The Ancients - Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

Alexander the Great. One of the most recognisable names in history. In his short lifetime he conquered the mighty Persian Empire and marched his army as far as the Indus River Valley. But it is important to remember that Alexander’s achievements were only possible because of his father Philip. It was Philip who transformed the Kingdom of Macedon from a backward domain into the dominant power in the Central Mediterranean. It was Philip who reformed the army and created the force that would serve as the nucleus of Alexander’s famous victories. Both were extraordinary leaders. Both embodied a charismatic style of leadership that helped transform them into semi-legendary conquerors.Anyone who knows me knows that I have a soft spot for the story of Alexander, his successors and the Hellenistic Period in general, and so I was delighted to be joined by the one and only Adrian Goldsworthy to talk all things Philip and Alexander. One of Britain’s most renowned ancient historians, Adrian has written countless books on ancient Rome, while his most recent work covers the stories of Philip and Alexander.This was a great chat and I hope you enjoy.Adrian is the author of Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conquerors.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we are going to the rise of Macedon. In particular, we are talking about the lives of King Philip II and his famous son, Alexander, better known as Alexander the Great. Now in this podcast to talk through the lives, to give an overview of these two remarkable figures in antiquity, I was delighted to be joined by Adrian

Goldsworthy. Adrian is one of the most renowned Roman historians of our time. He has written books on Hadrian's Wall, Vindolanda, Julius Caesar, Pax Romana and more. But in his latest book he has decided to go a bit further back. He has gone to the rise of Macedon and he has gone to study to focus on the lives of Philip and Alexander. And this was a brilliant chat. Adrian is a fantastic communicator. This was great fun and you are going to absolutely love it. Here, without further ado, is Adrian. Adrian, it is an absolute honour to have you on the show. Thank you for inviting me. Now, Philip II and Alexander, this is the extraordinary story of two kings that changed the course of history. Yes, and Alexander's the famous one. You know,

everybody knows at least something about him. And because of familiarity, it's sometimes hard to remember that there's this little kingdom in the north of Greece that suddenly dominates Greece and then marches off, defeats the Persian Empire, the great superpower of the world, and keeps going into modern-day Pakistan, northern India, and turns around eventually, but is still clearly planning other things in such an incredibly short time. It is one of those staggering achievements, the sheer distance, the sheer scale of all this. But if we just look at

Alexander, the familiar bit, it makes no sense of how this kingdom can do it. And Philip explains why this was possible, how this was possible. So his career is just as important as Alexander's, and in many ways more interesting, though it's harder to understand because of our sources. important as Alexander's and in many ways more interesting, though it's harder to understand because of our sources. And in regards to Philip, his career is absolutely extraordinary. From what you're saying, he transforms his kingdom from being on the brink of ruin to becoming the dominant power in the central Mediterranean. Yes, and one of the problems is, again, because Alexander's story dominates, we see the Philip of that story, who's the old man, one-eyed, limping from wounds, drunk, can't even reach his son when he gets angry with him to feast and charges across the floor,

he trips over. We forget that when Philip became king, he was 23. He was the young, dashing, handsome, charismatic hero, where his brother had just been killed in battle fighting against the Illyrians with most of the army. The older brother than that had been murdered a few years before. Macedonian kings were tending to die violently. They were being picked on by all their neighbours, both from the Balkan tribes, but also from southern Greece, the big cities like Athens, like Thebes. Macedonia was weak, very, very weak, looked as if it was going to be torn apart. And this unproven youngster takes over as king and not only survives, but within 20 years or so turns this round in this incredible powerhouse. So it's just the speed of it all. There were lots of people still alive when Alexander died who could remember the time before Philip and could

remember that weakness. And change is very familiar to us in the modern world, how quickly progress can change things. But this was something similar. You know, this is an incredible revolution in the whole Eastern Mediterranean, all the way of the Near East beyond. And how on earth is this happening? You know, the Macedonians, for goodness sake, how on earth could these people do this? I mean, exactly. From what you're saying there, it sounds like before Philip, the Macedonians north of these famous city-states like Athens, Sparta and Corinth, had they been sort of looked down on? Had they never really been considered as a very strong power? Yeah, they're vulnerable.

What they've got are good natural resources. They've got the minerals, they've particularly got timber. It's a different climatic area to Mediterranean Greece. And yes, we tend to see all those great big monuments like the Parthenon, that sort of thing. We forget the amount of wood, the big beams that were needed to support the ceilings, and also the timber for scaffolding just in the process. And then you think of Athens and her wooden walls, saving them from the Persians. Those ships were mostly built from Macedonian timber and the fleet that dominated the Aegean. Again, the Macedonians have

got lots of stuff people want, but they're not very strong. They don't have city-states, schools of thought as to whether they're Greek or not, even though they're speaking a dialect that is clearly Greek. And they're also, you know, the other way we tend to forget about it is that they're on, at the very least, the fringes, but probably, as far as the Persians are concerned, for a long time, inside the Persian Empire. So this is almost like a replay of the Persians. They get a great war leader and they take over the empire. The Macedonians are almost the fringe people that do the same. Suddenly these warriors turn up. And you can see

it almost as an extension of what traditionally you think of as Near Eastern history. But actually they're part of that. The false sort of East-West divide or Europe against Asia, doesn't really work in this period, because Macedonia has always been a bit of both. So it is staggering, but it had been very weak. They didn't produce good armies. And the other thing is that there are a few kings that last a long time, but the royal family of the Macedonian kingdom are their own worst enemy, because they kill each other with great abandon.

And it's quite striking that the family live a long time if they don't die violently. So you get these blokes still in their 70s and 80s, still very active, but you're more than likely going to get murdered or die in battle. And in a sense, Philip and Alexander beat the odds in both of those cases to live as long as they do, but they don't get themselves killed beforehand. Well, that's very interesting itself, considering both spoilers don't live, let's say, very, very long lives. And in further regards to these natural resources, how does Philip embrace these natural resources to transform his kingdom, to make it so powerful?

It begins politically and militarily. He becomes king after a disaster, and he spends the winter months and the next spring fighting off a couple of rivals from within the family, and then building up an army and going and defeating the Illyrians. But as soon as he does that, he starts taking the offensive, and he goes to Amphipolis and takes that city, which controls a lot of mines that are very valuable. But there's a nice quote from a very late historian, Justin, who talks about Philip waging war like a merchant.

