The Ancients - Alexander the Great's Mad Scientist

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

WARNING: graphic descriptions of violence and warfareMeet Diades, Alexander the Great’s overlooked military engineer, the man who made the impossible siege of Tyre happen.Tristan Hughes and Professor Edmund Richardson retell the thrilling, brutal, brilliant story of invention, ambition, and ancient warfare at its most extreme.In 332 BC, he turned a coastal blockade into a 1km causeway, then faced fire ships, molten sand, and a city that refused to yield.MOREAlexander the Great | Rise to PowerListen on AppleListen on SpotifyTyre: The Jewel of PhoeniciaListen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch here: @TheAncientsPodcastPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Tim Astall. Produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hey and welcome to the ancients. I have just finished recording this episode and it is all about a figure who has been sidelined by Alexander the Great and his conquest. But this man was key to some of Alexander's most legendary successes, how he was able to conquer an island city. This is someone who's also been described as a mad scientist, this military engineer, this catapult inventor, a figure called Diades. This is what I love about the ancients. We don't just do Alexander the Great. We can explore these figures that have been sidelined in history over the centuries and bring their tales back to the forefront. This was really fun. It is a story and a

half with the brilliant storyteller Professor Edmund Richardson from Durham University, who's just written a brand new book all about Alexander. Right, having said all that, let's get straight into the episode. Enjoy. And on the shoreline of what is today Lebanon, engineers are hard at work. The sounds of hammers on iron and wood ring out from their tents in a bustling quarter of a much larger camp, a military camp. The base for King Alexander III of Macedon's mighty army, for tens of thousands of soldiers that have crossed over into Asia with their king to fight the Persian superiors. power. But for the past few months, Alexander's army has stayed in this one place. They have been fighting a long and gruelling battle against a powerful city, separated from them by a large stretch of water,

hundreds of metres wide. The city's formidable walls can be seen in the distance, reflecting its present status, untouched and unbroken. The city, of Tyre. Many believed taking Tyre was an impossible task, but Alexander had refused to back down. At the start of the siege, he had gone to meet with his chief military engineer, Diades of Pella. Alexander needed a way to attack this city a kilometer off the coast. Diades had to find a solution. What Diades decided upon was extraordinary. He would build the biggest artificial promontory ever made, a man-made land bridge linking the mainland to the walls of tyre itself. Fast forward several months and progress was proving incredibly slow. Diades had employed

thousands of the soldiers carrying load after load of material to slowly build this promontory. But the Tyrians have been resisting it fiercely. They have burned large parts of it down, From their ships, they have killed hundreds, if not thousands, of Alexander's builders. But Alexander pressed on, reliant on the cleverness of his chief engineer Diades, to counter these Tyrian attacks. Diades was doing just that. Gradually, the land bridge was edging closer and closer to the great walls of Tyre, and now he has just invented another weapon.

Rolling out of his workshop comes a beast, a mechanical beast, a catapult larger than any the world had seen before. It's pulled on wheels and has a long square-like wooden frame. Ropes are fixed to the centre of the machine, which can be pulled back with levers, to then release a projectile with more force and power than any war machine before in history. Slowly, the beast is wheeled far onto the promontory, protected by ships and towers alike. Then, its crew loads it up with an almighty stone and lets loose. The stone holes through the air, travelling for hundreds of metres, before it comes crashing down in the city of Tyre. For the first time, Alexander's army had managed to hit the city.

The Tyrians could only watch on as the Macedonians celebrated their new superweapon. The tide of the siege was starting to shift in favour of Alexander, but there was still much more to do. If Diades was to become known as the man who took Tyre, he needed more catapults, more towers, more siege weapons, more men. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the extraordinary story of Diades and the Siege of Tyre with our guest, Professor Edmund Richardson. Ed, it is such a pleasure to have you on the show. It's such an honour to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation. Oh, you're more than welcome. And of course, we're going back to the figure of Alexander the Great. But, I mean, he always takes the limelight, but his story features a whole

host of these other fascinating figures that can so easily be overlooked. And I feel this is this is very much the case with the man we're going to be focusing largely on today, this figure called Diades or Deities. He absolutely is someone that most people are never going to have heard of. Whereas if he say, well, I'm kind of writing about Alexander, I'd like to tell you about Alexander the Great. People are going to just put the head in the hands and be like this guy, this guy again, again.

And all the way back to the ancient world, people are like this guy again. Like even Aryan, he opens his history by saying, well, why on earth does the world need another book about Alexander? and that's in the first century. But Diades is someone that very, very few people, even very few classicists have heard much of or know much about. But he's someone who really made possible some of Alexander's most spectacular victories.

And you could really say that without him, there is no Alexander the Great. Ed, you've got to explain this label, first of all, because Joseph and I were talking about this before we started recording Joseph, our producer. why can we potentially call him the original mad scientist or the first mad scientist? So he's someone whose ideas absolutely reshape reality. And he does things that even from the perspective of the 21st century

seem just absolutely barking. Like you're like, you're reading this and you're like, no, no, that's not possible. He did what? He did what? He did how. He did why. So he's someone who absolutely will not.

He doesn't have that kind of sort of little little checkpoint or trapdoor that most of us have in our minds. Like when we have an idea that's, you know, completely, completely out there. And it sits around in our heads for a minute. And then we're like, no, no, no, no. That was just a bad idea. I had too much to drink. It was too late. My mind was wondering.

Now, Diadi is just. goes ahead and does it. And because when he's having all these ideas, he's also got Alexander and his entire army and the entire resources of the Macedonian state, basically at his disposal, he's able to take these ideas which, you know, most people would have thought were completely impossible

and actually drag them into reality. So he's someone who we see doing things that no one has ever done before on a quite remarkable scale. Gosh, that's so exciting. In particular, it's in regard to siegecraft and one particular siege which we're going to get to, Ed. But a few background questions, first of all.

Diades, he's this military engineer, isn't he? So just how advanced is military engineering at the time of Alexander the Great? So what's remarkable is how many things were just taken for granted? You see that quite a lot of the time in these moments just before the world begins to change. But in the sort of fourth century BC and certainly in the fifth, there's a lot of war. There's a lot of battle.

