In Our Time - Alexander the Great

Episode Date: October 1, 2015

Alexander the Great is one of the most celebrated military commanders in history. Born into the Macedonian royal family in 356 BC, he gained control of Greece and went on to conquer the Persian Empire, defeating its powerful king, Darius III. At its peak, Alexander's empire covered modern Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and part of India. As a result, Greek culture and language was spread into regions it had not penetrated before, and he is also remembered for founding a number of cities. Over the last 2,000 years, the legend of Alexander has grown and he has influenced numerous generals and politicians.With:Paul Cartledge Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of CambridgeDiana Spencer Professor of Classics at the University of BirminghamRachel Mairs Lecturer in Classics at the University of ReadingProducer: Victoria Brignell.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Alexander III of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great, is one of the most famous figures from the ancient world. Born in 356 BC, he became king, age 20, after his father Philip had been murdered. Alexander then went on to kill all his rivals and secured the throne. Over the next 12 years, he marched his army more than 12,000. miles as he conquered the Persian Empire and defeated his king Darius III. He spread Greek culture through Central Asia and found his cities, among them, Alexandria, in Egypt.

He did speak, his empire stretched from Greece in the West to modern-day Pakistan in the east, taking in what we know as Iran, Iraq and Egypt and Afghanistan. He's widely regarded as one of the most skillful and influential leaders and military commanders of all time. With me to discuss Adelazana the Great are Paul Cartledge, emeritus professor of Greek culture, A.G. Levantis, Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge, Diana Spencer, Professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham, and Rachel Mayer's Lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading.

Paul Cartlidge, what was the status of Macedon in the Greek world at the time when Alexander was born in 356 BC? Down to the end of the 5th century BC, so in other words, within 70 or so years of Alexander's birth, Macedonia was just a geographical expression. There was a kingship, it was based in, in what we call lower Macedonia, Eastern Macedonia, at Pella, but it was not a strongly unified kingdom.

It was on the fringe. And it wasn't until Alexander's father, Philip II, that Macedon, the kingdom of Macedon, became a major player in Greek politics. And what did he do? Philip. Well, first of all, he had to strongly unify the two halves of his geographical base, the West and the East, the Upland West, the Lowland East. which he did. Having done that, having introduced, I'm being very brief here,

major military reforms, having got the barons, as we like to call them, Vapland Mastonia on his side, he then had huge ambitions, first to conquer, to become the dominant power in what we call Old Greece, that is the southern Balkan Peninsula and some of the Aegean area as well. With a view too now, this is where historians start to disagree, did he always have in mind, was he aiming towards the big project, which was an Asiatic campaign against Persia, the great Oriental power, as it had been for 200 years,

or did that come to him fairly late on in his thinking? Alexander's family back, his mother, can you tell us about his mother? He's one of the seven wives of Philip. Yes, Philip. Now, this is some, I mean, we're going to talk later, I'm sure, about how Greek were the Macedonians, or how typically Greek, well, in my opinion, they are certainly Greek,

but they had practices which are not common, and one of them was not monogamy amongst the royal family. Greeks were typically monogamous, and they used that to distinguish themselves from non-Greeks, who are not necessarily monogamous. Philip was said to have fought his campaigns by marriages, one of the historians of Philip, a biographer of Philip, and in all, as you rightly say, he had seven.

Now whether they were all formally married as wives, that's an issue. But the mother of Alexander, Olympias, we normally say, she came from Iperus, Ipirus to the west, and she was his either third or fourth spouse in some sense. But crucially, she produced the first male heir, and that's Alexander the Great. So what sort of court, did he have a court, what sort of, back grounded the young Alexander experience?

Well, you can imagine, with more than one female potentially vying for influence, with Olympias coming from outside and herself, having a very proud self-ascribed ancestry, descended from Achilles, no less. And Philip claimed to be descended from Heracles. So imagine the combination of those two. It was said to be a love match, and most of us believe that's purely fictional, that actually it's a very utilitarian marriage, because she brought certain things to Macedonia that Macedonia lacked.

But at any rate, Alexander would have grown up amongst a court that was somewhat in schism, to put it mildly, and different wives, different children being born, who's going to come out top? And you mentioned that Philip was assassinated. Well, it's no secret that Olympias and Alexander II were implicated. In other words, there were sources that believed that they had a hand. in Phillips' assassination.

