Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 371: The Siege of Tyre

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

Joe, Nate, and Tom discuss the time that Alexander the Great altered the geography of the planet in order to build a huge land bridge and punish Tyre for not letting him visit the ancient world's most instagrammable temple. Get more episodes on Patreon here! https://www.patreon.com/c/lionsledbydonkeys We've got merch available! Check out our store here: www.llbdpodcast.com/

Hey everyone, it's Joe. If you like what we do here on the show, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you access to our entire bonus episode catalog, as well as every regular episode one full week early. Access to all of our side series that are currently ongoing and our back catalog of those as well. Gets you ebooks, audiobooks, first dibs on live show tickets and merchandise when they're available. And also gets you access to our Discord, which has turned into a lovely little community. So go to patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys and join the Legion of the Old Crow today. Hello and welcome to the Lion's Head by Donkey's podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate.

Bella's, how are you doing? Hot. In a basement again. me is Tom and Nate. Bella's, how are you doing? Hot. In a basement again. I mean, it seems to me that most of our life is spent this way, but yeah, good. Trapped in a room that vaguely smells like Monster Munch. Joe had never had Monster Munch before,

and I sold it to him on the premise that it's basically like the British version of Funyuns, which is exactly what it tastes like. Mm-hmm, that's true. Now we all just smell like onions, though. It'll go away a lot better than if you were eating you know, Frino, Armenian cuisine, all the raw onions. You leave the raw onions alone. They're delicious. So I've gathered you here today because we're gonna talk about, we all know him,

we all love him, he's history's greatest twink warlord, it's Alexander the Great. I'll be honest, I don't actually know that much about it but I'm excited to learn all right great and now we've never really talked about him on the show before which is kind of weird for a history show that's been going for almost a decade yeah I would have thought that we would have talked about him before now well it's not because I'm homophobic it's cuz I hate Greeks in fairness also like we don't really talk about ancient history stuff that often yeah Maybe here and there, but it's not really the, like, if you were to randomly select an era, chances were really good.

You wouldn't fall on that side of things. Yeah, generally. And unfortunately for like a lot of that stuff, like the really cool Alexander, the great stuff, like it has series written all over it. And I always put them off for a different time. Yeah. We'll leave that to a, you know, like the, the rest is history, you know, goalhanger productions. I would also say too, that like to some extent, uh, having some familiarity

with the sources is probably helpful, like being able to read those languages, but I don't know everything, you know, you can obviously get plenty in English, but uh, there's a degree to which, yeah, you know, the groundbreaking stuff that's going to be done is going to be people who can decode tablets and whatnot. I'm still doing that Rosetta still. Yeah, not really, not really doing a lot of tablet decoding in my day to day. The last thing you're going to see is a tablet in my hands. Whoop decoding they tablet.

It's like are you going to a festival drug test? It's like, could you please decode my job? You and like British Egypt ologist in 1890s decoding the tablet And the reason why you know I say I hate Greece it's actually not true But this podcast famously is a North Macedonian nationalist. So We're taking a strong stance here. It's such a funny story, like, country got owned so bad they had to change the name of their airport so they wouldn't have to have like a paragraph for a name. Poor North Macedonia.

Now the story of Alexander is one for the ages, but today we're going to talk about one of his more well-known exploits. That's a time a city told Alexander to go fuck himself, so he changed the topography of the planet out of spite. Have you ever heard of the Siege of Ty? References to it yes but I don't know anything about it. So it happened in 330 BC but of course Alex Aylund did not decide to create a land bridge off the coast of what is today Lebanon out of nowhere. Instead it really goes back in history about a

hundred years before the siege. But to make a very long story short we'll just hit that the greatest of you know. 3036 BC, Alexander's father, Philip II of Massimus, clapped by his own bodyguard, leaving the throne to his son, who was only about 20 years old at the time. Of course, rumors continue to persist that it was actually a plot between Alexander's mother and Alexander to steal the throne, none of which has ever really been already proven or will probably ever be. And if you watch the Oliver Stone film Alexander It's because Alexander kind of got honey-potted by his own mom because that movie is weird as shit Historical documentarian Oliver Stone say Oliver Stone making a very strange approach to historiography

I've never heard of this taking place. Have you watched that movie? No, it's okay I've seen Nixon and JFK So I know that he gets a little weird with it It's really bad and the most important thing that you should know that is like a society of Greek historians sued the film For its portrayal of Alexander because they made him gay Oliver stone Not very a you know, calling portrayal of Greeks either Alexander the Great or Spiro Agnew you know, calling for trail of Greeks, either Alexander the Great or Spiro Agnew. I just remember doing a show at a,

like what used to be a Macedonian, like cultural association club in Sydney. And I imagine they were one of the signing parties on that letter. Like all those dudes in the Sydney suburbs were just like, I cannot believe Oliver Stone, you piece of shit. He was not gay, I promise.

I know this for a fact. Much like all of your sources, a guy came to me in a dream and told me the truth of what happened To you know 2100 years ago exactly. It's like that film made him, you know His sexuality had been on you know more fluid which is almost certainly what real life was But also that he really wanted to fuck his own mom, which as far as anybody could tell is not really based in reality It's like no he, he's straight, but only for a small... Which kind of feels like Oliver Stone was like at his wits end with the script and then

saw Gladiator and was like, I bet you I can make it. I can run with this. I got some ideas here. I can make this work. Alexander's early reign pretty much collapsed through a pile of plots and revolts. Most city-states held in line by his father through force and intimidation saw a chance of breaking away at the news of an Untested boy king so one of the first things Alexander had to do is slap an army together to march run and kick them all back

In line. Hmm Of course this involved something that all Greeks do at one point or the other and that is start killing Balkan people Before doubling background destroying Thebes, heads the infamous Alexander the Great quote I want that Thebian obliterated. I also laugh because if you look up like a geology map or geography thing of the Balkan peninsula Greece is included, you're like listen, listen alright, alright in terms of landmass probably but you really don't want to ask the Greeks their opinion of this. Yeah they get really mad about it.

Yeah look I'm just of the stance position that it is all Greater Albania. Exactly. Everybody knows this. That brings us to the eventual legendary showdown between Alexander the Great and his arch-nemesis Darius III of Persia. Depending on which account you read, Alexander and his army crossed the Hellespont to invade Persia with about 50,000 men. The choice to cross the Hellespont was made on purpose, as the same spot that Persian forces crossed over about 150 years before to invade Greece.

