Dan Carlin's Hardcore History - Show 74 - Mania for Subjugation IV

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

The stage is set for an in-person showdown between Alexander and Persia's Great King. The resulting Battle of Issus, although often ignored by Hollywood, is one of the most important battles in all ancient history. It gets its due here.

What you're about to hear is part four of a multi-part series on Alexander the Great, a subject 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 that 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. December 7th, 1941. It's history. A date which will live in infamy. That's one small step for man. The events. One giant leap for man.

The figures. From this time and place. I take pride in the words Ish bin and Biali. The drama. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this war. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know

whether or not their presidency. The deep question. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not a problem, but we are not descended from fearful men. It's hardcore 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. And 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 mean, I think of these Apache leaders like Mangus, Colorado, or Cochillo Negro, or Pizago Cabazon. 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. the things. Easy to understand the relationship when it's amongst a small group like that where

everyone knows one another. But as armies get larger, you know, 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 Dwight 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, you know, win battles for them and keep them safe and all these kinds of things. I mean, 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 great commanders when the armies get very large, because they're rarer.

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. It's 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 when 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 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 round? emperor 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 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 in russia or whatever i mean that's an institutional

loyalty to a general or a emperor in this case but you develop 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 army a bunch now, we're a year into his command, basically, of his dad's army. And he's really 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 tails. You can see a data point here where the relationship that's going to propel this army to do amazing things for this man, where 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 story, so-called barbarians north of macedonia he had the destruction of thebes now he's got this in a paddle 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, 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 Parmenio, 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, 60-40 relationship between Alexander and Parmenio with Alexander at the 60 and Parmenio 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 a shipment to a Athens. This is told in Aryan to 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 Aryan, 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 you're like three-dimensional chess he's doing a lot with a little that one inscription well that plays 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 pre-year He says 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 and 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 Thermopy 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 armor did Alexander send back to Athens? 300. And who did he specifically leave out in the inscription for everybody to see for the Spartans? Yikes, 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 granicus who fought for the persians back to greece in chains as a message that this better not happen again because you know under the terms of our leagues of the greek thing we are not supposed to be fighting against one another this is a war of greeks against barbarians fight on the other side expect to die or come home in shamed and be a slave. The good news for us after the Battle of the River Granicus is our two main sources, Arian and Deodorus,

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. He has to sort of collect his winnings

from defeating that Persian army, that regional version, I guess you could say have a Persian field army at the Granicus. 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 here because he's got a lot of work to still do

to make sure that area is subdued and it's going to involve, you know, wearing and tearing on the army and all this kind of. 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 persis to throw at him you know as soon as it's ready to go um alley here's the thing though alexander the i already notice it maybe i'm previewing here but you can already see the dude's energy and the speed and the speed is exhausted I mean, this is where we start to see a differentiation between, you know, the way Alexander operates and the way the king, some dude, remember we talked about that last and so on 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 wimp, 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 toad. 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, oh, you're just, you know, taking a quick trip to this. It'll be four straight days are marching. He's going to go 167 miles between two places

and just don't even think about it. But that's wear 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 is just already watching him move as he moves and sends forces like Parmenio and other detachments all around, at least the western part right now of Anatolia, to take surrenders and submissions by cities. The capital of the entire region, Sardis, who has got massive walls and could hold out for a long time and also have.

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 where 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 apparent and the ancient sources spent a little time on it,

so it's clear that all these cities are factionalized in terms of their politics and can't we relate to that? But they have factions that'll favor a democracy, factions that'll favor an oligarchy, 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, that's 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 Aryan says is one of the high watermarks of Alexander's morality,

he comes in and he sort of settles things, and he stops them from killing one another. Very gracious, you know, by later Alexandrian 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 Miletus. And Maletus is uncomfortable. It's an awkward situation.

I think A.B. 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 rule, the hated Persians who've been so terrible to you. We wrote plays about it and Maletus shuts its door. 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. Deodorus has our friend, the Greek movie figure that the audience in Greece can relate to Memnon. you know, in the city of Meletus 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 Meletus 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.

that. But that's not going to concern him either. The problem is, is Miletus 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 well, guess 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 oars and the timing. I mean, all that stuff, it is such. 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 that they're absolutely dwarfed in a quantitative sense. 400 or so Persian ships allegedly to about 160 that Alexander has trying to deal with the city surrounded on three sides by water. And we see.

Alexander and his proverbial speed come into play again. And the hard thing when you're looking at it 23 or 2400 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 firstest with the mostest? Well, he gets their firstest with the leastest.

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 and 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 there first. drops 4,000 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 like a long line barring entrance to that area and in a way if you want to visualize it turning it into like a mini passive thermopoly

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 are 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 Voldemar Heckel 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, Arian 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... his top general, his marshal, Parmenio. And we've seen this movie before, haven't we, where he and Parmenio disagree over what to do?

At the Battle of the Granicus, remember, Parmenio told Alexander to wait, according to Arian 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 Parmenio tells Alexander, he should be fighting a naval battle.

And Alexander says, no. A little bit of role reversal there, but here's the way Aryan puts it in the Arbery Descelaincourt translation of his work, quote. The Persians had about 400 ships, but Parmenio, 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, end 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 Parme. to make as far as Aryan's concerned.

Hey, he saw an eagle, man. What do you want him to do? But there are some practical realities, too. Arrian continues, quote, he, meaning Parmenio, 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 perils of the day.

end quote i can't help but think of like athletes you know who i guess they never gave up to sport if we're using parmenios and as an analogy here but i'm thinking of like these hockey players like gordy howe or something coming back at really heavy-duty ages and trying to get in there and mix it up physically with the youngsters um parmenio's going to get on that shammy these dudes were kind of amazing um but anyway so he says to alexander i'll go do it myself and this I'm Alexander's the one being cautious, and Arian has him saying, quote. Alexander replied that Parmenio 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 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 and Phoenician 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.

End quote. So some logical points, we would say, in addition to the, you know, Omen stuff. But then, according to Arian, 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. And Arian says, 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 Parmenios. 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, end 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, you know, that can beat his opponent. 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? I mean, look at the whole need to annexed a new state. territories all over the world in the late 19th century so you had coaling stations for your fleets right well in this era they can't go very far at all in general these um navies from the ancient world these

triremes and everything they would find a place to camp every night pull the ships up onto the beach the crews 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 at sundown. 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 to 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 it, 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 rams he's got underminer's 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 arian and diadores both have accounts Deodorus says Memnon was there, so Alexander had to attack the city. Arian doesn't mention Memnon at all, but says that, well, why don't we just quote the Martin Hammond translation of Arian and let the ancient writer explain 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. End quote. Then he says that the Macedonian Admiral brings the fleet up close to the harbor. when the people of Melita 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 boarded small boats and desperately tried to outrun the Macedonian triremes, but were caught by the triremes at the harbor mouth. most of them were killed in the city itself end 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 arian 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. The people of Melita 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, Miletus was so much a part of the reasons for this war, and their 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 you give 30,000 men 12 people each and it's a 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 use his army as a giant sort of executing a mechanism cornered enemy troops in a part of town or something and then just attack them from all sides no good answers but he's going to do this a lot 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 Miletus 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 you Alexander fans already know. And apparently, was being questioned in antiquity. I mean, Deodorus is talking about it, and that's, he wrote during like 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, tollamy up here on the stand, under oath, It's going to be difficult to figure out. What 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'm using as 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 Miletus 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. 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 it to stay there until the Persians catch it and kill it? So a lot of arguments, but he disbands the fleet and he keeps like 20 triremes 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 Miletus have harbors

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 one's going to be the same way, but worse. Like Meletus, only more so. Aryan and Deodorus both say that he kind of takes some cities in between Meletus and Hallicarnassus, which is the big city in the distance. some of them come over to him there's this famous incident where this this queen who's been out of power

comes to Alexander on the road between cities and basically asks him to support her and being restored 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, rip them out of the Persian Empire. We'll do what the Persians were famous for doing, too. Leave the local royal family in place and then just have them be subordinate to you. So there's a story about him doing that.

And supposedly when he meets this queen who 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, a bunch of these smaller cities come over to him and then he arrives at Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus is the birthplace of Herodotus.