There's so much war. But there's also a sense of things that military engineers just can't really be expected to do. Being able to besiege a city, that's fair enough. You can dig a lot of trenches. you can put up some power sades, you can blockade, you can cut off water, you can maybe get some ladders and go over the wall, you can maybe get the inhabitants to betray the city, leave a gate open, that kind of thing. Oh, the classics, right? But what you're rarely able to do is actually take a city, a well-fortified, strong city by force. When people read Homo,

when people read the Iliad, they're like, wait, they besieged the city for 10 years. and they didn't think this was maybe a bad idea. Wouldn't you give up after a year? Well, no, that's the thing. Incredibly long sieges. Seedges of well over a decade are very common in the ancient world. And much earlier than Alexander in the great Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, the Spartans besiege Athens every year for literal decades.

They march into Attica every year. They devastate the crops date. They send everyone scurrying behind the law. long walls of Athens, and then they sit there. Year after year, yeah, they just sit there. They just, they don't try to take the city. They don't try to knock the walls down. They don't try to really do anything.

They just sit. One day, one day they'll be a vintage. They're like an year's past, and 10 years past, and more years past. Diades is of a different generation. He comes of age, like Alexander, during the period where the Greece of squabbling, city-states gives way to the Greece of Philip II, where the power of Alexander's father, Philip the second of Macedon and the power of the Macedonian army gradually extends south from Macedon, over mainland Greece, and starts to sort of exert this kind of malign

and inescapable influence over Greek affairs. Now, Diaries is a bit of, is a bit of, is a tinkerer and an inventor and like an endlessly curious person. And at the time in 4th century of Greece, there's nothing like, you know, a technical school or an engineering college or anything like that. You can go and learn from a sophist. You can go and learn from a philosopher. You can either, the player chaps like trying to sell you a course about the nature of reality or the meaning of happiness or the nature of the universe. But if you want to figure out how to build things or how to break things, then your choices are either apprentice with a craftsman or join the army and join the army of Philip II. And this is what Diades does. He enrolls

in Philip's army. Now, Alexander's father, Philip, cultivated this image of like a one-eyed brawler and drinker and the thoon, but he's actually almost always the smartest guy in the room. He just really, really enjoys everyone thinking about how stupid he is and continuing to think about how stupid he is until he's rolled up their territory and picked their pockets and basically kind of made off with whatever he wants to make off with. Philip basically throws every spare drakner he has at the army. He takes this rag-tag force who professionalizes it. He equips the infantry with these gigantic spears that turn them into the phalanx that rip through the Persian Empire. He trains the cavalry into the companion cavalry,

which Alexander led to victory against the great king of Persia. But he also spends an absolute fortune on his engineers. He has someone called Polyidas of Thessaly, who died his studies under. And they're not just building existing weapons. They're trying to make new ones. They're trying to make bigger, catapults, heavier, just so many ways to basically knock down fortifications

and kill people in horrible ways that had never been thought of before. This is basically what Diades grows up in. He grows up in the greatest school of engineering the world had ever known, which just happens to be the army of Philip II of Macedon. As so often with Alexander, you almost always, the backstory includes his father, Philip the second of Macedon, and what he does.

And as you say, so polyardis, diodes, this military engineering school. And one development in particular that maybe we should highlight now, Ed, because I think it's very important, isn't it, in Diades' history. is the invention of that time of the torsion catapult idea, you know, kind of a big contraption, but able to get even more power when you're pulling back those ropes to let loose this missile. It seems like a straightforward invention, but it's incredibly significant and it's an incredibly sort of important part of why Diades is able to do what he's able to do for Alexander. So yeah, it's a great one to focus on.

before this, before like torsion catapults, so catapults which are able to store a huge amount of power and then kind of release it all at once with whatever they happen to be throwing across a battlefield. Catapults are very good at kind of scattering groups of infantry or just being kind of awkward things which kind of fill the air with flying rocks, but they're not able to really get up enough power to pose a serious threat to fortification. So you could line up a whole bunch of early Greek siege weaponry, first century Greek siege weaponry, and you could bang away at a wall pretty much for a long time. And the chances of that wall coming down,

if it was well-built, if people were able to kind of conduct repairs, was extremely low. Like the fortification, if it was a well-built fortification, was not really going to be under threat. The torsion catapult changes that. The early designs are kind of experimental.

or they go wrong quite frequently. They often do not drop rocks where they're meant to be dropping rocks, but they throw things with a level of power that simply had not been seen before. And they do so in a way that suddenly changes the equation between missile and fortification. Suddenly, Greek siege weaponry

is actually able to pose an actual threat to fortifications. and that really changes the game for warfare. So Alexander takes these with his army when he invades the Persian Empire alongside Diades and all of his array of military engineers, like the most advanced siege machinery of the time. So Ed, let's set the scene for Diades' is his shining moment in that campaign. Shall we start then in November 333 BC? Maybe on the 6th, should we say maybe on the 6th? Should we say maybe on the sixth floor around that date?

Is that quite a good date to start? What happens around there? Let's absolutely start there. That innocuous sounding date is a moment when the world changes. It's the date of the Battle of Isis, which is the first great clash between Alexander and Darius III, the great king of Persian. And this is a battle which Alexander is expected to lose. even most of his army expect him to lose. He's wildly outnumbered, and he's been outthought and outmaneuvered by Darius in the lead-up to the battle.

He's been on the coast of Asia Minor searching for this gigantic Persian army. The Persian army, meanwhile, has snuck up behind him, has caught him unawares, has cut him off from his baggage train, has helped itself to his food supplies, has killed a lot of. of his wounded and send a lot of the survivors back to Alexander with their hands amputated. And it looks like Alexander is about to be just wiped off history. But then, of course, at the Battle of Isis in November 33, he changes the world. He essentially walks straight into Darius's trap and turns it around on him. He traps this giant Persian army in a very narrow coastal plain. so between a range of mountains and the sea, so that the gigantic numbers cannot be used against him,

they're essentially all stacked up and can't surround him and can't overwhelm him. And he uses this Macedonian army, which had been trained at bust expense by Philip, and then is led by him with this kind of reckless brilliance, to essentially carve up Darius' force. Darius himself, when he sees Alexander and his companion cavalry charging at him, turns his chariot, runs for it, flees the battlefield. And so confident was Darius that he didn't just have his vast, you know, camp and his gold and his jewels and his carpets and his wine and his special bathtub and everything, like just ready within striking distance. He had his wife, his son and heir, his mother, his entire family, and Darius loses all of them. Alexander captures them. And this is a defeat such as basically no great king had survived before Doreth.

