The Ancients - The Other Alexander

Episode Date: November 8, 2020

Alexander, an Ancient Greek king and a victorious conqueror. No, not that one, not Alexander the Great. This time, we’re talking about his uncle, Alexander I of Molossia. In 334BC, when Alexander the Great advanced east to conquer the Persian Empire, Alexander of Molossia was travelling west across the Ionian sea to the south of Italy. In addition to their matching names and simultaneous expansionist expeditions, both Alexanders were brought up in the court of Philip II of Macedon. But whilst one remains a household name, the other has sunk into obscurity. To explore the life of this lesser known Alexander, Tristan was joined by Dr. Ben Raynor. Ben is a former Moses and Mary Finley Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. He talks us through Alexander I of Molossia’s formative years in Philip’s court, his relationship with the Macedonian king and his own successes as a leader. Ben and Tristan also delve into the legends about Alexander’s death, and his omission from popular history.

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. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, I'm delighted to say that we are looking at one of these forgotten figures

of the ancient Mediterranean world. Now, in our previous podcast, we were talking about Alexander the Great and his father, Philip II, with the one and only Adrian Goldsworthy. And today, we're kind of keeping on a similar theme because we are talking about the other Alexander. This is one of my personal favourite stories from antiquity. Now in the same year that Alexander the Great set forth to conquer the mighty Persian Empire in 334 BC, exactly the same year, slightly further to the west in what is now northwest Greece slash southern Albania, there was another King Alexander who set forth on his own intrepid

expedition west across the Ionian Sea to southern Italy. His name was King Alexander I of Molossia and his story about how he tried to forge his own empire in southern Italy is absolutely extraordinary. And joining me today to talk through the life, what we know and what are the stories surrounding King Alexander I of Molossia is Dr. Ben Rayner. Ben has written papers all about Alexander I of Molossia and what we know about him. Ben has written papers all about Alexander I and Melosha and what we know about him. And it was great to get him on the show to talk through the forgotten, remarkable story of the other Alexander. Ben, great to have you on the show. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. It's exciting. Now, it's very exciting indeed.

And one of the things I love so much about this podcast is that I'm able to do episodes to shine a light on these figures, these remarkable figures who seem to have fallen through the cracks, as it were. And this is no less true of this figure. This is the story of the other Alexander. The other Alexander, indeed, overshadowed by the Alexander that everyone thinks of, inevitably, Alexander the Great. But it's Alexander the Molossian. He's got an amazing story in his own right. Looking forward to digging into it a bit. Now, you mentioned the Molossian there. What was and where is the kingdom of Molossia? So the kingdom of Molossia was in the ancient region of Epirus. And that was in the northwest of what we traditionally think of as the center of the Greek world in antiquity.

It's the area that spans either side of the modern border between southern Albania and northwest Greece. It's a mountainous area, high pastures, wooded slopes, rushing rivers. It's quite bucolic and very cold in winter. It was looked upon by Greeks from the city-states of the south as a little bit backward, a little bit rustic, a little bit like stepping back in time to an earlier point in their conception of Greek history. Marsh is in this region. It's in an upland plain inland around the area of the modern city of Oianina. So just to confirm, it is not the very small independent nation

in the centre of the United States that there is today? Believe not. That's not my period, so who knows? Okay, so the mid-fourth century BC, what is the situation with the Kingdom of Molossia at this time? The Kingdom of Molossia at this time, it's small. It's not very well known. It's not one of the major players in the region or in the Greek world generally in terms of political or military clout. Now, Molossians were only one of several peoples in the area of roughly equal size and equal importance, others being the Caeonians or the Thesprotians. These population groups sometimes worked together, sometimes clashed with each other. It's quite isolated, Molossia, at this time. It's in the uplands. It doesn't have easy access to the coast within its territory.

