Episode 371 - The Siege of Tyre

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Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate.

Bella's, how are you doing?

Hot?

In a basement again.

I mean, that seems to be most of our life is spent this way, but yeah, good.

Trapped in a room that vaguely smells like Monster Munch.

Joe had never had Monster Munch before and I sold it to him on the premise that it's basically like the British version of funyans, which is exactly what it tastes like.

That's true.

Now we all just smell like onions though.

It would go away a lot better than if you were eating primo Armenian cuisine, all the raw onions.

You leave the raw onions alone.

They're delicious.

So I've gathered you here today because we're going to talk about, we all know him.

We all love him.

He's history's greatest twinkle warlord.

It's Alexander the Great.

I'll be honest, I don't actually know that much about it, but I'm excited to learn.

All right, great.

And we've never really talked about him on the show before, which is kind of weird for a history show that's been going for almost a decade.

Yeah, I would have thought that we would have talked about him before now.

Well, it's not because I'm homophobic.

It's because I hate Greeks.

In fairness, also, we don't really talk about ancient history stuff that often.

Yeah.

Maybe here and there, but it's not really the, like, if you were to randomly select an era, chances are really good you wouldn't fall on that side of things.

Yeah, generally.

And unfortunately, for like a lot of that stuff, like the really cool Alexander the Great stuff, like it has series written all over it.

And I always put them off for a different time.

Yeah, we'll leave that to, you know, like the rest is history, you know, Goldhanger production.

I would also say, too, that, like, to some extent, having some familiarity with the sources is probably helpful, like being able to read those languages.

But I don't know, everything, you can obviously get plenty in English, but there is a degree to which, yeah, you know, the groundbreaking stuff that's going to be done is going to be people who can, you know, decode tablets and whatnot.

I'm just going to go.

Yeah,

not really doing a lot of tablet decoding in my day-to-day.

The last thing you're going to see is a tablet in my hands.

Whoop decoding they tablet.

The reason you going to a festival drug test hent it's like could you please decode my tablet

between you and like british egyptologists in the 1890s succu up decoding the tablet

fuck off uh and the reason i you know i say i hate greeks it's actually not true but uh this podcast famously is a north macedonian nationalist so

we're taking a strong stance here uh it's such a funny story like uh country got owned so bad they had to change the name of their airport so they wouldn't have to have like a paragraph paragraph for a name.

Poor North Macedonia.

The story of Alexander is one for the ages, but today we're going to talk about one of his more well-known exploits.

And that's a time a city told Alexander to go fuck himself, so he changed the topography of the planet out of spite.

Have you ever heard of the Siege of Tyre?

References to it, yes, but I don't know anything about it.

So it happened in 330 BC.

But of course, Alexander did not decide to create a land bridge off the coast of what is today Lebanon out of nowhere.

Instead, it really goes back in history about 100 years before the siege.

But to make a very long story short, we'll just hit the greatest of, you know, 336 BC, Alexander's father, Philip II of Massam, is clapped by his own bodyguard, leaving the throne to his son, who's only about 20 years old at the time.

Of course, rumors continue to persist that it was actually a plot between Alexander's mother and Alexander to steal the throne, none of which has ever really been able to be proven, nor will it probably ever be.

And if you watch the Oliver Stone film Alexander, it's because Alexander kind of got honeypotted by his own mom because that movie is weird as shit.

Historical documentarian Oliver Stone.

I was going to say Oliver Stone making a very strange approach to historiography.

I've never heard of this taking place.

Have you watched that movie?

No.

It's okay.

But I've seen Nixon in JFK, so I know that he gets a little weird with it.

It's really bad.

And the most important thing that you should know is like a Society of Greek historians sued the film for its portrayal of Alexander because they made him gay.

Oliver Stone, not very, you know, know, kind portrayal of Greeks, either Alexander the Great or Spiro Agnew.

I just remember doing a show at what used to be a Macedonian Cultural Association club in Sydney, and I imagine they were one of the signing parties on that litter.

Like all those dudes in the Sydney suburbs were just like, I cannot believe Oliver Stone, you piece of shit.

He was not gay.

I promise.

I know this for a fact.

Much like all of your sources.

A guy came to me in a dream and told me the truth of what happened two, you know, 2,100 years ago.

Exactly.

It's like the film made him, you know, his sexuality a bit

more fluid, which is almost certainly what real life was, but also that he really wanted to fuck his own mom, which as far as anybody could tell is not really based in reality.

It's like, no, he's straight, but only for his mom.

Which kind of feels like Oliver Stone was like at his wit's end with the script and then saw Gladiator and was like, I bet you I can make it, I can run with this.

I got some ideas here.

Let's make this work.

Alexander's early reign pretty much collapsed to a pile of plots and revolts.

Most city-states held in line by his father through force and intimidation saw a chance of breaking away at the news of an untested boy king.

So, one of the first things Alexander had to do is slap an army together and march around and kick them all back in line.

Of course, this involved something that all Greeks do at one point or the other, and that is start killing Balkan people

before doubling back around, destroying Thebes.

Hence the infamous Alexander the Great quote, I want that Thebian obliterated.

I also laugh because if you look up like a

geology map or geography thing of the Balkan Peninsula, Greece is included.

You're just like, listen, listen, all right.

All right.

In terms of land mass, probably, but you really don't want to ask the Greeks their opinion of this.

Yeah, they get really mad about it.

Yeah, look, I'm just of the Stones position that it is all Greater Albania.

Exactly.

Everybody knows this.

That brings us to the eventual legendary showdown between Alexander the Great and his arch nemesis, Darius III of Persia.

Depending on which account you read, Alexander and his army crossed the Hellespont to invade Persia with about 50,000 men.

The choice that crossed the Hellespont was made on purpose.

It is the same spot that Persian forces crossed over about 150 years before to invade Greece.

And Alexander, largely thanks to his tutor Aristotle and his mother, who, movie aside, was a crazy woman who constantly told her son and anybody who would listen that Alexander was actually the legitimate child of Zeus.

So, you know, he was on a revenge mission for the whole Greek world.

Yeah, it's looking like my little special boy.

He is the best.

He is going to rule the world.

He's Zeus's son.

Zeus, unfortunately, can't attest to this because he's busy abducting other, you know,

teenage males in the form of an eagle, swinging them down and taking them away.

Am I right?

I love the idea you're now confessing to having anamorph capabilities.

Yeah, and I only use them to get laid.

Yeah,

you turn into a hedgehog and then you like spin very fast.

Yeah, I am canonically sonic.

That or he would just want to conquer as much as possible.

Depends on which version of this story you want to believe.

Was Alexander a Greek revenge warrior or is he just a king?

Yeah, probably the king one.

One is more entertaining and one is a lot more realistic.

Of course, much of this is not owing to Alexander's genius, as is often said or portrayed, but rather because Persia was in a state of decline for quite some time, owing to what else but countless throne-related beefs that left the empire completely destabilized and picked apart by disloyal and corrupt provincial governors, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah, Greece, you know, famously a very, very, very, very unified country.

Yeah.

But also in the case of Persia, it's just like, yeah, the sort of court schemes and whatnot.

It's just like, it's just a, this was already a problem.

Not that any historical examples show anything recently about corrupt provincial governors

running raw with it in any country we can name.

We just need to figure out like who's going to win this war based purely on a numbers game of who has the most scheming eunuchs.

Who up plotting with a vizier?

I don't actually know if in this era they had court eunuchs or viziers, but it is very funny.

I'd like to believe.

You take the lens of everything as the Ottoman Empire and just slap it onto

BCE Persia.

As Alexander invaded, these bickering governors were confronted by a Greek mercenary in the employee of Persia named Memnon, who had married into the Persian nobility.

Memnon warned the governors to torch all of their crops and leave nothing for Alexander and then withdraw from the field of battle, using Persia's vast size to make Alexander become overstretched, his logistical system to break down, and then end the invasion before it could get a foothold.

Of course, they refused to burn their own shit and instead demanded that they should all go to battle at Grenicus.

This is a very famous battle where Persia gets absolutely crushed.

Memnon gets the hell out of there as thousands of people die, bringing word of the coming Greeks as he runs.

Memnon, more like Memgon.

I'm just going to say that Memnon sounds like

could be the name of a modern think tank that translates news broadcasts from Iran to be as racist as possible.

Memnon is Greek AI that just makes everything Greek.

Memnon is the think tank that says that the Greeks are canonically Uzbek.

It's taken as a little bit of a, I don't know if it's a conspiracy theory or not, but I definitely think that like the whole thing behind memory is like, oh, we'll translate stuff that's broadcast on a daily basis in the Middle East to show how backwards they are.

It's funded by a lot of people who want to do basically.

do George W.

Bush style foreign policy.

But they didn't realize that all of those things they were trying to shock people with are actually just incredibly funny.

All of a sudden, it's like basically you've now introduced the concept of making the joke about how Spongebob got the house under the sea and the pineapple under the sea through jihad.

Who's to say he didn't?

Backfired on you, you know.

But the years of corruption and decline in the region saw many of the governors who were loyal Persian clients just a few days before throw their gates open and welcome Alexander.

And obviously, this is to save them from his army and destruction and being overthrown.

But for Alexander, it worked all the same.

The cities that did, namely Helicarnassus, would be put to Alexander's siege engines in the form of big-ass rocks being hooked at them, which was, of course, revolutionary for the day.

Though my personal favorite part of the whole Helicarnassus saga is a story of one failed attack against the city's walls happening after a detachment of Alexander's army got way too drunk and kind of double-dogged dared each other into starting a battle.

Like a whole bunch of soldiers get really drunk and It starts with two soldiers like, you, I have more courage than you.

I'm going to charge the walls.

The other guy says, well, fuck you.

I'll charge the walls too.

And they start going.

And then people in the camp think they forgot some order to attack.

So before long, all these drunk soldiers just throwing themselves against the walls while Alexander is just rubbing his temples like, God damn it, they've done it again.

As the story goes, after this, he goes north.

He takes the city of Gordium, home of the famous Gordian knot, the legend of whoever could untie the knot would conquer all of Asia.

And as the story goes, Alexander just cuts the knot in half with a sword, which is known as fucking cheating.

I like, I don't like, I don't know.

No, no, no, that's not cheating.

That is thinking outside the the box.

Disrupting the Gordian knot space.

Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, Memnon is sprinting from one city to another, constantly trying to alert them to get their shit together and fight off Alexander, while also losing virtually every battle he fights against Alexander.

And each time he's pretty much the only one to get away.

I'm starting to think like Memnon is an inside job.

It was only when Alexander was hoofing it through Syria that Darius finally realized that this shit should be probably taken seriously.

He is trying to slap together an army.

This takes a couple months.

And this is proving to be incredibly difficult owing to the fact his commanders, governors, and everyone in between had been busy stealing everything that wasn't nailed down before Alexander invaded.

And everybody fucking hated Darius.

It's kind of like a cyclical thing, right?

Like the state is failing.

Their power is waning.

So everybody's stealing everything.

So in turn, the...

the empire is failing harder and then they're mad at the guy who isn't necessarily stealing everything for not like why can't you control me from stealing my all of your shit darius joe biden the third

but he was eventually able to put together an army of about a hundred thousand and deployed against alexander isis yeah um

recent events make it uh slightly more difficult to differentiate the two so we'll just do our best well it's funny because uh if you ever watch archer the spy agency was also called isis um and then uh obviously isis became a thing and they rapidly changed it without saying anything because like in the background you see them like wheeling out the isis ISIS sign as a joke and they never bring it up again.

And there was some like weird online wallet for your phone app that was called the ISIS wallet at the time.

Yes.

I know that there's more examples of this where, yeah, like, you know, 10 years prior, it just didn't have the same connotation.

And now it's just, it comes across really funny.

And yeah, I, just for my understanding, where is this located?

Is this in Syria?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Just like ISIS.

Paying for all my heroin shipment with ISIS pay.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm using ISIS coin.

I'm being prescribed.

I don't understand why.

Just a guy who's like, no, no, no.

I'm not talking about that ISIS.

I'm talking about the goddess ISIS.

Come on, guys.

I mean, there was this thing that my dad told me about this in the U.S.

There were these hunger-suppressant, like appetite-suppressing candies.

They were like pretty mild, but they basically were, you know, as like health diet pills, but they were called AIDS, but it was A-Y-B-S.

And obviously the name changed.

It didn't last very long.

But I do recall there being a riff on this in one of the Onions historical headlines thing where they're like, in the 80s, AIDS will be synonymous with fitness and health.

It's like, yeah, ISIS even worse.

So Darius loses his battle so badly, he's forced to flee the battlefield.

And he's forced to flee so quickly, he leaves behind his wife and daughters, as well as tens of thousands of his soldiers, to die.

As the story is told, Alexander was so close to Darius that he watched him run and was pissed he didn't get a chance to kill him personally.

And also he kidnapped his wives and daughters.

Yeah.

That's just a different level of spite.

Like, I couldn't get you, but I have stolen your family.

Yeah, it's like, I got you within arm's reach and you're running out of the airport lounge.

That feels like things aren't going too well for you.

Alexander the Cray was rolling up and saying like, hide your kids, hide your wife.

Oh.

Welcome to the Darius the 30th airport.

It's like, you know, all cylinders fire and we're going to reach into the quiver and pull out a viral video from 15 years ago.

Big old Antoine Dodson.

I think he's still alive.

I hope so.

He seemed like a nice guy.

Let's not look into that too much.

This is normally the part of the story where I, you know, he says, fuck fuck it.

He dumps all of his plans out the window and just goes chasing off after Darius, but he didn't.

To make a long story short, Persia, despite getting its teeth kicked in since the invasion started, still vastly overpowered Alexander in the realm of naval power.

So he wanted to advance across the Mediterranean coastline and start by taking out Persian naval bases.

The king amongst these were the Phoenician cities of Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, and Arwad.

The Phoenicians had something of a deal with the Persians.

You build and staff the navy, you know, with the best ships and the best crewmen in the known world at the time, in exchange for what amounted to be semi-independence.

You can kind of rule over yourself and maintain a sweet monopoly, and most importantly, on purple cloth dye.

Ooh.

Yeah, they're ruled by prince.

Well, I also, I mean, at that era, it's like, yeah, can you imagine this?

Just showing me like, we invented a new color.

This shit was

awesome.

I've never seen this before.

This is real.

Showing open like purple sandals like they're the fucking galaxy foam puzzles.

Imagine it in the modern day.

It's like we found this plant, and if you like dry it and grind it up in a a powder, it turns your clothes into a hologram.

Check out my new Phoenician bathing ape.

Shut the fuck up.

You have nobody to blame for this but yourself, mate.

Nobody.

I wouldn't know what this stuff is without you.

That's from like 20 years ago.

That's the thing.

Fine.

It's a Phoenician, what is it, G-Star Royal?

I will say, if you want to know about, if you really want to get the...

The height of the bathing ape, sort of like technicolor camo era, just go to an airport that's got a flight connecting to a regional city in Russia.

Every single person will be dressed that way.

But it was like I was saying before is that like where I live is like now the cultural wheel has turned where people are dressing like it's 2014, 15 again.

And they're like, there's like Somali kids dressed like 2015 Swaggapinos in like full multi-cam babe.

I mean, I remember that Aaron Morgan.

I hear the Phoenicians are making a comeback.

The 2000s, but I feel like if I see people like, I mean, obviously the culture trends, youth culture stuff is going to move on, but people are like, yeah, you're going to do like old school throwback stuff, and they're playing like Mac DeMarco.

I'm just going to kill myself.

Oh, I heard someone asking if I heard that

McIlmore put out a new album the other day, and I was like, Never fucking speak to me again.

Oh, man, I lived through the peak, like, Mac DeMarco years when I think I was like 19 or 20.

I mean, so many completely disgusting, unwashed dungarees.

I mean, like, bear in mind that, like, his sort of base of operations was central Brooklyn, and that's where I was living at the time.

So, I mean, like, it's not even bad music, but just the whole kind of ambiance around it.

Like, it definitely attracts a certain kind of very, very unwashed person.

Even in a climate like New York, it's really bad if you don't walk because you get fucking diseases.

It's really

ants on your feet.

I mean, you got bigger things than ants in New York get on your feet.

I'm like, rats on my feet, mice on my feet, bedbugs on my feet, cockroaches, both German and American on my feet.

The German-American boon of cockroaches on my feet.

Now, the relationship between the Phoenicians and Darius is not a good one.

Sedan had rebelled a few years before and gotten pretty seriously smashed in response.

This meant the other Phoenicians were quite happy to chill with Alexander when he came into the neighborhood.

Alexander thought the other cities would go as easily, but then he ran into Tyre.

Tyre was by far the most powerful of the Phoenician cities and only gotten more powerful by sitting at Sidan's rebellion.

The king of Tyre was so favored by Darius that Darius made him the commander of his navy, which meant he was actually away from the city when Alexander rocked up to the city's gates.

And so everybody has an idea of what this looks like in their head.

Tyre is a city that's kind of split in half.

The old city is on the mainland coast, and New Tyre is in a walled-off island fortress about a half mile off-coast.

Inside of New Tyre, there's a temple to the Phoenician god Melkart, who the Greeks pretty much just said, like, ah, it's Hercules.

Same thing.

So when envoys from the city came out to meet Alexander, they grant him the freedom to march his soldiers through the old city down the coast, to which Alexander said, yeah, thanks, that's great.

But I really went across into New Tyre and give an offering at the New Tyre's temple of Melkart, owing, of course, because it was a huge festival going on to him at the time.

And Phoenicians immediately saw this for what it was.

If they allowed Alexander into the city to give offerings at the temple, it's such an important festival, it's pretty much the same as surrendering to him.

And the Phoenicians are trying to maintain kind of neutrality, so neither Greeks nor Persians burnt their shit down.

So the envoy hit him with a counteroffer.

Well, there's a temple to Melkart in the old city, and you can do whatever you want in there.

You can get real weird with it, but you can't come over here.

The meeting, which so far had been conducted in what has been called professional tones, as much as diplomatic professional tones existed back then,

was immediately ended because Alexander lost his shit, screaming and yelling and throwing things, demanding he be allowed into the main temple in the new city.

The envoys quickly left, ran back to the new city, and advised the government that we should probably let Alexander to enter the city.

But when they sent word to the king of Tyre away on navy duty, he said nobody was to enter the city, Persian or Greek.

It did not matter.

And he had a good reason for saying that.

Tyre was a fortress.

It had withstood decades of total Thailand or siege over the years, you know, a classic form of warfare saber metrics, if you will.

The city was known for being virtually impossible to take.

And the reasons for this were many.

It was an island fortress with incredibly rough water separating it from the mainland.

The walls on the island were 150 feet high in some places, and the walls are built right up to the water's edge, meaning there's really no beach to land on, exactly.

There's no place to get a foothold.

And the garrison only had about 8,000 people, but that was considered enough to defend this place.

Alexander was aware of this, which is why when he tried to speak to the envoys again, so maybe he could be able to figure out a way to end this without having to attempt to invade this place, the messengers were arrested, murdered, and their bodies are thrown into the sea.

I mean, it's a great, you know, disposal method of being like right on the sea, just throw shit on it.

And because it doesn't really have a beach, it's not going to wash back up.

Yeah, it's going to go to the old city.

That's their problem then.

Yeah.

I mean, they're probably throwing all their garbage over the walls anyway, right?

Did the Phoenicians invent the car battery?

No, they're getting rid of the car tires.

Maybe

they're just throwing their horses into the sea.

I was just thinking about this too, and I realize it's an extremely low-hanging fruit joke, but every time you say the name Melkart, all I can think of, like call it a weekend of performances in very hot venues, kind of affecting my brain, but it just sounds like they worship a Dutch guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Melkart de Joung.

He's teaching them all about

doing weird

colonialism in Indonesia.

I mean, I'm just trying to think of like places because I know some of these are also famous cities for like Crusader battles or like, you know, Frankish versus Saladin battles.

So place that he built a fortress and be like, no one will ever take this from me.

Well, ever.

Unfortunately, after Alexander leaves, Tyre is significantly easier to besiege for reasons that we will get into.

As the story goes, Alexander had a dream of Hercules himself fist fighting the walls of Tyre.

It must have been so cool to have dreams back then where you just envisioned a bonus level from Final Fight.

Well, it's like that scene from Street Fighter where you have to fight the car to get to the bottom.

I was going to say, yeah, yeah,

you beat a car to death, and then it's like, all right, you get all these bonus points.

But it's Hercules punching a city.

No, all of us just have stress dreams.

Yeah, we have dreams about we're late to school.

You know, with the school we graduated from 20 years ago and we don't have, you know, like we're not wearing the right color uniform or something.

We don't have pants on.

But imagine it's like that and you wake up and you have a cabal of seers to tell you what your dreams actually mean.

And everybody takes them at face value.

Because that's what happens with Alexander.

He wakes up, tells the seers, like, I dreamed of, you know, Hercules doing the Street Fighter extra level of punching the city.

And the seers say, oh, well, that means the city would fall.

But only after Alexander did something that could be taken as an act of God.

So what really happened was.

Alexander was a pretty competent field commander, well known for thinking outside the box.

He looked at the span of oceans separating the new and old cities of of Tyre and came to the conclusion: well, if they won't fight me on land, I'll bring the fucking land to them and see what they have to say about it.

So, Alexander gets together with a team of engineers and decides they would build a massive causeway stretching from the coast all the way to the new cities.

Yes.

So, it's sort of like the U.S.

Army Reserves ad from the 90s about like, what do you do when you can't cross the river?

Build a bridge.

But it's like, that's Alexander the Great's mentality.

Except it's not a bridge, it's a whole causeway.

Like, this is not to be used once or twice.

This is like he's going to change the face of it.

It's not a pontoon bridge.

He's just going to, he's going to, yeah.

All right.

And you remember, it's, you know, 330 BC.

Any attack is going to require a massive formation of infantry, siege weapons, things of that.

You've been talking about these formations, and it's like, oh, that's five divisions.

Oh, that's an entire army group.

Like, these are huge numbers of people.

And marching side by side.

So the causeway is going to have to be fucking huge so they can attack the wall.

It would need to be at least 200 feet wide the whole way.

The Germans hate the the Greeks so much because the Greek guy invented the first Autobahn.

Yeah, the horses had no speed limit on the causeway.

In order to do this, Alexander would need supplies and manpower.

So he enslaved the entire population of the old city and had them begin to part out their own houses and buildings and, you know, streets, whatever, anything that had rocks and start chucking them into the sea to start building the foundation for the causeway.

Throwing in all your old car batteries,

throwing in neighbors you don't like.

It's a shit job, but it's work, you know?

I mean, like, I guess this is like, you know, at sword point, Corvette.

Oh, yeah, but this is not an option.

It's not an option.

Yeah.

You listen here.

You are going to take apart your own house and throw it in the sea.

Tens of thousands of men, women, and children are packing down sand, rocks, and laying timber in the burning hot sun, all while the Tyrians in the new city laughed and shit-talked them because this whole thing looked ridiculous.

Some Tyrians even got into boats, paddled up to the workers, and pointed and laughed at them, like literally just doing drive-by roasts.

and so like what are you poseidon or something your cloak isn't even that purple

this shit looks dusty as fuck that's more of a lavender

oh my gosh so yes it's a drive-by boat roast drive-by hating they're not even like shooting arrows at them or anything yet they're like this is so ridiculous it could never work

they obviously never thought that the people in the new city would ever have to worry about this.

But then as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, the causeway kept growing, inching closer and closer to the new city at an alarming rate.

By every account of the story, it happens very fast, which I assume is what happens when you have an army of slaves at your beck and call.

But also, like, the idea of this seeming completely impossible to the point of like no danger, whatever, it's so absurd.

This is like a playground spat, and a kid's like, oh, well, I'm going to dig a hole to China.

And then he actually does.

Now, the reason why this was going so quickly at first is because the seabed by the shore is flat, right?

It's easy to pile this shit up.

But then they got to the deep part and slaves just started vanishing under the waves.

Alexander was on shore for the construction, personally guiding the building, encouraging, man, because I mean, he was pretty smart.

He also had a team of engineers with him.

And the sea just drops off into a deep end, which Alexander probably had no idea about this is why the water was so rough is because it gets trapped in this huge underground like ditch and gets churned up.

And then, you know, hundreds and thousands of workers begin drowning.

That absolutely did not stop Alexander and his army of slaves because why would he care that they're dying?

Once again, coming back to a recurring theme on the show, we are now into corpse infrastructure.

Yeah, I mean, they're definitely in there.

Like, if you dig far enough into the tire causeway, which still exists today, you'll find a lot of Greek skeletons.

Complaint tablet says I was promised a hologram cloak.

What's your benefits package?

One purple piece of cloth.

To make matters worse, the laborers were also close enough to the walls now that the Tyrians started realizing there's some danger happening here.

So they begin getting picked off with bows.

Then they saw construction was somehow continuing.

So Tyrians, who, remember, are a naval power, which Alexander is not yet, load into boats and just begin conducting non-stop drive-by shootings on the work crews as they dump literally tons of dirt and rocks and timber into the the water day and night.

So effectively, like there's a, as you go into the channel, the sea, obviously the depth increases, and they've just decided to make that cavern, chasm, whatever you'd call it, go away by just filling it in.

Yep.

Just however long that takes, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to block up and you're going to raise the seabed level, basically.

That is correct.

Tens of thousands of handfuls of dirt.

at a time.

Now you're going to be filled full of arrows while you're doing it.

And Alexander had no boats to to use to try to protect his workers, so the boats could just cruise up and down the causeway under construction completely unopposed.

And now having your laborers caught in a constant crossfire of arrows and flying rocks is obviously bad for business.

Casualties rapidly began to rise and working became just impossible.

So Alexander's engineers went back to work building a series of transportable armored walls that could be dragged over the laborers as they're working, who again are still falling into the ocean all the time.

Invent big trash can lid to cover these people with.

Yeah, I mean, it's and also it's made out of like leather and hide, which they made on site, which you have to think of how bad this camp smells because you know how they're curing this leather all the time.

They would piss on it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The same slaves that are filling up the water with dirt are just pissing into buckets, which they then are using to make leather to turn into shields.

I mean, like, but when you think about that many people, when you're talking about hundreds of thousands, and then all of the logistics support, like just the fact that every single person has to go to the bathroom at some point, like you're creating new topography in your own right that way.

Don't forget to go to the piss bar.

Clocking out of my job at the front of the seawall to go, then clock into my job at the piss factory.

You know, say what you will about Alexander the Great.

There's a lot of complaints, but the one thing that he skirts by on is he crushed the union at the local piss factory.

All you hear is like the whistle going,

time to clock out, boys.

Go get in them troughs.

So, yeah, I imagine that

this was making progress, but it was very hard to

continue with the same rate when, yeah, effectively, like everyone's getting turned into pincushions.

Yeah, pincushions,

and like waterlogged corpses is constantly lapping up at the side of the causeway.

Alexander de Greyser sitting on the shore looking at you like he's playing Sim City.

Yeah, he's just, I love the idea that, like, you know, when you get to this level of absolute control as a military commander, that you can basically do the terraforming from city skylines.

It just

matter costs a billion dollars just keep raising the coast how many people do you think have died making this like do you think i care

just like me playing literally any city building game of like oh uh you know wmd went off or there was some fucking chemical spell like i'll just ignore that side of the city now at certain intervals the laborers stopped on the causeway to build siege towers so alexander's soldiers could staff them and fire back at the constant swarming mass of boats that were trying to kill them and these towers were actually quite effective.

And so was that movable armored wall.

And the Tyrians began to not be able to slow them down quite so much.

So they decided to up the game.

A fire ship.

They loaded a ship down with pitch and brimstone and charged that thing right into the side of the causeway.

Because remember, the top of the causeway is timber.

Yeah.

And, you know, there's building equipment everywhere.

There's siege towers built on top.

This thing is just a giant pile of kindling.

It crashes into the causeway, sets everything on fire, and then supporting ships behind the fire ship land on top of the causeway and just begin slaughtering workers.

So a lot of laborers are given the choice.

Well, like, well, do I burn alive on the causeway?

Do I jump into the ocean and die?

Or do I let the guys who are actually my countrymen murder me?

You get three choices.

You know, who says Alexander doesn't care about the welfare of his workers?

And everyone is dressed in purple at the time.

Everyone's dressed like prince.

The artist probably knows the guy staving a sword into my face.

Alexander's seize engines went up in flames and the towers came down by the time Alexander ordered a retreat.

By the time some of the workers managed to get back to the old city, the entire causeway had been burnt down, reduced to little more than dirt lumps with burning logs and slaves on the sea.

The Tyrians pulled back to their city, convinced that they had won.

However, Alexander decided, you know what?

This wouldn't have happened if I had just built a bigger causeway.

So he did.

On top of that, he made a pretty obvious realization.

It was really stupid to attack an island fortress without a navy.

That seems to be a bit of an oversight.

So he sent envoys to the surrounding Phoenician cities to demand that they give their fleets over to them, and they did.

Soon, Alexander, who only a few minutes before had virtually no fleet to speak of, had one of the largest in the world, taking ships from Cyprus, Sidon, and Byblos, all coming to his aid.

The Tyrians, possibly hit with...

history's biggest Uno reverse card up until that point, suddenly found themselves overpowered at sea and trapped into their own port, as Alexander's new fleet had them completely blockaded.

The Tyrian fleet and its commanders did do something really smart while also recognizing there is zero way they could fight Alexander at sea anymore.

They chained all of their ships together from one end of the port to the other, blocking it so Alexander could invade the port.

They staffed it with Marines ordered to fight until the death, or as I just say, Marines.

Marines are universally psychotic.

I mean, I do feel like there's always these stories where it just starts to sound like the realm of the fantastic when it's like, how do you defend the port from this massive fleet?

Like, chain all the boats together, build, like, it just, it's, it starts to sound like legendary in the sense of, you know, like half made up.

But it's also like, what if we made this island a peninsula?

Yeah.

I mean, like, one side is literally terraforming the land.

And when you remember that naval warfare at the time was just infantry warfare on boats, like they would crash into one another and just shoot Marines across and start stabbing each other.

So it makes sense.

Now they can't invade.

They would have to crash through this chain of boats.

And if Alexander attempted to break through the small confines of the port, because the port's entry, of course, it's easily defendable.

It's small on purpose.

Despite the fact that they outnumber them, they would lose so many ships and men just to take over these ports.

And again, it's on the other side of where he's building this giant fucking causeway anyway.

But outside of that, the Tyrians could do nothing but watch as a second causeway, this one double in size from the first, begin inching closer to them across the sea.

Just like you wake up in the morning, you have whatever the ancient Greek version of coffee, which was probably wine and olive oil.

Look out the window, and you can just see he's like, Yeah, they made another six inches yesterday.

The coastline is growing again.

Yep.

Oh, goddammit.

The road is coming right at us.

Credit or credit, Sue to Alexander.

He can build a road faster than like any state that I've ever lived in.

Well, I mean, much to Republican governor's chagrin, you can't corvée labor 100,000 people at a point

because of woke.

Not yet.

