectator's eyes would therefore have been one of men wounded and being wounded in countless different ways and struggles of every imaginable kind erupting on the field

in the pursuit of victory when the Persian axiothries a brother of deirius who was renowned for his courage saw that Alexander was making for deirius in a seemingly unstoppable charge let me stop you here or a slow carving his way through the crowd toward the great king deodorous continues. He resolved to share his brother's fate he collected the best of the horsemen in his command and with them it is side he swooped down on Alexander certain that this demonstration of brotherly

love would bring him great fame among the Persians he fought in front of deirius's chariot engaging the enemy fearlessly and such was his skill that many fell dead before him but Alexander had the advantage in terms of valor and soon a great pile of corpses was heaped around deirius's chariot for in his longing to break through to the Persian king every Macedonian contended passionately with his comrades and gave no thought to personal safety and quote deodorous says in this

pushing forward and killing towards deirius's chariot Alexander was wounded in the thigh this is a long running part of the story that some sources say in some don't interestingly enough considering

“we talked about this at the Battle of the Granicus too and I often do by the way because I think”

it's key one of the key variables on an ancient battlefield but once again this psychology of animals comes into play and deodorous writes quote the horses yoke to deirius's chariot

that they attempted to shake off their bits and almost bore deirius off into the midst of the enemy and quote deirius is also sort of part of the same tradition as deodorous and has a version of that story and he says quote by this time deirius's horses had been pierced by lances and were distracted with pain they had begun to toss the yoke and were at the point of hurling the king from his chariot and quote I read an interesting theory a while back because the whole

horse thing is so interesting to me and it was about how they might have trained horses to do things that people don't think they should do like charge solid objects and the suggestion was that they

would have these horses and train them to charge these ranks and then the ranks would always

“open up in training so they would get this idea that oh that's what they'll always do and then”

in the real battle they would you know assume that the people in front of them with the pointy spears would move and they didn't and in that theory a horse is a one-shot weapon because it will only do that once and if it survives it'll never do that again so psychologically you have to train sort of the horse to do things it wouldn't otherwise do because the horse psychology is key well how long would one expect chariot horses to sit there in the midst of what I just described

and not lose it heck people lose it all the time all those people that would run away before they

even came into combat and those poor horses find themselves when they do well one way or another

it's an into part of the story that they're not going to stick around and can you imagine if they

“go crazy with the great king of Persia in the chariot pulled by them area and has it a much more”

cowardly move and has the great king deciding he's got better places to be and in my Aubrey to sell in court translation of Aryan Aryan says quote the moment the Persian left went to pieces under Alexander's attack and derias in his war chariot saw that it was cut off he incontinently fled indeed he led the race for safety keeping to his chariot as long as there was smooth ground to travel on he was forced to abandon it when there ravines and other obstructions

barred his way then dropping his shield and stripping off his mantle and even leaving his bow in the war chariot he leapt upon his horse and rode for his life end quote so the Aryan version of the Alexander movie definitely portrays the great king of Persia as a coward as opposed to a victim of

“thinking fluids but in this case horse thinking fluids it matters not because once the great king”

flees the battlefield and this also very common in ancient warfare everyone around him starts to run to and this sets off a chain reaction and kind of explains what's going on with the Persian sledgehammer back at the at the seaside part of this battle because it sounds like it's just getting going and into it and there's a lot of fighting going on and then they see that the great king is fleeing and the army is sort of retreating like that wave pulling back to the ocean and

they decide to go with it too and now the killing really gets bad this is where the crowd dynamics really comes into play and anybody who's a person who studies things like escape routes and a crowded theater if there's a fire would understand what's going to happen here because in this sort of terrain there's only a few passes that will allow anyone to get away from what's happening here and they are nowhere near wide enough to deal with the number of people that are going to try to use them

and the metaphorical fire the pursuing in this case mostly Alexandria and cavalry is burning them

as they run and the second they have to slow down because once again you reach a bottleneck in the

way out and it's a giant crowd they are killing you from behind and there is no quicker and more one-sided way to die than that way there have been some wonderful recreations as we had mentioned earlier showing how routes may have happened and it's interesting to see how certain people run ahead of the pursuers and engaged the people running away you know at speed whereas other small groups of people running away decide to turn around and form a little block together I mean there's

a whole bunch of dynamics going on but once this becomes a rush toward the exits and everybody has their back turn trying to push their way through you are in nothing but corpses waiting to happen and the killing is immense and the Alexandria and compatriate a guy who starts his own

writers of ours he claims to have crossed Revene absolutely full of dead bodies and a bunch of these

