School of War - Ep 166: Rachel Kousser on Alexander the Great

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Rachel Kousser, professor of Classics and Art History at the City University of New York and author of Alexander at the End of the World, joins the show to talk about the violent, brilliant, complex career of Alexander the Great. ▪️ Times      •      01:27 Introduction     •      01:59 Early years and conquest     •      05:45 Pragmatic opportunist       •     09:20 Persepolis burning        •      11:48 Darius      •      14:36 Alexander in the field      •      19:30 Understanding the geography       •      25:56 Dreamer      •      29:50 “A war of choice…”     •      32:57 Building something new      •      34:36 Breaking point       •      38:00 King with consent      •      41:48 Harnessing strength Follow along on Instagram or YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

There's an old line that originates in Hemingway, that bankruptcy happens in two ways, slowly, then all at once. So it was with the end of the Persian Empire at the hands of Alexander the Great, our subject for today, and the person responsible for one of the most startling series of military victories in human history. We'll also talk about what happened with his military decisions and grand strategic thinking as he journeyed further east, as our guest today puts it, to the end of the world. Let's get into it. The invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infantry.

A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain situation in the ground. We shall fight on the beaches, we'll fight on the landing ground, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, substack, and Twitter.

and feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Rachel Couser. She is professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center City University of New York. She is the author most recently of Alexander at the end of the world, the forgotten final years of Alexander the Great. Rachel, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for having me. So why don't we start?

Your book, very interestingly, is about Alexander after he, you know, essentially defeats the Persian Empire. It's everything that comes next. And obviously, we'll spend most of our time on that. But would you mind, could we kind of set the scene and talk a little bit about Philip and also Alexander's defeat of Persia? You know, just help, which is the part, those are the parts of the story more often told. Just give listeners a sense of how you get up to the point where you begin the tale. Absolutely. So Alexander is the crown prince of the small kind of peripheral kingdom of Macedonia in what is now mostly northern Greece. And his father, Philip, is about to embark on an invasion of the Persian Empire, the hegemonic power of its day.

and he is then assassinated before Alexander's eyes and perhaps, as I discuss more in my book, with his connivance. And he leaves Alexander these dreams of conquest and a well-trained and brutally effective, albeit rather small, army. Alexander is 20, which is mind-boggling. And in the next four years or so, he accomplishes an astonishing feat. He snuffs out rebellion in Greece and to the immediate north of Macedonia, then crosses the hellespont, the thin sliver of water separating Europe from Asia. And in the course of about three years, conquers the western half of the Persian Empire. Everything from Turkey to Syria to Egypt. which was then at that point part of Persia to Iraq and Iran.

And it's this astonishing, almost near frictionless glide where he is able to defeat the best armies, the Persian emperor. The Persian king could pull up against him. He captures the major Persian treasuries. He kind of co-ops the most effective subordinates of the king. He even captures the royal family. And that's when he gets a lot. gets to Persepolis, and I think everyone, particularly has exhausted and traumatized troops, are expecting him to go home.

And Cachean go home to Macedonia. And instead, he keeps going east. And that's what my book is about. So, you know, I think at the extent that people study Greco-Persian rivalry, the story probably starts with Herodotus and, you know, the Battle of Marathon, early 5th century wars. And then, as you know, of course, better than the rest. of us, it becomes an increasingly complicated story in the sense that it's not just Greece versus Persia, not least because there really is no such thing as Greece. There's these shifting

coalitions of city-states. And then Persia is, of course, always, they're not fools. They're for most of this period involved in Greek politics and aligning themselves with this or that city-state. By the time we get to Alexander's period, there are lots of Greeks serving as mercenaries for various elements of the Persian state or sub-states. It's a mess. Like, it's just very complicated like the status of of of of greco persian opposition and then as i as i understand it you know the defining debate of of greece or a grand strategic debate of philip's life is you know is greece going to align with philip against persia or is greece going to stick together and probably align with persia against philip and obviously philip and then alexander sort of settled this question definitively

greece will be aligned with macedonia to oppose persia no matter what and just to to conclude with with the question that you just inspired me, the way you finish your remarks, is Alexander contemplate, what is Alexander's grand strategic conception at the start as best as you can tell from the evidence? And how does it evolve? That is to say, does he see himself as the King of Kings from the beginning? Or does he begin as essentially, which would have been very common at the time, a peripheral rating power that's going to come in, take the loop and go loot and go home, as you suggest most of his soldiers expect? Yeah. I think he's an opportunist. a pragmatic opportunist to a much greater extent than people believe.