It's got a couple of things going for it. It controls the ancient Oracle of Zeus at Dodona. This is one of the most prestigious and most famous oracles in the Greek world. Herodotus thought it was the oldest of the major Greek oracles, and it gets mentioned in Iliad and the Odyssey. People came from all over the Greek world to visit the oracle at Dodona. Quite a trek up into Molossia, but people did it anyway. And we've got thousands of these lead lamellae, these little lead sheets that people wrote their questions on to ask the God. All sorts of lovely domestic personal stuff about their children, their property,

their agriculture. The other thing Molossia was a little bit known for was its royal house, as we will absolutely talk more about as we go on. They were known as the Iacids because of their supposed descent. They claimed descent from the line of Achilles, that Achilles of the Iliad. And the fame of them and their house largely comes later. But in the mid-fourth century, they were a bit connected. They had some connections across the rest of the Greek world. But a major oracle and a relatively well-known royal house didn't do Melosia a lot of good in the mid-4th century against their big problem, which was aggressive neighbors. They had a lot of trouble defending themselves against peoples from the north that the Greek sources generally just call Illyrians. And they made a regular habit of raiding southward into Molossia and into Macedonia nearby,

and that was the big problem facing Molossia, inability to defend itself. So is this the kind of kingdom that Alexander is born into? This quite old, prestigious, well-known kingdom with these famous landmarks, as it were, but also trouble with raiding neighbours? Yeah, absolutely. So Alexander, he was the son of the Molossian king at around this time, Neptolemus, and as you say, born into this relatively isolated, small, weak kingdom. But with this sense, no doubt, of his descent, of his importance in a web of interconnected elite families

across the Greek world that claim this kind of mythical descent. They weren't the only ones to do this. Lots of other elite Greeks had this grandiose idea of their own lineage. He was born into this house sometime in the late 360s BC, and his father Neptolemus died when Alexander was quite young, and so he would have grown up in the court of his uncle, Erebus. And so what do we know about this early life of Alexander before he becomes king? Not a great deal. Melosha is one of those areas of the Greek world that tends to pop up when it crosses the path of a greater power or a greater set of stories that narrative historians at the time focus on. But we can estimate about when he was born because of what we know about how old he was

when he took the throne. Spoiler alert, but what else we know or we can infer about him before he takes the throne of Molossia is when his uncle, the king, has dealings with Philip II of Macedon, Alexander the Great's father and Alexander the Great's predecessor as ruler of Macedon. Philip spent his reign absolutely transforming the fortunes of Macedon. Philip spent his reign absolutely transforming the fortunes of Macedon from, like Molossia really, a backwater kingdom into the major power on the Greek peninsula. Part of his policy for doing that was securing his borders with marriages to the peoples that bordered Macedon. Molossia was one of these, and so Alexander would have been about five or six when his older sister, Olympias,

was married to Philip II to form an alliance between Molossia and Macedon. About the only other thing we know, and the first time we encounter Alexander himself properly, is again when their paths cross with Macedon. And Alexander himself isn't having a great time in this one. His uncle, Arabas, has managed to get on the wrong side of Philip. And in 349, Philip defeated Arabas and takes the young Alexander hostage to ensure Arabas' good behaviour. So one can imagine Alexander, now in his early teens, was not completely thrilled, but it would, as we'll talk about, set him on a path to the throne of Melosha himself. So in hindsight, possibly he saw it as a blessing. So Alexander, for his teenage years, he's not actually in his home kingdom. He's a hostage at the centre of the kingdom of Macedonia.

Yes, he is indeed with his sister, the queen, and his brother-in-law, Philip. And I think it's probably hard to overstate the importance of this day in the Macedonian court for Alexander's subsequent career. What we know about how young elite men were brought up in the Macedonian court at the time, it's very much the upbringing that Alexander the Great himself would have had. It was a society that four men of that class stressed the importance of athletic skill, of skill in the hunt, of military skill, skill in personal combat, and all of that wrapped up in this intense culture of competition. I mean, you had to strive to be better than everyone around you. So we can imagine the

young Alexander the Molossian being taken from his smaller, slightly less well-known, slightly more isolated kingdom, suddenly thrust into the centre of this intensely competitive upbringing, while Philip himself was going to war, constantly expanding Macedon aggressively. So he had the example of Philip and Philip's actions and saw what it did for Macedon, how it enriched Philip and those around him, and how it changed Macedon's fortunes completely. I think all of this will have a big impact on Alexander going forward. I mean, absolutely, because Philip II, he is transforming the central Mediterranean of mainland Greece, making Macedon the dominant power. And you can imagine for someone like Alexander the Molossian at Philip's court, watching this happen, as you say, it must have