It's the capital of Caria. It is the satrap, you know, seat of 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 old Memnon of Rhodes, right? As we said, our one Greek character in the story that the Greeks can all sort of empathize with and get behind. He's 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 put in command of the whole region by the great king, Darius, been 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 faldemar heckel had pointed out something that's easy to forget but in hella karnassas are a bunch of people that hate alexander a bunch of people who are on sort of the naughty list so that if he ever found them they're going to be in trouble um 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 their own personal fortunes so every thing that is sort of on the line here. There's going to be a sense of desperation in this halicarnassus 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, and this is something I didn't know. Apparently they're sort of like expected defenses for certain sized 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 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 Heliconarcus was the same way, are 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 besieger, 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 canons 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 cities and how universal it is right you go look at any ancient portrait of any city anywhere 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. You're not going to defeat that in the field probably. But once he has to fight a 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 too probably,

the formation that the Macedonians fight in. We've talked about it all this time right, the close order, you know, heavy infantry phalanx with the long 16, 18 foot pikes fighting, you know, shoulder to shoulder as 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 would just terrify you, well, that were so effective at the bottom, of the River Granicus 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, when he approaches one of the outcroppings, there's, you know, these walls around Halicarnassus incorporate 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 sieges are and how we can see Alexander's true extra ability now come to the four. I said in the last edition, as we had talked about, that Alexander's got this army which can just do amazing things without him. The sieges 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 approach in a 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 Halicarnassus. I like the way that historian Ian Worthington and by the spear sort of sets up the Halicarnassus challenge here, and he writes about it by saying, quote, Halicarnassus 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 mauselope of Carya, who had died in 353,

and which was eventually completed by his widow, who happened to be. be his sister. Artemisia. Halicarnassus, he writes, was built on a hillside and was seemingly impregnable, with enormous six-foot-thick defensive walls, on top of which were fortified battlements and a series of high towers for protection. In front of the walls was a deep moat, at least 40 feet wide, and behind them were the main city and its two citadels, 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 in supplies or even escape unhindered if need be, whereas his own supplies were starting to run out and had to be ferried in from Militist at least two days away. End quote. Now the Greeks always make it sound like Persian general.

ship sucked, which people like Pierre Briant 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 is going to face here in the siege of Helicarnassus is, you know, 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 Parmenio's 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, whose 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 him who are professional fighters who do this for a living and who know because they've watched what Alexander did at the Granicus.

They know what the, you know, league of the Greeks says happens to people that, I mean, they know what's going to happen. They're desperate too. And they don't have to face the scary Macedonian pike phalanx that Philip Alexander's dad designed specifically to destroy units of hoplites. 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. I mean, 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 Halicarnasse, 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 Halicarnassus itself. He thought if he could take that,

then we could just use that as a place to land the siege engines. And Arian has this great story about how Alexander finds out from some of the loyalists 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 a, you know, picked force,

but it sounds like it was pretty large. Philanjites cavalry, the whole thing 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 with spears, and they're all ready. Being Alexander, he attacks it anyway, brings down a tower or two, we're 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 Halicarnassus 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 Halicarnassus 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 400, 390s in the Greek world anyway. Things like bolt shooters and stuff. And then you get different kinds of catapults, 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 where they're going to have them on both sides, shooting at each other, and they're going to be using the 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 walled town, how do you do it? Well, the way that was the tried and true and easiest way is 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. At some time 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 1,900 BCE, they're using towers and engines of one sort or another, and the famous Trojan horse from the Iliad may be an allusion to something like a siege tower. but half of everything Alexander is 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. number is but if we imagined a 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 citadels 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 Halicarnassus is really a case of parry and thrust in sort of a fencing sense, or a spy versus spy where Alexander the besieger does something and the people inside the city try to counter it. we'll knock down a wall here, we'll rebuild a wall there. I mean, the key element, if you read the ancient sources, though, and it happens multiple times.

I'm trying to add up the number of times in Arian. 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 open 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 pitch are going to throw that onto the siege engines and try to light them all on fire and this is going to 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 overtime 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 Deodores, for example, he talks about this happening in relays. 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 don't have 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's 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 Arian and Deodoras talk about it that there are prepared things that they put up to sort of shield the people who are working. So think of like Wicker mantlets or something like a Civil War, rather than a First World War trench situation where you put up things,

if you were a kid with a tree house and someone was throwing dirt clods 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 moat and you have to fill in the moat to get the siege engines close enough.

And, well, why don't I let Deidorus pick up the story? It's very exciting. And the difference, by the way, between Deodorus and Arian in their accounts of this is that Deodorus has it be a extremely difficult thing for Alexander. Ariens weird because he makes it sound like nothing was a big deal, but then when he tells you how many people were injured and whatnot in any given situation, you kind of go, sounds like a big deal.

So the real problem Alexander has is that because Halicarnassus 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. Deodorus in my C. Bradford Wells' translation picks up the story with Alexander arriving right outside Halicarnassus and starting the siege. And Deodorus says, 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 fighters. 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 Memnon at first easily beat off the Macedonians assaulting the walls, for he had large numbers. He had large number of 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 Macedonians showed far superior prowess, but the Persians had the advantage of numbers and of 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. end quote. Well, if you read Arian, 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 battlefield 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 Aryan 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 knight sally from Halicarnassus to set fire to the towers and the other engines which had been moved up or were nearly in position was countered and easily beaten back within the walls by the Macedonian guards, supported by other troops roused by the alarm. About 170 of the men from Halicarnassus were killed, including Neotolamus, the son of Arabeus, the brother of Amintas, one of those who had deserted to Darius. 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, end quote.

That from my Martin Hammond translation, by the way. But any way you slice it, that's a lot of injuries, right? 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 Thebes 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 in to support them, right? There's a whole school of thought out there that Perticus is sort of a whipping boy for any decision,

Alexander makes where the outcome isn't stupendously overwhelming, somehow is Perticus's fault, and lots of analysis over the eras as to whether or not the bias of one of the main sources here, Ptolemy, friend of Alexander, one of his generals, one of the successors, the guy who started the whole dynasty in 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. Ptolemy is a little like I know history will treat Perticus unkindly because I will be writing that history. So Perticus gets the short end of 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 Alexandria generals at this point, how he keeps his job. Who knows? But here's the way that A.B. Bosworth in his conquest and empire sort of 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 Halicarnassus, and Alexander was compelled to parlay for a truce, a humiliation unique in his reign. End 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 Arian, 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 sallying forth of 2,000 picked men, according to the ancient sources. This is the sortie where the piqued men are 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 phalanx 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 Arian portrays this as easily sort of crushed because 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 youngens how it's done. And so no problem, Arian points out. But Deodoras and 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 Effialtis, and he's the one who leads this sallying forth 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 done for. And in my Robin Waterfield translation of Deodoris, Deodorus says, quote, Effialtes therefore put together a force of two thousand 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 hard to emphasize how, and it may have been something a Macedonian king was expected to do, but Alexander's always jawny on the spot.

He's right there. He's in the front. He's fighting. And remember, this is a very dangerous situation for a king to find himself in the mix of something like this. And Diodorus continues, quote. When Alexander realized what was happening, he posted the form of a form of a lot of 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 save the siege engines. A great shout arose from both sides at once, and the trumpets sounded the city. for battle. The soldiers fought with such skill and extraordinary determination that a ferocious struggle ensued. The Macedonians managed to stop the fire from spreading, but Effialtis and his men were winning the fight. He was by far 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 volleys 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 in large numbers, even Alexander had no real response. End quote. It's at this point, Deodorus says that the old guard is called in an in.

they're going to show the youngens, you know, how it's done, and they do. From I see Bradford-Well's translation of Deodorus, 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-heartedness 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 effialities and many others, and finally forced the rest to take refuge in the city. Night had already fallen as the master's 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, end quote. I like the way Peter Green describes the tragedy that happens next as the tide turns in the battle. 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 mistimed, and Peter Green in his Alexander of Macadon 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 Macedonian's 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 escraped a victory at all. The Macedonians withdrew to their camp. Alexander knew when not to press his luck, end 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 at anchor 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 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 and fifty-fit tower that had all the artillery on it that the defenders were shooting the macedonians with it's burning they burn a bunch of the buildings and if you believe airy and alexander then steamrolls the entire city. Peter Green thinks this is unlikely. He'd already promised it to that old lady who he was calling

mother. He 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 citadels there, and it's going to take Alexander's garrison like a year to wheedle them out. He puts a big moat around

it and a wall and just keeps going, and so does Memnon. 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 is

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 Meletus, 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. It's 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 the poor Persians because they have no good generals themselves and now they lose this wonderful Greek general who was, you know, who had held off Alexander's father and now was holding off Alexander and with him gone, what are you going to do? But meanwhile, while this is going on, Alexander splits his forces, sends Parmenio 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 ballpark idea what we're talking about.