And Alexander largely thanks to his tutor Aristotle and his mother, who movie aside was a crazy woman who constantly told her son and anybody who had listened that Alexander was actually the legitimate child of Zeus. So yeah, he was on a revenge mission for the whole Greek world. Yeah, it's like my little special boy. He is the best. He is going to rule the world. He's Zeus's son. Zeus unfortunately can't attest to this because he's busy abducting other, you know, teenage males in the form of an eagle, sweeping down and taking them away. In whom's amongst us, am I right?

I love the idea you're now confessing to having anamorph capabilities. Yeah, and I only use them to get laid. Yeah, you turn into a hedgehog and then you like, spin very fast. Yeah, I am canonically sonic. That worry, you know, he would just want to conquer as much as possible. Depends on which version of this story you want to believe. Was Alexander a Greek revenge warrior, or is he just a king? Mm. Yeah, probably the king one.

One is more entertaining and one is a lot more realistic. Of course, much of this is not owned to Alexander's genius, as it's often said or portrayed, but rather because Persia was in a state of decline for quite some time, owing to what else but countless throne-related beefs that left the empire completely destabilised and picked apart by disloyal and corrupt provincial governors. You know, that kind of thing. Yeah, Greece, you know, famously a very, very, very, very unified country. Yeah. But also in the case of Persia, it's just like, yeah, the sort of court schemes

and whatnot. It feels like it's just a, this was already a problem. Not that any historical examples show anything recently about corrupt provincial governors Running running wrong with it in any country we can name We just need to figure out like who's gonna win this war based purely on a numbers game of who has the most scheming unix Who ate who up plotting with a vizier? I don't I don't I truly know if it this era like they had court unix or viziers, but it is very funny It was just like you believe you like take the lens of everything is the Ottoman Empire and just slap it on to like you know BCE Persia. As Alexander invaded these bickering governors were confronted by a Greek mercenary the employee of Persia named

Memnon who had married into the Persian nobility. Memnon warned the governors to torch all of their crops and leave nothing for Alexander and then withdraw from the field of battle using Persia's vast size to make Alexander become overstretched, his logistical system to break down and then end the invasion before it get a foothold. Of course they refused to burn their own shit and instead demanded that they should all go to battle at Granicus. This is a very famous battle where Persia gets absolutely crushed, Memnon gets the hell out of there as thousands of people die, bringing word of the coming Greeks as he runs. Memnon more like Mem-Gone.

Memnon sounds like, like could be the name of a modern think tank that like translates, you know, news broadcasts from Iran to be as racist as possible. Memnon is Greek AI that just makes everything Greek. Memnon is the think tank that makes everything Greek. Memnon is the think tank that says that the Greeks are canonically Uzbek. It's taken as a little bit of a, I don't know if it's conspiracy theory or not, but I definitely think that like the whole thing behind memory is like, oh we'll translate stuff that's broadcast on a daily basis in the Middle East to show how backwards they are, funded by a lot of people who want to, you know, do

basically do George W. Bush style foreign policy. But, uh, they didn't realize that all of those things they were trying to shock people with. They're actually just incredibly funny. All of a sudden it's like you basically, you've now introduced the concept of making the joke about how SpongeBob got the house under the sea and the pineapple under the sea through jihad. Who's to say he didn't? Backfired on you, you know?

But the years of corruption and decline in the region saw many of the governors who were loyal Persian clients to a few days Before throw their gates open and welcome Alexander and obviously this is to save them from his army and destruction and being overthrown But for Alexander it worked all the same the cities that did namely Helichornassus would be put to Alexander siege engines in the form of big-ass rocks being hooked at them Which is of course revolutionary for the day though my personal personal favorite part of the whole Helicharnassus saga is a story of one failed attack against the city's walls happening after detachment of Alexander's army got way too drunk and kind of double-dog-dared each other into starting a battle. Like, a whole bunch of soldiers get really drunk and it starts with two soldiers like, you, I have more courage than you. I'm gonna charge the wall. They're like fuck you

I'll charge the walls too and they start going and then People in the camp think they forgot some order to attack so before long all these drunk soldiers just throwing themselves against the walls while Alexander Just rubbing his temples like goddamn it. They've done it again As the story goes after this he goes north He takes city of Gordium home of the famous Gordian Knot, the legend of whoever could untie the knot would conquer all of Asia. And as the story goes, Alexander just cuts the knot

in half with a sword, which is known as fucking cheating. I don't know what. No, no, no, that's not cheating. That is thinking outside the box. Distrupping the Gordian Knot space. Ha ha ha ha. Meanwhile, while all of this is going on, Memnon is sprinting from one city to another, constantly trying to alert them to get their shit together and

fight off Alexander while also losing virtually every battle he fights against Alexander and each time he's pretty much the only one to get away. Is there anything like Memnon as an inside job? It was only when Alexander was hoofing it through Syria that Darius finally realized that this shit should be probably taken seriously. He's trying to slap together an army. This takes a couple months and this is proving to be incredibly difficult owing to the fact his commanders, governors and everyone in between had been busy stealing everything that wasn't nailed down before Alexander invaded and everybody fucking hated Darius. It's kind of like a cyclical thing, right?

Like the state is failing their power is waning. So everybody's stealing everything So in turn the the Empire is failing harder and then they're mad at the guy who isn't necessarily stealing everything for not Like why can't you control me from stealing my all of your shit Darius Joe Biden the third? But he was eventually able to put together an army of about a hundred thousand and deployed against Alexander ISIS. Yeah. Recent events make it slightly more difficult to differentiate the two, so we'll just do our best.