Rachel Maas, can we take the childhood of Alexander a bit further? How would he have been educated at the time, in what would you have been educated, and so on? Well, Alexander, in a lot of ways, had the best education money could buy at that time. His tutor from probably around the age of 13 was famously the renowned philosopher Aristotle, who was a pupil of Plato in Athens,

but who was also of a Macedonian background himself. He was from a city called Stegera, which had been overrun and partially destroyed by Philip, and its population sold into slavery. So Aristotle is supposed to, in return for his tutorship of Alexander, received benefits and preferential treatment for his own home city as well. Alexander was brought up and educated with a very close group of young, noble Macedonian friends and companions of the same age. And we find among these figures who would

subsequently go on to be very important in the history of Alexander's campaigns, such as Ptolemy, who later became king of Egypt, and Hefisdion, who was Alexander's closest friend and companion. What Alexander got from Aristotle and from his general tutorship as a young man was a very strong sense of the cornerstones of a Greek cultured education. So he was trained in philosophy, and he also, naturally, like all good educated Greeks, knew his Homer very well. And the story of the Iliad was very important to him on his campaigns. He's supposed to have slept with a copy of part of the Iliad under his pillow, as the story goes. And he developed a very strong association with Achilles. And as Paul has already said, he can trace his dissent to Achilles and Heracles,

notionally. Well, Alexander's Achilles' identification is very strong. On his campaigns, he visits the site of the city of Troy. And this is something which he perceives a very, very strong identification with. Having Aristotle as a tutor is beguiling. Can you tell us what sort of influence he had on the way he behaved and acted for the rest of his his life? Well, there's the question really. One might like to think that Aristotle has a great opportunity here, that he could shape a young Macedonian nobleman, someone from the, traditionally the fringes of the civilised, I'm doing scarequokes, Greek world, into an ideal ruler. It's not quite that way, but Aristotle and philosophical training that he gives Alexander is very influential in the way

that he conducts himself in his relationship with Greek states as well. The story goes that when he visited the Greek city of Corinth, he went looking for the famous cynic philosopher Diogenes who lived at Corinth. And Diogenes was not a philosopher in Aristotle's mode. He wasn't very social. He didn't work with a philosophical school. He detached himself from what would have been considered civilized Greek society and lived in a barrel outside the city walls.

and the story goes that Alexander went and sought out the great philosopher so that he could pay respect to him and asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him. And Diogenes' reply to the Great Conqueror is, yes, could you please step to one side, you're blocking the sun. Can you tell us about the tension there had been, let's say Alexander is in his teens now, but even before then, between Greece and Persia,

before Alexander then come to his time. This is something that goes really as far back as you would care to trace it. The famous Greek historian, the father of history, as it were, Herodotus writing in the 5th century BC, sets out to trace the origins of tension between what he refers to as Greece and Asia. And Herodotus takes this back, even in the 5th century BC, very, very far into the remote past. He says this is something that can be traced back to the time of the truth. Trojan war tension between the Aegean world and places to the east. We're not really in a position to verify how much of this legend is factually accurate in any way, but what we do know

a lot about in the 5th century BC are the wars which broke out between the Persian Empire, which was controlling most of what's the modern Middle East and also most of present-day Turkey and the Greek states, which are not just in mainland Greece, but we're not just in mainland Greece, were in the greater Greek-speaking and settled world, which includes a lot of the western coast of modern-day Turkey. The Persian Empire was expansionist. It took control of a lot of these Greek states in Western Anatolia. And in the 5th century BC, Persian armies advance increasingly far into mainland Greece itself.

Now, I'm sure listeners may have heard of famous battles, such as marathon, also thermopoly. This is the kind of degree of threat that Persia poses to Greece. It's something that Greek states have worked very, very hard to fight off the Persian threat. And this is really where Alexander's movements into the East enable him to cast himself as the Avenger of Greece against Persia. Diana Spencer, how did Alexander come to power? We've talked about how his father, Philip, had many wives.

One of the marriages, or relationships at least, with a woman called Cleopatra, proved particularly insulting to Alexander and his mother Olympias. And one of our sources, Plutarch, actually talks in very vivid, exciting detail about the sense of wounded pride, but also political, kind of cataclysm. Why is that? Well, it seems as if there was a real sense in perhaps Alexander and his mother's mind that they were. and not of pure Macedonian descent. Alexander's mother. His mother and his mother. His mother comes from Apira, as Paul mentioned.

So Alexander, although Philip is his father, and of course a good Macedonian background, he's not entirely Macedonian. Cleopatra is a Macedonian new queen, potentially, who, of course, could become a rallying point for some of the more disaffected nobles in those various political factions that we mentioned. So she's a threat to...