When he starts, it is clear that what people were expecting, for instance, when the great Athenian orator Isocrates sort of puts to fill up an idea of what he should accomplish, it basically gets no further than Western Turkey. And in Isocrates' view, he should conquer that, colonize it with Greeks for the benefit of the Greeks, and then... Go ahead. It's not clear to me that Philip would have stopped there either, but certainly once Alexander manages to defeat Persia repeatedly, I think he gets a taste for more. And I think he has, you know, the Greeks described it as Pothos, this kind of desire for what you don't have.

one of the many different Greek kinds of desire, but a particularly important one for empire builders, I would say. But I think there are also serious strategic problems with his soldiers' vision of just sort of looting and going home. Because while you're saying, you know, while we sort of were talking about it, okay, he's gotten all the way to Persepolis. Persepolis is only about halfway through the empire.

There's another 1,500 miles east. And although we tend to see Central Asia and Afghanistan and Pakistan as perhaps because of their 20th, particularly late 20th century history, not major military powers necessarily, these were powerful, rich and formidable parts of the Persian Empire. And they had some of the best horses. They said big flat lands to graze them on. They had, Afghanistan was extremely fertile, courtesy of an elaborate irrigation system, particularly North Afghanistan that brought water down from the snows of the Hindu Kush. And Pakistan was incredibly rich and fertile. Even in the time of Herodotus, at one point he's detailing, like, how much each part

of the Persian Empire gives in taxes. And the area that is now Pakistan is like a third. and it's one of 20 provinces. So that gives you a sense of how powerful that was. So if he leaves those areas unconquered and antagonistic to him, there is always the danger that they will come back and take back whatever he's conquered so far. If opportunism is the model here,

there's also another layer, which is what's being done is occurring in ways that is, you know, it's portrayed back to Greeks and to his Macedonian troops in ways that will make sense to them. And so we're at Persepolis. Persepolis is burned, which, I mean, Alexander is capable of great brutality, but it's not a, it's not that he's not Genghis Khan or Genghis's successors. That is to say, it's not the necessary outcome of being conquered by Alexander that you're going to be burned to the ground.

In fact, to kind of behave reasonably, take the loss, as it were, you might, you might make out okay. There are exceptions, Thebes in Greece, he raises before he even leaves Greece because they rebel. And now Persepolis is burned in a sort of traditional. account of the reason of the burning of Persepolis is retribution, retribution for the burning of Athens, which is a Herodotus account. I mean, that goes back, what, 150 years? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that, and that, is that your analysis as well? Is that, is that, so talk us through why Persepolis is burn. Right. So, from a Greek perspective, absolutely. It is retribution

for Xerxes's burning of Athens 150 years earlier. From Alexander's perspective, at this point, he does not need to be courting the Greeks. They are not a formidable problem for him. They have their occasional rebellions. There is, in fact, about the same time as the burning of Persepolis, a Spartan rebellion against him. It is easily quashed by his regent antipater in Macedonia. They're not the people he needs to convince. And although I think this was like a side benefit that they were happy about this, the people he is focused on are the Persians. And although from a Persian perspective, you might expect treating conquered cities mercifully would be a better option. And in fact, it's the one he usually does at Epitana, at Susa, the other major capitals, he kind of cut steals.

The reason Xerxes burned Athens is because it's a very profoundly Persian and long history in the Near East before Persia. way of showing that you are the absolute conqueror is by destroying particularly the most valuable, the most highly religious or politically important places. So this is a signal above all to the Persians that their king, who is still alive at this point. Darius is on the run. He's going to Afghanistan, but he, or he's trying to get to Afghanistan. But he's still alive and, you know, capable of raising another army and coming back.

