Empire: World History - 103. Alexander the Great: Defeating Darius

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

Darius has already been defeated by Alexander. His wife has been kidnapped and has now died in childbirth. The omens sent by the gods bode ill for him. Yet, the two are ready to face off at Gaugamela. Will Darius be the first commander to defeat Alexander in battle, or will he fall like all those before him? Listen as William and Anita tell the story of the end of the Achaemenid Empire. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Turimple. No, just no. Okay, do not. No. No.

for describing the wonderful battle which I'm about to give a ration on. You have the most impish face on. I thought we dealt with this Paul's business, and you're just deliberately now driving me to the edge of distraction. I am all set to tell one of the most wonderful stories, which we're going to have on this pod. Yeah. I mean, you left us on a cliff edge.

It was the night before the battle, the great battle where Darius, the third, is going to face Alexander the Great, and everything that could go wrong as far as signs and omens are concerned has gone wrong for Darius. We have an eclipse that apparently turns the moon blood red first of all and then to darkness. We've had meteor's streak across the sky. We've got the priests who probably don't have the heart to tell Darius, this is not good news, saying,

could be good, could be bad. And his wife has died in childbirth. And his wife has died bearing a child that almost certainly isn't his, because his wife has been held hostage by Alexander the Great. So, you know, this is not a good frame of mind for Darias. And what's more, you told us just before in the last podcast, all the preparations that the Persians have done for this great battle at Garamella, removing all the vegetation, flattening the ground for the chariots. They've seen it all. Alexander's troops have seen it all because there is a great full moon.

And all of these battle plans have been revealed the night before. So they are ready. They may not have the numbers, but they have the preparation. that element of surprise has gone for the Persians. So tell us about the battle of Gargamela itself. So I think the numbers are not bad. I mean, Arrian, the Roman source, says that the Persian army's 40,000 cavalry and a million infantry. Extremely unlikely, almost certainly wrong. But I think the kind of considered opinion is that Alexander has about 47,000 men. So his troops are growing. He's conquered Egypt. He's conquered the whole of the Middle East. And he's gathered.

troops. He's doubled his troop numbers, doubled them, hasn't it? He's doubled his troops, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And every sort of Greek mercenary who's been working in the courts of the Levant has now joined Alexander's army. And he has the money to pay them. And he has the money to pay them. He can pay for mercenaries. You know, he's been conquering land and conquering, you know, bank accounts wherever he goes or the equivalent. So dawn breaks on the 1st of October, 331 BC. It's October, but it's not October as we know it here in Europe because it's hot. It's very hot. Damn hot. It's very hot. This is in the middle of Iraqi Kurdistan. This is on the edge of the desert. And the Greeks are up early. They're in position before dawn breaks. And as is usual, in Persian practice, Darius placed himself in the center of the army. While Alexander split,

his troops into two units. And again, as at Isis, it's the Macedonians who are the first to engage. They just charge forward. And again, they charge towards the riot. So just talk me through this, because I'm not as battle literate as you are. But we've got a small force facing a larger force. And as you say, he sort of does the same thing he does at Isis. Do they break into two flanks and try to outflank? Or are they running head on right into the heart? So they begin running head-on, and it's the cavalry with Alexander that's at the front, but at the last moment they swerve to the right. And this is a completely different tactic to what they'd done at Isis.

And again, it throws the Persians into confusion. And they try to outmaneuver the Macedonian cavalry. And consequently, a gap opens up in the Persian troops. And Alexander's troops launch at the Persian chariots at full speed. and the Macedonians use their seresis to attack. What's a seresis? Their long spears. Long spears, right, okay.

And the Macedonians use these spears to attack and kill the horses and the charioteers as they charge past. So things are immediately going wrong again. And this is now the third time that the Macedonians have outwitted the Persians. And once again, Darius realizes that Alexander has an opportunity to strike at him. So he skillfully turns his chariot and again he drives off the battlefield. So he's determined to live to fight another day, but this is, I think, a decision that he will greatly regret because not only is he abandoning battle for the second time, he's going to be

losing his Mesopotamian heartland. Galgumela in Iraqi Kurdistan is on the edge of Mesopotamia and below it you can move straight into the plains leading to Susa, Babylon and Persepolis. It's one thing to lose Anatolia, and I think Darius would have been fairly happy to have lost the periphery of his empire. Obviously not very happy, but it was never the centre of Persian. You can tolerate it. You can tolerate it. But this now is a fatal blow. And no one, I think, would have imagined that Darius would ever have come to this or really that he could come back from this. So just as in Isis, Darius,