had a profound influence on him and what he thought was what he should do when we get onto that later. I think so. I think so. I think anyone, particularly in the formative age that Alexander was, being witness to genuinely transformative events. We don't have a lot of detail about his day-to-day while he was there. A lot of this is inference about what we know more generally about the upbringing of young Macedonian elite men at this time. But he had as front seat a view as anyone of this process, and it can't but have made an impact on him. Because you mentioned Olympias there a bit earlier, being his sister. So does that mean that Alexander the Molossian is the uncle of the famous Alexander the Great?

It does. It does. So yes, Alexander the Great was Alexander the Molossian's nephew. And there are other Alexanders around as well. They didn't have a great imagination in terms of a variety of names, it seems, this set of royal houses, but absolutely, uncle of Alexander the Great. So how long does Alexander the Molossian spend in Macedonia? When does he return to his home kingdom? So he is taken hostage in around 349 BC, and he returns home, is returned home around 343. So it doesn't sound like a long time, but he's there for a very eventful six or so years in the history of Macedon. And I think, again, at his young age, and given the kind of education he was having, very formative years. The way he gets back is, it really seems like Philip did not get on with Alexander's uncle,

who is still on the throne of Molossia, with young Alexander being kept hostage for his good behaviour. But Arabass manages to fall out with Philip again, and this time Philip decides to be done with him. He invades Molossia, gets rid of Arabassas and installs Alexander instead as king in Melosha. Because it seems that he and Philip got on very well. There's, for one thing, the very fact that Philip installed him on the throne in Melosha to try and maintain this alliance more concretely is itself a sign that Philip had a lot of trust in Alexander. There's a much later source that also alleges that they had an intimate relationship. So they could have been very close indeed and have a real personal bond. But that's how Alexander returns to claim his throne.

He is shoved upon it by the man who had been keeping him hostage. Not an auspicious start. Well, not an auspicious start. I can imagine that there are from then on strong ties between Alexander's kingdom and the Macedonians to the northeast. There absolutely are. This is the primary reason really why Alexander the Molossian gets overshadowed is because from this point forward, Molossian history and Macedonian history are very much intertwined because of these links between their royal houses. I mean, you've got the close relationship between Alexander and Philip we were just talking about. Obviously, Philip is married to Olympias.

Alexander the Molossian himself is married to a daughter of Philip II of Macedon by another wife called Cleopatra, who goes on to have her own very impressive career in politics in this period. They actually get married in 336 BC, and Philip II is assassinated at the festivities of their wedding. So yet another inauspicious thing happening in Alexander the Molossian's life. But there we are. But this alliance between Macedon and Molossia was important to both sides. More important to Molossia, I would say, probably by the time that Alexander I is installed on the throne in 343. Early in Philip II's reign, it was important for him to secure his borders, hence the series of alliances making marriages. But by the time we get to 343, Macedon, it's the major power in the entire Greek peninsula. So it's very important for Alexander I of Molossia, when he gets back to Molossia and takes over the throne, to stay on the right side of Macedon.

But he seems to have a very good relationship with Philip. This seems to be an alliance he can expect to maintain. have a very good relationship with Philip. This seems to be an alliance he can expect to maintain. And Philip shows his trust in Alexander. Actually, when he puts him back on the throne, he expands Molossian territory massively. He hands over gifts to Alexander the Molossian, three cities and a stretch of coastline, because this is the sort of thing you can do when you're Philip of Macedon in the 340s, just hand over some cities. So Alexander the Molossian, he's back, and he's ruling over a much bigger Molossia than any of his predecessors had. His territory has access to the coast now, which is important for communication with the wider world and trade. And he has a great relationship with the most powerful man