“people were killed before the pursuers ever even got to them the crowd itself becomes lethal”

as deodorous points out this is from my sea breadford wells translation of the ancient historian and he picks up the story from the moment where the Persian king exits his chariot gets on his escape horse the lone horse that he can ride out of there and says quote seeing their king in the state the Persians with him turned to flee and as each adjacent unit intern did the same the whole Persian cavalry was soon in full retreat as their route took them through narrow defiles and over

rough country they clashed and trampled on one another and many died without having received a

blow from the enemy for men lay piled up in confusion he writes some without armor others in full battle panoply some with their swords still drawn killed those who spitted themselves upon them most of the cavalry however bursting out into the plane and driving their horses at full gallop succeeded in reaching the safety of the friendly cities now the Macedonian failangs and the Persian infantry were engaged only briefly he writes for the route of the cavalry had been as it were

a prelude of the whole victory soon all of the Persians were in retreat and so many tens of thousands were making their escape through narrow passes the whole country side was soon covered with bodies and quote anyone who's taken an interest in what sometimes called battle field archaeology that's taken place in locations like where George Custer died at the Battle of the Little Big Horn will be fascinated by as I am too by how modern technology can almost recreate the battle

based on what you could call debris fields left over whether it's ammunition, bones, equipment, whatever and if you you know read the accounts here this battle could almost be recreated that way I mean the carnage around that where the great king's chariot was his remarked upon there's a great slaughter there because that's where you know it all hit the fan right the the bravest guards troops at the king has or trying to literally fend Alexander off that's the famous scene

from the Alexander mosaic you know the Alexander charging spearing a guy and the great kings right there in the chariot and to look on his face well says it all even all these years later but they don't know how many people were killed in this battle on the Persian side for the same reason that they don't know how many people fought in this battle on the Persian side but it's an absolutely safe bet to say you know it's 15 or 20 titanics at least going down right 20,000 at least

you could bump those numbers up double and have a lot of people be fine with that too

“and the only thing that probably saves that from being worse is night”

remember the battle supposed to have started in the late afternoon so they probably only had by the calculations that we even mentioned two hours or something of light so however long it took to have the battle I mean Alexander supposedly himself is involved in the pursuit and the ancient sources say he pursued for looked it up it's between 20 and 25 miles so then you have to not just go that far but then turn around and retrace your steps to get back to where you were

and to be honest there's a lot of things that interests me about this moment in this guy's life it's something that's been relatively unexplored in for example the movie history of the man I mean as we said I think the battle of this has doesn't even appear in the two major movies

that have been done about Alexander but what's going through his head at this time first of all

I mean in my scene you're probably going to get one of those ratings where you can't even bring people under 18 even with permission from a parent because think about what he's going to look like at this point now the fine wound he supposedly has and very well may is going to have been

“bleeding so there's going to be that but you need to remember what these battle fields look like”

and I've talked about it extensively because in my mind I can't even picture it and of course you know battle fields in the ancient world are like fingerprints no two are exactly the same

they in some places they would hold two hours afterwards to show people what it looked like there's a

more big curiosity in the whole thing but it must have been awful to behold

“I remember reading some stuff historian Larry Tridal had talked about when he was talking”

about what the environment of the ancient battle field would be like and he was quoted in my copy of combat trauma and the ancient Greeks saying about a hoplight battle which is similar to what we had this afternoon here and he says quote the sights and sounds of this fight like any battle ancient or modern are nearly beyond the comprehension of the inexperienced the battle field itself would have become littered with bodies of the wounded dying and dead making it difficult to walk and