This is a sign to the Persians that he can no longer protect them. And this is a way of striking his legitimacy and convincing the Persians that it's time for them to come over. Although Alexander later has these kind of regrets that he burned Persepolis, in some ways it seems to report. Talk a bit about, I've always said Darius, but now I'm intimidated and feel like maybe I should say Darias. Talk a bit about the sort of the opening incident, the major incident of the period that you're going to, that you focus on in the book, which is his death in Alexander's discovery. It's a marvelously dramatic scene that, you know, if we're in a novel, you would think they're laying it on kind of thick. I know, and it's real. So at Darius is defeated repeatedly by Alexander, the last time is it a battle in an area that's sort of like, it's now Iraqi Kurdistan, essentially, Galamella. where he's decisively defeated fighting against Alexander, and he heads east. And for a long time during the winter, the battle is in late fall.

For a long time during the winter, Alexander's not exactly sure where he is. They can't fight him. And so he's sort of, you can't just sort of wander around Iran, which is freezing cold and so on with a large army. So he sits his army at Persepolis until springtime and he gets some sort of clearer idea and move around. Then he goes in the hunt for Darius. And what he's hoping is to capture Darius alive and to have him submit and acknowledge Alexander as his sovereign, which would be the smoothest transition of power. The problem with that is that, as the burning Persepolis suggests, Darius legitimacy is in question. And Darius is surrounded by powerful kind of regional governors who think that they might do a better job.

And so Alexander is trying desperately to get to them through this very difficult countryside in sort of deserts in eastern Iran. He's shedding troops relentlessly because he can't go fast enough through this tough territory with 30,000 men or even 17. And so by the time he finally catches up and they sort of do this cat and mouse game for about a month. By the time he finally catches up with Darius, he's been deposed and he's being dragged along as a kind of. bargaining token, but when the conspirators against Darias see that he, that Alexander's getting really close, they kill him and they flee. And so Alexander, you know, he's got like 3,000 men, captures the remnants of the Persian army, and looks for Darius and he's dead. So his hope for that kind of legitimacy and that not peaceful transition of power, but more peaceful

transition of power is over, and he has instead, the chief conspirator has just shortly thereafter crowns himself the new king. I would be, this is technically a military history podcast, though listeners will know that we sometimes range pretty far afield from that. But I would be remiss if I didn't ask, you know, what were the, what were the main ingredients in the strategic or maybe operational tactical sauce that got Alexander this far? And then to transition into the main part of your narrative, how do those, how do the military challenges that he's faced up till Darius' death change? Right.

So for much of his conquest of the Western Persian Empire, which is pretty closely held by the Persian king, he would get to the border of a territory with his army and try and sort of convince them to submit before he comes in. And often they would because there's a large army. on their border and if they can't, if they don't think they can feel the large enough army, they submit. You then take, moves in, leaves the administrative structure in place, moves on, which spares him from having to conquer, to fight them and also gives him access to the Persian administrative system,

which I think was really key to his success, that he is going to be able to use all the resources of a very highly affected, well-connected army, an empire, against, the king of that empire. So he does that, but every so often, the Persian king musters enough people to find a sort of big set piece battle. And the Persian king can always have sealed more people in the battle, but Alexander's are more heavily armed, better defensive, like, you know, breastplates and helmets and so on. They also have these really long spears, the 18-foot-long Sarissa spear, which means that their infantry is like a porcupine.

It's really hard to get close enough to them to do any damage. And he also has a really well-trained, although much smaller than the Persian, cavalry. And they have these same 18-foot spears. So Alexander is really good at fighting battles. He cut his teeth at the Battle of Chirona, which kind of pretty. puts paid to Greek freedom in 338 when he's 18. He waits the left wing of the battle. He's good at that.

He's really good at anticipating what his opponents are going to do and countering it. And he's actually brilliant at logistics, which is kind of underappreciated. It's not very glamorous. But he knew where his soldiers were going. He knew how to feed them. He made sure that they were in as good shape as possible before the battles started. that kind of thing I think really was critical to his success. And then the other part that was critical to his success was the ability to co-opt these various leaders to figure out what he could offer them that would be desirable, usually sort of like reinstating them in power, perhaps with a few checks and balances.