Well, it's funny because if you ever watch Archer, the spy agency was also called ISIS. And then obviously ISIS became a thing and they rapidly changed it without saying anything because like in the background you see them like wheeling out the ISIS sign as a joke and they never bring it up again and there was some like weird online wallet for your phone app that was called the ISIS wallet at the time. Yes, yes. I know that there's more examples of this where yeah, like, you know, 10 years prior It just didn't have the same connotation and now it's just yeah, it comes across really funny And yeah, I just for my understanding where is this located? Is this in Syria? Yeah. Okay. Yeah

Paying for all my heroin shipment with ISIS pay. Yeah, exactly. I'm using ISIS coin. I'm being prescribed Just a guy who's like no no, no, I'm not talking about that ISIS. I'm talking about the Goddess ISIS. Come on, guys. I mean, there was a thing that my dad told me about this in the US. There were these hunger suppressant, like, appetite suppressant candies. They were like pretty mild, but like they basically were, you know, as like health diet pills, but they were called AIDS, but it was AYDS. And obviously the name changed. It didn't last very long, but I do recall there being a riff on this in one of the onions, like historical headlines thing where they're like,

in the eighties, AIDS will be synonymous with fitness and health. It's like, yeah, ISIS even worse. So Darius loses his battle so badly, he's forced to flee the battlefield and he's forced to flee so quickly. He leaves behind his wife and daughters as well as tens of thousands of his soldiers to die. As the story is told, Alexander was so close to Darius that he watched him run and was pissed he didn't get a chance to kill him personally. And also he kidnapped his wives and daughters.

Yeah. It's just a different level of spite. Like I couldn't get you, but I have stolen your family. Yeah. It's like, I got you with an arms reach and you're running out of the airport lounge. That feels like things aren't going well for you. Alexander DeCray was running up and saying like hide your kids, hide your wife. Oh, welcome to the Darius, the third day airport lounge. You know, all cylinders fire and we're going to reach into the quiver and pull out

the viral video from 15 years ago. Big up Antoine Dodson. I think he's still alive. I hope so. He seemed like a nice guy. Let's not look into that too much. This is normally the part of the story where I, you know, he says fuck it, he dumps all of his plans out the window and just goes chasing off after Darius, but he didn't. To make a long story short, Persia, despite getting its teeth kicked in since the invasion started, still vastly overpowered Alexander in the realm of naval power.

So he wanted to hit Vance across the Mediterranean coastline and start by taking out Persian naval bases. The king amongst these were the Phoenician cities of Byblos, Tyre, Sidon, and Arwad. Phoenicians had something of a deal with the Persians. You build and staff the Navy, you know, with the best ships and the best crewmen in the known world at the time, in exchange for what amounted to be semi-independence. You can kind of rule over yourself and maintain a sweet monopoly, and most importantly, on purple cloth dye. Ooh. Yeah. Yeah, they're ruled by Prince.

Well, I also, I mean, in that era, it's like, yeah, can you imagine this? It's just, show me, show me, like, we invented a new color. It's real. It's awesome. I've never seen this before. Is this real? Showing open, like, purple sandals,

like, they're the fucking galaxy foam Imagine it in the modern day. It's like we found this plant And if you like dry it and grind it up with a powder it turns your clothes into a hologram Check out my new for the Phoenician bathing ape You have nobody to blame for this but yourself Nate nobody I wouldn't know what this stuff is without you That's from like 20 years ago, that's the thing. Fine, it's a Phoenician, what is it, G-Star raw. I will say if you want to know about it, if you really want to get the height of the bathing ape, sort of like Technicolor camo era, just go to an airport that's got a flight connecting

to a regional city in Russia and every single person will be dressed that way. But it was like I was saying before, is that like where I live is like now the cultural wheel has turned where people are dressing like it's 2014, 15 again. And there's like Somali kids dressed like 2015 Swagapinos in like full multicam babe. Hell yeah. I mean, I remember that air more like- Glad to hear the Phoenicians are making a comeback. The 2000s.

But I feel like if I see people like, I mean, obviously the culture trends, youth culture stuff is going to move on, but people do like, yeah, you're going to do like old school throwback stuff and they're playing like Mac DeMarco. I'm just going to kill myself. Oh, I heard someone asking if I heard that, uh, uh, Macklemore put out a new album the other day and I was like, never fucking speak to me again. Oh man. I, I lived through the peak, like Mac DeMarco years when I think I was like 19 or 20. I mean, so many completely disgusting unwashed dungarees. I mean like bear in mind that like his sort of base of operations was central Brooklyn and that's where I was living at the time.

So I mean like it's not even bad music, but it just, the whole kind of ambiance around it, like it definitely attracts a certain kind of very, very unwashed person. Even in a climate like New York, it's really bad if you don't wash your fucking diseases in your feet Now bigger things in ants in New York get on your rats on my feet mice on my feet bed bugs on my feet cockroaches both German and American on my feet German-American boot of cockroaches on my feet, the relationship between the Phoenicians and Darius is not a good one.

Sedan had rebelled a few years before and gotten pretty seriously smashed in response. This meant the other Phoenicians were quite happy to chill with Alexander when he came into the neighborhood. Alexander thought the other cities would go as easily, but then he ran into Tyre. Tyre was by far the most powerful of the Phoenician cities and only gotten more powerful by sitting out at

Sedan's rebellion. The king of Tyre was so favored by Darius that Darius made him the commander of his navy which meant he was actually away from the city when Alexander rocked up to the city's gates. And so everybody has an idea of what this looks like in their head. Tyre is a city that's kind of split in half. The old city is on the mainland coast and New Tyre is in a walled off island fortress about a half mile off coast. Inside of New Tyre there's a temple to the Phoenician god Melchart, who the Greeks pretty much just said like, ah, it's Hercules. Same thing. So when envoys from the city came out to meet Alexander, they grant him the freedom to march

his soldiers through the Old City down the coast, to which Alexander said, yeah, thanks, that's great. But I really went across into New Tyre and give an offering at the New Tyre's temple of Melchart, owing, of course, because it was a huge festival going on to him at the time. And Phoenicians immediately saw this for what it was. If they allowed Alexander into the city to give offerings at the temple at such an important festival, it's pretty much the same as surrendering to him and the Phoenicians are trying to maintain kind of neutrality so neither Greeks nor Persians burnt their shit down so the envoy hit him with a counter offer well there's a temple to Melkart in the old city and you can do whatever you want in there

you can get real weird with it but you can't come over here the meeting which so far I've been conducted and what has been called professional towns as much as diplomatic professional towns existed back then, was immediately ended because Alexander lost his shit, screaming and yelling and throwing things, demanding he be allowed into the main temple in the new city. The envoys quickly left, ran back to the new city, and advised the government that we should probably