Sorry, excuse me. She's a threat to his succession. Yes, I think that's clearly the bottom line. And I think some of the later historians have wanted to embroider this with a kind of psychological perspective, perhaps. But I think the political fact is it looks as though this could be a moment when a new male heir, a male heir who could be characterized as purely Macedonian, might be on the cards.

So this wedding seems to have provoked something of a crisis for Alexander and his mother. And in fact, his mother heads away from Pella, from the Macedonians. Donian court, and Alexander himself, seems to have taken on what we would think of as a six-month self-imposed exile in effect, in which he sulked, perhaps, one might say, being a little bit more psychological about it. And you get to the assassination of his father, by a so-called bodyguards. By a so-called bodyguards. So he comes back.

Things are sort of patched up, but the relationship, one would imagine, has lost perhaps the integrity of a kind of an heir apparent and his father relationship. that it might have been originally conceived of. When Cleopatra's daughter is getting married, so she's being married in Epirus, Philip goes to the wedding. So they're celebrating the wedding, and one of his bodyguards, Passenius, supposedly kills him.

Now, he very conveniently is killed whilst escaping, or attempting to escape. So nobody really knows the rights and wrongs of that story, but it's thought that Alexander and his mother might have been involved. And this is really where it comes back to that slightly OTIS context I was setting, that whilst one might think, why would Alexander, the fantastic heir apparent, kill his father at this particular moment? Well, I think the answer is because this is a moment where he can perhaps cut the danger off,

the danger of a new heir who is a Macedonian coming into the picture. And how did he secure, having that assassination having occurred, how did he secure his position and grab the throne? Well, unfortunately, perhaps from a modern perspective, he does it by killing, most of his rivals. He did spare his half-brother, Philip Arridaeus, but all of the rest of the potential threats, cousins and half-siblings, are all executed,

some rather gruesomely, in fact. Quite early on, he seems to have decided that he would invade the Persian Empire. Do we know anything about, in this hazy evidence world that he lives in? Do we have any notion of when that might have happened or why that might have happened to this 20-year-old? I mean, I think to my mind,

it ties in with some of the things that both Rachel and Paul were saying earlier, and in particular this sense that he believed himself, or at least was represented as believing himself, as having a descent from two very significant figures who have close connections with the East, and that's Hercules or Heracles in the Greek world and Achilles. And both of those figures, I think, playing a significant part in his very Greek education under Aristotle, are likely to have in some way formed a self-conceptive. for him that there could be a civilising mission, a mission for somebody

who's more than a military figure. Paul, before you... I'm just going to add that Philip was assassinated, having already formed an organisation in Greece, the first objective of which was to appoint him to lead this

pan-Helenic expedition, as Rachel said, of revenge. And so therefore, if Alexander, as I believe, was not part of Philip's plans, well, what you're You've just been talking about him fulfilling the desire to emulate Akira. He just wouldn't have been in Asia. And so I think that's another quite powerful reason why he might have thought,

it wouldn't be a bad thing if Philip was got out of the way so that I could lead this expedition, which, by the way, had already started by the time Philip was assassinated. And he sets off on this, becomes legendary. We can use that word with authority on this, in this occasion, March across. and one of his greatest defeats we're told was the capture of Tyre, the Phoenician city of Tyre. Can you tell us about that, Paul?

Well, you mentioned at the beginning that he is most famous probably for being one of the absolutely five-star or multi-star generals of the whole world. I mean, not just ancient Greece. He's up there with probably Napoleon, perhaps Jenghis Khan. There are hardly any others who have his record of no defeats. And so he seems to have been one of the absolutely extraordinary people and one of his talents as a general was to adapt to different situations. So he didn't just win pitched battles, which is tough enough, but he also captured mountain fortresses,

up many thousands of feet in the snow, etc. Now, the tyre siege is, I think, his most interesting siege. It's particularly brutal. He's fighting here the Phoenicians who live in, what's now Lebanon or what's left of Lebanon, and they performed the role of being the Navy of the Persian Empire. So he takes a very odd decision to fight the enemy's fleet by land. He dismisses his own ships.

In other words, he's going to take successively their bases, and he has to take them by land. Well, unfortunately for him, Tyre, ancient Tyre, was on an island. So in order to even reach this fortified island city, he has to build a huge causeway, and it's the basis today of the fact that ancient tower is linked to the mainland, because it's that causeway which links to the mainland. So it took him seven months. These were fiercely resistant, and it involved developing all sorts of new kinds of weaponry and defence against weaponry, etc., etc.