in the Greek peninsula. So some inauspicious elements, but also it's looking up for him. So he has this strong base somewhat provided by his ally, and I'm guessing it's a base that he'd want to build on quite substantially. Absolutely, yes. And I think we can trace that desire to some of the things we were talking about earlier, you know, the culture he's been brought up in in the Macedonian court, but also by seeing the example of Philip. I mean, Philip started ruling quite a small and weak kingdom himself in 360 BC, and then he conquers other Macedonian kingdoms, he conquers beyond the region of Macedonia, and Alexander's been seeing all of this. He's been seeing what you can do as a young energetic king if you take chances, if you take risks,

if you aim for aggressive expansion. And absolutely, he looks to replicate that with Molossia and in the region of Epirus. And so how does he go about doing that? Well, again, it's a matter of inference, because the sources are not good. The sources are basically not there, unfortunately, for Alexander I's reign in Molossia and Epirus itself. We have this gap in the sources between around 343 when he gets put back on the throne by Philip II and his Italian campaign from 334. from around this time and immediately after Alexander's reign. And we can try and piece together from what we can see in these sources, what Alexander I might have done at home, as it were, in Molossia and in Epirus. So the caveat here is that these sources are very difficult, they're fragmentary, they're sparse, they're difficult to interpret. And what I'm about to talk about is my personal take on these sources and what Alexander does in Molossia and Epirus.

But broadly speaking, what we see from around Alexander's reign and immediately afterwards is more peoples in Epirus beginning to act together in political and military contexts. So as I said, we've got the Molossians that Alexander I rules over and that his royal house has ruled over for a long time. There are other peoples living in the region of Epirus. I mentioned a couple of them earlier, Coneans and Thesprotians. And these peoples have lived alongside each other for a long time. There's been cooperation, there's been rivalry, but they've always lived separate community lives. They've always been essentially separate. But now for the first time, we begin to see them acting together as Epirotes. This is new. This is something different.

This is something that they've not done before, acting in concert as a group of peoples living in a region together. So in our written sources, we begin to see them fighting together and taking political decisions in common. We see the name Epirus appear for the first time in contexts that make it look like it's a state, an independent political entity. And we have coins of the Epirotes, which again would seem to indicate that a group calling themselves the Epirotes at this time have enough organisation to mint coinage and

guarantee its value. And this is all new, and it dates from late in Alexander's reign or immediately afterwards. This suggests that this phenomenon of the Epirotes coming together to exist for the first time and acting concert for the first time happened under Alexander I. You take what else we've been talking about, what we know about Alexander I's upbringing, his ambitions, the example that was set for him by Philip in Macedon, and I think you can make a strong argument that a major reason we see this happening with the Epirotes is that Alexander I pursued it as king of Molossia. He came to the throne of Molossia, took the experience he had of expansion from living in Macedon and his ambition that had been inculcated in him by his education and decided, I'm going to try and bring together the peoples of the region, although bring together might be euphemistic. One imagines there was quite a bit of conquest and some strong-arming involved, but I'm going to try and forge a regional state in much the same way Philip of Macedon did. I can

gain personal glory from it, but I can enrich myself, my friends, and it can act as a springboard for further activity, further conquest, further aggression. Because uniting the tribes, that must give you a significant increase in the amount of manpower that you have available. Absolutely. And I think this has to be one of the things that underlies the future success of Epirote kings, because Alexander is not only Alexander the Molossian, he's not only overshadowed by Alexander the Great, but he's overshadowed by other members of his family. Contemporary, I'd say Olympias is probably more famous than Alexander, but also later, Pyrrhus is probably the most famous Aekid king. But Pyrrhus' success, I don't think would have been

possible without the manpower, as you say, and military resources uniting Epirus, or at least beginning to, provided the Aekid kings for their aggressive expansion. He seems to set in motion this political transformation in his kingdom. What is next for Alexander? Where does his expansionist eyes lure him to? Well, he can't look east. That's Alexander the Great. I think it's one of the things that often gets forgotten in Alexander the Great's story is that eastward expansion is a policy he inherited from his father. He inherited that from Philip. So even while Philip is still alive, there are Macedonian armies and expeditionary force in Asia Minor. And also he can't look to the Greek mainland,