let Alexander to enter the city. But when they sent word to the king of Tyre, away on Navy duty, he said nobody was to enter new city and advised the government that we should probably let Alexander to enter the city. But when they sent word to the king of Tyre away on navy duty, he said nobody was to enter the city, Persian or Greek, it did not matter. And he had a good reason for saying that. Tyre was a fortress. It had withstood decades of total time under siege over the years, you know, a classic form of warfare sabermetrics, if you will. The city was known for being virtually impossible to take and the reasons for this were many. It was an island fortress with incredibly rough water separating it from the mainland. The walls on the island were 150 feet high in some places and the walls are built right up to the water's edge, meaning there's really no beach to land on

exactly. There's no place to get a foothold and the garrison only had about 8,000 people, but that was considered enough to defend this place. Alexander was aware of this, which is why when he tried to speak to the envoys again, so maybe he could be able to figure out a way to end this without having to attempt to invade this place, the messengers were arrested, murdered and their bodies were thrown into the sea. I mean it's a great disposal method of being like right on the sea, just throw shit on it. And because it doesn't really have a beach, it's not going to wash back up.

Yeah, it's just go to the old city. Yeah, problem then. Yeah. I mean, they're probably throwing all their garbage over the walls anyway. Right. Did the Phoenicians invent the car battery? No, they're getting rid of the car tires. Maybe they were just throwing. They're just throwing their horses into the sea.

Just thinking about this, too. And I realize it's an extremely low-hanging fruit joke, but every time you say the name Melkart, all I can think of, like, call it a weekend of performances in very hot venues kind of affecting my brain, but it just, it sounds like they worship a Dutch guy. Yeah, yeah, Melkart de Jong. He's teaching them all about doing weird colonialism in Indonesia. I mean, I'm just trying to think of like places, because I know some of these are also famous cities for like Crusader battles or like, you know, Frankish versus Aladin battles. So place that he built a fortress and like no one will ever take this from me.

Well, unfortunately, after Alexander leaves, Tyre is significantly easier to besiege for reasons that we will get into. As the story goes, Alexander had a dream of Hercules himself fist fighting the walls of Tyre. It must have been so cool to have dreams back then when you just like you just envisioned a bonus level from Final Fight. What's that scene from Street Fighter where you have to fight the car? You beat a car to death and then it's like, all right, you get all these bonus points. But it's Hercules punching a city.

Now all of us just have like stress dreams like dreams about like we're late to school you know the school we graduated from 20 years ago and we don't have you like we're not wearing the right color uniform or something we don't have we don't have pants on but imagine it's like that and you wake up and you have a cabal of Sears to tell you what your dreams actually mean and everybody takes them at face value that's what happens with Alex and he wakes up tells us the seers, like, I dreamed of, you know, Hercules doing the street fighter extra level of punching the city. And the seers say, oh, well, that means the city would fall.

But only after Alexander did something that could be taken as an act of God. So what really happened was Alexander was a pretty competent field commander well known for thinking outside the box He looked at the span of ocean separating the new and old cities of Tyre and came to a conclusion Well, if they won't fight me on land I'll bring the fucking land to them and see what they have to say about it So Alexander gets together with a team of engineers and decides they would build a massive Causeway stretching from the coast all the way to the new massive causeway stretching from the coast all the way to the new city. Yes.

So it's sort of like the US army reserves ad from the nineties about like, what do you do when you can't cross the river? Build a bridge. But it's like that's Alexander the Great's mentality. Except it's not a bridge. It's a whole causeway. Like this is not to be used once or twice. This is like, he's going to change the face of the earth.

It's not a pontoon bridge. He's just going to, he's going to change the face of the bridge. He's just gonna do he's gonna yeah. All right And you remember it's you know 330 BC any attack is gonna require a massive formation of infantry siege weapons things of that I've been talking about these formations and it's like oh, that's five divisions Oh, that's an entire army group like these are huge numbers of people and marching side by side Yep, so the causeway is gonna be fucking huge so they can attack the wall It would need to be at least 200 feet wide. The whole way. The Germans hate the

Greeks so much because the Greek guy invented the first Autobahn. Yeah the horses had no speed limit on the causeway. In order to do this Alexander needs supplies and manpower so he enslaved the entire population of the old city and had them begin to part out their own houses and buildings and You know streets, but have anything that had rocks and start chucking them into the sea to start building the foundation For the cause throwing in all your old car batteries throwing in neighbors. You don't like it's a shit job, but it's work You know, I mean like I guess this is this is like, you know at sword point job but it's work you know I mean like I guess this is this is like you know at Swordpoint, Corvallis, Lever, it's not an option. Listen here you are going to take

apart your own house and throw it in the sea. Tens of thousands of men women and children are packing down sand rocks and laying timber and the burning hot Sun all while the Tyrians in the new city laughed and shit-talked them because this whole thing looked ridiculous. Some Tyrians even got into boats paddled up to the workers and pointed and laughed at them, like literally just doing drive-by roasts and so like, what are you, Poseidon or something? Your cloak isn't even that purple. This shit looks dusty as fuck.

That's more of a lavender. Oh my god, so yeah, so drive-by boat roasts, drive-by hating. They're not even like shooting arrows at them or anything yet. They're like, this is so ridiculous. It could never work They obviously never thought that the people in the new city would ever have to worry about this But then as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months the causeway kept growing inching closer and closer to the new city at an alarming rate. By every account of this story, it happens very fast, which I assume is what happens

when you have an army of slaves at your beck and call. But also like the idea of this seeming completely impossible to the point of like no danger or whatever. It's so absurd. This is like a playground spat and a kid's like, oh, I'm going to dig a hole to China. And then he actually does. Now the reason why this is going so quickly at first is because the seabed by the shore is flat, right? It's easy to pile this shit up. But then they got to the deep part and slaves just started vanishing under the waves. Alexander was

on shore for the construction personally guiding the building, encouraging man because I mean he was pretty smart. He also had a team of engineers with him. And the sea just drops off into a deep end, which Alexander probably had no idea about this, is why the water was so rough. It's because it gets trapped in this huge underground ditch and gets churned up. And then hundreds and thousands of workers begin drowning.