And if any of this is to be believed, I like that disclaimer, don't you? But Halicarnassus 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 1,000-person little city states. And so Alexander, for example, will be in one region and there'll be like 30 of these cities that sort of surrender to him or accept, you know, his kingship or what have you. So those are small places, though.

The problem 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 asterisks in his career. But if you try to imagine what it's, like for the people on the other side, well, 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 posterity in Deodorus's 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 siege engines before the those people realize they're doomed. And then Diodorus 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, Deodora 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 wife, as 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 Deodorus says they decide to hold this last grand evening with their loved ones, the best food and drink 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 gives you an idea right there magnify that by a lot because alexander's whole career he's 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 their 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, 33 BCBCE, 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 terrain 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 and we'll say it this whole time is he's not one of those guys who stays in the velvet tent by himself while having the grunts,

you know, have to 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 peoples who are nobody, he's right there in the front.

It's crazy. It's during this time period between Helicarnassus 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 Gordian knot. The Gordian knot story for those of you

who can see a lot of similar ones around history. It's the X-Calibur Sword and the Stone story, isn't it? I mean, well, the sword and the stone is not really X-Calibur, but you know the story I mean. He gets the X-Calibur from the Lady of the Lake later, but that's neither here nor there. but in terms of the Gordian 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 Plutarch tells both of them 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, Aristobulus, Plutarch says, gives this answer is that he simply pulled out 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 by 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 Bione is getting, well, getting kind of tired now that Alexander's basically done that. Never mind the reconquest 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 Gordian-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 own the world when you didn't even know what was in the world. You have claimed of territories you haven't even discovered yet. That's what the Gordian nuts telling Alexander, if we buy that rationale.

But clearly, if the Pope can do it in 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 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, it sounds like a crazy, Persia is so rich you can't believe it, kind of exaggeration, because that's like the money that nation states have. I mean, that's just that level of money. if we, you know, halved it by 75%, it's an outrageous amount of money still for an individual to have. That assumes, of course,

that you could ever have something by 75%. Nonetheless, a lot of people want to kill Alexander, and there are some stories that occur during this interlude period, right? We're in early 333BCE, which kind of show the precariousness of the life of a great conqueror, right? 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 an Alexander or 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 first. 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 to Alexander's dad. And Alexander always blamed the king of Persia for his involvement in that. And listen, I mean, what are the people?

the odds as we said, you're going to kill the greatest man of his age and his kid's going to be bigger than he is, maybe you just keep doing that till you get a loser, till you get a lemon. Alexander gets a letter from his mother, according to Deodorus. 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? One's Parmenio and he's here with Alexander doing all this stuff, but he left the other one in charge of you know, home base, right? Antipater. These guys are ancient and Antipater and Olympius are always

sort of fighting with each other and her letters back to Alexander often complain of Antipater and sometimes his letters complain about her, but you got to be careful. I'm going to be careful insulting the king's mother when he has a special relationship with her. but diodorus says she sends a letter with all kinds of useful information including a warning about you know needing to be careful of antipater's son-in-law who is 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 he arrests him and takes him around with the army for a long time in captivity they usually torture people in these situations uh 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 do 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 is 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 it? 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 these areas, it's beginning to be the summer of 33, 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 in 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. He didn't listen. He jumps in. Boom, you have a disaster on hands. He starts like having convulsions and he's 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've 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, but same name as 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 for it and lose their lives, right? He's too dangerous to treat. And this one doctor who's known 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 note arrives from Parmenio saying, be careful of this doctor, you know, implying that he might be in on the 1,000 talents trying to assassinate you. And the doctor hands the potion to Alexander. Alexander hands the letter from Parmenio, 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 suggest 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 mean, I'm not even including, by the way. We just do this as 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 and 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. 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, they'll mention a week long, it seems like, I think that's labeling it correctly,

guerrilla campaign that Alexander will fight in Kalikia 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 Kalikian guerrillas, 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 it was a trainer talking and he said something to the effect of keep track of the wear and tear right keep track of the damage as it begins to add up right

there's acute damage like you get hit in the head and you're unconscious and you're affected for the rest of your life acute damage but then there's the accumulated damage right this is where we talked a couple of installments ago about possible CTE building up over time um there's a lot of of fighting and Alexander's in the midst of it. There's something going on where either he feels compelled to be there or he couldn't stand the idea of not being there. He either loves it or feels like to be the guy he has to be. He has to be seen to be in the front run or maybe a combination of the two, right?

Expectations and his own enjoyment of it. Because I have to believe it would have been okay from time to time for him to say, listen we just got here i'm going to meet with the men and do some strategizing send a little force out there and deal with those calician guerrillas in 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 bc e as alexander still probably feeling the after effects of this illness and recovering the great king of persia and his army gets on the move.

And I have a little bit of a dilemma with something like 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 going to use one line because I've always found it so amazing that I know I used in Kings of Kings III. 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-Briott, I think it was, said it hadn't happened in 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. Well, 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. It means nobody living has ever seen one. It really emphasizes, doesn't it, 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, like 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, an 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...

lot of other things you can't figure out i was reading my alexander the great in the logistics of the mcadonian army by donald w angles and he said that the you know 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? It takes forever to get to where you want it to go, but when it 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, inordinately on the battlefield day of the combat sort of 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 in advance 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 that 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 um and this has been a 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 barb so-called barbarian armies of 150,000 200 thousand these two tones and these kimbri coming down from the mountains but how would you feed them right even if they stayed in a place for five minutes they're going to be like locust what allows you to feed large armies as Hans Stelbrook said so long ago, are the logistics of 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 him and his relatives and there's concubines and everything you need, the soldiers all have assistance. And, I mean, that swells the size. I mean, those are all mouths to feed as the old saying goes. But in the ancient world, I mean, in the modern world, too, but in the ancient world and in the east especially, this is a display. The army on the march serves a lot of purposes, doesn't it? and one is to sort of reinforce royal authority.

And Alexander and the Macedonians would use their army for the same thing. But in the Persian sense, 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 wealth

is turned into ostentatious displays and lots of references 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 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 their 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 Curtius, who probably has no idea what one of these really looked like, but he gives 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 Courteous 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 Curtius, 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.

end quote let me stop you here this is part of the persian religion right a hurrah mazda zoroastronism this flame's never supposed to be extinguished and you know like the olympic torch or the john f kennedy eternal flame i mean you just you carry it with you it's a sign and all the people on the march are going to see it too and they're going to tell their grandchildren about it kentis courteous continues talking about the people whose job it is to sort of oversee the flame, the religious people, the magi. Quote, Next came the magi, singing the traditional hymn, 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. end quote now typical of ancient writing they assume that their gods are the same gods

everybody else is worshipping just under different names so quintus courteous is Jupiter is Alexander's Zeus is Egypt's Amman and is Ahura Mazda from the Persians as far as these people are concerned they obviously did not worship Jupiter per se Curtis 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 12 nations of different cultures variously armed. Next in line were the soldiers whom the Persians called the Immortals, some 10,000 in number. No other groups were as splendidly bedecked in barbarian opulence. Golden necklaces, clothes interwoven with gold. Long-sleeved tunics actually studded with jewels.

After a short interval, he writes, came the 15,000 men they call the King's Kinsman. This troop was dressed almost like women, its extravagance rather than its fine arms catching the eye. End quote. So here you go, right? going to slam them now for their feminine-like qualities. Because the Persians would wear robes.

They would, you know, there would be the eye makeup that the Egyptians used to wear, too, 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 allows them to sort of explain, you know, to their audience why their weak culture fell under the masculine virility of the 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,

it looks like dory foe or dory, the men who usually looked after the king's wardrobe, and these preceded 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 two golden images, each a cubit high of Ninus and Bellas, respectively. Between these was a consecrated eagle made of gold and represented with wings outstretched, end quote.

Then he talks about the king, and this is 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 and deadly. What did we say in the last installment, right? The Persians are all like stormtroopers or guys in red shirts in Star Trek. They're nameless and faceless, and they don't matter except as, you know, it matters to the Greek side of the story, except for one character on the other side. The real bad guy, the Ming the merciless, the Darth Vader.