So miracle Darius is still in power. He falls back to Babylon, tries to rebuild. Alexander, rather than pursuing Darius to Babylon, rather than trying to end the war in one stroke, basically stays where he is and works his way gradually down the coast of Asia Minor, taking one city after another. Some of them just open their gates, some of them surrender. Some of them, however, put up a fight. And it's the ones that really put up a fight. It's the ones that absolutely close their gates and look over their walls with contempt to Alexander

and his army, where Diades and his genius really come into play. Amazing. And this coastline today, so this is the coastline of the eastern Mediterranean, Monde, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, that stretch of land we should be thinking. Exactly, yeah. Running, basically running down that coast, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, down towards modern day Egypt. And it's that stretch of land, which is sort of incredibly wealthy. And it's sort of a bunch of cities which had changed hands historically between Greeks and Persians. intermediate regimes and which had been the focus of a huge amount of rhetoric in Greece before the war, where Alexander claimed he was making war on Persia to liberate, these cities, places like Biblos and Sudan and Haliccanas, both Greek and Phoenician cities, where Alexander is claiming that his war against Persia is this war of liberation. So this place is, this part of the world is

is symbolically hugely important for the story Alexander's been telling about why he's launching this war and what this campaign is for. So he starts going south, as you say, mentioned places like Biblos there. How long before he and his army, including Diades, how long before they start to meet, when do they start to encounter resistance? So initially it goes almost suspiciously well for him. In the couple of weeks after the Battle of Isis, basically everyone is so shell-shocked by the idea that the great king has been defeated by this unknown kid from the hills of Macedon. This is like, what is Macedon, where is Macedon, why is Macedon? No one really kind of puts up. Yeah, exactly.

But no one, no one really puts up that amount of a fight. So a lot of the Finnish cities just fully open their gates and pro-Persian regimes are. dismantled and alternative rulers are put in place. But around a couple of months after the Battle of Isis, Alexander encounters a problem and it is an extremely large problem. It's the city of Tyre. Now, Tyre is a singular and remarkable city. It's an island city. Well, there's a, there's a bit of the city, which is a kind of small settlement on the mainland, but then most of it is an island. About a kilometer off the coast, and it is one of the most strongly fortified places in the world at the time. The island is surrounded by walls. There's no place to

land. The shore is rocky. The Tyrians have an extremely well-trained fleet, which fully overmatches Alexander's. He absolutely cannot float a boat without it. getting just destroyed within minutes. They have full control of the sea. The city itself is far beyond the reach of even Diades' most up-to-date artillery. So Alexander can throw all the rocks he wants from the mainland, but just everything's going to hit the sea. Nothing's going to even scratch the walls.

He can't get anyone onto the island, let alone over the island, let alone over the walls. And tire, of course, can easily be reprovisioned by sea. It's a Phoenician city, and it has a network of colonies throughout the Mediterranean, most famously Carthage. So it has allies, it has friends, it has money, and it has absolutely no interest in opening its gates to Alexander. Initially, it seems like everything's going to be fine.

Alexander sends envoys to Tyre, the Tyreans send envoys to Alexander, and everyone seems to be about to reach some kind of accommodation where Alexander can just walk into the city, sacrificing the great Temple of Heracles or Melchart, as the Tyrians call the deity, the star-clad god, and everyone will be left to go about the business. But through one of those things where, you know, the tone of the debate shifts or the mood and city shifts. The Tyrians decide, you know what? No, no, no. To hell with that guy. We're not going to open our gates. We're not going to let you in. We will not attack you, but we're not going to say anything nice about you. We're not going to acknowledge your authority. We're just going to

sit on our island and basically see who wins this war, and then we're going to see maybe we'll let them in. The Tyrians have no reason to think that Alexander can do anything about this. Right. You know, you're quite right. We might think today you're just like, why the hell do they decide to do this against this figure who's so well known today is one of the greatest military commanders of all time. But as you say, at that time, they don't know that really quite yet, do they? They don't know that. They of course have reports of Darius being defeated, but they don't have an accurate battle report. For all they know, it could have been a fluke, for all they know, there could have been, there could be a much larger Persian army just about to descend on

Alexander. Certainly, Persia is still the world's superpower, right? Alexander is still outnumbered. overmatched, there's no real likelihood for the Tyrians, and indeed for most people, that Alexander will destroy or conquer the entire Persian Empire. Indeed, there's very little reason to believe that that was Alexander's own objective at this point in his campaign. If you actually want to decapitate the Persian Empire, if you actually want the Persian Heartland, then you pursue derives, right? You follow him when his army is broken, when he's defeated, when he's running for his life, you follow him, and you could have been, Alexander could have been at the gates of Babylon in a few weeks after the Battle of Isis. There's no force that could have stopped him.

But the Tyrians probably think that Alexander is going to get swept into the sea, or he's going to do what a lot of Greek expeditions in Asia Minor did at this point, which was you land, liberate, supposedly liberate a few cities, you grab as much gold as you can, and then you run for it. You get the heck out of that before a Persian. Field Army arrives and you declare victory and you sacrifice to the gods. And meanwhile, all the people who welcomed you, who opened their gates to you, who cooperated with you are getting hunted down by the great king and our meeting very sticky ends indeed. So the Terrians are like, this is not a long-term investment. This is a terrible idea. So they decide they can wait a map.