That absolutely did not stop Alexander and his army of slaves because Why would he care that they're dying once again coming back to a recurring theme on the show? We are now into corpse infrastructure Yeah, I mean they're definitely in there like if you dig far enough into the entire causeway which still exists today You'll find a lot of Greek skeletons Complaint tablet says I was promised a hologram cloak. What's your benefits package? One purple piece of cloth. To make matters worse the laborers were also close enough to the walls now that the Tyrians started realizing there's some danger happening here so they begin getting picked off with bows. Then they

saw construction was somehow continuing. So Tyrians, who remember are a naval power, which Alexander is not yet, load into boats and just begin conducting nonstop drive-by shootings on the work crews as they dump literally tons of dirt and rocks and timber into the water day and night. So effectively, as you go into the channel, the sea, obviously the depth increases, water day and night. So effectively like there's a as you go into the channel the

sea obviously the depth increases and they've just decided to make that cavern chasm whatever you'd call it go away by just filling it in. Yep. Just however long that takes you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna block up and you're gonna raise the the seabed level basically. That is correct tens of thousands of handfuls of dirt at a time. Now you're getting filled full of arrows while you're doing it. And Alexander had no boats to use to try to protect his workers, so the boats could just cruise up and down the causeway under construction, completely unopposed. And now having your laborers caught in a constant crossfire of arrows and flying rocks is obviously bad for business. Casualties rapidly began to rise and working became just impossible. So Alexander's engineers went back to work building a series of transportable armored walls that could be dragged over

the laborers as they're working, who again are still falling into the ocean all the time. Invent big trash can lid to cover these people with. Yeah I mean it's... and also it's made out of like leather and hide which they made on site Which you have to think of how bad this camp smells because you know how they're curing this leather Yeah, it's just the same slaves that are filling up the water with dirt are just pissing into buckets Which they then are using to make leather to turn into shields I mean like when you think about that many people you talk about hundreds of thousands and all the logistics support like just the dirt are just pissing into buckets which they then are using to make leather to turn into shields. I mean like when you think about that many people, when you talk about hundreds of thousands and all of the logistics support, like just the fact that every single person has to go

to the bathroom at some point, like you're creating new topography in your own right that way. Don't forget to go to the piss bucket. Clocking out of my job at the front of the seawall to go then clock into my job at the piss factory. You know what, say what you will about Alexander the great there's a lot of complaints But the one thing that he skirts by on is he crushed the union at the local piss factory Here is like the whistle goes. I put time to clock out boys go get them troughs

so yeah, I imagine that this was making progress, but it was very hard to This was making progress, but it was very hard to Continue at the same rate when yeah effectively like everyone's getting turned into pin cushions Yeah pin cushions and like waterlogged corpses is constantly lapping up at the side of the causeway Alexander DeGrasse they're sitting on the shore looking at you like he's playing sim city Yeah, he's just I love the idea that like know, when you get to this level of absolute control as a military commander, that you can basically do the terraforming from city skylines and just, it doesn't matter, it costs a billion dollars,

just keep raising the coast. How many people do you think have died making this, like, do you think I care? But just like me playing literally any city building game and like, oh, you know, what WMD would offer, there's some fucking chemical spill, like, I'll just ignore that side of the city. Now at certain intervals, the laborers stopped on the causeway to build siege towers so Alexander's soldiers could staff them and fire back at the constant swarming mass of boats that were

trying to kill them. And these towers were actually quite effective. And so was that movable armored wall. And the Tyrians began to not be able to slow them down quite so much. So they decided to up the game. A fire ship. They loaded a ship down with pitch and brimstone and charged that thing right into the side of the causeway because remember the top of the causeway is timber. Yeah. And you know there's building equipment everywhere. There's siege towers, this thing is just a giant pile of kindling. Mm-hmm. It crashes into the causeway, sets everything on fire, and then supporting ships behind the fire ship will land on top of the causeway and just begin slaughtering workers.

So a lot of laborers are given the choice, well, like, well, do I burn alive on a causeway? Do I jump into the ocean and die or do I let the guys who are actually my countrymen murder me? You get three choices. Who says Alexander doesn't care about the welfare of his workers? And everyone is dressed in purple at the time. Everyone's dressed like Prince. The artist probably noticed the guy stabbing a sword into my face. Alexander's seize engines went up in flames and the towers came down by the time Alexander ordered a retreat. By the time some of the workers managed to get back to the old city, the entire causeway

had been burnt down, reduced a little more than dirt lumps with burning logs and slaves on the sea. The Tyrians pulled back to their city, convinced that they had won. However, Alexander decided, you know what? This wouldn't have happened if I had just built a bigger causeway. So he did. On top of that, he made a pretty obvious realization. It was really stupid to attack an island fortress without a navy.

That seems to be a bit of an oversight. So he sent envoys to the surrounding Phoenician cities to demand that they give their fleets over to them, and they did. Soon Alexander, who only a few minutes before had virtually no fleet to speak of, had one of the largest in the world, taking ships from Cyprus, Sedan, and Byblos, all coming to his aid. The Tyrians, possibly with history's biggest uno reverse card up until that point, suddenly found themselves overpowered at sea and trapped into their own port as Alexander's new fleet had them completely blockaded. Though the Tyrian fleet and its commanders did do something really smart while also recognizing

there is zero way they could fight Alexander at sea anymore. They chained all of their ships together from one end of the port to the other, blocking it so Alexander could invade the port. They staffed it with Marines ordered to fight until the death, or as I just say, Marines. Marines are universally psychotic. I mean, I do feel like there's always these stories where it just starts to sound like the realm of the fantastic when it's like how do you defend the port from this massive

chain all the boats together, build like it just it's it starts to sound like legendary in the sense of you know like half made up. But it's also like what if we made this island a peninsula? Yeah I mean like one side is literally terraforming the land. And when you remember that naval warfare at the time was just infantry warfare on boats. They would crash into one another and just shoot marines across and start stabbing each other. It makes sense. Now they can't invade, they would have to crash through this chain of boats.

And if Alexander attempted to break through the small confines of the port because the port's entry of course it's easily defendable it's small on purpose despite the fact that they outnumber them they would lose so many ships and men just to take over these ports and again it's on the other side of where he's building this giant fucking causeway anyway but outside of that the Tyrians could do nothing but watch as a second causeway. This one, double in size from the first, began inching closer to them across the sea. It's like you wake up in the morning, you have whatever the ancient Greek version of coffee, which was probably wine and olive oil.