But to me, the key thing is this, but before the siege finally concluded, a number of Phoenician rulers of other cities than Tyre deserted the Phoenicians and therefore deserted the Persian Empire and came over to Alexander. They recognised that here was a force. Alexander was, well, as they often called him in Greece, invincible. And now what he did after the siege was very, very questionable. He often operated, and this goes back to his father,

I don't want anybody ever again to resist me in the way this particular. particular city has done. So you make an example of them. You destroy their city, in the case of Linthus, or in the case of Thebes, or in this case, you massacre, you crucify large numbers of your enemy in public, on the shore, and this is extremely horrible. Crucifixion is a most unpleasant mode of killing an enemy. But the point is, never again, guys, resist me like the Tyrion's resisted me. Rachel Mayers, how was the Persian Empire governed and how did it, was it prepared

for this invasion? The Persian Empire is, well, as the name suggests, it's ruled by an emperor who is of Persian descent and whose home base really is Iran-Precipolis in southwestern, present-day

Iran. But the empire is made up of a huge number of different ethnic groups speaking their own languages with their own religions, in different provinces, everywhere from Egypt in the West through to present-day Uzbekistan and the northeast and present-day Pakistan in the southeast as well. So it's an area that doesn't necessarily have a lot culturally linking it together.

Now, the Persians do have a very efficient administration, which is run in the Aramaic language. They have regional centres which are ruled by Persian governors, but it's an area where we can imagine that there are, are tensions between the regions and the central authority, and areas in which someone like Alexander coming in might potentially be able to break pieces off or plated loyalties. Diana Spencer, I'm going to conquer Egypt relatively easily. Why was that?

I think Egypt was ripe for the taking, really. And the Egyptians were not happy subjects of the Persian Empire. Rachel mentioned it's a very heterogeneous collection of peoples and ethnicities. And the Egyptians had not long been been subject to Persia. They weren't keen on Persian domination. They had a proud history of their own, of course, of imperialism before their decline. So when Alexander, after Tyre and after making his way down the coast of Asia Minor,

when he reaches Egypt, he's actually welcomed as a liberator rather than as a conqueror. So it's a very different dynamic to, you know, the dynamic Paul was talking about in Tyre. But what does Egypt give him? Egypt gives him all sorts of things. It gives him credibility as somebody who has called him. conquered a major, albeit in slightly, straightened circumstances, former world power. It gives him a kind of a cultural boost, because of course, Egypt is famously a very deeply

cultured civilisation, very wealthy civilization. So it gives him access to a new sort of source of supplies, so a new way of having a supply base that isn't requiring him to send back to Greece. And of course the Romans later were going to find Egypt had a very similar sort of focus for their imperialism. But what I think it does, perhaps. most interestingly from my point of view personally, is it seems to be the trigger point for some of the things that will come back to haunt Alexander later on,

issues around the notion of him being a divine descendant of Achilles and Hercules coalesce around the figure of Jupiter Ammon or Zeus Amon. It's a local Egyptian deity known as Amun who the Greeks assimilate to or imagine is similar to their chief god Zeus. Paul can't know it was a huge

expedition and there were all sorts of battles as you said snowy mountain tops and it's going to be guerrilla warfare when we get to Afghanistan and so on. But was there one decisive battle against the Persian King Darias? There was indeed and took place near what's today Eardbill

which is the modern pronunciation of Arbella. And how old would Alexander be then? Alexander in 331 was 25 and he came to the throne age 20 as you say so we've been campaigning for three years. He started out when he was 22. And Gorgamila is a flat plain, northern Iraq, and Darius, Darius III, was waiting for Alexander.

And it's always a question. He'd been in Egypt. And actually, he's done something rather strange in Egypt, which you mentioned Zeus Amon. Well, Zus Amon has a famous shrine in the far western side of Egypt, really towards Libya in the desert, in an oasis called Siwa. So what What on earth was Alexander doing, going on this very dangerous side trip, 250 kilometres, when Darius is waiting for him in Iraq, as we would call it, why doesn't he get over the Euphrates and take him on? Well, it's part of Alexander's charm and mystique that he was concerned to get the gods on his side and to prove to his troops.

They were going to win because the gods were on Alexander's side. They deserted, as it were, the Persians. He crosses the Freitas, he marches up into the plane, and he's faced with something of the order of. Now, figures are always inflated. The sources are all Greek. They're not Persian, so they tend to enlarge them. But the figure given is something over a million.

Well, we think probably 200,000, 300,000. Even so, absolutely vastly over numbers, outnumbers, Alexander's troops of 50,000, something like that. And Alexander, therefore, has a major morale problem, which he solves. And I think it was Napoleon who said that the morale factor, to all other factors in warfare, is as three to one. The morale factor is three times as important as all the other factors in warfare. So he's up against elephants.