because that's very much Macedon's fear of influence now. You can't do anything major in a political military sense on the Greek mainland without Macedonia's say-so. So he has to look elsewhere. And the obvious direction is west, towards the Italian peninsula, towards Sicily, and towards Africa. So I can imagine he was reasonably pleased when a Greek city to the west, Tarentum in southern Italy, came calling, looking for a general to help them. So he receives this call for aid from this Italian Greek city-state from across the sea. Brilliant, absolutely amazing. This is like what he's been waiting for. I know, it couldn't have come at a better time. It seems serendipity. I mean, again,

we know so little about filling in the blanks in Alexander's policy, but it certainly came along at the right sort of time. This call to aid was made by Tarentum in 335. And so this is the same year that Alexander the Great, he's succeeded to the throne of Macedon the previous year, and is consolidating his position in Greece, and he would shortly launch himself on his grand Asian expedition. And one can't help but imagine that Alexander the Molossian is looking at what Alexander the Great is doing over the mountains in Macedon and thinking, what can I do? My argument is that he spent a few years trying to unite the tribes in Epirus, really build up a strong domestic position there. But maybe he's reaching the limits of that. Maybe he's looking for something larger. And it comes along at just the right time. He wasn't the first

Greek general to go looking for glory in southern Italy, of course. So why did Turandot make the request? general to go looking for glory in southern Italy, of course. So why did Tarenta make the request? The Greek city-states in south Italy had been having a lot of trouble from around the mid-fourth century with military pressure from Italian tribes living in the interior. And at one point, they might have been able to see off this pressure themselves. But it seems that from around the middle of the fourth century, they increasingly became unable to do so. They didn't seem to have the manpower and the resources themselves to effectively stop raids from these Italian tribes and from their cities being conquered. There's major and endemic warfare in southern Italy at this time, andidamus, has a go. He's invited over by Tarentum in the late 340s, but does not succeed, dies in 338 fighting the Italian tribes. And so Tarentum has to go looking

for someone else to help them. And they find a sympathetic ear in Alexander of Epirus. Geographically too, it's not too far away. How long is it between Alexander receiving this embassy before he accepts it and then gathers the army and then heads across the sea to southern Italy to their aid? Pretty rapidly. He was keen. Trentum seems to send out this request in 335 and the next year, 334, Alexander is off to Italy. So he was ready to go. So the same year that Alexander the Great heads off from Macedon east into Asia for his conquest of the Persian Empire, Alexander the Molossian, with his own army, sails across the Ionian Sea west to southern Italy for his own great, well, what he hopes to be his own great campaign of conquest.

It's a lovely bit of symmetry, isn't it? And ancient authors themselves picked up on this. And there's this passage in Strabo that does this quite florid comparison where it says it seemed as if the entire world had been split in two and that Alexander of Epirus, the other Alexander that we're talking about, he thought that he would have as much scope for glory in Italy, Sicily and Africa as Alexander the Macedonian would have in Asia and Persia. It's this very florid, overblown passage, but hindsight is 20-20. But if we think about all the stuff that we've been talking about, about Alexander I's upbringing, about the fact that he might have reached the limits of his expansion in mainland Greece, this heroic model of kingship that demanded this kind of aggression and this expansion to gain glory and gain prestige, even taking away the temporal coincidence, I think we can

very reasonably picture that Alexander the Molossian, Alexander of Epirus, had great hopes for his Western campaign, really hoped this would be a springboard to the same sort of massively successful aggressive expansion that Philip and Alexander had enjoyed taking Macedonian resources to do so. And so how does this campaign progress? Does it start well? It does start well, even though it's one of the episodes of Alexander's career that we know more about. We still wish we would know more. We can't reconstruct it in full detail, but from our later Roman sources, we get quite an impressive list of peoples that Alexander defeated, the Italian tribes he'd been called over to defeat, the Brutians, the Lucanians, the Apulians, all of whom had enjoyed significant success against the