fight at the same time blood and viscera would have made the ground slippery in the air foul the noise and confusion would have been bewildering and disorienting all at once man to quote and so here we have Alexander on this ride back don't know how long it would have taken him depends on his speed right hour maybe two and he's got some time now to think in a absorb what's happened and when he arrives you know back where the Macedonians are near the battlefield he must have

looked like carry from the movie carry when the pigs blood was all dropped on him how can you be in close proximity to lots of people having limbs locked off i mean the arterial blood spurting all over the place go look at a crime scene photo of a modern murder scene and now imagine what we talked about with Alexander and crowds and all this kind i mean this is the sort of stuff that'll get your movie rated x or something and you won't even be able to bring people under 18 with

the parents you know a company meant ruin your movie right there but that's probably closer to the

reality i'm fascinated by several aspects of what what's just happened though the first of all

just Alexander leading the pursuit himself is so Alexander even his dad who was no shirter when it came to being the first among equals and like you know the whole thing i mean gave up as i limped around for you know the rest of the end of his life i mean he gave up his body for all that i but even Philip might have said okay let the light cavalry do the pursuing let's start the party early get the wine going but not Alexander and if this was the only time he did this it wouldn't

be worth bringing up but all throughout his career he does this he doesn't miss an opportunity

“to be involved in the fight wherever it is and things to remember and we said this before he he is”

famously not as tall not as big as the people around him i mean he's he's this is remarked upon

and yet he's right there first and he's gonna get him into trouble of course because think about

we said the boxing analogy the idea the wear and tear keep track of the wear and tear on this guy what's going on in all these pursuits i could transfer your brain into his mind and all of a sudden you could see the images flashing from his memory banks i mean you'd be traumatized there be your rated x movie right there but think about all these incidents how many people did he kill today how much of those things stick with him or not it's a long running debate by the way and

that combat trauma book i just mentioned is one of the books that talks about it there's all kinds of versions though Achilles and Vietnam that talk about this question about whether or not what we would call PTSD today is something that was really invented by moderns and that culture and all sorts of other things insulated earlier peoples from it or whether or not it's more biological and it doesn't matter what time and place you come from that might add as variable but you

you see enough murders and participate enough murders it's going to affect you no matter what it's an interesting debate but somehow one wonders whether all the incidents that Alexander's living and going through here are having some effect on him and if not the stuff we can argue about whether or not it's biological or cultural or any of those sorts of things just think about how many times you get hit on the head battle of the granicus famously almost has a skull split open

lot of talk these days that didn't exist before CTE you know the concussive damage that occurs in contact sports a lot of talk now that wasn't around when i was younger about this because more

“is known about it when you look at Alexander and all the wear and tear remember he's not just”

stabbing people in the back during these pursuits people are selling their lives dearly the battle of kene where Hannibal surrounded 50,000 or more Romans that's the end of the battle as far as a war gamer is concerned right that's when i pack up and go home but you still have to kill all those

car the genie in thinking the battles well and I've surrounded these guys but I still have to kill my

“way to the center of a massive crowd and everybody at the edges is going to fight like a cornered rat”

same applies to Alexander and that's a large part of the Alexander story that goes unrecorded

at up all the time he does what he just did here take part in the pursuit be the first over

the wall whatever it is and you don't record the rocks that hit him in the head and all that other stuff we'll have a chance to revisit this later because it's part of the mystery but the other thing that occurs to me if you're in just things like the extremes of the human experience there are other extremes beyond the bloody and the horrible there's the extremes of emotion I mean what does this feel like what is what is running through his emotional sense at this moment

when you try to think of like scoring a goal in the world cup scoring a touchdown in the Super Bowl I mean what is this compared to and what's the amplitude and what are the emotions you know it's a jubilation is this sort of shock is it a let down because you've had all this adrenaline and all this stress you've been looking up to and now it's

deflated are you simply completely physically whipped because you probably have never

“exerted yourself athletically and physically as intensely as you have today and remember the”

days leading up to it or is it brain chemicals involved we have adrenaline and serotonin and dopamine and all these things working on him I mean what does this feel like very few people have ever been in the situation where they can feel what Alexander's feeling here at least not at the amplitude he'd be feeling it I'm fascinated by what that must to use the word again feel like now I'd said that you know no one knows how many Persians died no one knows how many