And that, to me, was actually like perhaps more effective than, you know, his winning. Yeah. What happens in the East that's different and harder is what a lot of people have found moving into that region is that instead of fighting these big set peace battles, he's fighting guerrilla warfare. And he has to learn how to deal with people who are lighter, more mobile. They're usually on horses. They're firing with arrows so they can sort of shoot from far and then run away and disappear into places like the desert where his troops can't go. And that is much harder for him. I think he eventually figures out sort of a combination of combined arms force tactics and really very extensive negotiation culminating in his marriage to Roxanne, the daughter of a senator.

Afghan warlord who becomes his most sort of prominent local power broker. My next question is in the form of a confession. And I'm going to solicit from you if you can. This is sort of an ambush question, so feel free to say pass. but something that might be helpful to the audience. I've served there in the military. I've spent a long time, a large chunk of my life thinking about this region. And I still find the geography of broader Central Asia,

Central Asia broadly conceived, so like down to the ocean, endlessly confusing in a way that Western Asia is just not as confusing. You know, you've got the Mediterranean, you've got the Levant, you've got Mesopotamia, you know, the fertile crescent, then you go up the mountains into West. Western Iran to the plateau. And it's like, at this point, it's like some big muscle movements and they're all pretty easy to wrap your mind around.

And then you get to Eastern Iran. Yeah. And after that, everything's just a mess, geographically speaking. How do you, somebody who just wrote a book about this region, how do you in your mind organize, you know, geographically this region in a way that is intelligible? Like, I'm thinking of like, you know, that magnificent opening to T. Lawrence's seven pillars of wisdom where you kind of fly up over the Middle East and he sort of, Like, do you have a version of that where you think about this part of the world in a way that can be understood?

I mean, I read a lot of, I read a lot of people who were explorers, British explorers during the British Raj. I read soldiers' memoirs and memoirs of people who were more recently in that region, which really helped me kind of get a grip with, helped me understand it. I also talked to a bunch of French archaeologists who were the last people who excavated in Afghanistan before the same. Soviet invasion. And that was really helpful in understanding because we have this image of Afghanistan now that's very different from what it was like before, like the last 40 years of civil war. So, I mean, from Alexander's perspective, the biggest sort of organizing principle is, is it north or south of the Hindu Kush, which run like a spine through Afghanistan? north of the Hindu Kush,

you have this incredibly fertile region of northern Afghanistan, which you can tell me I have not been there. I don't think it's quite so nice anymore. I was all south. I was in the part that was always rough. Okay, yeah.

That part is like, in his time was linked together by Oasis. Yeah. So Kandahar, Harat. There are all these oasis towns along what then becomes the Silk Road. But it's essentially like he's following the Silk Road, in essence,

or what's going to become the Silk Road from Oasis to Oasis. So that part is all deserty. You get into, you cross into Pakistan and you get back into sort of, he was mostly in this sort of high plateau areas near the mountains of Kashmir and so on in Pakistan, beautiful and fertile. And then if you think north of the Hindu Kush, it's both this, for initially this beautiful fertile region, which has a lot of, I got really deep into their irrigation systems, which is like

So nerdy. But it was fascinating. It really was what made this possible that this was such a powerful region. But then as you get further north, you get into basically you're getting desert, desert in the center, mountains to the east, and then step to the north. And that's kind of how I organize it mentally. And then the major political units at the time superimposed on that. Because today, I mean, part of what makes it so complicated today is, by the way, that was the most clear explanation I've ever heard. So thank you. That was exactly. Exactly what I was soliciting. Today, you know, you've got, the South is a little bit more simple because you've got Afghanistan and Afghanistan. Excuse me, you've got Iran than Afghanistan than Pakistan. So it's not that complicated. As you go north, you get into Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, you know, there's all these political units superimposed on already complicated terrain in ways that are not necessarily dictated by the terrain. Like Afghanistan, for example, is split by the Hindu Kush.

It's crazy. Yeah. You know, the border isn't where you would think the mountains suggest the border ought to be. What were the main political units at the time? Right. So there were a series of different provinces of Persian Empire. So northern Afghanistan was essentially like one province. And then there's this little part that's to the very east sort of like where Big Ram is now.