Look out the window and you can just see, it's like, yeah, they made another six inches yesterday. The coastline is growing again. Yep. Oh god damn it the road is coming right at us. Credit where credit to Alexander. He can build a road faster than like any state that I've ever lived in. Well I mean much to Republican governor Chagrin you can't corvey labor a hundred thousand people at Swordpoint.'s true because of woke not yet just doing you know those videos from china of them like building overpasses yeah overnight and it's just like everyone's like moving around at like triple speed i had to be corvaded to work at a holding blood feast highway in like maryland or whatever yeah yeah exactly they've built a huge

highway so they can get more trucks to bring in the corn. They're going to turn into ethanol that everyone's legally required to burn. The Tyrians resulted to fight to the death doing all they could building larger and larger wooden towers on top of their already 150 foot tall walls. And then they built catapults on top of those rickety ass wooden frames to fire down onto Alexander. Ancient ancient battle is basically Fortnite. Yeah, there's a Tyrian just on top of all hopping as like a tower just shits out underneath of them.

I mean, like, I guess, okay, it makes sense to sort of desperate times calling for desperate measures, but like there is an element of, which is totally ridiculous to this, like everything you're describing. And a lot of them fell down. Like as they're building, it's like, oh, we have to build another tower.

Oh, oh God. That would crash directly into the elementary school. Can you build an appendage on top of the appendage, please? down like as their buildings like oh we have to build another town oh god directly build an appendage on top of the appendage in another world Alexander the great got one-shotted by someone in a Bob Belcher skin floating above the walls of tire absolutely what 360 noscopes of across the Cosway. Macedon collapses over Tyre. Hate John Benjamin as no leader of the entire Greek world. I love the idea that like yeah Constantine instead of seeing the sign of the cross in

the sky he just sees the cast of Bob's Burgers. Of course this all eventually leads to a non-Bob's Burgers related problem. Up until now the Tyrian Navy was free to come and go, bring in supplies to the city, and at one point even evacuate most of their women and children, but they didn't force them to leave. Like a lot of people's wives and kids refused to leave, so. But a lot of people are gone. But now that was gone, right?

They couldn't get their fleet out of port, but during that time, they also, they could bring in stones and arrows and projectiles to shoot at the work crews, but now they couldn't. So they began tearing up stones from the street or stripping their own buildings, bare for ammunition to fire at the Greeks. Imagine you're a worker working at the cause of a taco bell side, just rips overhead. That cross my mind though. It's like the impenetrable fortress, but then if you wind up getting completely cut off,

you're sort of like, damn, I wish we could grow some shit in here. Well, well, well, if I'm not being hoisted by my own petard and then that the thing that is hoisted me collapses because we've run out of materials to build them. I mean, to be fair, this is long before the invention of the petard. So you're being hoisted by your toga my purple toga hosted by a purple robe a counterfeit purple robe we ran out of the purple plants I think that's what took out David Carradine I washed it too much and now my toga is just chartreuse that's an unforgivable faux pas in the

Phoenician world you won't be stoned to death feels like you're gonna be stoned to death regardless I will fucking kill you you're either being stoned to death or all the- no you won't be stoned to death. Feels like you're gonna be stoned to death regardless. I'm gonna fucking kill you. You're either being stoned to death or all the- no you won't be stoned to death because all the stones are now in the sea. Damn it, they don't fire you at the Macedonians. Thus cementing your place in the foundation of the new causeway I suppose. Which has gotta be like a third bone at this point. It's bone by volume. My lord, King Alexander, one of our soldiers

was taken up by a large-headed Irishman flying through the air. He's fighting on both sides somehow. Another few weeks of this and the second causeway had gotten close enough to the walls that Alexander's heavy siege weapons were sent forward to pound a living shit out of the mainland facing wall. Alexander, or rather his engineers, were generally considered revolutionaries in the field of siege warfare and siege engines, and they invented all kinds of acme-ass shit to use in the process,

including, my personal favorite, the crow, and this was not a siege weapon that for some reason only kills Bruce Lee's son. Oh. The siege weapon you just didn't know was loaded It was a massive hook on a chain Fired from a tower that would sweep across the top of a battleman and just like rip people apart and pull down Stones and shit like the tactical version of getting the cane at the Apollo theater. I

Like the tactical version of getting the cane at the Apollo theater. I like this. So it's basically like, like a large hook that sweeps things clean basically, but at like a comically overstated scale. Yeah. As I said, like this is some ACME shit. I mean, this is the era of what is it? Syracuse with the reflecting mirrors, like primitive laser can to set boats on fire. Like they did have some unique weapons in this era and Alexander landed more rams, catapults, and giant acme scythes around the walls, and the Tyrians met them at every turn, wildly outnumbered but not really seeming to care. Repair teams slapped together the city's walls as soon as Alexander broke them down. I assume

by doing the Fortnite rapid build trick just hopping through the air and shitting out breaks. I hate when I get hit with a massive fucking stone and then see Bob Belcher doing the gritty across the top of the battlements. Alexander's not even sure what burgers are yet but he knows he hates them. Somewhere in the collective European unconscious there is a legend of Tomato Town. Everybody remembers the famous last day in a tomato town or Alex here the great Built an overpass over the highway to get there fast No, it would have been I tilted towers because tomatoes hadn't been brought to Europe Fuck then the Greeks were reminded suddenly that they in fact had built a causeway in the middle of a very very angry sea and it