please, Gargamela, he crosses the Zargos Mountains to the Iranian plateau, before reaching Ekbatana. Where's Akbatana? Where exactly is that? Is that in the Iranian heartlands? So, Egbatana is one of the ancient capitals of Persia near modern Hamadan in western Iran. And it, again, is one of these amazing archaeological sites dug by archaeologists in the 1930, the same time that Persepolis is being dug. And it's one of the great, the great, archaeological sites of the Middle East. And Alexander passes there and goes straight on to Babylon. And this is, again, the kind of hugely humiliating moment because Babylon was the first great conquest of Cyrus. And it was the conquest of Babylon that made Cyrus the Great.

Yeah, so put the Great into Cyrus, the Great. Absolutely. Yeah, it puts the Great into Cyrus. And now Darius has gone and lost it. And to add salt into his wounds, Alexander is welcomed as a liberator in Babylon. Yeah, that is interesting as well. So he's welcomed in Babylon. And also what he does is he has a very different mindset. I mean, maybe because, you know,

they're not pointing sharp sticks at him. But he starts ingratiating himself with the priesthood of Babylon, which is something that is hugely pleasing to the people of Babylon. Well, Alexander is historically literate. He knows the history of these places. and it's a big deal to have conquered Babylon. It's one of the great cities of antiquity. So rather than just sort of randomly shipping off everybody into slavery,

like he'd done with Tahr and Saidan, he is welcomed by these people, and he in turn respects their gods, and he goes to the temple of Marduk, which is where Cyrus had gone when he first conquered it all those centuries ago. And Alexander, like Cyrus, adopts the royal titles of the Babylonian monarchy, such as king of all the lands. And so, again, we've been brought up to think of Alexander as the West.

And very Greek. As a very different thing, a Greek. But he's putting on Persian garb here. He looks like a Persian. He's putting on all this stuff. Yeah. And this is not something which is surprising to him because the Macedonian court for seven, eight generations has been Persianate.

His father sits on a Persian-style throne. So he knows what to do. This is not a foreign culture. This is something he understands, he knows the etiquette. Okay, so I mean, this is now the start of what looks like their fall of dominoes as far as Persian territories are concerned. Correct. Some fall with great ease, others with enormous resistance. So, I mean, you've got the administrative capital of Sousa.

Where the civil service live and where you find all the Kunaiform tablets. Yeah, all the people who make things happen. Yeah. Exactly. And that surrenders without resistance. And then he's got his eye on Persepolis. Now, Persepolis is so very important. Just describe Persepolis to people who don't know it.

So Persepolis, again, one of the greatest sites of antiquity. It survives very, very substantially today. As Alexander saw it, it's lost its roof for reasons that we'll come to in a minute. But when you go to Persepolis, it stretches out over the plains of Fars for mile after mile. And any tourist that goes there, you come to the first enclosure and, you spend an hour or two there and you kind of think that's it. And then you just realize that there's more. You're just starting. And there's more. And there's more. And soon it's lunch and it's very hot. And you still haven't seen half the sight. It's enormous. It's breathtaking and

grand and intact, of course, in 330 BC. And they open their gates. Pacepolis opens its gates to the Macedonian army. And one would hope, if you are sitting there in Pesepalus, that just as with or maybe even Babylon, that, you know, this will be fine. All will be fine. He'll come and pray to our local gods and we're all going to be fine. But, and we've talked about this before in imperial history, when you have an army that is all roiled up and hasn't had a fight in a while, sometimes the commanders decide this is the time you've got to let them blow off some steam. And that is where they do it in Persepolis. And boy, do they, isn't it awful what happens in So the great archaeologist of Persepolis was this guy called Hertzfeld, who excavated it in the 1930s. Robert Byron, for example, in the road to Oxyana, when he goes to Persia, he comes across Hertzfeld, still digging sites. And one of the things the archaeologists find at Persepolis is that they find the skeletons of people who've hid in the drainage beneath the main site, hoping that they're going to be spared. And these people are slaughtered.