Macedonians died either you have the numbers from the ancient sources which clearly sound like

propaganda or they're being misinterpreted right they'll give you these low numbers and then you

realize later they're only counting you know the companions or something you know those those Thracians or those Ukrainians or those light troops they didn't even they weren't even mentioned in the numbers so who knows there've been good estimates that the numbers are probably something you know 1,500 with a four to one or a five to one ratio wounded to dead so that's you know four or five thousand men wounded and that makes sense when you think about the kind of injuries you

would get from all that stuff being thrown in the air like we talked about all those javelins all those arrows kicking around in the air that's going to be a lot of people getting wounded it demonstrates yet again the difference between the kind of casualties that the winner gets versus the loser and it's that route and all the killing that happens after the battles officially over that really determines who suffers a lot more

speaking of the suffering there's an incident here that occurs when Alexander gets back from the pursuit the timeline is weird so it's hard to know whether it happens sort of like right when he comes back or if it's the next day or if it's spaced out over both of them but it's an interesting moment and I'm fascinated with this too we talked about it when we talked about Alexander destroying thieves and what human beings do in situations like that if you're a thief and he's destroying

your city and you know this is coming what do you do do you stand your home do you head to the

“you know city square to be with other people and it seems like that's what a lot of people do”

and when Alexander's troops overrun the camp of Darius which is nearby that's where they were sort of staying while they awaited the battle well now the Macedonians get their hands on it Peter Green referred to it as a looters paradise you have to think of as we had mentioned earlier something along the lines of a city the the number of people that would have been living including the hangers on and all the support people in this Persian camp would have made a good size

ancient city and the pavilion for the great king alone this giant tent has a courtyard I mean it's it's massive it's far richer than most of the people in the Macedonian army have ever even dreamed of and remember if the speeches you know grain of salt here are to be taken you know the ones that Alexander gave before the battle of any sort of value at all he's literally telling people like the thrations who get a slap in the face by being said you know people

who make a living off robbery he's telling them what's there right to motivate them well guess what time to collect your winnings and this camp is being ransacked to such a degree

thrown out because they found better stuff along the way so they throw out the stuff that they

had previously because they found something better and they can't carry it all and of course part of the loot here are people especially women and they're part of the nightmare that's going on in a place like this because as we had said the Persians bring their families with them the great king's family is here the family of a bunch of the people the so-called kinsman which is really the let's call them the oligarchy of a kiminid Persia they're here too and now they've fallen into the

Macedonian hands and they are being abused the ancient sources talk about it and you know again

“this is where you have to parse the sources a little because remember that Aryan is doing a version”

of Alexander that makes it really shave off the rough edges if he ever says anything critical you

take it as hyper critical because that's unusual for him but in this case Aryan uses what's happening here as a setup to show you know one of Alexander's really good qualities allegedly but the Volga tradition guys the deodorous is and the the courteous is they fully talk about what the Macedonian troops are doing to the women and an interesting scene develops and again if we're doing this like a movie there's a scene to include here because it's interesting and you don't get a lot

of these in history but it's it's the moment where the queen mother who is there so this would be derious the third's mother she's there she's going to be the elderly older power and it's almost through like the power of her dignity and personality she creates I was trying to think of what a good term would be to create the right visuals it's like a circle of protection around the nearby people around her drawing them again this is me reading into the sources but you can read it for yourself

and see what it is you think's going on here it sort of brings them into her circle of protection and it's keeping the Macedonian looters at bay and this whole incident includes a lion from deodorous that I love but wonder what the ancient Greek in the ancient Greek how it sounds but he's talking about the women that are being abused and then they seek help he says from those who need help themselves and that's like this queen mother I mean ostensibly they think she thinks

“and she's with her son's wife which is also derisa sister I think and and his two granddaughters”

and the grandson and and they think they're going to be executed anyway and here she is through the power of her dignity and personality sort of keeping the looters at bay and this is the way deodorous and the fabulous robin waterfield translation um tells the story quote the women who were taken prisoner suffered terribly previously given their pampered way of life they had scarcely been

able to bring themselves to travel on richly appointed wagons and never exposed any part of their

bodies he's talking about these Persian noble women but now they were evicted from their tents clad only in their undergarments be wailing their lot and tearing at their clothes they appealed to the gods and fell to the knees of the victors ripping off the jewelry they were wearing with