In this case, it's Darius, and Quintus Curtius 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 scimitar, its scabbard made of a precious stone. His royal headdress, called a Cadaris by the Persians, was encircled by a blue ribbon flecked with white.

Ten thousand spearmen carrying lances chased with silver and tipped 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 30,000 foot soldiers, followed by 400 of the king's horses. End quote. Now that's not the whole army. That's just sort of his entourage. Now, while Curtis can give us sort of a sense of sort of the grandeur and the opulence and the all-inspiring nature of something like this, I'm not sure 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, Arian and Plutarch say that the army that the great king is leading here is like 600,000 men. Deodorus has it more like 400,000. courteous says it's like 250,000 infantry and 62,200 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 600,000 men marching around even if your army has that many men, right? You break them up. But wouldn't Napoleon teach us?

Or for that matter, the Mongols, right? you break them up into smaller little armies 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 Napoleon's or the Mongols' time teaches. But back in these days, it was one big clump, right? And, well, 600,000 men, how do you feed a clump like that no matter how many supply dumps you station along the way? And it's fascinating. I mentioned Engels's work earlier, I believe, Alexander.

the great in 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. Engels was saying it was 100,000 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 ate up 8 million pounds of grain that's 4,000 tons he said and if that's what an army of something like 40,000 or so 45,000 maybe guys needs what's the Persian army need

especially if it's really 600,000 men which it isn't 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 100 or 120,000 men in the Great King's Army, that's a ton. I like the way historian George Cockwell and his famous work, the Greek Wars, the failure of Persia, 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 50,000 foot and about 9,000 horse. By the time he reached Italy, they were down to 20,000 foot and 6,000 horse. And yet with these, for 16 years, he remained undefeated. For the great attack on Antiochus III in 189,

the Romans had an army of about 30,000, and were confronted by 70,000 of all sorts of troops from all parts of the Salucan realm, including the most eastern peoples. Alexander, Cawkewell writes, began his invasion of Asia with something like 43,000 foot and 6,100 horse, and confronted the might of Asia at Gau Gamala with about 40,000 foot and 7,000 horse. End quote. And we should recall that, like a lot of our arms, 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 Engels 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 45,000 men that is a large ancient city isn't it? If the great king's army is 120,000 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 locusts 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 than it would be for the people in that region today using, you know, modern farming methods and whatnot. So the question of food is paramount. I mean, Hitler talks about it in Mine Kampf 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 Hans-Dell Brook, going back to Hans-Dell 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 over people that 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 will run into 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 or go all the way down into the Delbrookian minimizations and start talking about 50,000 men or 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, top two or top three but there are some Chinese battles that were very large right around this 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 awe-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 war is 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 Adolf Hitler, who both were in the First World War, when Churchill had his failure, Gallipoli, he goes and command some troops in the war. And Hitler, of course, was a runner. both those guys saw what some of the First World War was like, right? From their vantage point, from their part of the front,

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 a large battle you couldn't see to the end of the battlefields, right? They're 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 in a movie theater, that blows my mind.

And anybody else who even saw one of these armies pass 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 your 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 I made an impression, right? If you're looking at how these armies maneuver, though, it's fascinating. And it's through an interesting area, basically the best way to think about it, and 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 plain 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 the southwest of Turkey and the northwest of Syria kind of come together

and the maneuvering because let's remember that's a enormous part of generalship 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 a 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 and 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 a bunch of things. And eventually the Persians show up. And, you know, I was reading some things, and 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 Alexander's going to get trampled, the Persians are coming. So, I mean, if the Star Wars 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 Goldsworthy and Philip and Alexander sets it up.

And he writes, quote, a narrow strip of coastal plain led into Syria. fringed by mountain ranges that an army could only cross via one of three routes. Parmenio had gone ahead to secure the entrances to these, taking with him most of the non-Macedonian troops. Alexander busied himself in Kalikia, clearly feeling it safe for his army to be divided for the moment, until news arrived that Darius and his army were at Sochi in Syria, far nearer than he had suspected, and not far from the past near the pillar of Jonah. Oldsworthy continues. He hurried to reunite the army, and then together with Parmenio's men, he advanced to Isis, where a depot was established for the heavier baggage, and the wounded and sick

left behind. The king discussed with his officers whether it was better to wait for the Persians to come to them or to advance, and all seemed 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 bulkier supplies to be brought by water, end 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 generalship, 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, Army just waiting for him in battle formation and the Persians show up stretched out in a four, five, six person wide column 30 miles long or something. You could see how that would be a huge disadvantage. But apparently Alexander's hoping to catch the Persians in a 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 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 those sources say he doesn't believe it. In my Aubrey Ducelynincourt translation of ARI, and an Arian is usually pretty forgiving about Alexander's shortcomings. Aubrey DeCellincourt has Arian saying, quote, Alexander, not trusting the report that Darias was in his rear,

dispatched a party of his companions in a galley with orders to sail back to Isis and find out for themselves whether or not it was true. The coast by Isis, Aryan 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, Darias was indeed at hand. end 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 when the town of issus show up at his current location you know minus their hands having had their hands chopped off recently and cauterized and they show up and say the great king did it he took the whole supply depot you left behind killed or tortured uh 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 and persian 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 it confidence or hubris where the persians you know will take the spies and instead of just killing them outright, 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. I read once about Joe Frazier that he looked at opponents as 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 want to no part of him?

This is part of the explanation that the ancient sources give for why the Great King came up here into the narrows to begin with. Because it's a longstanding 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 are all. All of our major sources have it, where when Alexander is sick, remember after the Gordian knot thing, he had malaria or something, there's this delay. It's uncharacteristic.

Aery and other sources here point out that the Great King was wondering, what the hell's going on? Where is he? Why isn't he coming? And his flatterers, Aryan talks about this, says, yes, man, his boot lickers, which of course is part of that prejudice and bigotry and ethnocentrism that the West would have of the ease. The bootlickers are just saying, because he's afraid of you. He's delaying because he doesn't want to face your greatness in our country. cavalry and all these and the only people of course as usual now that memnon is dead you have to find some other greco-macadonian 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-macadonian 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 Kid yourself, he's not afraid of you. The minute he knows where you are, he's coming for you. In 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 fistfights 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 out flanked 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 100,000, 120,000, how that can get within 13 miles of Alexander and he not know about it. Got to wait until a bunch of guys with no hands show up to tell him, with Parmenio operating, you know, with scout cavalry all through those passes, that's hard enough for me to believe. But then you're going to tell me that the Persians, with an army, as we said, of 100, 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 them 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 phalanjites but more hoplites than you might think mercenary hoplites allied hoplites there's about 3,000 or so of the hypaspsists that are sort of a combination of guards and sort of specialists 8 to 10,000 sort of light infantry you've got your thracians and your allyrians who are a little like going and getting your native troops in the colonial era You've got to have some of the people who are used to fighting in broken country and tracking signs. And they're just maybe from the Alexandrian point of view a little canon fodderish.

But you've got to have guys like that. Then you have a thousand guys who are the Agranians and the archers that Alexander loves his Gurkhas and special forces. And he uses them all the time. They've become elite. They weren't elite before. They're elite now, just by experience alone. And then something like 5,000 cavalry or so. A decent number of them, the core of them, are those, you know, heavy cavalry lancers,

the Macedonian companions and sort of their mere images, the Thessalians. And normally they're in equal numbers, you know, just under like 2,000 of each of them. And when I was a kid, we used to think of these as almost ethnic units, but more of the modern histories want you to see, especially since Alexander's dad's where he was taken just almost like freebooters and soldiers of fortune and any people who actually met the qualifications and looked like they deserve it. I mean, there was an Arthurian Knight of the Roundtable kind of view of it if you want to look at it in a high-minded way, a 1977-Oaklin Raiders viewpoint if you want to look at it another way.

You know, all the cast-offs and all these people you can't find elsewhere. and in addition to those guys you probably have 1,500 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 Visas is going to be somewhere on the list, this is a pretty nimble army.

I mean, size-wise, you don't feel like, 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 50 or 60,000, which if those are the numbers, it's a whole different situation than everybody's been looking at to something more in the 80,000, 100,000, 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 they're impact units or 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 and horses who have a lot of armor. Not quite the catafracts of the Parthian or the Sasanid era, 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, and certainly to go after enemy leaders or what have you. These guys were not around the River Granicus. And then you have an interesting troop type, these so-called Cardassies.