Got swamped by gigantic waves that crashed out and swept away hundreds of men and siege weapons. And like Alexander sitting there like fuck I forgot about the ocean. Yeah he might be the son of Zeus but he has angered his uncle Poseidon. Alexander thought that this would all end when the causeway eventually reached the island he could launch his frontal assault. But this is where he discovered that maybe his legendary professional phalanx formations with their light shields and 16 foot long spears

were maybe not the best thing to try to scale 150 foot tall ladders. From where the Tyrians were sitting, the Macedonian men were sitting ducks. From all the way at the top, they could just drop whatever they wanted over the edge and it would just cave their fucking skulls in. Like the Macedonian men's shield were so light that if they just dropped a stone from the top it would punch straight through it. Right into their soft meaty bodies underneath. One

of their favorite tricks was to fill bowls with sand, put the bowl of sand over an open fire until the sand glowed red, and then dump the burning sand on top of the assaulting soldiers. The burning sand would get into every little crack in their armor and also, famously, their eyes, and the men would jump into the ocean to die rather than continue to burn. The sight of watching men's breastplates fuse to their skin and their eyes melt out of their own skulls was almost enough to force Alexander to call the whole thing off. Right about then was when another attack managed to breach the city's walls though, but only barely at the south of the island. The initial attack into the breach was forced back, but now they got all the way up into

the city itself, everybody knew the end was pretty much near. Now was July. The siege had been going on for six months and the garrison inside the city was looking pretty fucking bad. Remember, for most of those months they've been completely cut off. So people were thirsty, they were hungry, they were... disease was spreading through because they were just chucking dead bodies anywhere They could put them mostly in the sea, but Alexander's been were actually throwing them back They were eating all the plants to use to dye the clothes purple there. Everyone's looking like Barney. It's a combat grimace. I Mean that thought did cross my mind. I'm like, yeah not a lot of fresh water when you're in the you know impenetrable island fortress

Someone somewhere is really thinking like, man, we fucked up We were just some serious oversights in our defense policy here. Namely like turns out we need water to live People were so freaked out that they thought the gods were abandoning them So they begin to tie statues of the gods down to the street because people said that they saw them flying off to like return To the heavens like quick bolt down that statue so it doesn't get away. However just because they were starving and thirsty did not mean they stopped fighting. At one point the Tyrian navy launched a suicide attack against the Cypriot ships that were blocking them in. And this failed spectacularly as the entire Tyrian sortie was lost, but that

also scattered the Cypriot ships and caused a hell of a lot more damage than they took in the process. It was also news to Alexander that it was clear that these people were not going to surrender. They were going to fight until he took every last street in that city. So he gave his men three days of rest and then ordered the final assault on the city to begin. Boats were loaded with men and siege weapons, the causeway held thousands more, and soon Macedonian forces were attacking the city from every direction with, as it's told, Alexander leading them personally from the front. And this is less to do with like hero worship shit than a really bad habit that Alexander had.

For people who don't know, this is eventually how he dies. And he does it all the time. Alexander gets wounded so many times over the years of his short life, it's actually quite impressive. He didn't die of an infection sooner. Yeah, it's never really a good idea in the history of this podcast when the leader goes to the front. They usually either get Napoleon hoarse, or they like very very narrowly escape with all of their limbs. Yeah. Until you eventually don't.

At this point the men inside the city were too spread thin trying to plug all the gaps being smashed into the walls by the assault force. Not to mention the defenders had completely run out of arrows by now. So as the Macedonians pour into the city they're just getting it like making it hail with literally anything they can get their hands on. Rocks, cooking utensils, bits of wood, fucking little paring knives and shit. Alexander's men burst through the breach in the walls around the same time the allied Macedonian fleet smashes through both harbors. Men are pouring through every hole of the city, or as we call it, Greece.

This does sound like something someone on Xbox Live would say about my mom, but whatever. The Tyrian defenses began to break down, but still they fought on, even as all organizations completely broke down. Every corner of the city was another last stand against the Macedonians, again with those hilariously oversized spears forced to fight through the streets while dudes smashed their skulls from above with stones and burning pots of sand. Alexander made zero attempt to control his men as they unleashed what was now nearly seven months of rage built up on the city's occupants. Men were slaughtered as were thousands

of women and children who had not been evacuated. Some historians point out that Alexander took part in the wanted massacring owing to the fact that he was furious about having to build that fucking causeway, which that would not surprise me. Tyre died in a sea of blood and flames and if stories are to be believed the only people Saved from the slaughter or slavery or a couple hundred people that Alexander found hiding in the city's temple to Markhart when he finally showed up Hey, bro Remember when you would let me in? Mmm. Now as one final fuck you to Tyre and probably Darius and as a lesson to those who would deny

the murder twink what he wanted Alexander ordered the city's walls to be lined with prisoners all crucified to line the walls in case you're wondering the math it took 2,000. Wow. And this is like the the old school crucifixion like obviously we think of crucifixion now we think of the Christian cross no you, it was more like a T. Yeah, you're T posing for eternity. You're T posing. And you were going to more likely suffocate and die before you die from blood loss or

anything. And nobody's gonna be nice enough to come up and give you a quick shank so you bleed out. Yeah, yeah. Not everyone got to create the Lancelonginous. Then Alexander finally got to make his offering at the temple to honor the gods. Then he held several days of feasting and games in the city Which was a largely burnt down mass grave surrounded by the rotting crucified corpses of thousands of people by now

So, you know great great vibes at that dinner. Yeah, you know, it's smell crazy This delicious food. Unfortunately, like I've got hit with so much hot sand, I've been turned into a sealed lobster of a human. I've just got a carapace. In the end, the brutality of the siege got Alexander exactly what he wanted. When the news of what happened attire spread, virtually every other city on the coast surrendered rather than face that smoke. Shit, Darius himself sent peace terms to Alexander after this, but Alexander refused, continuing his conquest to the south.

Today if you look at a map, you'll see that Alexander's causeway remains because he turned Tyre into a peninsula. The end. That is fucking mad. Yeah, that's fucking crazy, right? Yeah, yeah, I mean that would be a pretty enormous undertaking now with all the things we have now to do that, and this was being done before like the concept of like a lever or like a pulley was seriously revolutionary.

And like today, there's two cities have kind of melded into one. So there's just like apartments and stuff built on it. So you can have like the world's most haunted apartment building in Tyre. That is the end fellas. How do you feel about the siege of tire? I mean like Alexander the Great, you know, the one upped by an ass at one stage, but anytime you hear any story about anything he did, it almost sounds like it just, Oh no, this is bullshit. Like this is obviously like Greek historiographic lies, but yeah. It's one of those like bigger than reality stories.

It's one of the reasons why we remember it. Yeah, because remember while he's doing this. He's like barely a legal drinking age. Yep I'm just imagining. Yeah that like part of me thinks okay This has probably been as you're describing exaggerated throughout history But then it's like mobile literal physical remnants of it are still there Yeah A few times in history has this happened the Romans did few things and you can still like they move the earth to you. You can see it. Yeah and Alexander the Great is like I need you to take all those stones and put them in the sea. Have we decided he has Mickey Mouse voice? Yes. He's got Bob Matthews voice.