along with everybody else. It's a kind of horribly modern story of people hiding from... I mean, it's 24-hour orgy of violence where they just hunt people wherever they are, men, women and children, nobody is spared in Persepolis. And initially, they do avoid destroying Persepolis, because I think, you know, Alexander is hoping that he'll be using this as his capital. This is the most magnificent palace in the world. He's just conquered. Of course, if you're the conqueror, you want it intact. You want it. you know, spanking new, so that you can rule from there yourself. And Alexander's showing all

signs of wanting to be regarded as now the legitimate new Shah of Persia. But in May 1330, for reasons that we don't entirely understand, Persepolis goes up in fire. And historians are divided over whether this is an accident, whether there's too much revelry and drinking, because the Macedonians are having a very good time, having just conquered the greatest empire of its day. their main rival. And they've done what rampaging armies do. They've been raping women. They've been destroying things. They've been helping themselves to everything in houses and looting the place dry. So it could be a fire. But it also could be retribution as well. Because, you know, I've read other sources that say that Alexander is surprised that the people of Persepolis don't like him.

Yeah. He's now in the Persian heartlands. And as we know, Persians today, as in all periods of history, are enormously proud people and they do not want foreigners coming and taking over their sacred sites. And Persepolis is, is an odd ruin. It's not just an administrative centre like suzer is. It is a sacred site. There's Zoroastrian symbols all around. There's the image of Ahura Mazda floating over images of the different kings of Persian, the great kings, all over the site. And it's a major center of Persian religion. And I think this is, you know, regarded by the Persians of the time as an act of complete sacrilege. So he doesn't get the respect or the abasance or the, you know,

love of these people in a way that he had, for example, in Babylon. The Babylonians are quite pleased to give rid of the Persians. But in Persepolis, it's quite different. Well, he didn't destroy and burn the people and murder the people in drains in Babylon. So, I mean, I don't know what he was expecting. Persepolis does burn. It burns. And this is one of the great tragedies of the time. And it probably, you know, wasn't something that Alexander wanted to happen. But anyway, he burns it. Yeah. And what's interesting is that quite quickly Persepolis, is covered by the sands.

Which is why so much of it stands today. And even when later in this series, we'll be talking about Fardousi and the Shannameh, and this great revival of the mythology of ancient Persia, many centuries later, when Faddaozy tries to recover the old history of Persia. But fascinatingly, Pasepolis doesn't appear anywhere in Ferdasie. There's no memory. It's gone by the 10th century when Faddao is writing the Shandameh. It's a flat plain of sand.

It's a flat plain. It's gone. there's no memory of it. I am so astonished at how the sounds of time quite literally preserve things for our eyes. I've been to Leptis Magna, which was also... Have you in Libya? I have. I have in Libya. I've been to Leptis. Oh, I'm very ambitious of that. And it is, it was perfection. It was absolutely so every detail. You know, you're used to seeing ruins and you're used to seeing sort of the blunt where a nose might have been on a statue or... So for those who don't know the name Leptus Magna, I think I'm writing it was built, what was rebuilt, of Sintney by Septimus Severus,

Yes. Who was the Roman Emperor, who was from North Africa. We always again think of Roman emperors as being sort of, you know, basically Italian. White Caucasians from Italy. White Caucasians from Italy. But Zeptimus Severus is a North African, curly hair, probably very dark skin.

And he rebuilds Leptus Bagnet as a spectacular show city for his dynasty. It is exquisite. And honestly, you could, at the time when I went, so actually I went to Leptus. What were you doing there? When did you go? So my husband and I mentioned in maybe the previous podcast that we tend to chase eclipses. And there was an eclipse that was going to be over the desert in Libya.

And as part of that, we went through Leptis. So it must be before our first child was. Gaddafi is still in place? Gaddafi was still in place. People were still frightened to talk about Gaddafi. So when we were in the capital, people were sort of muttering about Gaddafi under their breath, but not openly because they were still worried about the secret police being around. We were led by Tuareg into the desert to see this eclipse.

But then they also took a steleptus, and it must have been about 15, 16 years ago, I'm saying. And what happened was you could walk among the ruins and touch them, because so few people went to Libya in those days. This is true of Persepolis, even today. There's so few foreign tourists. There's nothing to separate you. Everyone's scared of going to Iran. Yeah. There are many patriotic persons wandering around, but if you go early in the morning, you have the site completely to yourself.