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 hoplites, maybe, the Persian attempt to recreate a troop type that traditionally they were weak in. They didn't generally manufacture hoplites of the Greek style.

And if you look at the enemies they usually fought, they didn't need to. I mean, if you're fighting Skittians on your northeastern border, remember the Persian Empire almost the size of the United States. If you're fighting a bunch of Skittians on your northeastern border, they're a bunch of horse archers. What do you want? You want archers yourself.

You don't need a bunch of hoplites, but against hoplites 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 hoplites or however many there actually are, forms sort of the heart of the great king's, at least infantry portion of his army here.

I mean, they're the spine that 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 hoplites for hire across the entire Mediterranean world during this time period to those who think it would be no problem. and everywhere in between does seem pretty clear that the Great King was recalling and scouring

the Greek hoplites he already had in his service from everywhere else they were busy. I mean, part of the reason that Memnon's 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 hoplites he was using. Brought him back so they could be here for this battle at Isis, you know, in late October, early November 333 BCE. So however many there are, he clearly put quite a bit of effort and sacrificed 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, I don't know, 12,000, let's just say 12,000 or so actual phalanjites, the rest being hoplites like these guys. And I remember one of my professors saying not all hoplites 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 a farmer in a small place like Plataia, who trains with his neighbors a few times of the year, keeps the armor above the hearth 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. They're 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 hoplites get the problem for them is that alexander's phalangeite phalanx was designed by his father specifically as a hoplight 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 cardacies are well majority opinion has leaned for quite some time that they are the home as we said homegrown version of a Persian hoplight

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 or 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 lines 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 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, it's just as many as you want who can just run around skirmishing.

And so they have tons of those people too. No, the first thing, 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 or reversed. The Persians look like they should be where the Greeks are and 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

there 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 as i mentioned but whichever one it is it seems to be more of a of an impediment or a 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 fordable, right? The parts where it would be more likely to get troops trying to run across it. The Persians have placed defenses. Now as a long time owner of a Persian wargaming 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 weren't 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, I mean, well, two of them use the word stockade to describe the fortifications The panel of mensch version calls it a palisade in his book In The Path of Conquest, the great Voldemar Heckel calls it an abatist which I had to go look up. Seems like they're all variations though on the, you know, get yourself a tree trunk, sharpened both ends of it, stick one sharpen end in the ground at an angle, stick the other end out and then put a bunch of, you know,

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 erie and who comes from the roman era where mary is his mules were a thing well that was the republican era he's a little later than that but i mean julia caesar's guys were building fortifications if they sat around for five seconds but the persians are women for wanting fortifications these fortifications by the way will come in handy no one knows exactly what this river looked like during this time period because they're not 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 damming 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. It might have been a little bit more natural during this time period and between dealing with those kinds of banks, the riverbed, the rock. the steepness of the sides and the fact that the few natural places where you would want to sort of use as pathways up the other side's bank,

those are going to have the stuccade or palisade 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 or the first or the Second World War, for example. And we talked about this with the River Granicus, and we've 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, in 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 going to wake up. There's going to 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 survive that doesn't mean you survive because then you get to try to sleep because you're going to 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 going to die, it's probably going to be tomorrow. If you're the Persians, if you're going to die, it's probably going to 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 atheists in 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 they're going to look for all the help. They could get in the same as true for Alexander's. and nobody wants, you know, even if you don't think the gods are going to help you, you sure as heck don't want them 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 going to be once they get to the battlefield. Because, you know, the night before, Aryan talks about all this, by the way,

and this 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, installments ago, 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 going to see it in Alexander's approach to the battlefield here, where you get a chance to see the march order and how he maneuvers troops to deal with difficult terrain. I mean, it's going to be very insightful.

And part of it is Arians 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, and 40, 50,000 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 A.B. Bosworth, a late great A.B. Bosworth, the Australian historian, he sort of runs it down. But Arian's the one who gives us the broad information for this. although Courteous also does this word,

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 30,000 cavalry and 20,000 light troops. So his screening force to sort of just mess with Alexander and just, you know, keep him at bay

is larger than Alexander's army, if we believe those kind of numbers. But remember, Arian has the Persian army at multiple hundred thousands of men, so what's 50,000 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 plains so that the Persians can outflank the Macedonians. Here, Alexander's 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 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 writes, 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 8. It was a gradual process. Files would move up to the front as spaces opened up for them,

and the phalanx 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 plain. But as the afternoon began, the Macedonian line closed on the Persians, end quote. Aryan and Curtis talk about the many halts that the army makes in order to sort of dress its lines and let everybody catch up.

Curtea says that Alexander is stopping and making everybody slow down. He's riding in front of the line, 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. 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 Arian says that there are speeches the night before, then there are speeches before the battle. These speeches are hard to figure out because they're 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 was said, right? They take a little dramatic license. Point number two, we do the same thing. Heck, you think any of the dialogue in any of the Alexander the Great movie, I mean, do 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 a 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 Clitarchus. 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 honest, some of this 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 Arian wants to transmit to the reader, and this is a good way to do it. again, we still use that in movies and film and entertainment today, don't we? It's a vehicle. It moves the story along, right? But what is a vehicle for the writer here? Because of the writer's importance, Arian is so huge in the Alexander story, that this has become virtual dialogue for the King of Macedonia, right? Whether or not he said it, it's become part of the known legend of this guy, and they include it in the movies. I mean, I can remember Richard Burton uttering some of the same lines from Marion

I'm about to utter to you. It's fabulous, and so I'm going to quote it at length. From the Aubrey Descelain core 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 has often threatened you, and you have looked it 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 Darius 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?

Maccadonian version of Godmittons. Arian continues, in Alexander's voice, We ourselves shall have room enough to deploy our infantry, while they, no match for us either in bodily strength or resolution, will find their superiority in numbers of no avail. Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men 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, Thracians, peonians, allerians, agranians, they are the best and stoutest soldiers in Europe, and they will find as their opponents the slackest and softest of the tribes of Asia.

And what, finally, of the two men in Supreme Command? You have Alexander. They, Darius. End quote. How can you not love that? Whether or not Alexander said that he should have. Then the next stage, and again, worth quoting in full

talks about first you appeal to them on that level right where they're fighting for freedom you know the the Greeks and there's stoutest men and all that kind of stuff and of course then what would a good salesperson

do after that you tell them what they're going to get after they beat these weak people in 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 Aryan 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 Darius's satraps, right, as corporate vice presidents. Not over the cavalry raged at the Granicus or the 20,000 foreign mercenaries, but over all that

was of any worth among the Persians and the Medes, and all the other nations in Asia, subject to the Persians and the Medes, 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 an end to all their long hardship, and there was more. Let me just stop and say, isn't that what they always say in those infomercials? And there was more. He reminded them of what they'd already achieved for the Common Core. caused 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 Arian even says that later on where he'll say, and several more such things as generals do. So, I mean, everybody understands that speeches to the, at least people down to the, 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, Viva, Emperor. This is something that Napoleon has done, not just with his actual physical people that he knew and fought with, 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 Xenophon's famous army of a previous era? if you've ever read xenophon's anabasis the 10,000 Greeks who were in Persian service fought in 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 are you? shouldn't they do far better it's a great argument he then in a more cover all the basis 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 specifics he 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 Illyrians and the Thracians and Courteous showing his own biases says that since those people make a living by looting, Alexander tells them to go and look at all the 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, on 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 war gaming that the Persians are a missile army. If you like, you know, bowfire and javelina, the Persians are your army, not necessarily your, you know, hand-to-hand army, but you don't want to get too close to them.