Doesn't live in a shoe lives in a sandal. No snake will ever ruin my career. I won't get snaked on! Oh no, an arrow in India! Certainly nothing bad will happen from this! But fellas, that is an episode and to our dear listeners, we do a thing on this show called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question, you can support the show on Patreon, you can ask us on Patreon, you can ask us on the Discord where we have a dedicated channel to it, or you can build a causeway from wherever you are to wherever we are and we will answer

It on the show and today's question is what is your unexpected? hobby or interest Unexpected or not people will be surprised like is it like yes I'm wondering is the question is it like I didn't expect to get into this or people would be surprised So I feel like we could go both. Mm-hmm, huh? So I've had to the question is it like I didn't expect to get into this or people would be surprised to learn this? I feel like we could go both. Huh. So I've had to learn how to use a lot of power tools that I kind of wish I had learned from my dad before because he like was a carpenter, but I actually recently learned how to use

like a router, like not router like the computer kind, but actually like the one that you have on a track to basically to cut grooves into things and stuff like that. I've slowly been learning this stuff and it's actually kind of, it's really cool if you know how to use it. Like it requires, there's this ridiculous sensation of like, I've been thinking about this for two weeks and planning out how to do it.

And then the actual cut takes like 45 seconds. But obviously it's much better if it goes well cause you planned it versus like, oh, I'll just figure this out as I go. And it just becomes a complete disaster and you waste all this material. I don't know. I guess that's probably it. I mean, working sound engineer and doing building studios and stuff, obviously I had to learn a lot about installing shelves and microphone cables and network cables. But that one, I think there are a lot of things I remember my dad having that I like just never thought I would need like, okay, a table saw,

whatever, but like, you know, needing to use like, uh, like a track saw or a jigsaw or the difference between a regular hammer drill and an SDS drill and stuff like that. And weirdly doing stuff that damages your hearing has become part of my job. I don't know why. I don't know. I feel like, uh, the hobbies that I have are probably like pretty on brand for me. Like obviously I do a lot of photography. Um, I'm really into 19th century portraiture, which is once again, probably something that's not surprising. Uh, I don't know. Uh,

I really like Sabrina Carpenter's music, but once again, like that's probably not surprising for anyone who listens to this fucking podcast. I had to throw this in as a thing because as we were trying to research an upcoming series I couldn't find what I was looking for on, you know, like, what was it? Open library. But I did wind up on a thing basically talking about portrait photography and specifically nude portrait photography, which I was trying to find something about Lord Byron and yet for some reason this came up and I found out there were hand colored plates

that were daguerreotypes that were basically nude photographs. But when you look at the date, it was like 1845 to 1850. And it was like photography hadn't existed for more than 10 years at that point. And they were already doing like centerfold photographs. Like it's the first thing they did. That would be like the first thing we figured

is how to make porn with it. Well, yeah. And you see so many other technologies being used this way. And someone, you know, you remind yourself, well, the French did invent photography. So make porn with it. Well yeah, and you see so many other technologies being used this way, and you remind yourself, well, the French did invent photography, so there you have it, but that to me, okay, it's one thing to write 19th century old photography, that's not a surprise, but it's very, very funny

in researching stuff for this show, being like, 1845? Before they invaded Algeria, they were taking spread eagle photos, this is insane. I don't think I have any interests that would be unexpected. I have no hobbies no I think everything that I do people would expect that I do. I remember doing a Q&A for TF one time and one of the questions was what's your favorite painting at Biosynet? I've never seen a painting I like. I honestly don't know is the least surprising thing I've ever heard. I don't, I honestly don't know. Like, yeah, I'm a gym guy. I like martial arts, I like video games, and I read a lot. Like, everybody knows this of me. You have a dog, though. You do have a dog, you're a dog guy.

Everybody knows I'm a dog guy. Yeah, but who would be, I wouldn't look at you and be like, that guy's a dog guy. And maybe people are more surprised it's a very tiny dog. Yeah, yeah, I would say, I mean, like, they would assume you would get some kind of, ridiculous, like an Irish wolf hound or like a great Pyrenees or a great Dane or some kind of dog that's like, you really don't want having an accident in your apartment because he looks like a person to shit on your floor.

And a big person at that. Yeah. Fucking Audrey the giant brick on your couch. I don't know. Fuck it. I'll bring you to the National Gallery and just show you some like William Blake paintings that change your life. I see that wouldn't surprise anybody. You know, they're like I go to museums and stuff like that as well,

because we have a lot of those in the Netherlands. I'm moved by classical music such as the Final Fantasy 7 soundtrack. Exactly. I mean, it's a pinnacle of human ears. And I'm moved by classical art, aka the background for Final Fantasy 7. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those watercolors in Final Fantasy 6,

you know, they're pretty close to romantic paintings. I really like the finger paintings done by elephants. I legitimately don't know a weird, unexpected interest of him. I am the most like known person. Like, I'm not hiding any weird interests. Actually, I think how interested you are in Dutch politics is kind of. Oh, I live there. I know. But like most like people who are like, you know, immigrants to a country would not take up a level of interest in politics that you would have a specifically like Western

immigrants to like Europe. Yeah, that's true. I mean, and weirdly like I did living here, but I think because the fact that I could vote where I won't be able to vote in Switzerland for nine years and and Swiss politics is completely inscrutable. So I'll be the first of it. I don't really know much about it I can't vote in the Netherlands for many years to go Yeah, like you can you know, you can probably reel off like the municipal policies policies of a guy called like Jeep Vanderklee I Guess that's my niche interest is Dutch politics. I need to get more interest But fellas, I believe that's a podcast. You host

other podcasts, plug those other podcasts. I am either the co-host or producer or some combination thereof for trash future, kill James Bond. What a hell of a way to dad and no gods, no mayors. Listen to beneath skin show, but the history of everything told through the history of tattooing and also you can buy either my photography or art books at beneath the skin shop.com this is the only show that I host and you already listened to it so thank you for that but consider supporting us on patreon you make everything we do possible you get almost what eight years of bonus content ebooks

audiobooks discord access first dibs on live show tickets and merch and there's more of that stuff coming and you'll get one piece of Phoenician purple dyed clothing taken from a skeleton that doesn't need it anymore exactly skeletons don't need clothes especially when they're part of the foundation and until next time destroy your home build a causeway