He sees each war, he takes the money, the plunder from one, and then spends it all to prepare for the next one and the next one and so on. Philip acquires vast sums of wealth and of steady income from the mines and from elsewhere and from tribute, but he spends it all. He keeps on raising more soldiers, mercenaries, paying his own men, getting siege engineers. He keeps on bribing anybody to be a friend in outside kingdoms and tribes and all this sort of thing. And it's always looking to the next success. In a sense, they create a machine that can't stop and can't wind down because you always need another war to pay the debts you're promising and to keep on rewarding people and make sure that they stay with you.

So it's a mixture of everything, but he doesn't really stop. And it's very hard to put your finger on, say, when Philip's secure. And because it's such a personal power, and because he leads in battle from the front and exposes himself, if he'd got himself killed, then Macedonia could easily have returned to the past and gone back to this weak, divided kingdom, prone to civil wars and picked on by all its neighbours. So again, people thought that when Philip finally died, this has got to be over. And then again, the big question when Alexander goes, what's going to happen next? So from what you're saying, it is with Philip, we'll go on to Alexander in a bit, but with Philip, it's conquest after conquest. But even at the same time, all these

battles he is fighting, he is right at the front. He is fighting at the front with his men. This sounds like huge, risky plays. It is and it isn't. It's a little bit like a medieval king where you're expected to be there for at least some of the battle and participate. The relationship between Macedonian nobility, but also the wider group, the Macedonian citizens is the wrong word, really, because there isn't a single city. But the true Macedonians who are extended, they're called the king's hetairoi, the king's companions. And you have to share both the good and the bad with them. So you share the risks, you share the benefits. And there's clearly a tradition of this. Philip, because obviously things are difficult, he has to fight a lot,

spends even more time doing this. On the other hand, one striking thing, and it might reflect our sources as much as reality, but when you look at the battles of this period, the number of knights fighting in the high Middle Ages when the armour was so good compared to the threats, that actually you could do the sort of William Marshall type stuff and get away with it, or Richard the Lionheart, and you weren't sort of chopped to bits when you were young. So there's an element that it's always a risk. You could die, and people do die. But on the other hand, Philip and the other Macedonian generals and commanders, they acquire a lot of wounds and they keep on going. They seem very good at surviving all the risks of blood poisoning and all the things we'd think would be appalling. So it's risky. But on the other hand, it means your army fights with this incredible spirit as a motivator. This is huge. And again, once you've started doing this, you can't really stop and say, you know, I'm getting on a bit now.

And again, once you've started doing this, you can't really stop and say, you know, I'm getting on a bit now. I'll hang back and watch. Because that's the culture. The whole point is you're the king, you are the warrior, you have to lead. But then Philip is hit in the face at the siege of Mithurne and loses his eye. An inch or so's difference, a little bit more pressure on the arrow could easily have killed him outright or crippled him. And there are other wounds where it's probably the same. And rumors as well circulate in Athens and elsewhere that he's died of disease on campaign. He does push his body really hard.

And clearly he and a lot of the Macedonians are pretty tough individuals and they keep going. But always this was a risk. And because this is so much personal regime, that risk is you're rolling the dice every time and you only need to lose once for it to all go horribly wrong. So it is a big deal. And it may be that's partly why, or partly his own sense of achievement and accomplishment that Philip is supposed to have said he was proud of his diplomatic successes and his military ones.

So he doesn't fight for the sake of fighting. But on the other hand, he's always ready to do it when he feels that's more beneficial to him. And by the end of his reign, how far do Philip's conquests stretch? The most obvious ones, he's reached down into southern Greece, and obviously he's fought the Battle of Chaeronea, defeating the Thebans, the Athenians, and their allies. There's sometimes a tendency to see this as defeating the Greeks and their allies, but given that lots of Greeks are on his side as well, you know, it's all a question of where you stand. We get less detail of the campaigns

against the Thracians, against the Illyrians, and then later on the Scythian campaign, which is taking him up into modern Bulgaria and the edge of those wide rolling hillsides and plains you get there. But again, because it's, as far as if you're an Athenian, well, who cares what's going on up there? We don't get the detail. And it's quite striking. There are several years in Philip's life where we don't actually know where he was and what he was doing. And almost certainly he's doing things up in that part of the world. So geographically, Macedonia goes back to way beyond even its greatest extent in the past. And it's big. And if we didn't have Alexander coming next, and then you look at the map, and suddenly there's this great expanse of, hey, this is my empire. This would be huge and very impressive.

But again, a lot of it is a question of alliances rather than direct control, particularly with the southern Greeks, but also with the tribal kingdoms of the north. He's extended his influence and they're not attacking him in the way they used to. But he doesn't physically run them day to day and put in administration. So it's power as much as physical empire. Sounds clever consolidating if you've got these rulers, these client kings, as it were, also serving your interests, but you're not ruling them directly. With most ancient powers, you don't have the administrative resources to go off and run everybody's. The Romans run their empire on a shoestring. And it's always, really, if you locals would just get on with your own thing and not cause us any bother, we're fine with that.

We don't. It's similar. It helps that there are a lot of cultural links. It's easier to deal with particularly some of the Greek states like the Thessalians, but also Philip can speak directly to ambassadors from Athens personally in their language and vice versa, which makes a difference. But we also probably play down the connections with the northern peoples that the Macedonians have. You know, Philip's mother may well have been an Illyrian. One of his wives is. He may have married a Scythian.

And the cultures, again, we see this clear dividing line, although Macedonians, they're almost civilized, they're almost Greek. And then you get these Thracians and Illyrians, and they're just a load of barbarians, and they're hairy and savages. Well, again, you look at the archaeology, it's not so clear. There are clearly differences, but there's probably quite a lot of cultural similarities, or at least points where you could, okay, I know what he's thinking, I know how he's going to act, that make it easier for you to deal in a way that probably an Athenian wouldn't. Although again, it's striking, you look at the Athenian generals who turn up in the Gallipoli Peninsula and areas like that, where they're marrying local princesses and this sort of thing. And some of them get adopted by local kings. So again, we can sometimes be so narrow about what our sense of what the Greeks were. And it comes down to everybody living and being quite wealthy and living in Athens. what the Greeks were. And it comes down to everybody living and being quite wealthy and living in Athens. But the Greeks weren't bound by those rules. They got off and did all sorts of other things. And there were lots of very different communities in the first