southern Italian Greek cities. He seems to do very well against them to start with. A notable thing we get as well is a list of cities that Alexander conquered and or liberated. I imagine that depends upon your perspective. They're spread about. They're quite far from each other around southern Italy. Heraclea, Supontum, Consentia, Torino, once you plot them on a map, they are a significant distance from each other. So the impression one gets is of a campaign that started very well. He had a great deal of military success. And it seems to be a restless, energetic campaign ranging over much of southern Italy. And it is the sort of thing that

you would expect from Alexander, given his upbringing, his ambition. And he's got a solid ally in Tarentum who provide him with a good base of operations and the ability to mint coins to pay his troops. They probably supported him with some funds as well, and possibly some allied troops. So it's all looking good. You mentioned Roman sources a bit earlier. Do we know of Alexander having any contact at all with the Romans at this time? They say he does. They say he does. It's important to remember that Rome in this period, so Alexander's Italian campaign started in 334, and Rome at this time was not the major power it would become in really not that

very many decades. It's not the power that Pyrrhus would face 50-something years in the future, but it was a major power in central Italy. And in 332, Alexander defeats a couple of Italian tribes at the Battle of Paestum, which is close to the Bay of Naples. And this brings him sufficiently far north and west to begin to enter the Roman sphere of influence. And again, reconstructing the campaign, it seems as though Alexander wasn't entirely done fighting the tribes in the south closer to Tarentum and the people who actually hired him to come over to Italy. So he's not looking for trouble further north at the moment. So our sources do record that around this time, he established

friendly relations with Rome. So there was some connection there. Although interestingly, the Roman sources themselves seem pretty certain that these friendly relations would not have lasted had he continued to be successful. One wonders whether that's looking back through their future experience with Pyrrhus or whether it's reflecting a kind of genuine anxiety about this energetic king rampaging around southern Italy. But for now, friendly relations with Rome. We'll get on to Pyrrhus soon, I'm sure. But what happens to Alexander's campaign? It all goes very quickly wrong. And it's really quite a turnabout. Again, we don't know as much about it as we might like, but it seems that shortly after his pretty significant victory at Paestum in 332,

something starts to go wrong for him. There's a suggestion that he falls out with Tarentum, which doesn't help. It's in a late source and it's in a source tradition that is traditionally anti-Tarentum and the whole anecdote comes across as trying to blame the Tarantines for being deceitful and perfidious. So it's difficult to know how seriously to take it. But if there is a kernel of truth there, that would have been a big problem for Alexander. And one could see why it might have come about. Perhaps the Tarantines realised they'd bitten off a bit more than they could chew. Alexander's had, by this point, a couple of years of really successful campaigning in southern Italy. It's perhaps becoming clear that he doesn't intend to leave until he's had a lot more success,

that maybe he's not actually doing it for Tarentum, but for his own glory. And there's also a story that he tried to move the meeting place of the League of Greek Cities that Tarentum is by far the most important member of outside of Tarentum's territory. So again, one could see that as kind of interfering with Tarentum's interest. So it's difficult to know how much of that we should take as true. But if it does indicate some problems with that relationship, it would have been a big problem given how important Tarentum was as a strong base of operations for Alexander in southern Italy. So that could be one reason things started to go wrong. But the real problem seems to have been that he underestimated his enemy and overestimated how much success he'd already had. So sometime in 331,

it seems he decides to campaign very close to the heartlands of a couple of the most problematic tribes, the tribes that had the most problems fighting, the Brutians and the Lucanians. that had the most problems fighting, the Brutians and the Lucanians. And he broadly seems to have encountered more opposition than he expected. And the sources are pretty clear that he was killed in battle near the city of Pandogia in southern Italy. Livy has a wonderfully dramatic passage about Alexander's end and it's pure action film fodder. He says that Alexander positioned his army

on three hills that were nearby each other, and from there he was going to raid out into enemy territory. But then there's freakishly bad weather, the ground gets turned impassable, and two out of these three detachments get cut off and slaughtered, and Alexander is left besieged with the remains of his army on the third hill. And then he cuts his way out, he engages the enemy general in single combat and slays him, and forces through enemy lines, rallies his forces, and tries to get them across a nearby river, but in the midst of doing so is struck down by a javelin thrown by an enemy soldier. It's a very dramatic and florid passage, and even if the details aren't historical, it's probably important to remember that this is the sort of behaviour we could expect from a king like Alexander. Even if the details,