But 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 but the Persians have already done that they're in place why move they're looking um Adrian Goldsworthy 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 uh 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 operate in that kind of terrain so that's where the persians put all their cavalry as alexander approaches he will have been outflanking himself and that's because as he gets nearer to the river the hills on his right begin to become closer and the foothills sort of encroach and there are troops all over the river the hills on his right begin to become closer and the foothills sort of encroach and there are troops all over those hills and the foothills, you know, range right up to the mountains, and they're crammed with Persians, light troops. Historians don't know whether these are just archers and javelineers and slingers or whether there are more formed troops there also. It's not going to be like hoplites and close order phalanjites or anything. They can't operate in that kind of terrain, but it could be tribesmen, the same kinds of things Alexander uses his Gurkha-type agranians for,

but lots of them. You believe Aryan there's like 20,000 of them up in those foothills. That's a modern division. I'm not going to think that 20,000 of them are there. But since Arian has the entire army at like 600,000, 20,000's a minuscule tiny detachment. By the way, I should point out that according to Arian,

the 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 line. So when 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 L and the Persian front line is the is the stock of the L and then there's a right hand turn and that's where the light troops all are they're on Alexander's 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 a historian adrian goldsworthy had an interesting point which reminds us of exactly what happened with alexander way back when he was facing the Illyrians, and he was able to scare the crap out of them 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 of this warfare here. You have hours to think about it. You're 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 is clouds of dust. Then you would have seen, and 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 pike straight up. So the first thing you would have seen is these,

this like forest of pikes appearing, getting longer and longer as the troops get closer. And Goldsworthy was saying, with the nature of the land there, you know, with its dips and dead zones and sorts of things, the troops that you're watching will disappear. here for a while and then all of a sudden they come over the rise 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 Plata, 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 beings sometimes do in times of extreme fright, and the ancient Greek playwrights would allude 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, Parmenio, for example, and Alexander, they're not worried. But amongst this vast crowd of people on both sides are the less sure, the more frightened, the ones who are experiencing the moment that someone in the First World War, who, 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 once 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 be 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. Well, they sure as heck probably haven't seen the king either. And the Persian king is not a Pharaoh. He's not a god king. But he's a, I think it's safe to say you could call him a near 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 man and this is Alexander's moment to do just that and he can see him on the other side 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 whose 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, agranian 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 and 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 sea side 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 hammerhead of his hammer blow stationed and turns the hammerhead into a sledgehammerhead. He's got basically, what would you say? I was going to 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 sledgehammer. And it looks like Alexander was planning the exact same idea.

in reverse, in a mere image, because he was going to put his, you know, hardcore 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 sledgehammerhead 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 Thessalian cavalry, arguably as 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. Arian says that Alexander told the Thessalians to make this maneuver, this going in motion from right to let, from mountainside to seaside, behind the big block of human beings that is the phalanx so that the Persians won't see it, but it still means that when they get there, the entire Persian sledgehammer has to be held off

by a mere 2,400 or 2,500 cavalry. That job sucks, and you wouldn't want to be the guy that has it, and the guy that has it is Parmenio. The only great general Alexander's dad ever found, he said, one of the two Jack Lillane-Mcedonian generals that are still around, both approaching 70 years old. The other one's Antipater back in Macedonia, ruling in Alexander's stead and getting headaches from Alexander's headstrong mother.

But if you recall, Parmenia 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 outnumbered three or four or five to one. Alexander will do some other finagling, 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 and a little bit of cavalry holding off any possible sortie by those Persians that have 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 unit to the left of the companions, the 3,000 elite hypaspis infantry. Now Alexander's dad, Philip often fought with the elite infantry back in his day.

We'll 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 hypaspus 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, the far right and protecting the flank of the giant block of human beings to their left the phalanx the phalanx is the center of the alexandrian battle line it is the most awe-inspiring uh unit i can think

of remember alexander's dad is as far as we know the first person to ever create a true pike phalanx 16 17 18 foot whatever pikes as we've said a lot of long spear phalanx is going back to say mesopotamia you know 12 foot whatever this is a whole 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 phalanxes 2,000 years after this time period. And Alexander's Pike phalanx 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 hypaspus in this battle line at the battle of isis 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 eight ranks deep in this battle which means it would have stretched the better part of a mile long anywhere from like you know i did the math 0.8 miles to 1.2 miles whatever we 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, a Roman general saw his first version of a Macedonian phalanx and proclaimed it the most terrifying thing he'd ever seen in his life. The phalanx is broken down into smaller units, call them battalions, call them regiments,

whatever you want. Taxus, I think, is the Greek name. And each, of those battalions are commanded by famous people, people who made it into Arian, whose names are recorded. And when I tried 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 did in 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 battlefields. So when they have an Amantas or a or Perthus commanding these units and we question why they're famous today.

Well, what if we just change their name a little? And imagine one battalion of the phalanx 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 phalanx and they're ready to go. To the left of them, we are told some more light-trupe. maybe some more tribesmen to the left of them are the 24-2500 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 vulgar tradition deodoris talks about it will 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 Farrell says the battle lines about two, two and a half miles long. Estimates are that the time of day is the late afternoon, based on how much marching has already occurred to get us to this point. Arthur Farrell says figure 4 p.m.

He also says in this part of the world, in this time of year, sun starts setting at 5, it's pitch black at 6.30. What that means is we've got an X to fill in for the algebraic equation that are the unknowns about this battle, if it starts at four and it's pitch black at 6.30, it's not lasting all that long. The date is anywhere from November 5th to November 12th. You'll find different dates, 333BCE. Alexander's Army has been marching since at least 3 a.m.,

and who knows what kind of asleep 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 4 p.m., I would think you would be tired, worn out. But who knows, maybe the adrenaline's kicked in and you're ready. But no matter what, at least the Persians 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's going to have this up and down the front line. He's still out of missile range. 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 going to 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 sort of a marching normal pace. Everybody's trying to sort of 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. missions. That would be 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 45,000 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 you say 50 yards certainly, but 75 yards may be 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 by basically scientists. who get people out on 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 things that would get people hurt or worse if you tried 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've got the high path, 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 infantry 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 fluidly on the field And I still, and you know, you're getting the Dan Carlin version of this story, but you've gotten everybody else's if you're an Alexander fan, so why not get mine? But I'm still trying to figure out how once Alexander and his forces get to this river, how the heck they don't get shot to heck trying to cross it. Have you ever seen a sporting event where they start throwing beer or something at a participant or a referee or something like that?

And you just see unbelievable numbers of these things flying out from the rafters. on this person, well, Alexander's 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 Vulgate tradition, as it's called, would like you to see Alexander as this force of nature hitting the river, crossing it and engaging with the Persians. The problem is, is 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 horse's 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 Aryan's ridiculous numbers but what that means is those scouting forces prevented any of Alexander's recon forces from checking out the battlefield in advance and reporting back. Alexander gets to find out, and we said this at the Granicus also, didn't we? Alexander gets to find out what this river's 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 Granicus brambles all over, reinforced with a 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 would be like if the persians held their fire and fired in volley it might look like what the ancient authors say which they said there are 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 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 is 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 hypospicists.

This theory only, the first time I ever encountered it was in the 1980s when Arthur Farrell 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 forded 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 infantry, a lot of things start to make sense. Other things make less sense. The things that make sense is all this missile fire is much more survivable if you're with the heavy infantry.

You guys, with their big shields, fighting as hoplites. Hoplites 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 clamber up over a stockade of sharpened 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 hypaspis here, at some point he

has to mount up. So we'll get to that in a minute. But it's either the hypaspis that cross first with Alexander leading them or the companions that cross first with Alexander leading them. But the infantry in front of Alexander freaks out. Remember, it was always said that the battlefield 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, we had 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 panicked 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 cardices represented and those are 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 hoplites 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, it'd 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 hoplites from Persia that they panicked, turned around and ran with Alexander's, either cavalry or hypaspus, right behind them, and they disordered the Persian cardices. Now, even if that didn't happen, somehow they panicked, they got, the other word you'll hear sometimes is shaken, a unit is 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 formed infantry, but they sort of fake it. It's like a giant game of chicken or if you ever played the game of, you know, made you flinch, the cavalry charges you, and if the infantry sort of panics,

then the cavalry continues the charge, right? completes it. If 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 roll of the dice. If, however, he's with the hypasmus, 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. You fans of the famous Xenophon work, the Anabasis. 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. So you imagine they

get within like a football field of view, a unit of thousands of Persians, an oblong formation he described it and then they get a good look at you and turn around and run away. Wargaming screws people up mentally from accepting this reality too because very few rulesets 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 them out on the floor, you know, spend all day, set up your army against your buddy, and you're going to kick his rear end and 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 you Napoleonic 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 a

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 in the napoleonic wars 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 most people figure out they've got better places to be and if they can't figure it out for themselves, Phobos and Pan helped 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 failure, 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 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 pincushion, but they can't be a pincushion in this sort of circumstances and there's a steep wall of, you know, riverside 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 in 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. And I'm going to give Arian's account and some other ones. And they all kind of start, if you don't mind just going a little chronologically backwards for a second. Usually it right before Alexander makes the charge. And here's the way 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 phalanx,