Alexander has not really got much of a reputation for sieges at the time. He's He's won some battles, but he's not got a reputation for being able to do advance siegecraft. And Tyre as well had a reputation of being thoroughly impregnable. It happily weighted out a 13-year siege during the Assyrian period. So Alexander, as far as the Tyrion's concern, is going to get bored or get dead long before they have to worry about letting him in. But so, fortunately, he does have this array of extraordinary military engineers at his disposal. He goes to Diades. What does he say?

So he goes to Diades. And he's like, he, the conversation is not recorded, but you can, you can imagine him like pointing at Tyre and being like, fix this for me. Well, you know, going to need some help him. because the Tyrians don't just, you know, refuse to let Alexander in. When he gets to Tyre, when he marches the army to the shore, and he takes the mainland settlement, he sends Amboys across the water because, you know, he's looking over Tyre and he's getting a little worried, and he's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, this might be more of a problem than I thought. The Tyrians kill Alexander's envoys.

They kill them publicly and horribly. They execute them, and then they throw the bodies off the walls of Tyre and leave those bodies on the shore until they're washed away by the waves. Now, of course, in ancient Greece, this is a horrible way to die, because if you are just left for the seas to take you, if you're denied the rights of burial, then your soul will wander as a lonely ghost for the rest of time. diplomatic envoys also, by tradition as old as Homer, were thought to be, you know, immune from summary execution.

So the Tyrians don't just refuse to let Alexander in. They do so in a way which is calculated to humiliate, calculated to debase, calculated to sort of perform their contempt for him, for the entire army. Alexander, remember, is pretty insecure at this point still. He's only a couple of years on the throne. He knows there's a lot of people in the army who would be very happy to reign in his stand. He knows he's got to keep winning, he's got to keep his army on side

in order to maintain his hold on power. So to have the Tyrians show their contempt for him in front of his entire army, and for those bodies of his envoys just to lie there on the shore for days until the waves wash them away with thousands of his men just looking at them,

seeing how helpless their king wants to do anything about it. That is worrying, right? You don't want to be a king who can't keep your men safe. You don't want to be a king who visibly is humiliated like that. As Macedonian kings tend to have like extremely, they didn't tend to die peacefully in their beds, let's put it like that.

So Alexander goes to Diades and he says fix this. Yeah, and so what does Diades do? He just like, well, this is quite a challenge, but I'm up for the task. Yeah, so he's got a problem because a lot of the normal ways you might go about taking this city are not available to him. He can't take it by sea. There's no, there's no easy way in, and besides the Tyrians have full control of the sea. He can't attack the city with his artillery.

He can't sort of try to attack walls or gates or fortifications or anything like that because absolutely nothing he's got will come close to reaching the island, let alone even scratching the walls. So what does he do? If the geography keeps Tyre invulnerable, Diades decides to change the geography. He starts doing something which there's really no precedent for on anything like the scale. He starts building a causeway from the mainland to the island. Now remember, this is over a kilometer across open sea.

So this is a wild undertaking. The idea that you could build something on that scale is just absolutely absurd. if you think about it in terms of any ancient Greek siegecraft, which is gone before. And when the Tyrians see what Diades is doing, which is basically demolishing every building, cutting down every tree, taking every rock, and starting to throw them into the sea so that you start to see from the shore this causeway beginning to advance. A few meters at a time, they think it's the funniest thing they have. ever seen in their entire lives. They cannot believe that someone would be so arrogant and so foolish

as to think that this would actually work or that this would intimidate them. It becomes overnight the absolute show of the season in Tyre. People literally outfit pleasure boats, like they take picnics, they leave the Seed City, they sort of heave to just, they row out, they sail out and they heave to just about out of like arrow or catapult shot. And they just watch all of these Macedonian soldiers like lugging rocks down to the water side and sweating and cursing and throwing all of the stuff into the sea, which of course just seems to be swallowing it up. You can imagine going like, you're doing great, just one more rock. You're nearly there. That's literally what they say. They're like, so you're planning to defeat Poseid now.

Like, what is it? What is your planning to do? Do you really think this is going to work? And there's literally four days and days and days. They come and they just shout remarks over there. Like, look at these poor guys. They used to, they used to be soldiers. Look at them now, just keeping rocks back and forth.

No, you look stupid. And this goes on. Dieti is ignores them. just keeps going. And it just keeps going one day after another. And when everything on the mainland is, every structure on the mainland is demolished, he sends thousands of men up into the hills to cut down trees.

He sends other parties out to like quarry out stone. He just, he just keeps going. And he's got almost all of the army working on this. So he's got tens of thousands of men just doing nothing but hauling. rocks. He's got cots. He's got mules. He's got Alexander himself, who's like out there in the front ranks of the man like throwing stones and into the sea himself. And gradually this causeway starts to advance. And is this when the Tyrion attitude starts to change, be like, oh, actually, this is getting closer? Yeah, they start to treat it as a bit less of a

joke. And they start to get a little bit more worried. Now, it's only still, it's maybe, maybe 50, 100 meters off shore, and it's still nowhere near the walls of tire, and it's only advancing in a couple of meters a day. But it is advancing. And now instead of pleasure boats, the Tyrians send warships. They man their galleys. They send them out, stuffed full of arches, and they basically descend on the men who are building the causeway, and they just pour arrows into them and because they are out on the open sea with no protection and no fortifications and no armor because they're hauling rocks and you really just can't wear armor and haul rocks at any scale. It's brutal. There are massive casualties. The tyrians keep doing this. So Diades realizes,

look, I've got to find a way to keep my guys safe. So he he starts building some other things and he builds these two enormous siege towers, which he stations at the end of the causeway and which basically move down the causeway as the causeway advances. They're multi-story constructions, and they've got siege weapons of their own inside them, and they've also got like a huge amount of space. So if any of the terian galleys arrive, basically,

all of the Greeks can either retreat to the shore or they can retreat inside these towers. and they can pour down artillery on the Tyrian warships. And pretty soon the Tyrians realize, okay, this attack isn't working so much. It just isn't as effective as it had. And the causal keeps advancing. What I love about this so far, Ed, and I'm sure there's still many twists and turns to go. But it's almost like a strategic game of chess.