He's up against sithed chariots. He's up against huge outnumbering of forces, and yet he wins. Can we go to you, Roche? How did he win? We've heard about his strategies and his mentions, his generalship. Can you give us what was he doing that was so much better than what anybody else was doing? Well, he's doing things that are a lot better than other people are doing in some ways. But there are areas where I think it's important to remember that Alexander did face very formidable opposition

that he wasn't necessarily capable of with standing in the way that he had heard. But he won this battle that Paul's been describing. Yes, yes, he did. So how did he do it if it was say 50,000 against 250,000? I think an important factor is what Paul's already mentioned, which is the Macedonian military technology and military training. The equipment they're using, the discipline among the troops, and also the factor of morale being extremely important as well.

When you say technology, it's these long 18-foot spears that again was mentioned early. Yes, using the Sirissa and the formation of marching and fighting in those as well. And that did the trick? Apparently so. What sort of victory was it? Did Darias flee the field and so on? Yes. Darius, after his major defeats, as a ruler, really loses a lot of authority.

Now, the Persian Empire itself fights on for quite a long time. But Darius is deposed by one of his own governors, a guy called Bessos, and is captured in taking off in chains by Bessos in the flight of the. the main Persian army up into Central Asia into what's not Afghanistan. I've been talking very fluently about what you did, Diana Spencer, but what I get from reading what you've all written is that the evidence is patchy. So can you just tell the listeners how patchy it is? I mean, as it were, own up.

Own up to the fact that we're all spinning stories here. I think before I say what evidence we do have, it's interesting just to mention a couple of very famous omissions. that we think existed, but we no longer have. And one of the most important is the history of the campaign that was apparently written as the campaign was progressing by Alexander's official historian, Callisthenes. And Callisthenes is an interesting figure

because he's the nephew of Aristotle, who Rachel mentioned was Alexander's tutor. But does that still exist? That doesn't still exist, I'm afraid. But some of the historians that we do have claim to have seen it or claim to have used it. The other thing that no longer exists, but that we believe did exist,

something that was a sort of daily log of the campaign, a daybook in effect. That also is gone. But again, we believe that some of the first wave of historians will have been consulting it. The first wave of historians was several hundred years later. Well, the very first wave of historians may actually have been very close to Alexander, so men such as Ptolemy, for example. So Ptolemy, who goes on to become king of Egypt making his capital in Alexandria. But we have records from him, do we?

We don't actually have records from him. I know this is starting to get terrible, isn't it? But what we understand to be Ptolemy's history is most clearly represented in the history of Arian. Which is when? And Arian is writing in the 200s A.D. So that's three or four hundred years later, as I suggested. Well, late first, early second, yes.

So how bad does it get, Paul? It depends what you're looking for. I mean, I'm a fan of Arian, not everybody is. He modelled himself on Xenophon, and he actually called himself Xenophon, but he was writing in the first half of the second century. He was both Greek and Roman, as it were. He came from what's now Turkey,

but he was a consul in Roman. He was Archon in Athens and so on. Well, he used Ptolemy. He also used a guy called Aristobulus, who was an engineer or an architect, for example, was asked by Alexander to repair the temple, the tomb of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire at Pusagetai.

But the general drift of what you've been saying, you tell listeners this is reliable enough or reliable? Well, I think as Diana just suggested, historians always write influence by their own times and the things that are going on in their own culture and society. But if I can add a word of not necessarily support, but empathy for ancient historians, they're engaged in the same project that a lot of us as historians in the present day are. We work with the primary sources that we have as close to the time that we're writing about. We work with secondary sources and we build our own construction of events based on that.

and unfortunately a lot of the primary sources from close to the date of Alexandria don't survive, so we can hope or deconstruct in the hope that these historians have worked with these sources and used them well. Back to Paul Cartledge. After the Persian heartlands, Alexander, I suppose by then known as the Invincible or coming known as the Great, move towards India. Yeah. What did he expect to find? What did you think he was doing? Well, he moved there, of course, via Afghanistan.

and the thought is that this had once been part of the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus, which achieved its greatest expansion in the second half of the sixth century, but by this time was beyond the purview of the Persian. So what's he doing? Well, there is one strategic explanation which is not often thought of, which is that any empire has to have frontiers. And though Alexander seems to have been more keen than most to expand them, you know, to go on forever.

Nevertheless, you have to be worrying all the time about what's next just beyond your frontier. The Roman Empire is a classic case of this. Why did Julius Caesar invade Britain, for example? So the strategic explanation of the Indian campaign is that he's wrapping up his eastern frontier. The romantic explanation, which is, of course, what the sources go for, Heracles had been there, Darnaisus had been there.