place. So again, sometimes there are Greek cities on the Black Sea that clearly get on in a functional way, if no better, with neighbors of a very different culture and have been there a long time. So we sometimes divide up ancient states by the simple labels you get in the sources and think that on the ground, how are these people actually living? How are they interacting? And there's probably a lot more day-to-day accommodation, if nothing else, because it was mutually beneficial. So Macedonia sort of straddled, you can see it there, but it's probably more common than perhaps we allow. Indeed, indeed. And there's one other thing I'd just like to quickly talk about before really going on to Alexander himself, and that is his mother Olympias, who is also one of these figures

who is not actually from Macedonia proper, but from one of the neighbouring regions. She is a really extraordinary figure. Yes, and it's the plea of anybody writing on a biography, particularly of the ancient world, we'd love to know more. We'd love something from her point of view. The problem always is that we only really hear about Olympias because of Alexander. If he hadn't come along, I doubt we'd know about her at all. And then clearly even the ancient sources think

she is very important in his life. The relationship is close, even though when he sets out for Asia Minor in 334, never returns, never sees her again. He's writing back and forth all the time. But we have to deal with ancient sources, and ancient sources were primarily written by the prosperous, the well-off aristocratic males. And in Greece in particular, they were desperately unhappy with the idea, they didn't like kings, but the idea of queens or women at a royal court having political influence scared the living daylights out of them and they just did not cope with this. Now it perhaps doesn't help that because of the politics at the time after Alexander's death his mother will become a key figure in the succession struggles

and she is not going to be bound by any ideas of what a noble Greek woman should do. She's going to raise armies. She's going to lead them. She's going to kill people. She's going to act in exactly the same way as the male members of the family in the aristocracy act. It's just that to a Greek observer, that's utterly wrong. Women shouldn't do that. So that means she must be unusually vicious, unusually savage. Whereas the men can be brutal and okay that's bad but well you know it's just what happens so we have all these problems you can say very clearly the relationship with his mother was hugely important to alexander it does seem fair enough to believe that however close they were initially or whether this is only ever on philip's part that relationship turned sour and philip and olympias didn't get on,

possibly because of the glimpses that they actually look very, very similar people, which can work wonderfully or not very well at all. And she is, from the royal family of Epirus, this other kingdom that, until Macedonia has its sudden rise, Epirus has been just as important, really, as far as they're concerned.

They don't see themselves as inferior. But it's a problem. You keep seeing almost a shadow of where she is and realizing there must be things she's doing. But it's too simplistic with anyone just to say the sources are biased, so therefore anything bad about them we disbelieve, and anything nice, that's all right. Because these are human beings, and they are good and bad, and we don't want to just change one prejudice from our sources to another one from us. So you come back to the sense of somebody desperately important. And there probably had been royal women who were as important as formidable in the past, but we don't get to hear about them. I mean, there's the classic case where she's accused by sources of being involved in Philip's

murder. Now, in the earlier murders of Macedonian kings, we often don't even know who their wives were. There may well have been court intrigue of this sort. And in the past, we'd simply assume, well, Alexander did it because he's the man who benefited. It's only because you get the sources that are a little bit more detailed, though not helpful, that you start to add these complications and other people get the blame or spread it out. I suspect anyone with the strong personality that she had, that she passed on to her son, and probably to her daughter, Cleopatra as well, who is also pretty active in things, Alexander's sister.

This is a strong person, but again, we don't know how often she saw Alexander while Alexander was growing up. And then how much contact do you have to have to be an important influence? You could look at someone like Winston Churchill, who didn't see much of his parents, but he's clearly trying to prove things to them for a very long part of his life. So it's maybe just a reminder that families tend

to be complicated. Human beings are all individuals. But we'd like to know more about Philip's mother as well, and she's barely glimpsed. These are clearly important people. And it's one of the reasons Southern Greeks claim they dislike monarchy is because people who are not aristocratic males get involved. But royal courts inevitably, these human relationships, people will influence in any society, no matter what the restrictions they place on what gender might be. These are human beings with their own personalities. And anyone who thinks that personality doesn't matter hasn't lived because this is how people work. personality doesn't matter, just hasn't lived, because this is how people work. Absolutely, absolutely. And we've talked about Philip, and we've talked about Olympias, these two figures who seem to have this huge influence on Alexander as he's growing up. I mean, whilst Alexander's growing up, in his youth, he's watching the conquests of Philip, but he's also got his mother close by. Are they two towering influences on him? I think so. You can feel sorry for him in some ways, but this is a tough act to follow.

And you have the story in Plutarch where Alexander's supposed to be downcast when he hears the news of Philip's latest victory, because, you know, what's my father leaving me to do? And generally within Greek society, particularly the aristocracy, there's this whole culture of competition, of excelling, of winning, that we see most obviously in the revival of the Olympic Games. But it's there, it's this pursuit of excellence, pursuit of glory, distinction. That's there with the Macedonian kingship even more, because if you're going to be ruler of this kingdom, a lot is expected of you. One of the problems, and one of the big differences of writing this book compared to, say, the Bible of Julius Caesar or Augustus, is we know enough about the education of Roman aristocrats

to have a sense, even if we don't know specifically about an individual, this is the sort of thing they do at each stage of life. With the Macedonians, that sort of information just doesn't exist. You assume, as with any ancient society, when a baby is born, as a child grows, there's all sorts of rituals, stages, you know, sacrifices performed at different times. We know nothing of that. You get that one weird quote where Philip's supposed to complain and sack an officer because he's had a hot bath. And he says, you know, Macedonia, we don't even allow women giving birth to have a hot bath. This idea we're really butch and do it. But again, what does that really tell you about how the family works and how the royal court works?

You get these stereotypes, usually fragmentary from Greek observers, that it's just a load of drunks. But on the other hand, what's really going on day to day, the stories about young Alexander, apart from omens of, yeah, this child's going to do wonderful things that you'll get about anybody in the ancient world who goes on to great deeds, probably later inventions. You have the story of him taming Bucephalus, the horse, which could be true. There's enough bits in there that make sense.