“trembling hands they fled with loosened hair over stony ground and huddled together calling for help”

from those who were already in need of help themselves some of their captors he writes dragged the wretched women away by the hair while others tore off their clothes and pawed at their naked bodies they struck the women with the butt of their spears and acted as though fortune had granted them the right to abuse the most precious and renowned of the barbarians possessions end quote well that's where courty is now has sort of the queen mother with her circle of

protection and in my John Yardly translation of courteous courteous is quote however it was derias his mother and his wife prisoners now who had attracted to themselves everyone's gaze and attention his mother commanded respect by her age as well as by her royal dignity his wife by a beauty that even her current misfortune had not marred the latter had taken to her bosom her young son who had not yet turned six a boy born into the expectation of the great fortune

his father had just lost in the lap of their age at grandmother later rius is too grown up but unmarried daughters grieving for their grandmother as well as themselves around her he's talking about the queen mother around her stood a large number of high-born women

queens and mistresses titles formally appropriate but no longer applicable they forgot their own plight and kept asking on which wing derias had stood and how the battle had gone claiming they were not captives at all if the king still lived end quote so you get this sense that these other women

have gathered around the queen mother because she's I mean first of all they're all going to die

“they're all going to die together that's what people seem to do in these so it's the situations”

but she's kind of holding off the looter and at some point I was reading some very good historians who were pointing out what's obvious when you think about it at a certain point someone of authority shows up some officers somebody who's who's not brain damage during the looting phase and realizes who they have here and how important these people are right Alexander they need a lot to Alexander alive right can use them for propaganda purposes all kinds of things

so as soon as they realize what they're dealing with here the dignity and the office of this queen mother does in fact save all these people around her and then Alexander shows up and has the chance to be Superman coming in and rescuing the vulnerable women from his own people and a couple of different incidents happen that are related one that involves the women

“freaking out during a dinner in the other room and Alexander hearing it and that they think you know”

that that derias his dad and they think they're all going to be executed so Alexander sends in someone to calm them down and make them feel better then another incident where he shows up with his good buddy Hifestian if you imagine Batman and Robin that's kind of Alexander and Hifestian except it's weird because Hifestian is the larger bigger sort of guy so it would be as though Batman and Robin appear on the scene and Robin is six foot two and 215 pounds and Batman's five foot

five and 145 so just a little bit confusing and it apparently in the stories confuses the queen mother who in the famous scene falls to the feet to besiege Alexander the great and instead of doing so had fallen to the feet instead of Batman of Robin because she thinks the larger bigger it sort of dude is obviously this great conqueror and he looks the part but Alexander in the story and he gets kudos for this too he didn't take any sort of offense and has some wonderful you know

sort of amorphous kind of eastern mysticism line where he says we're both Alexander so the Batman and Robin situation we're both Batman but the whole affair and the way he

treats these women and he's going to be basically by the way you know he's going to say that they

can stay in their offices he's going to give them even more of an allowance than they got before I mean it's it's perfect propaganda and that Alexander plays this part this is an underrated side of his genius by the way but he plays it perfectly but it allows these ancient authors in a way

“that's very interesting and this is where you have to throw a little love in the direction of the”

Alexander historiographer who's just sit here and study these things why it's so important for Aryan and deodorous and courteous and all of these guys that Alexander shows this sort of gallant nature this sort of lance a lot sergala had sort of almost you know courtly love air a medieval air a sort of values towards what they would have thought of as the weaker sex although Alexander's mother would kick his ass I read an interesting

line in one of the books that was pointing out that the fact that the ancient authors would make such a big deal of his treatment of women here was perhaps a reflection of how it was expected a person in his position would have treated them in other words maybe they were remarking upon

something that was unusual this is the way Aryan who always wants to believe the best about Alexander

puts it at the same time acknowledging that it's perhaps not a true story but even if it's not a true story he's still going to give Alexander credit because it seems like it should be and the arbitrary diseling court translation has Aryan saying quote I record this anecdote it's the hefestian story I just talked about not as necessarily true though it's credible enough if such were indeed the facts I cannot but admire Alexander both for the treating these women with such

compassion and for showing such respect and confidence towards his friend meaning hefestian if the story is just a story as he says it was at least inspired by Alexander's character thus he would have acted thus he would have spoken and on this account I admire him no less and quote well and the

and that's because as we talked about earlier Alexander's qualities are the sorts of