Yeah. I went several years ago. And you could still, yeah. So, I mean, you know, the point of that slight dog leg was that sand preserves. I mean, it is a take. But it makes people forget for a generation until somebody comes and digs into the sand. And you have this sort of revelation of buildings as people may have seen them in the days that they were used. Anyway, enough of that. So look, he's torched Persepolis.

This must have hurt Darias to his very quick. And now he knows, I guess, I mean, the writing's on the wall for Darias. If you lose Persepolis, then you've pretty much lost, haven't you? And also, there's not much left for him to gather troops from. As I say, it was bad enough to lose Anatolia, but at least you've got the Mesopotamian heartlands of Persia and modern Iraq to draw a new army from. But when you've lost that, too, all that's left is the northern fringes.

Again, we make the mistake often of thinking of the Achaemenid Persian Empire as being the same basic shape. modern Iran. It isn't. It stretches right over to the Oxus, to the Indus. And so there is quite a lot of territories. There's the whole of modern Afghanistan, there's the whole of modern Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. So there's places to recruit you, but it's not the Persian heartlands. Although it's Persian-speaking territory, this is not the place where... I mean, you can recruit men, but you can't get money from these places. These are outposts. These are not an empire. These are the raggedy bits that are left behind. So Darias is now, I think, looked on

even by his own people as a loser. Although he's lived to fight on, and although he is bravely fighting on, there's no question of him surrendering or trying to find an accommodation with Alexander. After that first offer was turned down before Gargamel. That's the last time he makes any sort of peace. And he's still fighting, but it's not looking good. He's retreating back into the mountains. And Alexander is chasing him. I mean, he's not just going to let him just disappear. You know, he's hot on the heels now of Darius, because only the total destruction of this man is going to cement his position as the man who has taken Persia. So Alexander pursues Darius. So Darius has been in Eqbatana, which is modern Hamadan, and is a long way from Persepolis.

This is modern Fars. Hamadan is right up on towards the Turkish border. But Darias now has to retreat back towards, what's now, Afghanistan. Bactria? Yeah. Yes, Afghanistan. The mountains of Bactria, that is Afghanistan, yeah. And he is burning fields and farms as he advanced, trying to deny Alexander the opportunity to draw any resources,

any food, any supplies from the region. He's doing a burnt earth policy. But Alexander wants to capture Darius alive. And after he's parted at Persepolis and burnt it down and had his rest, he suddenly finds new energy and is back in the saddle. And so he now is racing off towards Harage, his pronunciation, which is basically modern Tehran. And in only 11 days, he moves from Persepolis to the edge of the Elboats. And then Alexander hears some very, very unwelcome news.

Good place to take a break. A good place to take a break. Let's leave him for a minute. Let's leave him for a minute. Join us after the break and when we find out what exactly this unwelcome news is. Welcome back. So just before the break, we heard that and Willie was being very teasing about it, that Darias has, you know, apart from all of these defeats,

apart from being pursued into the mountains, apart from being seen as a loser by his own people. He has now withdrawn. Alexander is on his tail. And then he gets to hear that Bessus, the sap trap of back. which is in modern Afghanistan, is turning against him. Not just turning against him, but he's going to take him in chains now, because that feeling that this man is not a winner, not the one to back, this once very firm ally of his, who has ridden into battle,

do you remember in the first podcast? I said, just remember this man, he's going to be important. Yeah. But he claps him in irons. He'd fought for Darius Agagabella, as recently as that. He'd be on Attisus and Agamela, and he's made the decision now that Dariah is a loser and he wants to take over himself. So he waits until Darias is asleep and then

he bursts into the bedroom and chains up Darias. And Alexander's furious at this because he wants to be the one that's capturing. He wanted him. Yeah, he wanted him. Yeah. So Bessus seizes the great king, places him in chains and begins to transport him east. And he puts him in a Harim carriage, which is how the Persians used to transport their women. So this is adding insult. Is it? To transport him with the women? This is just to completely masculinate him or to hide him. Partly that, but it might just also be a practical way of doing it without allowing the locals to know that... To see who you've got. That their Shah has been captured and is chained up with some local satrap taking his place.