the story itself is fiction, it's plausible. This is the sort of king that Alexander I had been raised to be. And as I say, broadly, it seems that this is the year and the place that he met his end. Is there a prophecy surrounding his end as well? Yeah, it's the major. It probably forms the bulk of the source material that we have on Alexander I. I didn't know how to bring it up, given how unhistorical it seems to be, but it's a good story, so let's tell it. Before embarking on his Italian campaign, Alexander was supposed to have consulted the Oracle of Zeus at Toda, the major and prestigious oracle in Molossia that I mentioned earlier. And I imagine certainly he did this. This is the sort of thing you would do before embarking on a major foreign campaign. The oracle was said to have given him a warning. It warned

him that he was due to meet his destiny, the end of his days, at Pandocia and the River Acheron. Now, Alexander knew of Pandocia and he knew of River Acheron, and they were both in Epirus, they're in Thesprotia. And this was supposed to have encouraged him to go on his foreign expedition to get as far from the Pandoja and the Acheron that he knew, as far from them as possible. Now, as part of the dramatic story that we've just been telling, and it appears in smaller form as well, the story in other sources, but its biggest form is in Livy. Alexander has found himself fighting near Pandosia. And after he's cut his way out of this blockade, and he's trying to force his way across the river, they're having a great deal of difficulty. And one of his soldiers,

who's standing within earshot of Alexander, curses the river and says, Acheron is a good name for you. I'm paraphrasing here, because Acheron was one of the rivers of the underworld, a cursed, dark river with a black reputation. Alexander freezes and realises that he's found himself fighting near Pandosia and trying to cross the river Acheron. And suddenly the message that the oracle was trying to give him becomes clear. He's made a terrible mistake. Why it didn't occur to him while he was fighting near Pandosia? And he waited until crossing the river to realise this is an open question. But it turns out there's a Pandoja and an Acheron in Italy as well. And this is where and why Alexander met his end, because he didn't understand the Oracle's words. It's a great story. A great story, perhaps not completely

non-fictional, shall we say. I wasn't there, you can't say. I imagine it came about because someone realised the coincidence of names between where Alexander met his end and, oh my word, there's a Pandoja and an Acheron in Epirus as well. This is too good not to make something of. Love the story. And so what happens in the aftermath of his death? How is his death received? Again, it's one of those things we wish we knew a little bit more about. There's the general impression of it passing a little bit without notice, which is a little bit sad. There's a late story that Alexander the Great, who as we've already covered, Alexander the Martian was his uncle, that Alexander the Great heard about this while his army was far

to the east. And he put the army and himself into three days of mourning to mark the passing of a close family member. And apparently this made all the Macedonian soldiers think they were going home and they were roundly disabused of that notion quite soon. So Alexander seems to have reacted. This late story is true. We know that the Athenians sent an embassy to Alexander's widow who was left in Epirus. This is Cleopatra, Philip II's daughter, to express their sympathies for her loss. But I mean, one of the more interesting things about his death is how it's remembered in the Roman historical tradition.

We've already mentioned these a couple of aspects. There's the Oracle story, which is how Alexander's death is commonly related. This was a known and a well-known story about his foreign campaigns, it seems as though, as one would, his fortunes were compared to the fortunes of Alexander the Great. And an explanation was sought as to why his expedition and its initial promise didn't turn into the same sort of success that Alexander had. And that's very interesting. There's also, as I said, the conviction in Roman historians that Alexander the Molossian would have turned into a really big problem for Rome if he'd continued to be so successful. So to some extent in the Roman historical tradition, his death is remembered as a blessing, as a jolly good thing for Rome. And when he dies, if he's this charismatic leader, if he's similar to Alexander, does that mean the complete end of his campaign? Does the campaign just melt away with his death?