You've got the promontory being built, then the Tyrians finally reacting, and now Diades, you know, reacting himself with these siege towers. and now the Tyrians have to take a step back thinking, how are we going to change our strategy? It's absolutely a game of chess. And that's what makes the story of the Siege of Tyres so kind of fascinating and horrific. Because the Tyrians are extremely competent opponents, right?

This is not a city that sort of is helpless in the face of Alexander's stratagems. They give as good as they get. But they're not so much engineers like Diades. What they are is, is Kenneth. Now, the Tyrians, the great mainstay of Tyre's economy was a particular color, purple, the deepest, most incredible color in the ancient world, the color of dry blood. It's the purple that later would dye the robes of Roman emperors, and at the time would die the robes of the great king of

Persia. This purple is only made in Tyre, and it is the most valuable substance by far in the world. Like a tiny little vial of this purple dye would be worth far more than its weight in gold. The Tyrians make it, and it is a disgusting process. It truly is. They distill it out of the shells of sea snails, and these just giant fats along the shore with these snails deep. composing and getting pounded down and just having horrible things done to them along the shore of Tyre. But what this gives the Tyrians is skills in chemistry and skills in making horrible, horrible things, which they will put to work in the later stages of the siege against Alexander's army. And when they're faced with Diades' siege towers, when they realize that just sending

ships against the promontory just can't stop it advancing. They put their chemists to work and they put their sailors to work and they come up with this kind of remarkable countermeasure, which is unlike anything the Greeks had ever faced before. And it's a fire ship. A fire ship. Okay. Right.

So is that as it sounds, Ed, just loading up a transport ship or, no, something not as as valuable as a warship, something that they could, that could be expendable and then just loading it up with the materials and then lighting it near the promontory. Exactly. They take the biggest, ugliest ship that they've got, which is this old horse transport, right? It's low slung, it is shoddily built, but it's also this, a big old thing, because it's got to, got to have like enough room for dozens of horses on board. And they loaded up in secret, in the harbor of Tyre, and one of the harbors of Tyre, which faces out to sea.

So it's completely out of sight of Alexander and his men. They have no idea what's going on. And they loaded up with every kind of inflammable material they can. They stuff it with straw. They douse the straw in like pitch and bitumen. They paint the masts and the rigging of the ship with like pitch, and they just load this thing up with tons of like all the most unpleasant and inflammable things that they possibly can. And then they tow it out of the harbour in the dead of night.

Now the Tyrians are incredible seafarers and what they're doing with this fire ship is unlike anything that anyone has done with a fire ship before in warfare. Now people have used fire ships before generally pretty small, pretty haphazard. but they would generally just be lit on fire and turned loose and you'd just hope that the wind would send them in the right direction. This, however, has got a couple of warships towing it and has got a crew on board who haven't lit it yet. Instead, they're running quiet in the dead of night and behind the fire ship there's a whole bunch of small boats

filled with guys with swords and axes and spears and just every kind of unpleasant thing. So there's this little flotilla that leaves the harbour and the dead of night. And the Greeks have absolutely no idea what's happening. They've no idea what's coming. And this little armada just sails around the city of Tyre and bears down on Diades' promontory,

which is incredibly quiet. There's like a couple of watchmen, not really much happening. And the first, that the Greeks know about this. The first that they realize what is happening is when there's this sudden gout of flame in the darkness of the West. And what is happening is the crew on board the fire ship are running around as fast as they can, kindling every bit of the ship in turn. Then the war ships, the two ships that are towing it, pick up speed, they row absolutely as

fast as they can. Meanwhile, this thing behind them is turning into a fireball. The crew are diving off to be picked up by the small boats. There are these pots of kind of inflammable material in the rigging, which is starting to explode and sending kind of gouts of flame out into the night. This whole thing is turning into an enormous fireball, and the two warships just keep going until they're just within a few meters of the promontory. Then they cast off their ropes. They veer off absolutely at the last moment. And the fire ship, which has never got its sail set, but is just running on the momentum, crashes straight into the promontory, guided into it right next to Diades' siege towers, and the whole thing just immediately goes up in flames.

The Tyrians land from the small boats, from the warships. They set more fires. They light both of Diades' two towers on fire. And then they reboard their boats, and then they haul off, and they wait for the Greeks to come and try to put the fire out, which of course they do. Hundreds of men rush to the promontory, trying to eat. extinguish the flames. And the Tyrians then just absolutely lay into them with arrows, with every kind of artillery from all of the boats. The Greeks just kind of silhouetted against

the flames, so it's just basically target practice for them. And they only sail away when the two siege towers are gutted hulks and the promontory itself. A lot of the further start to see bits of the promontory. I just burned to ashes. So this is a huge and horrible setback for Diaries and for Alexander. Well, I mean, but also what a scene, quite frankly, for anyone who wants to do an Alexander the Great Epic in the future, just saying, got to include this story.

But yes, Ed, on that other side of things, I mean, imagining Diades and Alexander waking up and seeing it all aflame, like that red, orangey, high up into the sky at the dead of night, and then thinking like, do we give up or do we keep going? What do they decide next to do? And giving up would make sense, right? Because so far, Alexander has been fully outthought, outplayed, outmaneuvered. The Tyrians are still secure in the city. He's managed to inflict basically minimal casualties. And he's still hundreds of meters from the city. He's not even got halfway yet. But Alexander decides to keep going. So Diadi is basically

is set to work, rebuilding the broken promontory, building two new larger fireproof this time siege towers, and basically just keeping on going. The work advances, the promontory advances. But then when they start to get further offshore, of course, the seabed slips down, so they find they have to throw even more rocks, even more trees and even more materials into the ocean, into the sea, in order to hopefully sort of start to build the promontory up. So the work slows down. It's frustrating. It's exhausting. The Greeks have fed up. They've been hauled the Great King of Persia. They looted more money than any Europeans in history. They ought to be able to be back home, spending money which would last them for generations. But here they are hauling rocks, getting made

fun of getting killed and just months and months into the siege. And Taya still seems hundreds of meters away. It still seems incredibly far. But then things start to change and the siege starts to turn and events start to go Alexander's way. How does Diades play a key role in that turn? One is luck and one is skill. And the one thing that is luck is is that is luck is that is that is luck is that Alexander starts to get some ships. A lot of the cities further up the coast, which had previously surrounded to Alexander, had had their fleets out fighting for the great king of Persia. When they realized that the city back home has gone over to Alexander, the commander's defect as well. Alexander manages to round up a fleet of several hundred ships. He's able to get

naval supremacy. He's able to essentially bottle the Tyrian fleets up in the harbor, or at least temporarily, and he's able to sort of stop the raids on the promontory. So that helps a lot. Then Diades comes up with a new catapult. It's a version of this torsion catapult, which you mentioned earlier, Tristan, but this is kind of the big version. This is the big mama catapult, okay. This is the beast.