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 Persian infantry could not cope with the shock. Alexander's cavalry drove forward, pushing left towards Darius, who was in the center of the Persian levy, surrounded by his personal guard. Elsewhere, things went less well. The phalanx could not keep pace with 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 hoplites in Darius' service could then insinuate themselves,

between the lethal Sarissa, the Pikes, and attack the Macedonians from the side, where they were most vulnerable. It was a tactic, he writes, used by the Romans, to destroy the Macedonian armies in the second century BC. And it isis, the phalanx was more closely challenged than at any other time in the rain, meaning his kingship. There was a real danger of it being dislocated and routed, end quote. At this point in the Alexander movie, well, no Alexander movies, actually come at the Battle of Visas, which is interesting considering it's the nearest run thing to disaster Alexander ever had. But at this point of 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, you know, 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 else are endemosthenes and people in Athens, this is the opportunity to destroy the person. and 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 is 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 in Greece that don't like Alexander's thumb. How about if you're a Phoeban, and he destroyed your whole city, you're hoping the mercenaries here cut the Macedonian phalanx,

this invincible Macedonian phalanx, 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 phalanx then has to go through where you know the persians are waiting for them including and imagine it 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 air is filled with this stuff but very quickly the casualties mount in the phalanx as the mercenaries somehow get their way in to the flank of it and the officers are getting crushed. The leaders in the phalanx are actually getting crushed. The Eisenhower's, MacArthur's, and Pattons that are fighting in the phalanx are getting crushed. You know, famous names go down.

Quickly. Mentioned by name is the son of Seleucus, one of Alexander's good friends and a successor who founded a multi-generational dynasty in the Middle East. His name, Ptolemy, no confusion there, but let's remember Ptolemy is a little like Mike or Dan, for that matter, in the ancient world. His son Ptolemy just happens to be the unlucky guy, the unlucky officer who's in command of the Phelanx Battalion that gets hit in the flank by the Persian king's 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 Ptolemy's Phelanx Battalion gets speared in the flank by the hoplites of the great king, and they'll be using a nine to 12 foot spear, which I love is described as a short spear by Niden, but that is relative compared to the 15 to 19 foot pike of the Macedonians.

And Frank Niden writes, quote. Ptolemy 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 the Greeks. them. Their short spears, ha ha, caught the Macedonians in the side. As the Macedonian officers stepped forward to rally their companies, they made themselves targets and were stabbed. Talaimmy fell dead. So did one officer after another. When junior officers stepped forward to reform the companies,

the Greeks speared them too. Square by square the companies disintegrated. Most of Ptolemy's hundred or so officers were now slain, fatally wounded, or trampled to death. End quote. So here's the crisis moment. When was the last time the phalanx of Macedonia had been defeated? Well, it 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 phalanxes left, right?

The people at the sea where the big Persian sledgehammer is waiting to fall. on poor Parmenio and his cavalry and some Thracians and some archers and a bunch of people who shouldn't be able to deal with them. What's going on over there? Well, good luck figuring it out. You will find yourself being confronted at some point with Polybius' math, which is, you know, then interpreted by a guy like Hans Delbrook and 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 Del Brookian calculation of Polybius' numbers of how much space just a mere 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, Polybius 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 these Prussian sorts of guns.

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 the o'i bearer issue 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 macadonian side why aren't they blowing through here like the sledgehammer 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,

where we said it's like a wave crashing on a beach, and the wave could be breaking way down the coast, whereas it's still cresting down by you, and maybe Alexander is winning the battle on the far mountain side of the flank here before the sledgehammer 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 Niden, and he writes about the moment where the phalanx calls for help. He says, quote, surviving officers sounded trumpets, calling men to regroup and other units to help. Alexander's nearby strike force heard the call better than Parmese. Menio's wing, Alexander halted his advance on Darius and turned to observe the fighting some hundreds of yards behind him.

Sinus, or Koinos, commander of the front half of the phalanx turned and watched also. He was closer to the beleaguered regiment. In the Persian army, a man in Koinos's position would have waited for orders from the king. Not in this army. As Alexander watched, Koinos gave the order for his regiment and those beside it to turn around and head toward the fighting. Once Coynos arrived on the scene, he positioned his men so that they could

hit the Greeks on the side. What the Greeks had done to Ptolemy, Koinus now did to them. End quote. Now when Nydin is referring to what Alexander is doing, by this time Alexander is beginning with a couple of units of infantry, Phelang's guys too,

to make his way slanted towards the Great King's chariot in the middle. This is where, as we said earlier, the problem with the theory that is with the hypaspis 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 again. 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 thermodynamics,

hydrodynamics, one of those kinds of things for crowds of people, and it was interesting that I found out there was. And the term connected with this, I thought it was a fascinating term, is that crowds behaved like thinking fluids. And so the people, backed into this 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. I mean, shove them so close together that they become useless as fighters. The Roman legionaries used to 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 the horse play into all this because where are they in the crowds and i mean 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 it 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 seemed to 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 them. If you happen to have a nice little

javelin in your hand and you're not using it at the moment, wouldn't 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've got the actual head of state right there in front of you. I mean, the war is between, you know, the president of one country today and the prime minister of another. Well, here they are facing off Churchill and Hitler, yards from each other. and in the Vulgate tradition, the Deodoris's and the courteouses and stuff,

they like to get much more sort of descriptive about it all, tropes and everything else. So remember, you know, these guys weren't there. Some of this stuff is standard fare, but it does color it up for us a little bit in my wonderful Robin Waterfield translation of Deodorus. Deodorus 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 Aksiotrhus, a brother of Darius who was renowned for his courage, saw that Alexander was making for Darius in a seemingly unstoppable charge, Let me stop you here, or a slow carving his way through the crowd toward the great king. Deodorus continues, He resolved to share his brother's fate.

He collected the best of the horsemen in his command, and with them at his 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 Darius'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 Darius'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.

End quote. Deodorus says in this pushing forward and killing towards Darius's chariot, Alexander was wounded in the thigh. This is a long-running part of the story that's Some sources say and 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 one of the key variables on an ancient battlefield. But once again, the psychology of animals comes into play, and Deodorus writes, quote, The horses yoked to Darius's chariot received multiple wounds, and they were so startled by the number of corpses piling up around them that they attempted to

shake off their bits and almost bore Darius off into the midst of the enemy, end quote. The ancient writer Curtis is also sort of part of the same tradition as Diodorus and has a version of that story and he says, quote, by this time Darius'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. End 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 a 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 where they do well one way or another it's a

integral 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? Arrian has had a much more cowardly move and has the great king deciding he's got better places to be. And in my Aubrey-Deselancourt translation of Aryan, Aryan says, quote, The moment the Persian left went to pieces under Alexander's attack and Darias 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 the 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 too. and this sets off a chain reaction and kind of explains what's going on with the Persian sledgehammer

back 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 in 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, you know, in this case, mostly Alexandrian 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 engage 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 nothing but corpses waiting to happen. And the killing is immense. and the Alexandrian compatriot, a guy who starts his own dynasty in Egypt, his descendant as Cleopatra, Ptolemy, who's one of the main sources for some of these ancient writers of ours, he claims to have crossed a ravine 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 Deodorus points out. This is from my C. Bradford-Well's 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 this state, the Persians with him turned to flee, and as each adjacent unit in turn 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 phalanx 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 countryside was soon covered with bodies. End quote.

Anyone who's taken an interest in what's sometimes called battlefield 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 uh this battle could almost be recreated that way i mean the the the carnage around the where the great king's chariot was his remarked upon there was a great slaughter there because that's where you know it all hit the fan right the the bravest guards troops that the king has are trying to literally fend alexander off that's the famous scene from the alexander mosaic you know

with alexander charging spearing a guy and the great king's right there in the chariot and the 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 Titanic's 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 to get back to where you were.

And to be honest, there's a lot of things that interest 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 Isis 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 thigh 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 battlefields look like. And I've talked about it extensively because in my mind, I can't even picture it. And, of course, you know, battlefields in the ancient world are like fingerprints, no two are exactly the same.