I don't know if you ever went there where the U.S. Air Force base was. It's kind of near Kabul in the mountains. So it was a main province of northern Afghanistan, little province there. a couple of provinces of Afghanistan to the south. And then there was this sort of region that was one area called Sagdiana in the time that is now Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, not Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Khadjikistan. And the thing to know about all these areas is that they were tied to the center. And we have documents detailing people, messengers going back and forth.

but it certainly seems a little bit looser in terms of their adherence to what the center is like. And so they are, and they have quite powerful individual, I mean, I call them warlords, but that's probably not a, it doesn't have the best ring. I mean, they were like, they were legitimate political entities. And they might be organized, you know, one of the archaeologists, French archaeologists, he's done the most work, Claude Rapa in this area. So, you know, they were often organized like around what we would think is of a divider, like a river valley could be their sphere. And there are a whole bunch of them. And one of the reasons Alexander has so much trouble is there are a lot of them and they're not used to being under very tight rain. Right.

And then what he really does that makes them angry is he tries to cut, he tries to fortify the border. It doesn't build a wall, but he does build a city right at the border with Kazakhstan in the steppe region. And there are nomads who go back and forth all the time, and the Persians just let them, even though sometimes they would raid and so on. But it was generally mutually beneficial. And he tries to sort of make that a border. And that is really a bad idea. In southern Afghanistan, I thought it was cool at the time. This is an indication of my own nerdiness.

But I read years and years ago some obscure book about Alexander's career. Maybe it was that book about the logistics of the Massachusetts. Engels book. You're really like the only person who's actually read these books. But I remember reading that he comes up, I can't remember. I'm embarrassed. You'll know that you're off top of your head. But he comes up through the Helmand River Valley where I was fighting.

My Marines are never fighting. And it was time to the wheat harvest. He had to come through so he could eat. You know, he could collect the harvest. And, you know, we were fighting in the year 2010, you know, amidst the winter harvest. And it was just a fascinating, you know, millennia removed, you know, kind of echo. So, okay, so Darius is dead. He's in pursuit of the successor, Bessus, self-proclaimed successor.

Tell us about that phase of the adventure. And also, you know, as that proceeds, if the first part of the grand strategic calculation by Alexander is an evolution from opportunism, let's go, we've got the Greeks behind us, we're going to go on this grand expedition to Perja and see what we can get. And it transitions from that to I'm going to be king of Persia. At some point here, as your story proceeds, there's another transition to a dream that arises in human life from time to time, this dream of universal rule. So talk about how we start to get to that for Alexander. Yeah.

So the first three years of his invasion of Persia, he goes all the way from Turkey to Egypt to Iran, right? And it's just this super fast thing. Then he gets bottled up and people always say it's Afghanistan, but actually, Afghanistan is less of the problem. And what is now Uzbekistan is more of the place where there are all these little regional powers. And, you know, first he tries to sort of do deals at a very high level. He captures Basos, the self-proclaimed great king and punishes him. And then he thinks, you know, okay, we're good. And instead, he meets up with a series of where he sort of sets off a rebellion by trying to fortify the border.

And he meets up with this very effective rebel leader, a guy named Spita Menes, who is brilliant at asymmetric warfare. Like he doesn't have very many people, but he can come in with those, these really fast riding archer, you know, horse archer people, basically. I'm sure there's a good term for this that I don't know. And comes in, hits the Macedonians, flees, or even worse, lures the Macedonians to a place where they can't fight well. And then butcher's some. There's one point at which he lures them into a forest, which is a disaster if you're trying to be a, you know, a sort of well-organized infantry line. And just like, it's probably Alexander's largest loss. almost all 3,000 men are killed. So Alexander then turns to sort of more brutal tactics for a while,

and he tries to sort of subdue each little warlord in each little place, particularly by delegating to a lot of his very effective, he has these amazing sort of high-ranking officers who are both impressively loyal, but also very good and very ambitious. And so he gives them a lot of opportunities to distinguish themselves. The problem is that just makes everybody who lives there even more mad. And so finally, he gets this piece of luck, Bita Menace is assassinated. He marries Roxanne and he kind of negotiates an end. It's not a very pretty end, but it's a, you know, it's a sort of allows him to move on to it, to where he really wants to go, which is Pakistan, because in terms of the wealth and power of the place, that is like a much more desirable place.