And he's been experimenting on this for weeks, but he finally manages to get it into service and stop it, of coming to pieces and sending the rocks in the wrong direction. And he lines up a few of them on the end of the promontory and sort of kind of mentally, you know, crosses his fingers, so to speak, and test them. And he finds that they don't just reach the walls of tyre. They reach the walls with sufficient force to do damage. And this is horrifying for the because they have artillery of their own. They have siege engines of their own. And, you know, as I said, they're the world's foremost chemists. They're incredible engineers. But their own

catapults, even when they're firing from the walls, even when they're firing from high above, cannot reach the causeway. They can't reach Diades as machines. So they're starting to realize, wait a minute, this is something here that we have no idea how to defend. This is a kind of technology we've never seen before. And Diades just keeps building these catapults and he keeps lining them up. And he just essentially batters the walls of tyre and comes up against and starts to do some serious damage. He's not managed to knock anything down. He's not managed to sort of clear a path yet.

But he's able to hurt the city in a way that it had never been hurt before. So the Tyrians are starting to get really nervous. psychologically, as you say, it's a hammer blow that now actually Tyre for the first time is being physically attacked. And so just to clarify, Ed, they can't do their fireship trick again. They can't send galleys out full of arches to dismantle those beast catapults because of that other thing that you mentioned, because Alexander now has a navy protecting them. Yeah. So Alexander now has a fleet.

It's not, you know, it's not infallible. It's, the Turians do actually stage another raid. they actually put up sails across the mouth of the harbor so that Alexander can't see what's going on. They sort of build this, the outfit, this kind of swarm of ships. And they hear rumors that Alexander kind of tends to have a nap in the middle of the day,

he tends to disappear into his tent and just fall asleep and not be seen for hours. So they're like, okay, well, that sounds like a good time to try to do something. And so one day in the middle of the day, they drop the sails and they just send everything, basically. They send everything in the harbor. And they don't try to raid the promontory, interestingly.

They try to raid Alexander's fleet, which is, for the most part, drawn up on shore so that the sailors can rest, can eat. And they descend on this fleet, and they just start laying about them every way they can. They set ships on fire. They kill crews. And the ships that are afloat only have kind of pretty, pretty minimal crews at the time. So they're able to pretty, pretty quickly overwhelm them. And luckily for them, Alexander isn't having an app. He's actually with his fleet.

And he basically orders everything he's got to launch. But what he doesn't do is attack the Terrian fleet. What he does is row like mad to try to block the mouth of the harbor so that DeTherian fleet is cut off from their retreat. They can't actually get home. And once the Terrians realize this is happening, they basically just have a lot of, to engage in this kind of race with Alexander's squadron to see if they can actually get back into the harbor. Most of them make it back. Some of them are cut off. But after that, they're basically bottled up in Tyre. And meanwhile, Diades' promontory has actually reached the island.

He's done the impossible. So he's done it. He's done the impossible. And this promontory, by the way, still there. The city of Tyre still got this long, long, kilometer-long promontory between the mainland and what was the island city. So this isn't just a bit of siege engineering. This is something which changes the geography of the city permanently. The promontory is astonishing. And one of one of the things I was trying to do in the book was kind of model, okay, well, just exactly how much kind of material would this have taken? And it's, like equivalent of, you know, 888 or so's statues of liberty or, you know, a 13th of the Great Pyramid of Giza, right? So this vast feat of ancient engineering, when you bear in mind this is done just over the course of six or seven months, it's one of the most remarkable engineering feats in ancient history.

I mean, Ed, absolutely. And I would personally argue maybe alongside the medallions you get after his victory in India at the Haddash. maybe also alongside for my nerdy obsession the sarcophagus of nectonibo where he Alexander might have been temporarily placed his body that causeway that you can still see today has to be one of the top surviving archaeological features anywhere in the world that you can go to and say Alexander you know was there or was involved in the creation of this that's amazing it really is not I agree it's one of the ways that you can just unambiguously see the world changed forever because of this campaign. And it's easy to focus fully on just the narratives of destruction, but you can see in so many ways like Alexander's presence and also

the world that he left behind kind of woven through our reality in so many ways that are profound. And so the promontory has reached the wall, massive task, but tires, the walls of tires still need to be breached. There's still more to go, Ed. There is. And all of all of this building, all of this heaving of rocks, all of these battles, the fire ships, the catapults, all of this has just managed to get Alexander in the same place as most ancient armies, staring up at a vast array of city walls and fortifications in towers and gates, without, generally speaking, a good plan to get through them. Because remember, smartens have absolutely no chance to knock down the walls,

of Athens, takes them decades. They still don't manage to do it. They have to get the Athenians to demolish their own walls in the end. So Alexander still, he's not won it. He's not come close to winning it yet. But he is tired and he's impatient, and the army is very impatient. So Diades now has got his catapults attacking tire, not just from the causeway, but he's managed to get some of them mounted on ships.