I'm going to go there. And therefore, it's unnecessary. And since some of the fighting in what's today, of course, now Pakistan, Kashmir, involved extremely unpleasant repression of local troops, local peoples who were not keen to be re-incorporated in an empire of the West, as they would have seen it. Therefore, this is unnecessary, this is Alexander's showboating and merely gratifying his own base instincts for slaughter.

Well, that isn't my view, but it is a view. Dan Esmanson. I mean, I think Paul's mention there of the romantic view of this extension into India also finds strong resonances in Roman rhetoric. And actually the Romans speculated quite extensively as to whether what Alexander really wanted to do was to find the encircling ocean that was the final boundary, the final frontier.

Yes, the idea was that the landmass was encircled by one sea and he was going to get there. Exactly. So that kind of notion that Alexander was somebody who wanted to go beyond even where Dionysus and, and Heracles had gone, somebody was going to push the boundaries of reality as well as of fact. Can I ask you, Rachel,

and people, what was his state of mind? We have this man still young. He's still in his middle eight-twenties. He's marched for thousands of miles already. As Paul has pointed out at the very beginning of the program, and you pointed out, drilled army,

which is winning and winning and winning and winning. What's his state of mind? Who does he think he is? That's the big. question. Has he lost touch with reality, I suppose, would be another way of putting it. And I'd add to what Paul and Diana have been saying about the campaigns in Indian Central Asia, that he's facing a local enemy at this point, but he's also facing opposition from within his own army, which in some ways he's out of touch with. So in Central Asia, he has reduced, he spends three

years there, which is an incredibly long time for what essentially are hill tribes and small non-urbanized groups of people. He ends up having to leave the place garrisoned with small groups of Greek and Macedonian soldiers who absolutely hate being there. And this is something that the ancient sources are very clear on. The geographer Strabo writing later says that you can't grow olives in Central Asia. And I suppose we could use that as a benchmark of what to an ancient Greek is a definition of a civilised place to live. So he's got opposition potentially building there. And when there's a rumour that Alexander, has been killed in India, in fact, he was only wounded, all of these Greeks revolt and attempt

to return to the Mediterranean. And as he gets into India, this opposition within the army builds until the point at which he finally has to turn back. I think it's important to remember. It's not just the opposition of local people, the difficulties of the supply chain and terrain and climate. It's also the fact that his army will go no further. And it's also to do with his behaviour and the way, as we learn from what I from what you've written. Can you briskly take us through what he was doing that earned the

disrespect of the army that he led to so many victories? Yeah, you've got to distinguish between the inner court and the troops as a whole. And I'll just single out one episode, which to me is quite extraordinary. And we're now coming quite a long way down.

We're coming to 3-2-4 BC. We're in Sousa. He's done all this stuff in the east, far east, and he's come back to Iran. and he decides to hold a mass wedding, a kind of moony wedding. Allegedly 10,000 of his troops who had been in a relationship with an Oriental woman of some sort, a camp follower. Their relations are solemnized and Alexander gives them presents.

He's extremely rich. But more important than that is that he and about 70 of his closest companions, Greeks, Macedonian, Greeks and others, marry Persian women. and Rachel was talking about the three years that he's in what we call Afghanistan. Well, one of the things that happened there was extraordinarily important and very odd. He marries a Bactrian woman called, of course, Roxani, Rukhsana today. And this is his first of three wives. His next two wives are Persians, high-ranking Iranian royal women.

He never marries a Greek woman. He marries consecutively and at the same time three oriental women. And he has this mass wedding saying, what's going on? Well, to me, this is extraordinarily un-Greek. It is most far-sighted and most inclusive. He is not normal. He has a vision which is beyond that, which as far as I know anybody had ever expressed,

Aristotle thought all non-Greeks were barbarians fit mainly to be slaves. And this is part of a wider potentially program or unintentional program of Persianizing the Alexander's going through it this time as well. One very, very controversial thing he does is introduce a practice called proscenesis in the Greek, which is a Persian habit of barring down before the ruler completely flat, prostrating yourself. Now, good democratic or semi-democratic Greeks, this is something that's completely revolting to them. and it's very, very controversial for Alexander to do this. And in fact, there is a strain in modern historiography that suggests that Alexander is not just the first ruler of a new Hellenistic Greek Middle East.

He's also the last ruler of the Persian Empire and the old style as well, maintaining many of their traditions. Now, there's also tales in your words about him becoming a tremendous drunk and even killing one of his best friends at a dinner, party because he was drunk.