And the romantic in me, and I like horses, and I like riding, so I think, oh yeah, I'd like that to be true, whether it is or not, or whether that's what should have been the meeting. The way that I do remember talking to an actress and film producer once about the relevance of history to telling a story and saying,

well, sometimes fiction could be truer than fact. Whilst it's a logic I can't quite understand, there is an element as a storyteller where you want people to meet, you want things to come together. It's, of course, incredible that we do get Aristotle there as Alexander's tutor for a while, but then almost nothing said about what he teaches him and how long, and whether does he teach Alexander alone? Is he teaching a lot of other young noblemen? Is he teaching the royal pages? Don't know. We're not told. And we know that Alexander corresponds with Aristotle later on, who hasn't yet become the famous Aristotle, but presumably he's a bright enough lad, so knows his stuff. It's the same way

that Philip's period as a hostage in Thebes. People started thinking, oh, he must have learned this. He must have talked about this. He must have done this. He must have seen the, copied this later on. And Alexander and Aristotle must have talked about all these things and ideas. And they probably did. But we should also remember that people are quite capable of coming under other influences and their own and thinking of things later on. Human experience is not all about copying others. Sometimes very similar ideas, concepts, ways of doing things will be worked out from first principles by a completely different culture, because they think that's what we need. So there's a sort of simple story that somebody invents something, somebody has this idea, and then everybody else has to get it from that source. I don't think it's as simple as that.

What happens to Philip? Why does Philip meet this horrible end? The basic facts are fairly simple and ambiguous, because Philip has summoned all the representatives of Greece and beyond to come there to see him as he's just married off his daughter, Alexander's sister, to his nephew, the king of Epirus. So you've got this big ceremony, all this going in. And then as he walks into the theatre to the acclamation of all, one of his seven bodyguards runs up, produces a dagger, a Celtic dagger, it's called, from under his cloak, stabs Philip between the ribs. Philip dies almost instantly. The assassin runs off and he trips over a vine root and is killed before he can escape to the getaway horses by the other bodyguards. So basic facts, that's what happened. The personal motive of the assassin also seems

pretty clear, and this is one where rare case Aristotle vouched for this. Pausanias, this relatively young aristocrat, some years in the past, attracted Philip's eye, became Philip's lover for a while. Philip then, as he always is reputed to do, moves on to another young lad, also called Pausanias, confusingly enough. The first one is pretty miffed by this and mocks the newer lover, saying that he's too easy. He hasn't waited for the older man to impress him and woo him properly and that he's basically effeminate and weak and not a proper Macedonian aristocrat. To prove him wrong, the current lover goes off, gets himself killed heroically in battle, defending Philip with his body, and things would go on.

But the one who dies has friends. One of them is a chap called Attalus, whose ward and probably niece becomes Philip's most recent wife. Obviously big rise in status for Attalus. He invites Pausanias to a feast, gets him drunk. He and his friends beat him up. They might rape him. They then hand him over to the muleteers and slaves who do gang rape him. And when Pausanias goes to Philip, complaining, wanting recompense, both because Philip is his king, but probably also as a former lover. And there's that sense of obligation in both ways. Philip has a politician solution. So he sends Athelos off with a promotion, but sends him off to Asia Minor as part of the advance guard for the war with Persia, and gives Pausanias the

distinguished promotion to be one of these seven bodyguards. So that's a big perk, but it doesn't help the humiliation. And presumably he's still being mocked. People are not going to let him forget this. This is a small, rather bitchy court, one would suspect, where given the arguments over feasts you get in Alexander's story, this is clearly all going on. So Pausanias broods on this and murders Philip. So that's the simple personal motive. But then comes the question mark of, is there anybody behind him? Aristotle cites this as a crime of passion. So in that sense, as far as he's concerned, Pausanias' motive is simple. Alexander accuses the Persians of having arranged Philip's murder and keeps bringing this up in negotiations with them. And in a sense,

that's logical. If this Macedonian army suddenly arrived in Asia Minor and attacking you, about to be led by this famous war leader, get rid of him, maybe the whole problem will go away. Doesn't mean they did it, but it means it would make sense if they wanted to. On the other hand, there are rumours about Olympias and Alexander, and in a sense, because Olympias is accused of disposing of Philip's most recent wife Cleopatra and her infant child in the months that follow, we don't quite know how soon. There's clearly no love lost there. But on the other hand, it's a lot easier for people who want to say Alexander's great to blame everything bad on Olympias. I suspect if we didn't know as much as we do, and we just knew the basic fact, we'd probably assume Alexander or somebody close to him was behind it. On the other hand,

that doesn't mean it's true. It's just that when you only get a few fragments of information, you tend to go for the simple answers. He certainly benefits the most. He inherits this kingdom when he's in his early 20s. He's got this magnificent army, this really powerful kingdom. The Great War has started, but not really got going. So everything is there for him to do his stuff. And it's confused by the fact we don't know whether Philip was planning to take him to Asia or not. Was he going to be left behind, sidelined, or was he going to go and share the glory? And when people come up with personal judgments, oh, you know, Alexander was very pious, respected the gods, he couldn't possibly have killed his father. Well, we just don't know

enough about the inner workings of his head to do this. He took advantage of the situation in that he was proclaimed king within hours, and then very ruthlessly purges any opponents. But on the other hand, he'd do that anyway. Because even if he'd know nothing at all, the options are you either succeed Philip and become king or somebody's going to kill you. They're not going to leave you around. And one thing that Alexander never shows any sign of doing throughout his life is hesitating. This is not someone who hangs about to have a good think about what should I do next and procrastinates or anything like this. So there's nothing definitive in any way. It's possible he was involved. It's possible Olympias was involved. It's possible neither of them were.

The Persians may have been. It may have been just Pausanias. At the heart of it is one really damaged, traumatized individual. That sort of thing has been a motive for murder throughout history so it could be no more than that on the other hand it's a very public occasion to do this but then perhaps that's again for the sense of personal humiliation you've endured and the one who should give you justice hasn't then you are displaying as publicly as possible but it's even little things like there was more than one horse prepared for him to escape so does that mean there are accomplices?

