Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Alexander the Great

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

In the year 356 BC, a son was born to the King of Macedon, Philip II, and his wife, Queen Olympias. While no one could have known it at the time, that boy would grow up to fundamentally change the map of the ancient world. Multiple ancient kingdoms and empires would fall to his armies.  However, just as he reached the zenith of his success, he died, leaving chaos and confusion in his wake. Learn more about Alexander the Great and how he changed the map of the ancient world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the year 356 BC, a son was born to the King of Macedon, Philip II, and his wife, Queen Olympias. What no one could have known at the time was that this boy would grow up to fundamentally change the map of the ancient world. Multiple ancient kingdoms and empires would fall to his armies. However, just as he reached the zenith of his success, he died, leaving chaos and confusion in his wake. Learn more about Alexander the Great and how he changed the map of the ancient world on this episode of everything everywhere daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may

have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I've done several episodes where I've mentioned Alexander the Great. He casts a long shadow over ancient history in Greece, Egypt, Persia, the Levant, Turkey, Central Asia, and even India. So, I figured it was time to talk about the man himself rather than just addressing him obliquely. And let me say that this is a very difficult thing to do.

There have been large biographies written about Alexander, an entire podcast lasting over 100 hours, going into detail about Alexander and his accomplishments. So this is just going to be a brief overview of the life of Alexander, touching on the things that you should know if you're going to know about Alexander the Great. Alexander was born in July 20th, 356 BC in Palace, the capital of the Kingdom of Macedon. Macedonon was located in what is today northern Greece and the country of North Macedonia. The Macedonians were culturally Greek, but it was not the center of Greek civilization. They were kind of considered the hillbillies of the ancient. ancient Greek world, far from the centers of civilization like Athens, Corinth, or Thebes.

Alexander was given an education that was befitting a royal heir. His tutor was none other than the philosopher Aristotle, who taught him philosophy, literature, geometry, medicine, and, of course, military strategy. The big thing to take away from the early life of Alexander is that Alexander was the son of Philip II. And Philip did something that prior to his doing it had been thought to be impossible. He conquered and unified Greece. Ancient Greece had always been a collection of city states. They were small, independent, and they often ward with each other. Many of the city states like Athens weren't conquered per se, and that is for another episode, but suffice to say that Philip was the hegemonic power in Greece. In many ways, Philip did the hard part.

Philip was assassinated in the year 336. Needless to say, there was a great deal of controversy surrounding the assassination and the conspiracy behind it. Nonetheless, Alexander found himself King Alexander III of Macedon at the ripe age of 20. Alexander probably had a big chip on his shoulder. He was the son of the great Philip, one of the most successful military commanders in history, and he had to do something to distinguish himself from his father. His first order of business in 335 BC was putting down revolts amongst Thracian tribes to the north in Macedonia. Once that was done, he set his sights on an incredibly audacious goal. He was going to take on the Persian Empire.

Greece and Persia had a history with each other. The Persian Empire was the largest empire in the world at the time. It expanded from Egypt to India, and the King of Persia ruled a large, diverse population, which resulted in a very large army. The Persian Empire, also known to history as the Achaemenid Empire, was established under Cyrus the Great, and subsequently attempted and failed to conquer Greece on several occasions. If you remember back to my episodes on the battles of Marathon and Thermopyla, in both battles, the Greeks managed to repel the invading Persians despite being vastly outnumbered.

Philip had dreamed of conquering Persia, but died before he could put his plan into play. Alexander was going to fulfill his father's dream. In 334 BC, he and his army crossed the Hellespon, now known as the Dardanelles and marched into Asia Minor or modern-day Turkey. His army at the time was estimated to be approximately 48,000 infantry and 6,100 cavalry, along with a fleet of 120 ships and about 38,000 soldiers. At the time, Asia Minor was culturally Greek, and Persia had conquered the Greeks in this region. Alexander saw immediate and stunning success.

His first big win against the Persians was at the Battle of Granicus Roe, River. Alexander had about 18,000 infantry in the field with about 4,200 heavy cavalry. The Persians had 40,000 infantry and possibly as many as 20,000 cavalry. Despite being massively outnumbered, Alexander's army routed the Persians. Persian losses were estimated to be between 5,000 to 6,000 dead, whereas the Macedonian army only lost 115. Alexander was a military savant, and I don't think there's any. the other way to put it. He was able to adapt and devise strategies on the fly which had never been done before in military history. Alexander was the right person at the right place at the right time,

and it's something that seldom happens in history. Let's say there was someone in history who, for whatever reason, was better than Alexander at understanding and developing strategies in ancient warfare. The odds are highly unlikely that they would have had an army at their disposal, and even more unlikely that they would have been the son of a king who had just unified a group of squabbling city states. And on top of that, the odds were even more slim that this person would have even been born in an era that had ancient warfare. After the Battle of Granicus River, Alexander laid siege to the city of Halle-Karnassas. Around this time, he entered the city of Gordium and encountered the Gordian knot. It was said whoever could solve the puzzle of the knot would have become the ruler of Asia.

and legend has it that Alexander solved the problem by cutting the knot in half with a sword. And then he met the Persian Emperor Darius III at the Battle of Isis in 333 BC. Isis was one of Alexander's masterpieces. Alexander had about 40,000 troops at his command. Estimates of the size of the Persian army have varied throughout history, but they range from about 250,000 to 600,000. Modern estimates placed the number at about 100,000 just due to the logistics of feeding an army any larger. Regardless of the size of the army, once again Alexander was massively outnumbered and routed the Persians.