It was loosely held by the Persians, very loosely held, but he wants it as part of his empire. So that's where he heads. Well, let's talk about that then because this is where, you know, we start to run into, he starts to run into real trouble with his troops famously. And, you know, the story up till now, it's sort of a strategic rationale for everything he's done. You know, he couldn't get Darius. So the empire, he didn't have the sort of legitimate end of Persian rule. And then, you know, these are all parts.

They're more difficult to control parts of the Persian Empire. But these are parts of the Persian Empire. And he's trying to consolidate and a difficult, so, you know, it's all, it all makes sense. If your conception is, I'm going to rule Persia, this all makes sense. But then to cross the mountains into the Indus Valley, you know, at this point, and I think I feel like this is the consensus, a cool analytic balancing of risk and reward might suggest that if you've got a control from, you know, the, the Ionian Sea in the West to, you know, maybe, maybe we've gone far enough. And he doesn't. He goes, as your

title puts it to the end of the world. It's just because he wants the money. Like, talk us, help us understand the motivations and, and then tell us a bit about how it goes. Yeah. I mean, this is definitely where I think you see Alexander embarking on a war of choice. The people, in South Asia were not about to attack him and try and take the empire, the Persian Empire from him, he could certainly have kind of married Roxanne and said, okay, and headed back. And I think his troops were more than ready. They had been, you know, I mean, there's one calculation that over the course of all of their maneuverings, they marched something like 12,000 miles, which is like crossing the U.S.

times. I mean, that on foot mostly. That is crazy. So they are really ready to go home. I think from his perspective, it's not just about money. He had by this point, you know, more than enough, even for somebody who was extremely generous and money seems to have kind of just slipped through his fingers. It is partly about wanting, like, I think from his idea and he was not particularly, a cool analytical person. The risk-reward calculus was this is a really rich area. So like, unlike fighting in

Uzbekistan, which didn't give you a lot of money, this would be a lot of money for the amount of effort we're putting in. So that is part of it. But I think part of it is also just like he can't figure out what the defensible borders are and he doesn't know when to stop. And he thinks,

he also thinks, because Aristotle and his other people who educated him, and told him like there is this point where you're going to get to the ocean at the end of the world. And that seems like a rational kind of defensible border for him wants to get there. But it is, yeah, it's certainly beyond any strategic, any sort of logical strategic sense. It is there. I mean, you see repeatedly, not just in ancient history, I would argue we see it today. Yeah.

These dreams of a world empire. that there will be not just hegemony, there will be some sort of universal vision that comes to pass everywhere with you at the center of it. I mean, the Athenians seem to have it on their minds when they go to Sicily. Oh, yeah. The Romans actually within the standards of the time

that basically achieve it, as do the Chinese where they are around the same time. Does Alexander think of himself as the nascent king of the world and in those terms? And, you know, how does this, contribute to the tensions with the troops beyond just fatigue. I mean, there's a way in which Alexander's grand strategic conception long ago escaped the interests of Greece. And we are now in the interests of something new that he is building that is him. And we haven't talked about it yet,

but, you know, he's adopting these Persian customs, Persian dress, asking people to do the Persian version of, of kowtowing to him as they approach. Like, all this stuff is occurring. And now he wants to be king of the world, I think, right? Tell me if you agree with that. specific part of the assertion. I think he certainly wants to be the most powerful ruler that he could possibly be. His ambition is extraordinary. But also, I mean, people say this like, oh, he didn't know when to stop. But I'm like, well, the thing is he was really good at fighting.

Yeah. Like, I think many people would have wanted what he wanted. Remember the Thucydides and the Mealian dialogues when the Athenians and the people of Meal us are arguing about whether he'll be allowed us to submit to the Athenians or not. And Thucydides has the Athenians say, of men we know and of the gods we believe, the strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must. I think that's the attitude. And the thing about Alexander was there was no one strong enough to take anything back from. So he had the danger of kind of creating a unipolar world and wanting to follow that.