Well, maybe, but it might just mean he wanted a couple of fresh horses to outpace any opponents who were only riding one each. We just don't know. Mysteries abound indeed. Well, let's go on to Alexander then. And you mentioned there how the Great War with Persia, it's already underway when Alexander succeeds his assassinated father, Philip. And this seems ideal for Alexander. He knows he's got big boots to fill with Philip. And now he's got this opportunity to gain this great conquest

or to try and gain this great conquest in the East. Yes, the murder couldn't have happened at a better time as far as Alexander's concerned. But it shows you again all the work Philip had done. Philip has to fight for years to secure himself as king and fight off opponents. Within a year and a half less, Alexander can mount a show of force in Greece, campaign against the Thracians, campaign against the Illyrians. Thebes declares against him. He goes back, besieges, and takes Thebes by assault and destroys it as a political entity. All of that is enough to secure his control of the kingdom and

the wider area. And it is not really challenged. You will have the war motivated, led by the Spartans later on. But otherwise, Alexander's position is not challenged in Greece during his lifetime, or significantly by the Balkan tribes. There's again some campaigning, but it's not a real threat. So that shows you how much Philip had done. But the motivation for the war, the pretext that you're avenging the destruction of Athens and the invasion of Greece by Xerxes in a century and a half before, seems terribly thin to modernize. But to the Greeks, it's less so. And you'd have these Panhellenists who'd been talking about the only way to stop Greeks fighting each other is to find another more suitable enemy, go and defeat them,

take the Persians' gold, their land, and then live as wealthy landowners so we can all be properly civilized Greeks and we won't have to compete anymore. There's some chance of that if it ever happened. But it's a very strange idea that simply sees the Persians as a load of barbarians who don't count. They're fit to be slaves. They may as well be our slaves. And that almost small child thing, they've got wealth and money, but we're better than them. We should have that. That's not fair, you know.

So there's weird threads, but really it's a very convenient excuse. It's the Great War. Philip's done all the local wars and Alexander could push out further in Europe or something, but it's less exciting. Persia is the great target. And you have to wonder what Alexander thought

he was going to achieve when he started. He may well not have known and just been winging it. Let's see how far we can go. But it is a great expedition, but it's also a great gamble. Like Philip, he spent almost all his treasury to fund this war. And he lands in Asia Minor with very little food. He's got to secure territory. He's got to secure local resources, but he can't take all the food from the local cities because then they're going to turn against him. Why should they support him? He's got to try and pretend he's a liberator of the Greek cities of Asia and all this sort of thing. So the balance is this could go wrong very easily. And with Alexander leading in the style he does, he gets himself killed or crippled. Again, it goes wrong very easily. He's not going to destroy

Persia and the Persian Empire or the Persian king in one battle or one victory, but any one serious defeat means the war is over for him and he is lost. So we know what's going to happen, and we almost feel sorry for the poor Persians that suddenly this incredible military machine turns up to carve through them. But people at the time on both sides wouldn't have thought that way. This was not the natural conclusion. The probability was that he might gain a few victories, but eventually he'd come to an accommodation or be beaten. So it must have been hard for everyone to take in what was going to happen. Well, let's talk about one of these victories in particular now, because we have got upcoming very soon the anniversary of the Basilicis. I believe it's the 5th of November, but correct me if I'm

wrong, dates in ancient history are always difficult, aren't they? Yeah, and then you've got the Julian and Gregorian calendar, so it's going to be, what do we officially count it as? It's early November, I think is a good safe bet. Early November, okay. So let's use this as a case study to really look at Alexander's leadership on the battlefield. So first of all, the Baslavistus, what's the background to this battle? The background is that Alexander's overrun most of Asia Minor with modern day Turkey and is pushing into top of Syria towards Lebanon. And at the stage, the Persian king, his satraps have been defeated a year before in the north, they've gathered local forces. Persian empire is so big and doesn't have a standing army. It takes a long time to raise

the army, put it together, and then start plodding westwards to go and find these Macedonians. And you've got the organization to do it, but it is still a challenge to feed everybody, to keep them all organized. Individually, there's lots of good warriors. Individually, there's lots of good contingents. But they're not a team that knows each other and trusts each other and has fought together before under the same leader. So you're trying to train on the march as you're going along. And the king turns up with a lot of the court, with the harem, with a lot of splendor, some of which will be left behind at Damascus, but it still goes part of the way. So it takes a long time. Alexander doesn't really know where Darius is. And he pushes south. Darius ends up behind him because Darius doesn't know where Alexander is

either. And the two armies are blundering around. It ends up the Persians cut Alexander's lines of communications, such as they were, and they overrun a depot and, depending on the source, massacre a lot of wounded or chop off their limbs, their other hands. Alexander then discovers the Persians are behind him and Darius is taking up position by the river Issus, which he can't be certain where that actually was, though there are reasonable cases but the probability is the coastline which gives us some of the guideline has changed in the millennia since then so when Alexander turns around and heads back towards Darius he can't afford to wait partly because he hasn't got the food but also this prestige thing he's the one who's got to prove himself Darius doesn't have to prove

anything and if Alexander runs or retreats or shows fear, then you could just say, look, this is just some load of Macedonian barbarians. Forget them. They're not a threat. And also we tend to think somebody comes to a battle with Alexander the Great when you know you're going to lose then.

But people don't know that beforehand. It's like when you're encountering Napoleon early on. You know, he's just some French general. Who cares? So Alexander turns and closes quickly, but he then closes quite methodically with the Persians. And through a fluke of ancient historiography, we have a description of his march across the plain into Conte.

The Persians pretty much wait for him to come. They're in position behind this river, behind this stream, and they're going to use that to disrupt the Macedonian formation. Let them come to us. It's not really as well the Persian army, the sort of army to maneuver a lot. It's too unwieldy. It hasn't been trained for long enough together to know what to do. So wait for them to come to you. Great. So the Macedonians go through this series of maneuvers as they come onto a coastal plain. So they've got the Mediterranean Sea on their left and hills rising to mountains on their right.

So it's quite limited. It gradually widens. And we have this detailed description of how they change formation, how the phalanx changes its depth, how the cavalry move out, all this sort of thing. What's notable and tends to be ignored is that Alexander, the reckless Alexander

who jumps onto Bucephalus and charges off to glory, spear in hand, stops repeatedly, lets the men rest, lets them reorganize, keeps the line. It's very, very controlled, very disciplined. It's the opening gambits of a chess match. It's not British bulldogs charging straight towards them or anything like that. Gosh, there's my childhood coming back to me in a sudden flash. And moves up towards the Persian line, adapts to when he sees the Persian, because at first they can't really see what the other side has got, how they've deployed.