But Alexander won't have this because, you know, why should Bessus take the spoil of all spoils, the King of Kings? And so he's now after Bessus. He's like, right, you're not getting this. I need him. So he starts to hunt Bessus. And how does that go? Bessus retreats, and he retreats past modern Meshed in northeast Iran, towards Herat and the Harirut River. And again, this is one of the most sort of fantastic landscapes I've ever seen. Herat is this extraordinarily romantic city on the edge of the Harry Rud. Today, it's got the remains of these spectacular Timurid madrasas and these gorgeous,

tall minarets that rise up. Robert Byron in the road to Oxiana writes one of the great descriptions of architecture in the English language about this site. And the enormous arg of Herat, which is still there, was already established at the same site at this time and was the Persian centre. So this is the place that Bessus is heading for. And Alexander, with his companions, is chasing him. And he's left the army behind. Then he's left the army behind. Then he's left the other cavalry behind. And he's riding now with an incredibly small force of his immediate boon companions, his friends from the kind of gym in Bella, just as small force of these sort of battle-hardened mates. But I mean, this is either arrogance of a man who thinks he is a god,

or he knows that there's not going to be any resistance now because there's nobody on the other guy's side. Except Bessus, when why does he... No, Bessus has got a full army. He's the local governor. Why is he not worried about Bessus then? I find that really amazing. Because he's the son of Zeus. He's a god. That's now believing his own propaganda. So there he is. He's sort of hunting Bessus down. And then in this very movie-like scene,

they see the carriage across the plains of the Harry Rud. And these guys are running away, trying to get into what's now Afghanistan. And also trying to drag the carriage with Darius in it, you know, with them. So Alexander's not going to let that carriage go. And the Persians under Bessus see the Macedonians coming for them. And already, remember, these guys have now lost three major battles. Persepolis is burnt. And Alexander now has the reputation that he hits.

He is Alexander the Great. He is the son and Zeus. And complete panic breaks out in Bessus' troop, although they vastly outnumber the very small number of Macedonians. And Bessus decides that it's going to be him that deals with Darius. So he dismounts, even as the Macedonians are approaching. And he opens the... door of the carriage and inside is this poor huddled figure of Darius with his beard and his ringlets

bound hand and foot in chains and Bessus withdraws his sword and he kills him between the ribs in a single thrust leaving him undead still warm. Oh gosh and when the persians see the Macedonians coming for them the carriage is broken the wheel has shattered. So the Darius' carriage is sitting at an angle. They can't move it. And this warm body of the former shower is lying there, bleeding out, bleeding to death. And we have an account of, again, one never knows, because these are Roman accounts dating from 300 years later. It's like reading an historian writing today about something that happened in Stuart or Tudor times.

But according to the Roman sources, Darius is still alive. and asks Alexander for a glass of water and Alexander passes the water to Darius and he drinks it and then he dies. Yeah, I mean, there's also, aren't there sort of, again, possibly embellishments that a soldier of Alexander's cradles the dying king's head as he's sipping water that's been given to him by Alexander and that they allow him at least some, I mean, again, some dignity.

You know, they've watched Bessus now, who is the baddie. Bessus can be the villain who's done. this sort of thing just while he's about to lose. He takes the privilege from Alexander, and so Alexander shows mercy. This is, you know, what the propaganda says, maybe. But they allow the king to die quietly and drift away. And this is so seismic, because it is the last of the accamendides who dies on this field. And Alexander behaves very honorably, whether out of pragmatism or out of the eye for austerity, and he decides to give an honorable burial to Darius and to hunt down Bessus as a criminal, as a murderer. And he tries to tie himself

to the Echaemenids by actually marrying Darius's eldest daughter. He's already got his hands on Darius's queen. Now he actually formally marries the eldest daughter. And having established kinship with his former rival by marriage, Alexander vows to exact retribution on Bessus, who is eventually captured and tortured and executed the following spring in 3-29 BC. And when this great state funeral for Darius is held in the burnt-out ruins of Picepolis, Alexander apparently is weeping. And again, you know, is that pragmatism? Is it even true? But that's the story that he's sitting there, weeping for his fallen rival, weeping that he didn't have the chance to kill him him. we pinged that there wasn't one last battle, who knows? But that's the story.