What evidence you have and how does that play in, Dana? Well, I think, you know, there is almost no evidence apart from our Roman historians in effect. But I think what we're seeing with these stories of increasingly drunken rages or eccentric, a barren behaviour, if they're true, we're seeing instances really of what Paul and Rachel have just been talking about this sense that as the 320s were going on, Alexander was turning into something other than a Macedonian ruler. So we could start with the plot that supposedly was happening

earlierish in the 3-20s, which one of Alexander's inner circle, a general called Philotas supposedly knew about, but didn't tell him about, and obviously decided to hedge his bets, stay on the sidelines, perhaps. Alexander finds out about the plot and has Philitas executed,

tried and executed. He then had to have Philotas' father, another very senior general in the team Parmenion executed because of course you couldn't allow the father to stay alive when the son has been executed for treason. So that starts a kind of a process of distancing Alexander from his central

his core team that Paul was talking about. And this starts to become increasingly evident when we see stories like the one you just mentioned of Clitus. Clitus, a very old family friend in effect, someone who was related to the nurse that brought him up as a child. Clitus has been with him all the way through the campaign and Clytus is, in the sources, a plain speaker.

He's somebody from the old country who believes that he needs to give Alexander a word or two to tell him where he's going wrong. Unfortunately, he chooses a banquet at which a lot of drink has been taken in order to make this point. And he says, you know, Alexander, you need to get back a hold of yourself. You're becoming a Persian. You're no longer one of us. Alexander is incensed and he actually stabs him with a spear and kills him as part of the banquet. And then Alexander himself is killed. Is it assassination, Paul, or what is it? Yes, well this is the million-dollar question.

Did he die of natural causes, that is, say, malaria as a result of lots of wounds and an infection? Or was it a plot amongst his inner circle? Was he poisoned? I think the jury is out. Maybe my friends have very strong views, but I think probably on the whole, more likely as that he died from that. causes in the sense they're partly self-inflicted, that's to say, the terrible wounds that he had suffered front, back, everywhere, and he was weak by the time that this infection seized upon him, and it was deadly. He'd nearly died several times before.

But he turned back, but instead of going back the easy way, he went back as difficult a way as he could manage. What did he do that for? Well, you're quite right. This is part of this showboating in India. This supports the view that the Indian campaign was merely showboating and therefore to choose the more difficult way rather than the easier way back along the macran along the Persian Gulf where there wasn't any water and where it's desert conditions and so on well that was just crazy and a lot of his troops died but um i've no more comment than that that um he could have argued that he wanted to link up with his fleet one of his oldest friends was educated with him uh as a youth niarchos was a Greek from crete and he was in charge of

the Navy and so you could argue that the Navy and the Army should keep in sync. There are rational arguments you can make as well as irrational. When he died at 32, 32, nearly 303. When he died at 32, what was thought of him? What was his reputation? Paul said, Iniscible, he became known as the Great. Do we have sources accurate enough to tell us what people thought of him at that time? I think the really telling thing is what happens to Alexandria's body after his death. There is a notion that he dies in Babylon, and there's a notion that the appropriate thing would be for his body, his funeral cortege, to go to Macedonia for him to be buried with his ancestors. What happens is that very quickly after Alexander's death, his generals

parcel up temporary control of the empire between them, and Ptolemy, one of Alexander's closest companions from childhood, gets Egypt. Now, Ptolemy has long-term ambitions in Egypt. He does end up finding a dynasty, which concludes with the famous Cleopatra. And what Ptolemy does is hijacks Alexander's funeral cortege and brings the body to Alexander's city of Alexandria in northern Egypt, where it's set up and gives legitimacy to his dynasty. So whatever people may have thought about him on a personal level, he's a very important source of legitimacy for the rulers who follow him.

I think it's also interesting to note that as Rome starts to expand, into what was Alexander's territories in the Mediterranean, the Greek historian Polybius attempting to explain, you know, what has happened, what is this new power doing in the Mediterranean world, that Polybius uses Alexander as a kind of an example or a comparative for what the Roman impact on the Mediterranean could become. So we can see even fairly soon after Alexander's death, he's becoming a model for successive modes of imperialism. And in the Egypt that Ptolemy was ruling and the Ptolemy's rule developed what's called, we call

it the Alexander romance, which has meant that Alexander features in something like 70 plus national literatures, including, for example, Chaucer and Shakespeare, and I was very sorry he was cut out from the current version of Hamlet, the Barbican, but this romance

means that in art and in literature, Alexander performs all sorts of roles. He's a terrific knight in the Middle Ages. He's an explorer. He goes up to heaven. He goes down to the from the sea, he is the most famous, probably single individual, taking it all together the last 2,500 years. Well, thank you all very much.