Eventually closes up to the river, deploys his army fairly conventionally with cavalry on each flank. We don't know precise numbers for either side. The Persians have got Greek mercenary hoplites in the middle, as well as Persian troops trained to fight in a vaguely similar way. Lots of cavalry, not a lot of space for a lot of cavalry. There is then this great

mistake. It's an easy trap people fall into time and time again to assume Alexander always fought the same way, that his tactics are basically, I move to the right, I stretch the enemy's flank, I wait for a gap to open, then I, on Bucephalus, steam forward at the head of the companion cavalry into the gap, head straight for Darius or the heart of the army, killing everything in my path. And people have extended that even back to Chironae, when Philip's fighting hoplite armies in Greece, completely different to the Persian enemies he's encountering, in completely different terrain. People have done the same with Hannibal. They've tried to see his tactics of Cannae as foreshadowed by battles in the First Punic War,

let alone Hannibal's. And it doesn't make any sense. And successful commanders don't tend to do exactly the same thing every time, because people are going to work that one out. And what they do is they adapt to the local situation. So it looks here as if something is quite different. And Hammond originally came up with this idea, but it makes more sense that Alexander led a first charge in this battle on foot at the head of his elite royal infantry, the Hypaspes, because those are really the people you're going to run across a river in. You're not going to want to do this with cavalry, particularly when you're facing close order infantry at the other bank. So it suggests a much more complex Alexander, not this simple heroic leader,

but somebody who's controlling the battlefield as well and doing different things and adapting. So he does this first to make ground, to capture part of the enemy back, to get space to bring the cavalry across. This is a rocky bedded stream. You're not going to gallop horses over this. They'll walk across and they'll do it fine, but you need time to get there and then form the one on the other bank. He then probably gets on Bucephalus or another man and then leads cavalry charges. But it adds to a picture that one of the problems with the sources for all his battles

is that they tend to start big. These are the armies. This is how they're deployed. Then they close down to Alexander's flank. And then they close down to Alexander in person, the tip of the spear, charging on, forgetting what's going on everywhere else. And there are problems in this battle. There's hard fighting against the mercenaries, against some of the spear, charging on, forgetting what's going on everywhere else. And there are problems

in this battle. There's hard fighting against the mercenaries, against some of the other troops on the flank with the cavalry. One of the Phalanx regiments suffers very heavy casualties. Its commander's killed. It's probably pushed back. There are gaps in the line. It's broken up. The same as Alexander doing more than one thing suggests a much more complex battle than the simple old-fashioned battle plans of blocks on a map where, you know, this is 5,000 men and they just stay as one big lump. Real life isn't like that. This is much more complicated. Alexander is a lot more subtle. But there is one key thing that we always need to remember. Alexander, when it comes to the point,

can charge off and do these things. Once he's involved in hand-to-hand combat, he's going to have very little sense of the wider battle. He certainly can't influence it. But he trusts the Macedonian officers and commanders at all levels to do the right thing. And this is the product of 20 more years of war under Philip, because this is essentially Philip's army under Philip's officers, and they've been fighting alongside each other for a long long time and they know their job and they know the man on the right the man on the left who's in charge there how they'll act how they'll think so it's you've got to be careful about using sporting analogies for warfare but there is a sense that that really practiced team can become bigger than the sum of its parts because

everybody knows what they all make the best of their individual talents whereas the group of people you bring together who might be individually far more skilled, they're not used to working together and it takes time to get all these links. The Macedonians have had that time, the Persians haven't. So eventually the Macedonians win because they fight their way through. But casualties are significant to them. And then the big massacre occurs, as in most ancient battles, when one side runs away. And you have Ptolemy, the later king of Egypt, and one of the historians, claims to have written about riding over a stream that was bridged with corpses. There was clearly a sort of nightmarish element. Alexander's men kill a lot

of people as they run away, just as Philip's men always done, because the aim is always, let's not fight this enemy again. However, in proportion to the size of the army and the fact that all of Alexander's cavalry has fought extensively in the battle this pursuit probably isn't quite as ruthless as we might imagine because there aren't enough people to do it and they're all exhausted when they start it's absolutely extraordinary what you were saying there and i just loved it all of it because from what you were saying there of course alexander he's at the head of the decisive parts of the battle as it were perhaps first on foot and then mounts the cavalry and charges on the right but is it often overlooked the importance to Alexander's victories to his leadership style of his senior subordinates

people for instance like Craterus, Parmenion and Perdiccas people like that who are leading the other parts of the army who Alexander has this complete trust in to be able to basically manage and command independently during the battle. It is. It comes down to trust. As time will go on, fewer of the successor kings have the same level of trust because they don't have that same team. And all these people, it's worth thinking of Napoleon's marshals or the allied generals in the second war they're big personalities they often clash they don't always get on with each other but there's that basic element of trust and they know each other so well you know they know that someone will always do this but it comes down to that sense that it's almost a chicken

and egg situation alexander and philip can lead in this heroic way because they have good subordinates they have good subordinates and that means they can lead in this heroic way because they have good subordinates. They have good subordinates, and that means they can lead in this way. But the fact this army has become so good, and it's had such a long period of always winning, no matter how tough things are, we win in the end. And that assumption that it's always going to work out, it's always going to be fine, is a great, great strength. And it is part of the system. And it comes down, we think of the big names, Craterus, Parmenion, people like that. But the lower level, they're often named when they die or when they're promoted. The people who command the individual units of the phalanx, who command the hypaspis, all those different levels that the whole system is geared towards hierarchy.

And although the casualty rate is significant, it's not so very high. It's not like the First World War or the Second World War where your junior officers are dying at a prodigious rate, so have to be replaced. Many of these people stay at the same post or similar post for many, many years. And they fight lots of times and they get wounded, but they survive. So this really is an incredible team. And it's that that gives it its strength. In many respects, tactics, the weaponry is important. But in the end, other people in later years will have the same tactics, same weaponry, and they're not as good. It's that human element that makes this so special. And even after the conquest of the Persian Empire, the fall of the Persian Empire, as it were, as Alexander continues his conquests east,

does this team stay intact? It gradually changes, as obviously, you know, Parmenion will be executed after the supposed conspiracy of his son, Philotas. Some will die. His other son, Nicanor, had died several months before. And Alexander can promote, at the beginning of his reign, he can't really get rid of all of Philip's men and put in his own contemporaries, his own friends, partly because that's going to upset everybody and you'll get rebellion, but also his own friends aren't experienced. So Alexander is learning as he goes along. So are the likes of Ptolemy, Craterus, Hephaestus.