He's got some kind of old, olden sort of heavy ships where he's got catapults mounted on them. And he's, so he's got a few of them sailing around tire and sort of battering at the walls by sea. And he's starting to build ever more strange and elaborate contraptions. So he's got, he's even got a sort of shipworn battering round, which is slung between two warships, which how effective this was, I don't know. Like not hugely, I'm going to guess, but the sort of the battering ram was powered by the rowers of the ships. And he's even got this kind of giant drill,

which is sort of boring into the walls of tyre. So he's got all of these wild contraptions, which are attacking tyre from every direction. These feel more like the contraptions you mentioned right at the start where he has an idea late at night and then he's just like, yes. And Alexander's like, yes. and then it happens. Yeah, it's basically all sorts of versions of Diades being like,

so I thought we could do, and then Alexander's like, yes. And so there are all these strange things. Alexander is out of patience. He doesn't want to wait for Diades to just fully bring down the walls of Tyre. He wants to attack immediately. So he orders Diades two siege towers, the two towers that were protecting the builders on the causeway. He orders them to make a full frontal assault.

And so those towers have been rebuilt as well, the ones that had been burned down. Exactly, yeah. He's built two larger fireproof towers, and they've essentially been gradually sort of added to and elaborated until there are these like multi-story contraptions, you know, maybe maybe 10 stories tall or so and kind of lumbering very unsteadily down the promontory. And Alexander orders a full frontal assault. So he orders the two towers to be pushed up to the walls of time. basically at the front gate, and he orders his men to go over the wall.

Now, this is way too obvious, right? Because going straight over the front gate from the two very large towers, which the Tyrians have seen lumbering towards them for months, is a way too obvious version of a frontal assault. They have been able to see this coming for months, and they've been able to make plans against it. for months. So Alexander loads his best men onto the towers. They're pushed forward. They make contact with the walls. They lower, lower bridges from the top stories of the towers onto the

battlements of Tyre, and Alexander's men swarm across. Horrible things start to happen to them. The Tyrians don't just attack them with arrows, with siege artillery, because they've, of course, had plenty of time to line up the range, to line up shots, to have catapults ready to go, to hit those towers, to hit the points of the battlements where the men start swimming across. They attack them with some of the most advanced and some of the most horrific chemical weapons that have ever been deployed in ancient warfare. Now, the most gross of them and the most horrific of them is burning sand. the Tyrians take sand from the shore.

They heat it in these giant stone vats until it is molten. Now this isn't a temperature of 100 degrees or 200 degrees. This is sand will maintain heat of well over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And they heat it. And then they ladle it very carefully into specially modified catapults. and they fire it, not at the towers, but at Alexander's men coming over the wall. And the sand lands on them, and it just explodes in this rain of grains of superheated molten sand. And these are the toughest, the tough, right?

These are the men in the toughest army that the world had at the time, and they are just destroyed by it. The sand gets into the crevices of their armor. It burns through clothes. It burns through flesh. It burns through eyes. It burns through metal. And it essentially tortures these men to death,

the first and bravest, the toughest of the tough. And the tyrant, because the tyrians don't just want to kill Alexander's men. They don't just want to kill the massacists. Macedonians. They want, remember the thing at the start of the siege where the tyrians didn't just kill Alexander's envoys, they threw them off the walls so that their bodies would stay there for days. They want the rest of the army to see their best and bravest dying, screaming, helpless in agony. And they want them to look at Alexander and see that he cannot save them. And he did not save them. So the Macedonians, first. off the towers, they scream, they die. The Tyrians have these little, these gigantic iron hooks, which they send down, and they pluck people off the siege towers, and they fling them through the air into the sea. The Macedonians see them, these men like pinwheeling through the air, screaming,

falling to their deaths. And it goes on like this. Wave after wave, come up the towers. Wave after wave, die in agony. until Alexander, who hasn't gone over with his men, which makes you think that because he was normally at the front of every attack and the front of every battle, this time he doesn't. It makes you think, well, maybe he knew that something beyond even him was about to happen

until eventually Alexander orders the retreat. The towers pull back, the Macedonians pull back. And the mood that night in camp is really, really bleak and really. and really dangerous for Alexander because they've spent months, they've spent over half a year besieging the city and they have got absolutely

nothing for it at all. It's funny because when you think of people after Alexander, like some of his generals in the successor wars, when they have a defeat like that or a humiliating retreat like one man called Perdicus when he fails to cross the Nile,

he's murdered that night when his Adjutant's feel of the mood is changing in the camp. So I guess Alexander may, you know, the fact that he avoids that fate at that time, I guess, you know, he is the king and he's got a bit more, he's got a bit more clouts, but at the same time, maybe not because they've been doing it for months on end. The fact he survives that night is this actually a key moment in his life, this very night. It has. I think Perticast is a great example.

And, you know, you've done such wonderful work on Perticast. It's such a huge fan. And yeah, Perthaca has just unceremoniously murdered after basically his first defeat. And Alexander has to play this really carefully because even the people in his army who are normally unquestioning supporters of him, people like his sooths say are Aristander, are clearly turning on him because Aristanda, Aristander subsequently says to his man, the army, well, Tyre will be captured within the month. and there's this just low, bleak chuckle from the men because it's the last day of the month and Tyre is clearly a long way from being captured.

Alexander has to full on rewrite the calendar to add a couple more days to the month in order for this prophecy not to kind of rebound on him immediately. But one thing Alexander is very good at doing is adapting to horrible situations. Like when we were talking about the Battle of Issa a little earlier, That great victory against Darius III started out looking like a hideous defeat. Alexander had been ambushed. He'd lost his baggage. He'd lost his wounded. He'd lost most of the people he was meant to be keeping safe. And so that generally looks like a king who's about to be defeated in an army which is about to turn on their king. But Alexander gets his man to hold on

there and he turns it around. And the same thing happens here. Alexander, you know, when you look at the story of his campaign, this is not someone who never gets anything wrong. This is not someone who never has horrible things happen to him. But this is someone who's extremely good at adapting and sort of improvising of figuring out how to think his way and fight his way out of these problems. And this is what he does. He gives Diadi's time to actually bring down the walls of tyre. He says, all right, go for it. Let your catapults go.