Thank you, Paul Coutledge, Diana Spencer and Rachel Maherz. If you have a subject for In Our Time that you think deserves a radio audience and we'll make Radio 4 listeners in the UK and around the world sit up and take notice. Please send your ideas to us through our website by the 29th of October. One of them will be the subject of in our time on the 3rd of December. Thank you for listening. the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I mean, I think it's very interesting that we've seen Alexander played so

unsuccessfully through cinematic adaptation. Why do you think that is? I think one of the things that's most complex about Alexander is also what's most interesting about him, which is that sort of, that old thing, which is charisma. How do you capture charisma? How do you capture that idea of someone who can speak equally powerfully to troops in the field and also compel powerful, you know, robber barons in effect from the world of Philip and his father. I think Rosson got wrong the balance between what was going on in Greece. He spent the first two-thirds of the film getting Alexander to Asia and therefore the last bit was just too rushed.

And it was very studio-bound as well. Everyone just didn't feel that... Oh, well, that was probably technology. I'm sure it was technology. Whereas Oliver Stone in the early 2000s, he has the possibility to do he can stage pitched battles and he staged two. He goes over to Asia. He has Babylon, all that stuff.

Yeah. But he couldn't, I think, I met Oliver and I asked him about this, but he couldn't make up his mind whether Alexander was to be admired as a great hero or to be empathised with as a troubled person. He wasn't quite happy killing lots of people, but he was very sensitive and he had this wonderful relationship with Hephaestian. and he wasn't, in other words, the brutal conqueror, which I think most of my colleagues, you may be exceptions,

but most of my colleagues now, I think, take a very negative view of Alexander, partly because we're not wildly keen on imperialism these days. You know, we just don't have that empathetic view that it's okay in itself to wish to rule lots and lots of other people. What do your students say? Well, some of them begin the term by talking about Alexander in the terms of the greatest conqueror the world has ever seen. And once I've explained that we don't use that phrase, we...

Why don't you use it? Well, because it doesn't ask any questions. It's completely unnuanced. It starts with an assumption. And it also starts with the idea that this is in some way a competition, that, you know, there is a greatest and a second greatest and a third greatest and so forth. And I think Alexander is a wonderful teaching tool in a lot of ways because he's so complex and nuanced.

The sources are tricky to work with, and he's a figure that a lot of people project things onto. So he's a useful figure for making students think about what they're bringing to the interpretation of a subject, what is it that they are looking for in the past. I mean, I think you're spot on, actually, Rachel, in that idea that we have always, I say we, people have always projected their own fears,

anxiety,'s desires onto Alexander. I think that's in part because of all of the things that we've been saying in a way over the last sort of hour or so, which is that he was a radically different brand of leader, even in his own time. And I think that has really percolated to us through other radical brands of imperialism, which have picked up on the notion of a charismatic central figure who is at the same time kind of one of the people. The Romans pick up on that very vividly. But other popular imperializing movements or movements that started as popular anyway, Napoleon, I think Paul mentioned earlier.

Egypt, of course, you know, picks up on Alexander very vividly. And again, there's that kind of issue of someone who starts off one of the people, part of a revolutionary movement, but becomes an establishment figure to be tilted at. This dissolute figure that comes out is much evidence for that. Was he, I mean, I can see him becoming a Persian potentate because he wants to. And I think Paul explained that very well, that he's going beyond what had gone before. But the idea of being a sort of drunk at a party and murdering his best friend,

you think, did that really well? What evidence is for that murder of his good friend? I don't think we have any direct evidence. What we have evidence through is the works of someone like Aryan, as Paul was mentioning. I mean, it wouldn't be possible to make that up because Clytus was, as you said, so closely involved. And actually, he saved Alexander's life at the first battle of the Grenachers.

And there is an established massagon. tradition of getting very drunk at parties so that's not surprising. Is that a Macedonian? Is that very careful? Do we owe it to Macedonian? Massagonians? Yes, I think we can blame the Macedonians. But I think there's also the issue that, you know, you're on campaign.

There are probably issues with water and with availability of water, but you're carrying wine with you. So you actually potentially are more likely to get high quicker. You'd have no potential to necessarily to mix your wine in the way that you would expect as a Greek. So I think

there might have been, I suppose, functional reasons why there was more drinking going on even over and above Macedonian cultural practices. Well, Victoria comes in, I'll produce it too. Can I offer you tea and coffee? There are many more history and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uket slash radio 4.