So after this lavish state funeral in Persepolis, Alexander, though, is going to move eastwards again, because, you know, he's got Bessus, he chases Bessus, he gets his hands on Bessus, and then he decides he's going to stamp on every revolt in the region. And he's got his eye on India as well, because it's not far away. I mean, the geography of this is not a huge distance. You've reached Afghanistan. It's just across the... the mountains and you're in Punjab, pretty much. It's not. Today, it's a half hour or 40-minute flight from Herat to Kabul,

and a two-hour flight from Kabul to Delhi. Kabul is closer to Delhi than Bombay. It's amazing. Absolutely amazing. So just a quick overview of what Alexander has managed to do in 15 years of conquest, because it is sort of becomes that in the end. He manages never to lose a battle. As soon as he takes on the Persians,

he doesn't lose a single battle. He names more than 70 cities after himself. And as he is sort of like looking to India and looking to the north of India, there is a battle that takes place at the River of Hydapsis. And it is a very costly victory and one of the most costly victories for his Indian campaign. But he found the city, and he doesn't name it after himself, but he names it after his horse. I love that. And it's called Busefala after his horse.

So just to be clear, that the high despays is the Jellum. The Jelam River. It's one of the rivers in the Punjab. And I was just talking about this today with my son at lunch. And apparently there is a site still that you can go to the mound where Alexander's horse is apparently laid in the Punjab and Jellon. Right. I've never done it. Yeah.

But the site is known. Oh, wow. The other thing we should remember, and this is the thing I love, and I'm writing a bit about this in my next book, The Golden Road, is that Alexander then. basically organizes a Greek colonial colonization of Afghanistan. And in the 1970s, archaeologists discovered the site of Icanum, which is this extraordinary Greek city on the banks of the Oxus. And there are amphitheaters, there are Greek-style temples, there is a sundial, which is arranged for the time of Alexandria. I'm not quite sure how you can tell that. But basically,

there are sort of importing colonial time zones from further west. And the site was very destroyed when the archaeologist dug it up. But it contains one enormous sort of foot of a giant statue, possibly of Alexander. Wow. Okay. The sandal looking like one of those sort of massive Roman statues you see in. Rome. Yeah. One story that we haven't covered, which we ought to mention, is that, you know, you mention that he marries one of Darius's daughters. But then he does have this great love affair with the mythical beauty of Bactria, Roxana. Roxanna, oh, I love all the stuff. So if you, you know,

the man who would be king, it's sort of this Michael Cain figure who relives the experience of Alexander and also falls in love with a woman he calls Roxana in the same kind of area. So we're talking after sort of the decisive victories that he scored in the Eastern and imported his time zones and all of that. And what's amazing is that, of course, Alexander then having defeated Porus. And the story goes that the grandfather of Ashoka Chandra Gupta Moria meets Alexander as a man. The Morians are already established in Paliputra, which is 20 times the size of Alexandria at this point. It is the greatest city to the east of Persepolis or Babylon. And so all these ancient Indian kingdoms lie beyond.

But Alexander's troops will not go over the genome. It's the monsoon that finally does it. It's raining and it's raining. They're driven back by the waters. And they just refuse to go on. So they end up going down past modern Moulthan to the port of the Indus near modern Karachi. And they build a fleet and head back to Babylon down the Gulf. And there Alexander dies.

Well, before we get to the death, don't just leap ahead, my friend. I want to talk a little bit more about Roxana. Because the thing is, when he sort of sees this teenage daughter of this Bactrian nobleman, you know, she's beautiful, he's still only a very young man. He's only 28 years of age and supposedly has this great love of this great beauty. And the way, I mean, the traditional wedding ceremony that's supposed to happen is that the king slices a loaf of bread in two with his sword and shares it with his new bride. and that is how they are married.

And she gives birth to his only son, who will be Alexander the fourth, which I think is really interesting. But just this thing on love and marriage and his attitude, before you kill him off, just a minute, a moment more with Alexander and the way he then behaves. So now he's conquered everything. Well, what he does, which is deeply controversial to some of his gym buddies, as you put it, and the people back home, is that he goes native.

You know, he's married Roxana. He loves Roxana. but he starts dressing like a Persian as well. He starts wearing the striped tunic of the Persian fashion. And he also, what he does in 324, so this is, you know, three years after he marries Roxana, he orders, and obviously she makes him very happy because he orders a mass wedding in the Persian city of Susa, where he forces 92 of his leading Macedonians to take Persian wives. I mean, that's so, you know, you sort of get an idea that this is a man who is not just wanting to conquer, but wanting to make people feel like they're part of a bigger thing that allows them to exist.