Yes, how does Diades then manage to take Tyre? So he makes a plan which is rather more complex and rather more subtle than Alexander's just go in the front gate approach. He lines up all the catapults he can and he concentrates their fire on the front walls of Tyre, on that place where Alexander unsuccessfully attacked the first time. And gradually, because these catapults are firing at point-blank range and he's got so many of them now. He starts to bring down the walls. He starts to make a breach in the fortifications for the first time in the history of Tyre. And he begins to make space for Alexander's men to attack. Meanwhile, though, he's got ships battering at the fortifications and he's built a siege

tower on top of a ship. He's got, this we think is probably again an old transport ship as sort of heavy, wide-beam ship, where he's built a siege tower on top of the ship, which means that Alexander and his man can sail up to a point around the fortifications where the Tyrians hadn't got a chance to put large numbers of men. They hadn't got a chance to station this incredibly elaborate machinery with the burning sand and the catapults ready to fire at point-blank range, where the defences were much, much lighter. So Alexander, a couple days after his, you know, ignominious retreat, he attacks again,

but he attacks from several directions at once. Most of his army goes in the breach and the walls in the front, but he and some of his men go over the walls from the sea. They swarm up the siege tower from the ship, and they go over the walls from the coast. And then once they're in the city, they take the harbour. And that allows Alexander's fleet to swarm into the city from the sea, and then a whole bunch more men to land. So Tyre is essentially overwhelmed from several directions. And the Tyrians don't give up. They keep fighting.

They fight street by street, house by house. But Alexander and his men have them just hugely outnumbered and hugely outclassed. And they just brutally make their way through the city, killing men. women and children, enslaving some women and children, burning houses. There is so much anger, right? There is so much anger. And when Alexander feels his power totter, when he feels himself coming close to the feet, then he reacts with just extraordinary brutality,

which is driven by the sense of the impermanence of his power, the fragility of his power, the attacks that he leaves, unleashes after that, though those moments of fragility, those moments of vulnerability, are the most brutal in his entire campaign. And Tyre is perhaps the most brutal of them all. Almost all of the men of fighting age are killed. The women and children are enslaved, even dragged away from many of the temples and killed. And then 2,000 of the surviving Tyrians are crucified.

Now this is an act of mass execution which takes huge amounts of time and resources and cold-blooded brutality, but it's a message, right? It's a message to the rest of the Persian Empire to Alexander's Greek allies. Two thousand Tyrians are crucified in this long, bleak line stretching along the shore. one after the other, after the other, after the other, after the other. And their bodies are just left up there. And then Alexander walks into the temple of Melchart, into the temple of Heracles, and he makes his sacrifice.

And Tyre is left a depopulated ruin. Well, what a story. That is the siege of Tyre, but we don't have time for this, but I know that Tyre will bounce back very quickly, doesn't it? And regardless, it still will rise again in the time of the successes. But, I mean, Ed, Alexander is always at the forefront when exploring the siege of Tyre and how he conquers it. But let's not forget Diades. I mean, he is known as actually the man who took Tyre.

Is this the zenith of his career or what happens to him next? Do we know much else about Diades' story and what happens? We know a little. I think calling him, as Ascalis have, the man who took Tyre is more than just. And Alexander essentially puts him to work solving impossible problems, solving problems which should not be solvable by ancient warfare. So after Tyre, his army, Alexander's army, goes on down the coast to the last, essentially Persian outpost on the road to Egypt, which is the city of Gaza.

and Diades once again uses this remarkable siegecraft to take what should be an impregnable city and defeat the Persian governor, Batis, who had thought that he would be able to kind of slow Alexander's advance down. So yeah, Diades is the man who solves the problems that Alexander would never be able to solve on his own, and he's put to work doing that throughout the rest of his campaign. It is such a pleasure to cover his story, Ed. Does the name Diodes, I mean, does he become a bit of a legend for future Greek and Roman military engineers? So he's the hero of every Mechanicus, every siege engineer in the ancient world. We don't have time, but the history of seed warfare in the centuries after Alexander is ever more elaborate and wild.

I mean, if you thought Diades' promontory and siege towers were outrageous, like some of the contraptions that are built by Alexander's successors and by some of his engineer, their engineer, are just even beyond this. So blueprints, which allegedly were by diodes, find their way into ancient manuals of siegecraft. And some of them are more plausible than others. Of course, calling a catapult and original diodes is like calling a painting an original Leonardo for ancient siege engineers,

because he's sort of the hero and in many ways the founder of the profession. So we see his designs and we see his battles talked about by ancient engineers and his designs put to work and modifying and elaborated all the way through the Roman period. So, yeah, Diades is, if you've heard of him, you've heard of them in the ancient world. And for every Roman siege engineer, for every kind of mechanicus in a field somewhere in Germania trying to get a cataport to work, diodes is absolutely the hero of the profession. I mean, Ed, you've teed up another episode we can do in the future.

If you thought this story was amazing, if you thought this siege graph was amazing, it feels like we got to do the Siege of Roads with Demetrius, don't we, a decade or so later? That's the next level in the story. I would love to talk about that with you sometime. That would be a lot of fun. But it has been such a pleasure to cover this figure's story. As mentioned at the start, all these remarkable figures that accompanied Alexander, they can be easily overshadowed by Alexander's name.

Today we're bringing Diadis back into the spotlight through this brutal, but at the same time very extraordinary story. Ed, you cover it in your brand new book, this groundbreaking new book it is called. It is about Alexander. It's called Alexander God King Man and is out with Lonesbury now. Ed, it just goes me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Thank you so much. It's such an honour. Thank you so. Well, there you go. There was the brilliant and lovely Professor Edmund Richardson talking you through this incredible story. The story of Diades and this brutal siege of Tyre, how Alexander and his army conquered this island stronghold.

What a story, as mentioned, we will have to do the follow-up great island city siege tale. What happened after Alexander the Great the Siege of Rhodes with Demetrius, which is like the siege of Tyre in regards to these fascinating military contraptions and this strategic game of chess that happens between the attackers and the defenders. If you want that as the follow-up, let us know. We'll get Ed back on for that, and it will be a fascinating episode. If you want more from this time period in the meantime, we'll put links in the description to our series, our recent series, on the story of Alexander the Great, and also an episode we recorded a year or so ago with Catherine Pangonis all about the city of Tyre. Those episodes will put links to in the

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