Persian losses were in the tens of thousands killed and wounded, and Alexander only lost 150 men. More importantly, Darius, king of the Persians, fled the battle in full sight of his army. With that, Alexander marched south along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. He laid siege to the Phoenician island city of Tyre by filling in the land between the island and the shore. And Tyre is still not an island over 2,000 years later. From there, Heena's army marched further south and laid siege to the city of Gaza, and then went into Egypt where he found a population willing to embrace Alexander to be relieved of Persian rule. In Egypt, he met with the Oracle in the Oasis town of Siwa,

where he was told that he was the son of a god, and he began identifying himself as the son of Zeus Amon, a combination of both Greek and Egyptian. While there in 331 BC, he founded the city of Alexandria, something which he did in many of the lands that he conquered. Later in 331 BC, he left Egypt and headed into what is today Iraq. Darius at this point tried to use diplomacy to dissuade Alexander. After several attempts, he basically offered to make him co-reveh.

ruler of the empire, give his daughter's hand in marriage, and 30,000 talents of silver. According to legend, he debated accepting the offer with his close friends. One of them, Parmenian, spoke up and said, quote, if I were Alexander, I should accept what was offered and make a treaty. Alexander then replied, so should I, if I was Parmenian. Soon after he once again met Darius on the battlefield at the Battle of Gagamella. Gagamela has gone down as one of the most important battles in world history. To greatly oversimplify the battle, Alexander made the decision to attack Darius directly and personally. Darius ended up fleeing the battlefield again, and his army collapsed

seeing their leader flee. Darius was soon killed by his own men, and Alexander became the new leader of the Persian Empire. Alexander began adopting Persian customs. He began dressing like a Persian and adopted the tradition of Proscanesis, where people had to prostate themselves on the ground before him in an audience, something that Greeks never did. He pursued the killer of Darius, a Persian by the name of Bessus, as he felt that as the successor to Darius, it was his duty to bring a king slayer to justice. His pursuit took him into Central Asia and modern-day Tajikistan. And just as an aside, when I visited Tajikistan, the legend of Alexander is something that they still embrace, and I actually spent several nights along a lake

known as Exanderkool, or Lake Alexander. Along the way, he set up more cities named after himself. Now as the ruler of Greece and the Persian Empire, Alexander's ambition was still not satisfied. He wanted to keep going east to the edges of what was then the known world. Well, the known world to the Greeks. He eventually made his way into what is modern-day Pakistan. He continued his winning ways, establishing cities,

laying siege to towns and finding new allies. What eventually stopped his advance wasn't any formidable army. It wasn't losing on the battlefield. It was his own troops, the ones who had been with him from the start from Macedonia. Far from home and not having seen their families for years, they didn't want to continue any longer. Alexander agreed and began the trip back to Persia. The march back did not go well.

In one battle in India, Alexander was hit with an arrow that, went through his armor and punctured his lung, and it almost killed him. He split up his forces, and one half of them went through a desert in Iran, where many of them died from exposure and a lack of food and water. On the way back, Alexander found that many of the men he had left behind to run the empire abused their positions, so he had many of them executed. He continued to try to merge Macedonian and Persian customs and peoples. In his most famous act, he conducted a mass marriage between his Macedonian generals and Persian women. When he was back in Babylon, he began preparing for a new campaign, this time, to conquer Arabia.

Along with the invasion of Arabia, he had plans to construct a massive fleet that would be used to establish harbors in cities along the north coast of Africa with the eventual intent of taking Carthage. He also planned a circumnavigation of Africa and to build a tomb for his father that would rival the Great Pyramid. supposedly he also wanted to migrate a huge number of people from Asia to Europe and vice versa to physically create a single unified people. However, none of this ever happened. On June 11th, 323 BC, at the age of 32, Alexander died after a two-week illness.

His cause of death has been debated for centuries. Some say he was poisoned and others claim it was something more natural like malaria. When he died, he left no successor. The only thing he ever supposedly mentioned when asked about secession was the phrase, to the strongest. Over a little more than a decade, Alexander had changed everything. He single-handedly, well, and with the help of his army, changed the landscape of the ancient world. The Persian Empire was now gone, and in its wake were four successor states that were run by his top generals.

These states remain controlled by cultural Greeks for centuries. And Greek culture was brought all the way to India and changed the culture throughout his empire in ways that can still be felt today. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiever. I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. Your support helps me put out a new show every day.

And if you're interested in Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise, Patreon is currently the only place where it's available. And if you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and get notified of future episodes and projects, please join my Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.