But I believe didn't we say way back when we were doing the Roman shows, in some places they would hold tours afterwards to show people what it looked like. There's a morbid curiosity in the whole thing, but it must have been awful to behold. I remember reading some stuff historian Larry Tridle had talked about when he was talking about what the environment of the ancient battlefield would be like. And he was quoted in my copy. of combat trauma in 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 battlefield 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 and the air foul. The noise and confusion would have been bewildering and disorienting all at once. End a quote. And so here we have Alexander on this ride back. I 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 and have absorbed what's happened. And when he arrives, you know, back where the Macedonians are near the battlefield, He must have looked like Carrie from the movie Carrie when the pig's blood was all dropped on him. How can you be in close proximity to lots of people having limbs lopped 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 in 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 with the parents, you know, accompaniment. That doesn't ruin your movie right there, but that's probably closer to the reality.

I'm fascinated by several aspects of what's just happened, though. First of all, just Alexander leading the pursuit himself is so Alexander. Even his dad, who was no shirker when it came to being the first among equals, and, you know, the whole thing, I mean, gave up his eye, limped around for, you know, the rest of the end of his life. I mean, he gave up his body for all that. 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've said this before. 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 it's going to get him into trouble, of course, because think about, we said, the boxing analogy, the idea of the wear and tear, keep track of the wear and tear on this guy,

what's going on in all these pursuits? If 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'd 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 mentions 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 it

that might add as a variable, but you see enough murders and participate in 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 or 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 he's getting hit on the head. Battle of the Granicus famously almost has its skull split open. A 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 Ceney, where Hannibal surrounded 50,000 or more Romans, that's the end of the battle as far as a wargamer is concerned, right? that's when I pack up and go home, but you still have to kill all those people. And every one of them is going to want to sell their lives dearly, and so you could be a Carthaginian thinking the battles won, 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. Add up all the times 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 into 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 does this compare to and what's the amplitude and what are the emotions? You know, is it jubilation? Is this sort of shock?

Is it a letdown 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 and 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 Thracians or those Agranians or those light troops, they didn't even, they weren't even mentioned in the numbers. So who knows, there have been good estimates that the numbers are probably, something, you know, 1, 1,000, 1 ratio wounded to dead. So that's, you know, 4,000 or 5,000 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, though, 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 Phoebes. And what human beings do in situations like that?

If you're a Phoeban and he's destroying your city and you know this is coming, what do you do? Do you stay in your home? Do you head to the 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, the battle will 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 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 uh you know the ones that alexander gave before the battle uh of any sort of value at all he's literally telling people like the Thracians 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, to motivate them. Well, guess what? Time to collect your winnings. And this camp is being ransacked to such a degree

that the ancient authors talk about you can follow the trail of stuff that people have just 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 of the so-called kinsmen, which is really the, let's call them the oligarchy of the Kamanid 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 Arian is doing a version of Alexander that makes, it really shaves off the rough edges. If he ever says anything critical, you take it as hypercritical because that's unusual for him.

But in this case, Arian uses what's happening here as a setup to show, you know, one of a very Alexander's really good qualities allegedly. But the vulgar tradition guys, the Deodoris's and the courteouses, 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 the moment where the queen mother who is there.

So this would be Darias III'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 thinks going on here sort of brings them into her circle of protection and it's keeping the Macedonian looters at bay.

And this whole incident includes a line from Deodorus that I love. I 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 derives a sister, I think, and his two granddaughters and the grandson, 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 deluders at bay. And this is the way Deodor's and the fabulous Robin Waterfield translation tells the story, quote, The women who were taken prisoners suffered terribly. Previously, given their pampered way of life, they had scarcely been able to bring themselves to travel on richly a point. 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. Bewhaling 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, enacted as though fortune had granted them the right to abuse

the most precious and renowned of the barbarian's possessions. End quote. Well, that's where Courteous now has sort of the queen mother with her circle of protection and in my John Yardley translation of courteous Curtis says quote However it was Darius' 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 ysum 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 aged grandmother, La Darias' two grown-up but unmarried daughters, grieving for their grandmother as well as themselves. Around her, now he's talking about the queen mother, around her stood a large number of high-born women, their hair torn, their clothes rent, and their former gracefulness forgotten. They called upon their queens and mistresses, titles formally appropriate but no longer applicable. They forgot their own plight and kept asking on which wing Darius 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, if 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. of 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 officer, somebody who's not brain damage during the looting phase and realizes who they have here and how important these people are.

Right, Alexander, they meet a lot to Alexander alive, right? He can use them for propaganda purposes, all kinds of things. So as soon as they realize what they're dealing with here, the dignity in 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 Darius is dead 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, Hephaestian.

If you imagine Batman and Robin, that's kind of Alexander and Hephaestian, except it's weird because Hephaestian is the larger, bigger sort of guy. So it would be as though Batman and Robin appear on the scene and Robin is 6'2 and 215 pounds, and Batman's 5'5 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 beseech Alexander the Great, and instead of doing so, had fallen to the feet instead of Batman of Robin, because she thinks the larger, bigger 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 of 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, 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 perfect propaganda. And Alexander plays this part. 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 historiographers who sit here and study these things. Why it's so important for Arian and Deodorus and Curtis and all of these guys that Alexander shows this sort of gallant nature. This Sir Lancelot, Sir Galah had sort of almost, courtly love era, medieval era, 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 Aubrey de Selling Core translation has Aryan's. saying, quote, I record this anecdote, it's the Hephaestian 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 Hephaestian. If the story is just a story, is what 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, end quote. Well, and the vulgar tradition has their own reason to sort of laud this moment if it happened in Alexander's life. 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 those 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 era they love.

laud um this is where alexander really seems like something different than your run of the mill sorts of strong men and 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 file 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 the Spartan upbringing of the Macedonians, 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 courtyard of the great king's tent in the Persian camp that his 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.

sized tent maybe with couches and ch i mean here's the way plutarch describes it and then he has alexander have this wonderful line one of these wonderful ambiguous multiple ways to interpret it alexandrian lines that are classic and plutarch writes quote this is from the dryden translation by the way and it picks up the story where alexander's basically coming back from hunting for derius 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 there. The pages have gotten there and prepped it for him with tortures, and they've got a bath drawing. It's just, it's all ready for him. And Dryden has Plutarch saying, quote, But Darius's 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 Darius. 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 wrought, and smelt the fragrant odors with which the whole place was exquisitely perfumed, and from fence passed 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. End 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 you know the acadians i mean this is really really ancient stuff and alexander is the first european to find himself in a position to start bathing in the exquisitely jeweled baths of the people who are the inheritors of that level of royalty. It's something human beings have shown a propensity to getting used to.

And history shows it's often fatal if you do. What'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 harem and the bowing and the scraping and the well it wasn't so ron'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 a 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 subject who are used to treating their king as somebody more than human already. Well, this sort of thinking about oneself as potentially godlike, there's a little bit of a drug aspect to that. It 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.

And what happens to you as a historical figure, if you do? Well, maybe as we move forward, that's what we're going to find out. Is Alexander the great a cautionary tale? Well, let's just say that the stage is perfectly set for one of those Greek morality tales, or the Vulgate tradition version of the Alexander's story. where we get a chance to watch the same sort of power that has intoxicated rulers from time immemorial, the numbers of which it's almost crazy think of themselves as more than human after a while. Although, listen, this is not a world 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 the point is is it's not quite the claim back then to say you're divine than it is now there was a 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 moralists love this story because it's it's icarus all over again isn't it at this point in the icarus 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 Ostfront. Just a few of the classic hardcore history titles available from Dancarlin.com.

Every true fan has heard 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, a bird hunting idea that better to bag a single bird with a conservative sort of approach than to gamble and reach and, you know, end up having had a chance maybe a two and going home with none. I think about that when we get to where we are in this 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 Alexander'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. king, Anatoly, a 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 granite.

It's 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 a sort of a restless macadonia 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 was drawing the macedonian army but how far was it going to draw them after the battle of issis 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 will call him cowardly and all that sort of stuff while he lives to fight another day he's still out there ready to make deals ready to raise armies

I mean Persia is still existing and 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, Macadonna Tech, this startup company that's, you know, with this disruptive technology, some of these really early founders 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, a 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 guy's appeal he's he's playing for a celestial position here a greatest of all time position he's clearly drawn um in a way that makes his psychology fascinating to historians ever since because we always want to know, you know, what are this guy's motivations? And the reason it matters is because when is enough enough? I mean, what are this guy's victory conditions ever? I mean, he's going to become a poster child, you know, for a guy who's addicted to conquest, a guy who has

a mania for subjugation. More on this in part five, a mania for subjugation.