“qualities that in the right amounts and in the right mix are creating this formidable”

interesting person somebody who can do amazing things and we should point out that if a mosquito

with malaria bit Alexander today and he died he already would have written his name in the sands of history and be immortalized as the greatest conqueror the Greek world ever produced already just here so let's establish that but though same qualities which when they appear in the right amplitudes and amounts and mix can get easily unmoored and out of whack the golden mean as we talked about earlier is a difficult point to sustain and the ancient authors have this moment in the

Alexander story where he's starting to hit this plateau this is the good Alexander this is the

one that the people who see him more from the philosophical king side of things this is the the

era they laud um this is where Alexander really seems like something different than you're run of the mills sorts of strong manning conquerors and power mongers and its stories like the way he treats these Persian women and all these sorts of things that partially play into this the ancient authors say that at this point the army and the Macedonian rank and final have gotten a taste of Persian wealth and opulence and everything else and they're ready for more

Alexander has one of these moments recorded in Plutarch should be in every movie where he gets

“his exposure to the richness of this empire that he's starting to dismantle and remember Alexander”

even though they talk about a dispartent upbringing of the Macedonians all come on he's still the Prince Royale when he's growing up right in the court of Philip they may have been poor compared to Persians but they were hardly you know starving and yet when Alexander walks into the pavilion of the court yard of the great kings tent in the Persian camp it is men are looting Plutarch actually all the ancient authors try to describe the opulence and richness of this

we're talking about you know a football field size tent maybe with couches and i mean here's the way Plutarch describes it and then he has Alexander have this wonderful line one of these wonderful and big he was multiple ways to interpret it Alexander in lines that are classic and Plutarch writes quote this is from the dried and translation by the way

it picks up the story where Alexander's basically coming back from hunting for derias during the

pursuit he's going to be covered in blood and everything and he arrives at the tent and his own men have gotten their departures have gotten their imprepated form with tortures and they've got a bath drawing it's just it's already for him and dried and has Plutarch saying quote but derias is tent which was full of splendid furniture and quantities of gold and silver they reserved for Alexander himself who after he had put off his arms went to bathe himself saying let us now cleanse ourselves

from the toils of war in the baths of derias not so replied one of his followers but in Alexander's rather for the property of the conquered is and should be called the conquerors here Plutarch writes when he beheld the bathing vessels the water pots the pans and the ointment boxes all of gold curiously rocked and smelt the fragrant odors with which the whole place was exquisitely perfumed and from fence past into a pavilion of great size and height where the couches and tables

and preparations for an entertainment were perfectly magnificent he turned to those about him and said this it seems is royalty and quote I've seen that rendered differently this is what it means to be a king this it seems is what it means to be a king there's a couple of different ways you'll see it translated but you know the discussions over what he really mean is he taking a shot at the

“Persians for thinking that that's what this means or is he just in general all remember the Persians”

are the inheritors of the great ancient empires one right after another that go all the way back

to find himself in a position to start bathing in the exquisitely jewel baths of the people who are

“the inheritors of that level of royalty it's something human beings have shown a propensity”

of getting used to and history shows it's often fatal if you do well it's interesting of course is that the Greeks knew all about it it was their entertainment stock in trade for example to talk about how people like the kings of Persia were undermined by their luxury and opulence and the yes men and the women in the haram and the bowing and the scraping and the well it wasn't so wrong's ring that Alexander's put on his finger here it was Lord Acton's ring the one inscribed

on the inside with the words absolute power corrupts absolutely and even though he was a King Alexander

came from a culture that had more of we could say maybe I first among equals kind of kingship