Yes, it seems to. Again, we don't know really anything about what happens to his army after his death. That in itself is somewhat telling. One has to assume that they broke up into bands, maybe some of them returned to southern Italian cities, maybe some of them found their way back to Epirus if that's where they'd come from in the first place. But absolutely, without Alexander as the charismatic, energetic general at the centre of this entire endeavour, it's his personal campaign, his personal policy, it peters out. I guess it's a great way of looking at Alexander the Great's campaigns as well, seeing that if Alexander the Great had died, for instance, in perhaps Afghanistan or India,

how his army could have just melted away and fallen apart, very similar to what may have happened to Alexander the Molossian's army in southern Italy. Absolutely. And it's a fascinating point to think about how the political structures that underlie these aggressive expansionist armies led by kings of this sort at this time have so little give built in. There's not a contingency plan for when the king around whom the entire endeavour is built, if he dies, what happens? I mean, we do get a version of this when Alexander the Great himself dies, and there is no clear line of succession and what to do with his empire. But absolutely, it does make you think what could have happened, how stillborn

could Alexander the Great's campaign have been if he had died? And he was always trying to get himself killed, putting himself at the forefront of battle. There's a wonderful moment of the Battle of the River Granicus where he's only saved by one of his bodyguards chopping off the arm of an assailant who was about to kill Alexander. So absolutely, it makes you think that luck is with some and not with others. If we go back then to Alexander the Molossian, he's dead now, it's the end of his rule. If we go back then to Alexander the Molossian, okay, he's dead now, it's the end of his rule. What is his legacy? Does he leave a significant imprint on Molossia slash Epirus? I think so. I think it doesn't look like it in the short term. The history of Epirus and the Molossian royal house after Alexander's death is of being an appendage to Macedonian politics. It's of having, for a number of decades at least,

less and less independence, less and less say in Epirote affairs. And Epirus goes through a 20-year period of domination under Macedon at the very end of the 4th century. So it might look, in the shorter term, as though Alexander's reign left very little imprint and that Epirus and Meloscia just had a decline afterwards. I think in the longer term, what we talked about earlier, if you buy that Alexander I spent the first part of his reign trying to construct an Epirote state in Epirus, that he took his base in Meloscia and tried to forge a real political and military community out of the other peoples in the region, I think this is his real significance to the longer term history of

Molossia and of Epirus, because it sets the tone for political and inter-community relations in Epirus for the next century, really. His policy of aggressive expansion in bringing the Epirotes together, it doesn't start, but it acts as a really significant accelerator to a process of these peoples working more and more together, seeing themselves as more and more part of one community. And after Alexander's death, and the further we go on into the later fourth century and into the third century, we see much more of a sense of Epirote community forming. And in the end, it has its full expression in the Epirotes in the later third century, forming their own independent state without a monarchy. By this

point, they felt that they had enough of a community together to take that step. And I think Alexander is a major part of that story. And he also paves the way for one of the greatest warlords in ancient history. Well, indeed, Pyrrhus, the famous Iocid, enemy of Rome. And this is an interesting one in terms of trying to trace the influence of Alexander on Pyrrhus himself, because Pyrrhus is that much later, a number of decades later, and he's living in the world after the disintegration of Alexander the Great's empire or during the disintegration of Alexander the Great's empire. And Pyrrhus has so many strong, energetic, heroic, charismatic kings to learn his craft from. But I think Alexander the Molossian is important to Pyrrhus for a couple of reasons. The first is linked to what we were just talking about in terms of Alexander paving the way for an Epirote community. We know more about the reign of Pyrrhus and Pyrrossians. And as we talked about, without that manpower, without those resources, without Ayakid leadership extending beyond Molossia, there is no career for Pyrrhus of the kind he had.

I think also inspiration for Pyrrhus' own Italian adventures. We have to think about Alexander in that way as well. Tarentum came calling yet again for aid, for a general to come and help them, this time against an encroaching Rome. And perhaps Pyrrhus saw a chance to prove he was better than his forebear here. These kings of this mould, of this heroic, charismatic kingship, they were always in competition with not just their contemporaries,

but also their predecessors. So perhaps Pyrrha saw an opportunity here to prove that Alexander couldn't do it, but I can. Ben, that was a great chat. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been grand. Thank you very much for having me. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова