Alexander the Great, with Mary Beard

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Hello, everyone.

It's Tom Holland here, and I have teamed up with the great Mary Beard to bring you four episodes on what we together have decided are the four most iconic themes in ancient history.

And today we are looking at Alexander the Great.

Here's a short extract of that episode.

No one was like him.

Terrible were his crimes.

But if you wish to blackguard the great king, think how mean, obscure, and dull you are, your labours lowly, and your merits less.

That was the great American poet Robert Lowell talking about Alexander the Great, who is the theme of today's episode.

I'm in conversation with the great Mary Beard.

And Mary, I assume you would agree with Robert Lowell that Alexander's...

Well, let's not call them crimes, but I mean, he spilled a lot of blood.

He's a killer of men.

But would you also acknowledge a sense that he is i mean almost a figure of myth uh it's kind of terrifying and potent in a way beyond the the mortal norm i was going to say that i thought you read that out just to annoy me tom really um oh kind of i wanted to get you in the mood for this

you can't deny that alexander the great is worth looking at because so many people have so many people have copied him he's become such a kind of mythic figure not just in western civilization but actually you know throughout the world well he appears in the quran amazingly yeah exactly so the idea of me being sniffy as i'm quite tempted to be but i'm resisting it the idea of being sniffy and saying oh i don't you know a young drunken butcher

that isn't good enough you know you i think we do have to press at both the truth and the myth of alexander the great actually but you you wouldn't go so far as my esteemed colleague on the rest is history and offer alexander the great as a role role model for little boys and girls that he suggests that they should follow their dreams.

I dread to think of the fate of this country if we start using Alexander the Great as a role model.

I'm looking for someone who's got a kind of

bit clearer idea of what cooperation and collaboration might be than you know, we're all going to follow our dreams like Alexander the Great.

Help!

So why don't we

begin basically by telling the story and then, having done that, kind of open up questions about, well, was he great?

How did he come to be seen as great?

And actually, kind of slightly like with our previous episode, to what extent are the stories that we tell about Alexander actually likely to be true.

But to begin with, Alexander is born to Philip II of Macedon, which is kind of, I mean, it's kind of like the Scotland to the England of classical Greece.

I think that's being generous to Macedon, actually.

But you're right, that Macedon was on the northern margins of what we call ancient Greece.

And until the reign of Philip II,

it wasn't much to write home about.

So in fact, its turning point comes in the reign of Alexander's dad.

And

there persist in being

issues, you know, right up to now, but going back to the ancient world of whether we really thought, do we really think that Macedon is part of Greece or isn't it?

Because there's always kind of debate about whether the kings of Macedon should be allowed to compete in the Olympic Games.

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

And also, back in the fifth century, Macedon had been a part of the Persian Empire, which is the great superpower of the day, had tried to conquer Greece and been flung back.

And so the relationship of Macedon to Persia is also part of the story.

Yeah, I mean, it's there's so it's kind of looking two ways.

It's looking at what we would call Greece proper

and it's also looking at Persia and it's not making any great shakes until Philip II

from his capital at a place called Pella

actually

exerts more or less control both diplomatically, politically and militarily over the Greek world and clearly is already, and this is mid-fourth century BCE, is already beginning to think about what his relationship with Persia is going to be.

I mean you have to go back here in order to understand

what on earth either Philip or later Alexander is trying to do in moving east to Persia.

You have to go back to the idea that Persia is the dominant power in the East, which clashes famously in the fifth century, clashed in what we call the Persian Wars with the Greek world.

In the end, the Greeks,

those that hadn't gone over to Persia, were victorious, but there is a sense that there's unfinished business.

And it clearly is the case that somebody like Philip, while he's putting his thumb pretty firmly in his newfound kind of military power, quite how that arises, I think a big mystery, that

he can

leverage the Greek world by saying, and we're going to get vengeance on the Persian Empire.

And there are kind of two factors perhaps that would encourage someone in the Greek world to think that they could have a crack at Persia.

And the first is the sense that perhaps Greek military manpower has the beating of Persian armies.

So there's

a famous account written by the Athenian Xenophon of a squad of Greek mercenaries who find themselves stranded in Mesopotamia and then are able to march all the way through the Persian Empire and get back home.

So that seems exciting.

But the other thing is a sense that rather than attacking the Persians, the great powers of the Greek world, Athens, Thebes, Sparta, are just...

tearing chunks out of each other and that it needs a strong man perhaps to crack heads together and to say come on guys let's go and attack the Persians.

And he doesn't manage to crack any Spartan heads.

No, Spartans have always left out, haven't they?

And Thebes.

Yeah, so Thebes,

really, when Philip is a young man, is the great city-state.

Philip has gone there as a hostage,

and it's kind of the cutting edge of military development in the Greek world.

But when Philip becomes king, he has developed quite a kind of a formidable military apparatus, cavalry, phalanxes with very, very long spears.

I'm sure you'd love to talk about

Macedonian spears, but I mean it's important that he has kind of developed military technology in a way that, as it turns out, has the beating of the Thebans and the Athenians.

And they win, the Macedonians win a great victory, a place called Chironia outside Thebes.

And this is where Alexander is very young.

He's only 18, I think, and he commands...

the cavalry there.

And Thebes and Athens are kind of brought to submit to Macedonian overlordship.

Athens does better than Thebes.

Thebes is well and truly thrashed.

Athens is humiliated, or at least in the eyes of some, although there were others who were quite happy to go in with Philip II.

But I think what you say is interesting because there are backstories to all of this.

that you know Thebes has got a history with Philip II of Macedon.

You know, the Greek world has got a history with the Persian Empire.

And you can't really understand what's going on in the fourth century without seeing that old scores are being settled.

Yeah, so Philip is kind of basically he's conquered Greece and he's gearing up to invade the Persian Empire, and then he gets assassinated.

Alexander takes over and succeeds him as king.

Can we just look at Alexander's upbringing as it is told by

biographers and historians writing very much later?

Famously, he is the son of a mother who has a thing about snakes.

Olympias.

Right.

And she is the most glamorous of Philip's wives

and has some kind of religious affect with snakes.

But

one thing that's really unusual about Philip, and

it may explain something behind the assassination we don't know,

is that

he has many wives.

The Macedonian monarchy is polygamous, and that provides you with a lot of potential heirs, but it provides a lot of rivalry at the same time.

And so

Olympias is not Macedonian.

She's from Epirus.

And Alexander is a son, but Philip subsequently marries one of the many women in the Greek world called Cleopatra, who

so this is a theme, isn't it?

Loads of people with the the same name.

And she is bona fide Macedonian.

And so, you've clearly got,

in the idea, when you're thinking of succession planning, every monarch in the ancient world is always thinking of succession planning and never getting it right.

It looks as if

Olympias and Alexander are beginning to be worried that they're going to be sidestepped by sort of the true blood of the Macedonian race.

Thanks for listening.

You can subscribe to the Rest is History Club at the restishory.com to hear the whole episode, to hear the whole series in due course, and to get a massive, insanely brilliant range of other benefits.

Mary and I will be back next week and we'll be looking at the collapse of the Roman Republic and Julius Caesar.