And some are good, some are bad, the same as well. But they are learning and they get increasing jobs that are responsible. They get these roles as time passes. But you look at the wars of Alexander's successors, an awful lot of the leaders involved are Philip's men, and they're old. They're much older than Alexander. And it comes back to this sense that, for whatever reason, there's a lot of tough old men around in this period, like the Illyrian king Bardalus is in his 80s, who Philip defeats at the beginning. And many people like this, if they hadn't been executed, they show no sign of slowing down. These are still very active

battlefield commanders when we would consider them long past retirement age. So partly it's natural process as people die. Partly it's because Alexander can do more. He has more freedom to appoint his own men as time passes. So it's a gradual thing, and it has to work lower down. There's again an interesting quote from Justin, talking about the army that Alexander takes to Persia in the first place, and saying that he didn't look for young soldiers, but for the veterans. Even the rank and file are men in their 30s and 40s when they start. And it seems very odd to us because we tend to associate soldiers with very much a youthful thing. But it isn't that sort of army, which must have made Alexander's

youth stand out all the more. And when he doesn't grow a beard and remains clean shaven and some of his friends do the same. So there is a difference, but I think it sometimes works in his favour, sometimes doesn't. I find it then that it's even more astonishing that these figures continue to follow Alexander as he goes further and further east, conquest after conquest, seemingly having no intention of consolidation or anything like that, that these figures are still willing, up to a point, to follow him. I think some of it's habit, some of it's familiarity, and he keeps winning. It's hard and it's grinding and some of you are falling by the

wayside as you go past. But to some extent or other, they've shared in the great adventure of this, whether or not they believe the Panhellenist stuff or the causes for the war. Look at this incredible thing we're doing. And once Macedonia is a couple of thousand miles away, you can't just say, right, blow this for a game of soldiers, I'm going home. But for a long time, the army is essentially doing what it's done under Philip, but on a bigger scale. Philip has kept on fighting, but you've had the chance to go home for a few months in winter, maybe, where you see your family for part of the year. With Alexander, that's not happening. But you are getting intoxicated, I think, by the sheer scale of what they've done and the wealth that's come. The sheer quantity where it's noted that Alexander

can almost ignore widespread corruption amongst his senior officers because there's so much gold that it doesn't matter. He's still got enough for what he wants. And there's a strain. And I think at several points, particularly with the mass of the army, there's this feeling, right, we've defeated Persia, we've beaten Darius, we've got to Persepolis, we've burned that down. Let's go home. It's done. Let's finish. Let's have a break. Doesn't mean we never want to fight for you again. We might in a few years' time, but give us a bit of time. Alexander just can't seem to see that. It's a temperamental thing. He doesn't really seem that interested in ruling. As far as we can tell, though, again, we don't have a lot of the

documentation, the letters he's writing, but if you look at the sheer amount of time he spends traveling and fighting, we focus on the big battles, the famous battles, but there's only four of those in the whole campaign, the whole series of campaigns. But he's fighting nearly all the time. He's leading these raids. He's leading these drives through hostile territory, or it becomes hostile even if it wasn't at the start because you've attacked them. And he's in these sieges of this walled city after walled city after village and the mountains again and again and again. And these are every bit as dangerous in many ways as the big battle just because you die in a skirmish that no one will ever hear of you're just as dead or just as injured as you would be at the battle of issus without the fame and association it keeps on going but

there are clearly problems as well when alexander finally does say to a lot of the soldiers you can go home they don't quite know what to make of it. This has been their life. You can talk to people from the Second World War generation about the end of it. When you've been in the armed forces for years and suddenly they say you can go home. You didn't want to sleep in a bed or they heard a car backfiring and throw themselves down on the pavement. You hear these stories. How do you switch off? It's clear that Alexander, it's almost like a drug for him. He's got to keep going. It's what he does. This is his life.

There's no experience of anything else. What would he do? So it's a problem. Again, we're only getting glimpses of this. And you guess at some idea. But Alexander clearly misreads the mood of his men and his officers on several occasions. And yet, when it comes to a fight, he can always inspire them. And there's that sense of, okay, I don't like you so much anymore, but yeah, you might be not the

best king, but you're my king, and you're my Alexander, and I followed you before, and I'll do it one more time. It is a relationship that develops and is mixed and has tensions within it, but there is still that sense, like a family, that yeah, of this i can't quit now i can't let him down and i can't let everybody else down as well with the tipping point when you get a mutiny there's got to be enough of them that have actually decided no we're not doing this anymore as they do in india of course especially when we consider the amount of wounds i think he suffers so many wounds doesn't he fighting alongside the front ranks of his men and he's just like i've suffered these wounds with you i guess perhaps there's a feeling of guilt as well, but also a feeling of absolute adoration for someone who isn't just their leader.

He is someone who is with them in the front ranks, whether it's a siege or a battle, risking his life. Yes, that whole sense of the idea of the companion. He is your king, he's your leader, but you're not a subject. You're a companion. You're all sharing. You're all Macedonian. You've done this incredible thing. And yes, you've got other people in the army as well.

But at the heart, there's still this core of Macedonians or foreigners who've come and been made companions of the king. That's what's happened under Philip and will under Alexander. They're tied together by that common experience. And almost anything human, you go through something difficult with a group of people, you will get much closer to them in a short time. You may then meet them in different contexts and not understand why, but it's a human dynamic. It's just that these are people. They're not, you know, they come from a different culture. They have very different attitudes about all sorts of things,

but basically they're flesh and blood people, much like us. So there's almost a sense of, yeah, I'm in this, I've said I'm going to do it, so I've got to do it. And in the modern world, there's less emphasis on ideas of duty, of loyalty, of obligation to others. We're a culture of rights, perhaps. Not those things don't exist. They do often in the way that you'll see people will look after an old friend or somebody in the family, perhaps more than they might do other, they just feel that's the right thing to do. Magnify all of that for this society that is very much based around these relationships. And then the incredible success and the wounds that you mentioned, you know, the suffering, he's gone through it as well. He's done this with us. For all the criticism you had of your