Like, you know, maybe some people would be like, okay, I think I've done enough now. Like, let me consolidate. But, you know, tell that to the average 25-year-old man, I don't think this is going to happen. So, yeah, he kept going instead. And then it's just this, again, sort of extraordinarily cinematic sequence of events. He fights a war with the local king. He defeats him but then doesn't, but actually then restores him. There's a monsoon.

What's the breaking point? What actually leads to the mutiny, which ends this episode? Yeah. I think the breaking point, all the things you've mentioned are important. He has a big battle against a local South Asian king named Poros, and his, it was clearly from his soldiers' point of view, a really traumatic battle because they were fighting elephants in ways I go into more in the book, like those are scary, scary opponents and they succeed, but it was clearly terrifying for his soldiers.

Then the monsoon hits, and that means like 70 days of nonstop rain, sometimes, you know, going up to their thighs. These are people who are living in tents. So this is not an enjoyable experience. And he gets to a certain point. keeps going east, keeps going east past the Indus River, past anything that could possibly ever have been part of the Persian Empire. And he talks to each king as he goes along the way, like, oh, what's the next one like? And this particular king's like, well, you know, they're going to

be 12 days of desert. Then there's going to be this king and he's going to have like 4,000 elephants. And, you know, he's a really powerful king, which may be true, actually. Gangi's kingdom of the time was really an important, impressive one. And Alexander's like, great, this sounds wonderful. And his troops are like, yeah. And so finally he holds this meeting, probably of his officer class. And he explains his vision of where they're going next. And he clearly thinks they're going there.

Like he's got four months worth of grain collected to move forward. He's gathered intelligence about what it's like. He thinks they're going there. And finally, one of them who's one of his most loyal and capable, officers says, you know, we just can't go any further. And I think there are arguments in the, there are scholarly arguments about whether we call this a mutiny or not. Because no actual violence is offered to Alexander, I think it has more in common with a political protest than a mutiny. They don't try to do anything to him. They just sit there and tell him that they're not

going any further. And he kind of waits three days. He goes off to his tent and sulks like Achilles. Waits three days. They don't back down. I think he's hoping they're going to back down. They don't. And he finally has to back down. And to give him credit, he does. He realizes that this is not a fight he's going to win. And he doesn't try to attack them. Instead, he agrees to their demands. It's striking, too. I mean, it's sort of ill. illustrates the extent to which this is not a slave army and he is not a slave king. Even as he's adopting these Persian customs and literally attempting to conquer the world on some level, he operates within this local world of a Greek or at least Macedonian army that has,

I mean, certainly for obvious reasons, acknowledges him as king and as a remarkable human, which he has demonstrated that he is on the battlefield. but is but but but comes from a literally western tradition that is more egalitarian than other political orders we might imagine and he has to operate within that and he has to flex yeah absolutely i mean the the idea the men i think of historians now is the macedonian king has as much power as he can hold on to with the consent of the people underneath him and sometimes it's more and sometimes it's less but there is always a kind of jockeying for power between the king and his officers. It's true for Philip. It's true for Alexander.

So he returns west, and this is like there's so many interesting parts of the story here, and we don't have time to go into them all, unfortunately. But, you know, essentially makes a long return to Babylon where, but for a fever, he would, he would have consolidated, I think, rule. And human history would have been somewhat different. But he, he dies young. This last episode, as he goes west, you know, this story of Persian customs versus Macedonian customs continues. There's a mass wedding that I gather is controversial. There's an attempt to send a bunch of the troops home. Just talk us through the major controversies and struggles of these last few years.

Yeah. So he agrees to go home. He doesn't agree how he's going to do it. And the first thing is instead of going home this sort of more obvious way, which is go back the way you came, he decides to go south. to sort of follow the Indus down to the Indian Ocean and then track the ocean west back toward Iran. From, well, it's both a military and economic standpoint.

This has a logic to it because ships are so much, in an era where wind power is pretty much as good as it's going to get, ships are much more efficient way to go. And so if he wants this part of his empire stay within the empire and he wants to be able to trade, he needs to know that the sea routes work. So his idea is the ships are going to go along the coast. His army, part of his army, goes back through Afghanistan with the elephants that he's taken and he wants to be part of his army going forward and he's going to go along the coast with his ships.

That would have been great, maybe, except for one thing which he doesn't understand the monsoon winds. The monsoon winds are blowing the opposite direction. the ships are stuck, but he has already set off and they can't get to him by the time he figures out that they are not where they need to be. The ships would have been carrying the provisions that would have fed and, you know, given food and water to his army. And so he's really stuck. And he probably loses more people within his army in that trek back through what is now Balochistan, the Makran Desert, than he does in any of his battles. I mean, all the figures are kind of made up, so it's really hard to know exactly how many, but it's clearly a devastating loss. So that is extremely controversial, and then he comes back, and I think nobody expected that he was going to make it back.

So these local governors had kind of taken power in their own right. They're not best pleased to see him back. So he has to reassert his power. And he tries to do various things that he hopes will kind of create a moment. more stable empire. The mass wedding is perhaps the most controversial because he marries about 90 of his officers to high-ranking Iranian women. And this makes total sense from the perspective of trying to create a sort of intercultural

next generation, but is from many of them wildly unpopular. What lessons would you leave listeners with your years now spent studying the legacy of Alexander? What are the major takeaways that you have? So one major takeaway is about sort of how he succeeds. I think that the way the Greeks usually present it and many modern historians is he wins because the Persian Empire is weak. I think instead he wins because the Persian Empire is strong and he figures out how to harness that strength against them, which is perhaps an interesting takeaway to think about from a military perspective today in terms of when you had this kind of asymmetric.

warfare. A second thing he does that, I mean, there are a lot of things that I really found very hard to take about Alexander. I mean, I was fascinated with him enough to write a book about him. Homicidal, waterline psychopathic kid. I mean, that's... I mean, you know, intermittently, yeah, exactly. So, but one thing I did come to admire about him was what I would call his creative resilience. So often when he was faced with opposition, like most leaders would just kind of double down and I appreciated his ability to actually come back with something different and not just sort of more of the same. And I think he was better able, he was sort of more open, more flexible and also better able to admit that he was wrong than you would think for somebody who had

almost untramed political power. So I found that a really important lesson and sort of key takeaway, like thinking about leadership. Yeah. For sure. It was clearly like there's creativity and judgment. I mean, to your to your observation about the Persian Empire not being weak but strong, as I take it, a sort of classic line of critique of Alexander is after his initial victories in Turkey and then I guess Syria is the second one, right? It's, it's the second one? Yeah.

Isis is like right on the border of Turkey and Syria. Right. Okay. So, so, you know, he has, he has the Persian army and Darius personally on the. run after the second victory, and he doesn't pursue. And a longstanding critique is, well, he could have had him right there. Instead, he goes south. You know, he captures the rest of the Levant. He captures Egypt and goes and goes east after that. And this is a perennial dilemma in military affairs, by the way. Like, do you go into pursuit after a victory or are there other considerations that you have to

see to, you know, D-Day, you know, summer of 1944, you know, the actual plan for Overlord is you're going to build this catchment area in Normandy and only then are you going to go east in face of the Nazis, you know, and you have to build this, you actually actually have to build it to support the logistics of going east and Eisenhower, they end up in this dilemma where when the Germans collapse, like, do we go east now and do we wait? And they do, and they run out of gas, you know, and sort of sputter out on the German frontier. You know, you can see it just to stick with World War II, a landings at Anzio, you know, do you go straight for Rome or there are other things you have to do. And there's no right or wrong answer each time. It's all

circumstance dependent. In your account, And I find it persuasive. It's the right answer. You have to build up this catchment base of Persian resource before you go east. Absolutely. And I think he does that. He is able to recognize that because he's able to get beyond the cultural blinders that Steinied earlier generations of both Greek and Macedonian people who encountered Persia

and who weren't able to see the sort of tremendous resources they had. And he's also able to kind of kind of. of work within their systems and know when to leave well enough alone. So he doesn't like get rid of their armies. He just incorporates them into his army. And after the last 20 years of empire building in Iraq and Afghanistan, I admit I find this like interesting and interesting and like different approach. Rachel Kouser, author of Alexander at the end of the world,

the forgotten final years of Alexander the Great. Thank you so much for making the time today. Really appreciate having you on the show. Thank you so much. It was great. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.