“and he's moving into an area where if not the god kings of Egypt because the Persian rulers were”

not god kings but they were demigod kings and here we have a ruler in young Alexander who already reportedly has a tendency to wonder about his parentage and whether it's completely human or maybe a little bit divine and his mother might not be helping that tendency and now he finds himself beginning to inherit subjects who are used to treating their king as somebody more than human already well this sort of thinking about oneself as potentially godlike is a little bit of a drug

aspect to that can make you feel very heady I imagine although I've never been in that position

but like so many of the really dangerous drugs out there you can overdose of what happens to you

“is a historical figure if you do well maybe as we move forward that's what we're going to find out”

as I'll examine to the greater cautionary tale well let's just say that the stage is perfectly set for one of those Greek morality tales or the vulget tradition version of the Alexander story where we get a chance to watch the same sort of power that is intoxicated rulers from time immemorial the numbers of which it's almost crazy think of themselves as more than human after while although listen this is not a world of of a one god if somebody claims to be Jesus Christ

we lock them up in a mental institution today if you walk around saying you're a son of Zeus or something like that you just start doing the math say to your buddy well you know it's possible like I got around point is is it's not quite the claim back then to say your divine then it is now there's lot more gods running around the odds were better but you're separating yourself from the rest of the species and this is something the ancient writers talked about the ancient moralist love this story because

it's it's a carousel over again isn't it at this point in the Ikka story Alexander's really starting to gain altitude and those wings seem awesome and the sun's getting closer and he hasn't yet noticed that the wax is heating up but when you become intoxicated not just on power but on your own greatness and the idea that you're more than human and you're going to be the best and you're going to do things no one else has done and you're going to push the limits of history

well just be careful your wings don't melt wrath of the cons Punic nightmares Apache tears and of course ghost of the aust runt just a few of the classic hardcore history titles available from DanCarlin.com every true fan has hurt these favorites hey they make great gifts too 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 there's an old phrase that keeps popping into my head a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and it's a hunting idea bird hunting idea that better

end up having had a chance maybe a two and going home with none think about that when we get to where

we are in the story upcoming because the crowd that would suggest that everything we've seen up until this point in the story we could have seen it if Philip had lived if Ali's Andrew's dad had not been assassinated this could have been Philip doing all this and that's not

“impossible to imagine important to remember though that after the Battle of the River”

Granicus Philip had he done it would have inherited from the Great King would have snatched from the Great King Anatolia modern day turkey which is like four or five times what he already possessed in terms of land and resources would have turned him into sort of a regional superpower it would have been an enormous enormous thing some people would have been okay with that that might have been the bird in the hand for some people but maybe you know Philip is not the sort of guy to

maybe stop after an easy victory like the Granicus so easy to see Philip doing this too as we had said when you have an army like Philip had and you have this wealth imbalance between

“they sort of a restless Macedonia who's now subdued Greece and what are they going to do now?”

Well Persia's right there can't even defend themselves it's you know is drawing the Macedonian

army but how far was it going to draw them after the Battle of Isis you know you could basically say

a giant chunk of the Persian Empire is probably yours and the fact that the Great King got away even if Aryan and those people you know will call him cowardly and all that sort of stuff well he he lives to find another day he's still out there ready to make deals ready to raise armies I mean Persia still existing in Alexander still has to deal with it because Darius got away

“but this is the point in the story upcoming where the fact that Alexander is Alexander drives”

the story forward in a way that it almost certainly wouldn't have gone otherwise because we're going to start to see people peel off from this what do we refer to this Macedon attack this startup company that's you know with this disruptive technology some of these really early founders in the in the enterprise under Philip these people are going to start to look at what they've won and think that's awesome you know bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

and they're dealing with a guy who's operating with a completely different sort of metric he's not counting the money he's not trying to you know just be one of the great

conquerors out there in his day and age he's playing as we said earlier and this has always been

part of the guys appeal he's he's playing for a celestial position here a greatest of all time position he's clearly drawn in a way that makes his psychology fascinating to historians ever since because we all want to know you know what are the guys motivations and the reason it matters is because when is enough enough I mean what are the guys victory conditions ever when he's going to become a poster child you know for a guy who's addicted to conquest a guy who has

a many of her subjugation more on this in part five of a many of her subjugation