Marshall Hague and people like that, most veterans of the First World War left him right to the end. Lord Raglan in the Crimea was incredibly popular. Sometimes these odd relationships happen. And there's that intangible as well that's so hard to tell. He clearly had charisma or whatever you want to call it, as did Philip. Somebody else could have done all these same things and not been loved and not been liked and not been followed. But some human beings have that spark in them that make the rest of us do things we wouldn't do for anybody else. You can look at bust statues, you can look at portraits of Napoleon saying, look and think,

well, how did he mesmerise these people? Even film of Hitler, how did he do that? But he did. When human beings meet, there's something that works, fame, star quality, whatever it is that makes people do things. There are so many more questions I would love, fame, star quality, whatever it is, that makes people do things. There are so many more questions I would love to ask, but unfortunately, I don't think we've got time to ask them all. Like religion, the Persians, his relationship with women and all that. But just a couple really to finish it off. By the time the end of Alexander's reign, 325 to 323, Alexander's reign, 325 to 323, theoretically his empire is stretching from the central Mediterranean from Greece all the way to the Indus River Valley in Monde, Pakistan. But do we see in these years

when he's back in the centre at Babylon, do we see any hints of Alexander trying to consolidate, trying to create a strong base for this new empire? Only to the extent that he's largely trying to do the sort of things Philip's done, but on a bigger scale. So he's trying to admit some of the nobility of Persia and other regions. He starts to take wives from them, but also points them to high command, creates a Persian bodyguard, and this causes tension with Greeks and Macedonians. You have the mass wedding ceremony, where a lot of his companions and soldiers are given Persian brides, but of course he doesn't bring over a load of Macedonian women and marry them off to Persian men. So it's very one-sided. You have to remember even Babylon, I mean, we sort of think about it,

yeah, this is more like the centre, but it's actually quite far to the west, and it'll be even more marked under the Seleucids when the successor came, the capital goes to Antioch. There is a sense you still think the real and most important part of the world is there. He's got these plans for this big Arabian expedition. There's all sorts of rumors about going to North Africa, going to Western Europe, all these sort of things. And the Aryan comment that whatever he planned,

it wasn't going to be on a small scale, probably is pretty fitting. He doesn't seem to have wanted to sit down. And even though he's been badly wounded in India, shot through the chest with an arrow, there isn't a good case to be made that he is somehow rendered crippled and can't do things in the same way he could,

because he clearly is going on leading exactly as he has before. He doesn't fight so much because there's fewer opportunities, but he does a bit. And he certainly is on the march and riding, which he couldn't do if he'd had a collapsed lung or all these things that people have suggested. So he's still going strong. He's only in his 30s. He didn't know he was going

to die. And I don't think he was going to stop. You look at that empire and it does seem unwieldy. One of the problems is that the way Philip succeeded, the way Alexander, is that you keep moving and you take the people you've just conquered and defeated, make them allies, they go and fight somebody else with you. And then that bonds them to you. And you get reward. And then you do that with the next lot and the next lot. So it's very hard to stop. And the other thing we forget, it's rather like looking at what were Julius Caesar's

plans before his murder on the Ides of March. He's only in Rome for a few months. Alexander doesn't have a lot of time. By the time he's finished traveling, and he then shoots off down the Euphrates and Tigris to go and look at, you know, let's try and find our way to the Persian Gulf, he doesn't sit down at any stage and say, right, this is what my empire is going to be. This is how it's going to work. And I want these people there. And I want this and start to create the team to do it. It's much more done on the hoof. And let's see how it goes. And let's work it all

out. And it's very personal. It's the idea, I appoint someone who's loyal to me. Now, those sorts of things can work. And whether it would have kept going probably depends on whether a challenger emerged anywhere else. But Alexander might have been lucky to die when he did, in that there was probably more prospect of rebellion, as you get with a lot of imperial powers. You get the initial conquest, there's struggle, and then a generation grows up that thinks, hang on a minute, we're conquered, I don't like this, and rebels and resents it. That may well have been about to happen. It's less than we might think. Again, the sources tend to focus on the successors fighting each other rather than controlling individual regions. But it wasn't straightforward. So I don't think he did. I don't think consolidation

was in his nature. And he was really just planning for the next thing. And imagine, had he gone to go and attack Carthage or Rome or wherever it might be, how would that man be controlling kingdoms and satraps in northern India? In the modern world, that would be pretty mind-boggling. So you have to wonder, is this realistic? Is it just something he's managed to do, got away with? But then he's also trusted, well, let's see what works out. And if they rebel, I can always go and defeat them again.

Because the Macedonian core of the army is still pretty small. It's added on all these other bits. But when the Macedonians say no to a further advance in India, he has to turn around. He can't just say, well, I'll take all the Scythians I've got and the Sakai and Dahi and Persians, and I'll go and fight anyway. There's still part of him that is still king of Macedon. there's still part of him that is still king of Macedon. But no matter how threadbare perhaps the stability of the empire is, and what may have happened if he'd lived longer,

his legacy is undeniable, especially for the spreading of Greek culture. Yes, Greek becomes the lingua franca, the language for communications between communities, between individuals. We have to remember again, the tradition and the roots of civilization in much of what Alexander conquers are far, far deeper than they are anywhere in Europe, including Greece. You've got civilized communities that have organized, that have been literate, they've been record keeping, they've been organizing themselves to irrigate the land, whatever it might be, for thousands of years before he arrives. So Greek culture and the Macedonian culture is almost an extra layer you add on to the top. And some people buy into it and some don't. And some ideas spread and others don't. I think plenty of people, it doesn't have to be necessarily an aggressive thing in that

people can actually choose because you get kingdoms that emerge with later kings like Bithynia, Pontus, this sort of thing, that clearly have Palmyra later on. They have deep traditions of their own. They've taken bits of the Greek and the Macedonian as well, and later they'll take bits of the Roman. But it doesn't stop them being themselves. It's almost a development. But on the other hand, it is there. It's how Greek ideas spread. It's why the heart of the Roman Empire, the bit of the Roman Empire that will last longer is the Greek speaking bit. And why, you know, you'll get a New Testament written in Greek, why scholars in Alexandria would be translating Jewish scriptures before that into Greek.

So certain ideas come all the way through. On the other hand, you've got the paradox that in the long run, once you have the collapse of Sassanid Persia and the rise of Islam, there'll be less trace of Greek and particularly Roman culture in many of these areas.

And there would be, say, in Europe, where the Romans weren't there for quite so long. So it's an odd mixture. And we sometimes forget we're dealing with centuries and things change. And it isn't always a simple evolution of this one thing goes along on one thread. It can go another way. Things can alter. But it is a huge difference. And it certainly speeded things up. There were already Greeks in a lot of these places before Alexander got there. But it adds to the fact that when you see those mergings of culture and you see Gandharan art with the Greek influence, but also it's people coming together and saying, I like that idea. I like this. Let's put it all together.

So it adds another important thread, another important layer to what's already quite a complex mix and we'll keep on. New ideas, new thoughts will come along. So it does make a huge difference. So it's the legacy, but it isn't the empire Alexander founded or dreamed about. It turns into something else. Adrian, this has been a fantastic chat. Last thing, your book is called? Philip and Alexander, Kings and Conquers. Fantastic. A brilliant book. Adrian, thank you so much for coming on the show thank you for having me you