So when the archaeologists were digging Icahunum in the 1970s, they found this city that in many ways was completely Greek. It's got an amphitheatre, it's got a necropolis, it's got the sundial based on the sun at Alexandria. But it's also very Persian. And the temples in particular are basically Persian temples. And they're arranged in a Persian architectural manner. And so what Alexander leaves behind him is a very mixed, sort of Hellenized Persian. Mishmash. Or fusion.

Fusion is better. Fusion is better. Yes. Yeah. And this Hellenized Greek civilization, which is Alexander's legacy, continues right on until Roman times. And all the Ptolemies and the Seleucids and all these successor kingdoms to Alexander have this extraordinary intermixed culture. I'll let you kill him now. Okay, now is the time.

So let's talk about the death of Alexander, because I have some interesting observations. Let me tell you. Well, he returns to Babylon, and he dies quite quickly feasting in 3-2-3. And of course, there's rumours of poison, but equally it could have been the wound that he receives Imultan. Well, you say that.

I mean, the story is that he's sort of downing a bowl of wine, and then he suddenly, you know, he gets incapacitated and then he dies. There are medics who have looked at the descriptions from the ancient text about what happens to him, and they talk about this creeping paralysis that climbs up both sides of his body. And then there's talk in the ancient scripts about how he doesn't rot. You know, they keep his body for like six days and it doesn't rot at all. So there is a medic who has put forward the suggestion that he has actually been food poisoned, and it's triggered a huge response in his body where the body starts attacking itself called Gillane Barry syndrome,

something I am very familiar with because somebody very close to me has had it. You don't have it, no. No, I'm fine. But what it is, it's a paralysis that starts from the hands and the feet and then it rises up and it can stop you breathing and it can utterly paralyze you. And it matches, you know, your cognitive facilities are still working, but you're becoming paralyzed. And then you just lie there, you give the appearance of being dead. I mean, now in modern day treatments, you know, they put people on very very. ventilators and they keep them alive and hopefully, you know, they regain themselves. But they didn't

have that then. So Alexander for the six days that he isn't rotting and he's still warm, that's the whole thing, you know, where everybody starts saying, he is a god. Look, he hasn't gone cold. Six days later, he's dead, but he's not cold, is that he has actually paralyzed. He wasn't dead. So this Gleyn Barry syndrome had taken his body and he does eventually die. And there are medics who have looked into this and say, yeah, it looks very much like a case of Gilles, Blaine Barré syndrome. Dr. Catherine Hall, a senior lecturer at the Dunedin School of Medicine, has put this forward and she's, you know, published on it saying, could have been this. Yeah. So then the body goes on its own odyssey and Ptolemy takes the body to Egypt.

And the story is that he is buried in Alexandria and people go to see the tomb of Alexander in Alexandria, I think Augustus, for example, after defeating Ante Cleopatra, is taken in and describes going down into the vaults and seeing the tomb of Alexander. But there is a theory, probably wrong, but there's a Greek archaeologists who believe that actually his body was not laid in Alexandria and that it was buried in the Seaward Oasis where Alexander went to consult the Oracle. That's probably not true, but it's a nice thought of this body going right over the desert, this extraordinary moon scape at Seaward. Well, let's just talk very quickly about legacy because he ends the legacy of Darius and Darius's line. But what does he leave behind? Because it's not certain after he dies

so young. He's only in his 30s when he dies. 32, I think he is. He's got this one son with Roxana. But, I mean, does this line, this enormous fusion empire, does it pass to anybody? Does it survive? So the empire survives split up into these different units for many generations. I mean, you know, Cleopatra is from the line of Ptolemy. So when Octavian, the young Octavian, goes to conquer Egypt, he's taking on the successes of Alexander. But in Persia, which we saw resisted Alexander, even in his own time, there is a whole succession of native Iranians who take the kingdom back. And the next episodes we're going to be doing in the story of the history of Iran is the story of the great Sasanians,

who revive Persian power, fight back the Hellenized Greeks, and re-establish an empire on the ruins of the Achaemenids, and do their best to look like them. They have the same trounds, they have the same beards, and they establish their sacred sites on Achaemenid sacred sites at the back of Sepulis. If you go to Nakhshir Rostam, just behind Persepolis, it's not a Caymanid relief you see. It is a Sassanianian. one. And that's the story we're going to take on in the next episodes. Yeah, I mean, I'm really loving this series. It's so rich. And it really is an absolute meeting of so many different important periods of history. So do join us for the next episode of Empire. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. Goodbye from me, William to report.