Alexander Gray is just doing, you know, those videos from China of them like building overpasses overnight.

And it's just like everyone's moving around at like triple speed.

I hate to be corvette to work at a Holden Bloodfeast Highway in like

Maryland or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

They've built a huge highway so they can get more trucks to bring in the corn.

They're going to turn into ethanol that everyone's legally required to burn.

The Tyrians resolved to to fight to the death doing all they could building larger and larger wooden towers on top of their already 150 foot tall walls and then they built catapults on top of those rickety ass wooden frames to fire down onto alexander every ancient battle is basically fortnight yeah there's a tyrian just on top of the wall hopping as like a tower just shits out underneath it i mean like i guess okay it makes sense it's sort of desperate times calling for desperate measures but like there is an element of which is totally ridiculous to this like all everything

fell down.

Like as their buildings, like, oh, we have to build another town.

Oh, oh, God.

And

crashed directly into the elementary school.

Could you build an appendage on top of the appendage, please?

In another world, Alexander the Great got one-shotted by someone in a Bob Belcher skin.

Damn it.

Floating above the walls of Tyre.

Absolutely what 360 no scopes him across the causeway.

Macedon collapses over there.

H-Thump Benjamin is now now leader of the entire creek world like yeah constantine instead of seeing the sign of the cross in the sky he just ceased to care the cast of bobs burgers

of course this all eventually leads to a non-bob's burgers related problem up until now the tyrian navy was free to come and go bring in supplies to the city and at one point even evacuate most of their women and children but they didn't force them to leave Like a lot of people's wives and kids refused to leave.

So, but a lot of people are gone.

But now that was gone, right?

They couldn't get their fleet out of port.

But during that time, they also mean they could bring in stones and arrows and projectiles to shoot at the work crews, but now they couldn't.

So they began tearing up stones from the street or stripping their own buildings bare for ammunition to fire at the Greeks.

So imagine you're a worker working on the causeway and the Taco Bellislide just rips overhead.

Well, yeah, that thought did cross my mind, though.

It's like the impenetrable fortress, but then if you wind up getting completely cut off, you're sort of like, damn, I wish we could grow some shit in here.

Well, well, well, if I'm not being hoisted by my own petard, and then that the thing that is hoisted me collapses because we've run out of materials to build them.

I mean, to be fair, this is long before the invention of the petard.

So you're being hoisted by your toga?

My purple toga.

Hoisted by a purple robe.

A counterfeit purple robe.

We ran out of the purple plants.

I think that's what took out David Carradine.

I washed it too much, and now my toga is just chartreuse.

That's an unforgivable faux pas in the Phoenician world.

You will be stoned to death.

Looks like you're going to be stoned to death guardless.

I'll fucking kill you.

You're either being stoned to death or all the stones.

No, you won't be stoned to death because all the stones are now in the city.

Fire you at the Macedonians.

Thus cementing your place in the foundation of the new causeway, I suppose.

Which has got to be like a third bone at this point.

It's bone by volume.

My lord, King Alexander, one of our soldiers was taken up by a large-headed Irishman flying through the air.

He's fighting on both sides somehow.

Another few weeks of this, and the second causeway had gotten close enough to the walls that Alexander's heavy siege weapons were sent for to pound a living shit out of the mainland-facing wall.

Alexander, or rather his engineers, were generally considered revolutionaries in the field of siege warfare and siege engines, and they invented all kinds of acme-ass shit to use in the process, including my personal favorite, the crow.

And this was not a siege weapon that, for some reason, only kills Bruce Lee's son.

son

the siege weapon you just didn't know was loaded

it was a massive hook on a chain fired from a tower that would sweep across the top of a battlement and just like rip people apart and pull down stones and shit like the tactical version of getting the cane at the apollo theater

i like this that you said it's basically like like a large a hook that sweeps things clean, basically, but at like a comically overstated scale.

Yeah.

That's what I said.

Like this is some Acme shit.

I mean, this is the era of, what is it, Syracuse with the reflecting mirrors, like primitive laser cannon to set boats on fire.

Like, they did have some unique weapons in this era.

And Alexander landed more rams, catapults, and giant acme scythes around the walls.

And the Tyrians met them at every turn, wildly outnumbered, but not really seeming to care.

Repair teams slapped together the city's walls as soon as Alexander broke them down.

I assume by doing like the Fortnite rapid build trick, just hopping through the air and shitting out bricks.

I hate when I get hit with a massive fucking stone and then see Bob Belcher doing the gritty across the top of the battlements.

Alexander's not even sure what burgers are yet, but he goes to the airport.

Somewhere in the collective European unconscious, there is a legend of Tomato Town.

Everybody remembers the famous last stand at Tomato Town where Alexander the Great built an overpass over the highway to get there fast.

No, it would have been at Tilta Towers because tomatoes hadn't been brought to your

loving exchange.

Fuck.

Then the Greeks were reminded suddenly that they, in fact, had built a causeway in the middle of a very, very angry sea, and it got swamped by gigantic waves that crashed down and swept away hundreds of men and siege weapons.

And like Alexander sitting in the show, like, fuck, I forgot about the ocean.

Yeah, he might be the son of Zeus, but he has angered his uncle Poseidon.

Yeah.

Alexander thought that this would all all end when the causeway eventually reached the island and he could launch his frontal assault.

But this is where he discovered that maybe his legendary professional phalanx formations with their light shields and 16 foot long spears were maybe not the best thing to try to scale 150 foot tall ladders.

From where the Tyrions were sitting, the Macedonian men were sitting ducks.

From all the way at the top, they could just drop whatever they wanted over the edge and it would just cave their fucking skulls in.

Like the Macedonian men's shields were so light that if they just dropped a stone from the top, it would punch straight through it.

Right into their soft, meaty bodies underneath.

One of their favorite tricks was to fill bowls with sand, put the bowl of sand over an open fire until the sand glowed red, and then dump the burning sand on top of the assaulting soldiers.

The burning sand would get into every little crack in their armor and also, famously, their eyes.

And the men would jump into the ocean to die rather than continue to burn the sight of watching men's breastplates fuse to their skin and their eyes melt out of their own skulls was almost enough to force alexander to call the whole thing off right about then was when another attack managed to breach the city's walls though but only barely at the south of the island the initial attack into the breach was forced back but now they got all the way up into the city itself everybody knew the end was pretty much near now it was july the siege had been going on for six months months, and the garrison inside the city was looking pretty fucking bad.

Remember, for most of those months, they've been completely cut off.

So people were thirsty, they were hungry,

they were, disease was spreading through because they were just chucking dead bodies anywhere they could put them, mostly in the sea.

But Alexander's men were actually throwing them back.

They were eating all the plants they used to dye the clothes purple.

Everyone's looking like Barney.

It's like combat grimace.

I mean, that thought did cross my mind.

I'm like, yeah, not a lot of fresh water when you're in the impenetrable island fortress.

Someone somewhere is really thinking like, man, we fucked up.

There's some serious oversights in our defense policy here.

Namely, like, turns out we need water to live.

People were so freaked out that they thought the gods were abandoning them.

So they began to tie statues of the gods down to the street because people said that they saw them flying off to like return to the heavens.

Like, quick, bolt down that statue so it doesn't get away.

However, just because they were starving and thirsty did not mean they stopped fighting.

At one point, the Tyrian navy launched a suicide attack against the Cypriot ships that were blocking them in.

And this failed spectacularly as the entire Tyrian sortie was lost, but that also scattered the Cypriot ships and caused a hell of a lot more damage than they took in the process.

It was also news to Alexander that it was clear that these people were not going to surrender.

They were going to fight until he took every last street in that city.

So he gave his men three days of rest and then ordered the final assault on the city to begin.

Boats were loaded with men and siege weapons, the causeway held thousands more.

And soon Macedonian forces were attacking the city from every direction.

With, as it's told, Alexander leading them personally from the front.

And this is less to do with like hero worship shit than a really bad habit that Alexander had.

For people who don't know, this is eventually how he dies.

And he does it all the time.

Like Alexander gets wounded so many times over the years of his short life.

It's actually quite impressive he didn't die of an infection sooner.

Yeah, it's never really a good idea in the history of this podcast when the leader goes to the front.

They usually either get Napoleon horsed or they like very, very narrowly escape with all of their limbs.

Yeah.

Until you eventually don't.

Yeah.

At this point, the men inside the city were too spread thin, trying to plug all the gaps being smashed into the walls by the assault force.

Not to mention the Fenders had completely run out of arrows by now.

So as the Macedonians pour into the city, they're just getting, like, making it hail with literally anything they can get their hands on.

Rocks, cooking utensils, bits of wood, fucking little paring knives and shit.

Alexander's men burst through the breach in the walls around the same time the Allied Macedonian fleet smashes through both harbors.

Men are pouring through every hole of the city, or as what we call Greece.

This does sound like something someone on Xbox Live would say about my mom, but whatever.

The Tyrian defenses began to break down.

Still, they fought on, even as all organizations completely broke down.

Every corner of the city was another last stand against against the Macedonians, again, with those hilariously oversized spears, forced to fight through the streets while dudes smashed their skulls from above with stones and burning pots of sand.

Alexander made zero attempt to control his men as they unleashed what was now nearly seven months of rage built up on the city's occupants.

Men were slaughtered, as were thousands of women and children who had not been evacuated.

Some historians point out that Alexander took part in the wanton massacring owing to the fact that he was furious about having to build that fucking causeway, which that would not surprise me.

Tyre died in a sea of blood and flames.

And if stories are to be believed, the only people saved from the slaughter or slavery were a couple hundred people that Alexander found hiding in the city's temple to Markhart when he finally showed up.

Hey, bro, remember when you wouldn't let me in?

Now, as one final fuck you to Tyre, and probably Darius, and as a lesson to those who would deny the murder Twink what he wanted, Alexander ordered the city's walls to be lined with prisoners, all crucified.

To line the walls, in case you're wondering the math, it took 2,000.

Wow.

And this is like the old school crucifixion.

Like, obviously, when we think of crucifixion now, we think of the Christian cross.

No, you were, it was like a, more like a T.

Yeah, you're T-posing for a time.

Yeah, you're T-posing.

And, like, you were going to more than likely suffocate and die before you die from like blood loss or anything.

And nobody's going to be nice enough to come up and give you a quick shank so you bleed out.

Yeah, yeah, you know, not everyone got to create the lance of Longenus.

Then Alexander finally got to make his offering at the temple to honor the gods.

Then he held several days of feasting and games in the city, which was a largely burnt-down mass grave surrounded by the rotting, crucified corpses of thousands of people by now.

So, you know, great, great vibes at that dinner.

Yeah.

You know, it smelled crazy in there.

I would love to eat this delicious food.

Unfortunately, like, I got hit with so much hot sand, I've been turned into a sealed lobster of a human.

Just got a carapace.

In the end, the brutality of the siege got Alexander exactly what he wanted.

When the news of what happened to Tyre spread, virtually every other city on the coast surrendered rather than face that smoke.

Shit, Darius himself sent peace terms to Alexander after this, but Alexander refused, continuing his conquest to the south.

Today, if you look at a map, you'll see that Alexander's causeway remains because he turned Tyre into a peninsula.

The end.

That is fucking mad.

Yeah, fucking crazy, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that would be a pretty enormous undertaking now with all the things we have now to do that.

And this was being done before, like, the concept of like a lever or like a pulley was seriously revolutionary.

And like today, there's two cities have kind of melded into one.

So there's just like apartments and stuff built on it.

So you can have like the world's most haunted apartment building in Tyre.

That is the end, fellas.

How do you feel about the siege of Tyre?

I mean, like, Alexander the Great, you know, one-upped by an asp at one stage, but

anytime you hear any story about anything he did, it almost sounds like it just, oh, no, this is bullshit.

Like, this is obviously, like, creepy historiographic lies, but, you know.

Yeah.

It's one of those, like, bigger than reality stories, which is one of the reasons why we remember it, right?

Yeah.

Because remember, while he's doing this, he's like barely a legal drinking age.

Yep.

I'm just imagining, yeah, that, like.

Part of me thinks, okay, this has probably been, as you were describing, exaggerated throughout history, but then it's like, no, but the literal physical remnants of it are still there.

Yeah, only a few times in history has this happened.

The Romans did a few things.

You can still like, they move the earth to you, you can see it.

Yeah, and Alexander the Great is like, I need you to take all those stones and put them in the sea.

Have we decided that he has Mickey Mouse voice?

He's got Bob Matthews' voice.

He doesn't live in a shoe, lives in a sandal.

No snake will ever ruin my career.

I won't get snaked on.

Oh, no, an arrow in India.

Certainly, nothing bad will happen from from this.

But fellas, that is an episode.

And to our dear listeners, we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, you can support the show on Patreon.

You can ask us on Patreon.

You can ask us on the Discord where we have a dedicated channel to it.

Or you can build a causeway from wherever you are to wherever we are, and we will answer it on the show.

And today's question is: what is your unexpected hobby or interest?

Unexpected.

People will be surprised.

Like, is it like, yeah, I'm wondering, is is the question is it like i didn't expect to get into this or people would be surprised to learn i feel like we could go both

huh so i've had to

learn how to use a lot of power tools that i kind of wish i had learned from my dad before because he like was a carpenter but i

actually recently learned how to use like um

like a router like not router like the computer kind but actually like the one that you have on a track to basically to cut grooves into things and stuff like that i've slowly been learning this stuff.

And it's actually kind of, it's really cool if you know how to use it.

Like it requires, there's this ridiculous sensation of like, I've been thinking about this for two weeks and planning out how to do it.

And then the actual cut takes like 45 seconds.

But obviously it's much better if it goes well because you planned it versus like, oh, I'll just figure this out as I go.

And you just, it just, you know, becomes a complete disaster and you waste all this material.

I don't know.

I guess that's probably it.

I mean, like, I've

working

sound engineer and doing building studios and stuff, like, obviously had to learn a lot about installing shelves and microphone cables and and network cables.

So, um, but that, that one, I think, like, there are a lot of things I remember my dad having that I like just never thought I would need.

Like, okay, a table saw, whatever, but like, you know, needing to use like a track saw or a jigsaw or the difference between a regular hammer drill and an SDS drill and stuff like that.

And weirdly, doing stuff that damages your hearing has become part of my job working in sound.

I don't know why.

I don't know.

I feel like

the hobbies that I have are probably like pretty on brand for me.

Like, obviously, I do a lot of photography.

I'm really into 19th-century portraiture, which is, once again, probably something that's not surprising.

I don't know.

I really like Sabrina Carpenter's music, but once again, like, that's probably not surprising for anyone who listens to this fucking podcast.

I have to throw this in as a thing because, as we were trying to research an upcoming series, I couldn't find what I was looking for on, you know, like, what was it, Open Library?

But I did wind up on

them basically talking about portrait photography and specifically nude portrait photography, which I was trying to find something about Lord Byron, and yet for some reason this came up.

And I found out there were hand-colored plates that were daguerreotypes that were basically nude, nude photographs.

But when you look at the date, it was like 1845 to 1850.

And it was like photography hadn't existed for more than 10 years at that point.

And they were already doing like center-fold photographs.

It's the first thing we found.

Maybe like the first thing we figured out is how to make porn with it.

Well, yeah.

And I mean, like, and you see so many other technologies being used this way.

And someone, you know, you remind yourself, well, the French did invent photography, so there you have it.

But like,

that to me, like, it's, okay, it's one thing to write 19th century old photography.

This is not a surprise, but it's very, very funny in researching stuff for this show being like, 1845?

Like, before they invaded Algeria,

they were taking spread eagle photos.

This is insane.

I don't think I have any interests that would be unexpected.

I don't have any interests.

I don't have any

interests.

I have no hobbies.

No, I think everything that I do, people would expect that I do.

I mean, I remember doing a Q ⁇ A for TF one time, and one of the questions was, what's your favorite painting at Miles?

I've never seen a painting I like.

And I'm like, this is the least surprising thing I've ever heard.

I honestly don't know.

Like, yeah, I'm a gym guy.

I like martial arts.

I like video games and I read a lot.

Everybody knows this of me.

You have a dog, though.

You do have a dog.

You're a dog.

Everybody knows him.

Yeah, but

I wouldn't look at you and be like, that guy's a dog guy.

And maybe people are more surprised it's a very tiny dog.

Yeah, yeah.

I would say, I mean, like, they would assume you would get some kind of like ridiculous, like an Irish wolfhound or like a Great Pyrenees or a Great Dane or or some kind of dog that like you really don't want having an accident in your apartment because it's like a person just shit on your floor.

Exactly.

You literally, and a big person at that.

Yeah, like a fucking Audrey the Giant took a brick on your couch.

I don't know.

Fucking, I'll just bring you to the National Gallery and just show you some like William Blake paintings that change your life.

I see that it wouldn't surprise anybody know that I go to museums and stuff like that as well because we have a lot of those in the Netherlands.

I'm moved by classical music such as the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack.

Exactly.

Well, I mean, it's the pinnacle of human ears.

And I'm moved by classical art, aka the background out for Final Fantasy VII.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, those watercolors in Final Fantasy VI,

they're pretty close to romantic paintings.

I really like the finger paintings done by elephants.

I legitimately don't know what weird unexpected interest I've had.

I am the most

known person.

I'm not hiding any weird interest.

Actually, I think how interested you are in Dutch politics is kind of...

Well, I live there.

I know, but like most people who are

immigrants to a country would not take take up a level of interest in politics that you would have, specifically like Western immigrants to like,

yeah,

I mean, and weirdly, like, I did living here, but I think because the fact that I could vote, whereas I won't be able to vote in Switzerland for nine years, and Swiss politics is completely inscrutable.

So, I'll be the first to admit, I don't really know much about it.

I can't vote in the Netherlands for many years to come.

Yeah, like you can, you know, you can probably reel off like the municipal policies of a guy called like Jeep van der Kleen.

I guess that's my niche interest is Dutch politics.

Fuck, I need to get more interest.

Uh, but fellas, I believe that's a podcast.

You host other podcasts.

Plug those other podcasts.

I am either the co-host or producer or some combination thereof for a trash shooter, kill James Bond, What a Hell of Way to Dad, and No Gods, No Mayors.

Listen to Beneath Skin the show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing.

And also, you can buy either my photography or art books at beneath the skin shop.com.

This is the only show that I host, and you already listened to it.

So thank you for that.

But consider supporting us on Patreon.

You make everything we do possible.

You get almost, what, eight years of bonus content, e-books, audiobooks, Discord access, first dibs on live show tickets and merch, and there's more of that stuff coming.

And you will get one piece of Phoenician purple dyed clothing.

Taken from a skeleton that doesn't need it anymore.

Exactly.

Skeletons don't need clothes.

No, especially when they're part of the foundation.

And until next time,

destroy your home, build a causeway.