The Rest Is History - Alexander the Great, with Mary Beard

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

No one was like him, terrible were his crimes… Where was Alexander the Great born, and who were his parents? What drove him to go beyond the Aegean empire he had already carved out for himself, and conquer lands beyond the limits of the Greek world? Why did Alexander eventually turn back, after ten years of conquest? And, how much of his legend is actually true?  In the second episode of this exclusive new series on four of the most iconic subjects from classical antiquity, Tom is joined again by the world renowned classicist, Mary Beard, to discuss one of history’s most famous men: Alexander the Great….hero or villain?  **To hear the full episode, and all the other exclusive new episodes from Mary and Tom's ancient history series, coming out every Friday for the next four weeks, join The Rest is History Club at ⁠therestishistory.com⁠** _______ Twitter:@TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editor: Jack Meek  Social Producer: Harry Balden Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude  Producer: Tabby Syrett Senior Producer: Theo Young-Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to the restishistory.com and join the club. That is, the rest is history.com. Hello, everyone, it's Tom Holland here, and I have teamed up with the great Mary Beard

to bring you four episodes on what we together have decided are the four most iconic themes in ancient history. And today we are looking at Alexander the Great. Here's a short extract of that episode. No one was like him. Terrible were his crimes. But if you wish to blackguard the great king, think how mean, obscure and dull. you are, your labours lowly and your merits less. That was the great American poet Robert Lowell talking about Alexander the Great, who is the theme of today's episode, I'm in conversation with the great Mary Beard. And Mary, I assume you would agree with Robert Lowell that Alexander's, well, let's not call

them crimes, but I mean, he spilled a lot of blood. He's a killer of men. But would you also acknowledge a sense that he is, I mean, almost a figure of myth. It's kind of terrifying and potent in a way beyond the mortal norm. I was going to say that I thought you read that out just to annoy me, Tom, really. Oh, kind of. I wanted to get you in the mood for this. You can't deny that Alexander the Great is worth looking at because so many people have so many people have copied him. He's become such a, going to mythic figure, not just in Western civilization. But actually, you know, throughout the world.

Well, he appears in the Quran, amazingly. Yeah, exactly. So the idea of me being sniffy, as I'm quite tempted to be, but I'm resisting it. The idea of being sniffy and saying, oh, I don't, you know, a young drunken butcher, that isn't good enough. You know, I think we do have to press at both the truth and the myth of Alexander the Great, actually. But you wouldn't go so far as my esteemed colleague on the rest of history and offer Alexander the Great as a role model for little boys and girls

that he suggests that they should follow their dreams. I dread to think of the fate of this country if we start using Alexander the Great as a role model. I'm looking for someone who's got a kind of bit clearer idea of what cooperation and collaboration might be. We're all going to follow our dreams like Alexander the Great. Help. So why don't we begin?

basically by telling the story, and then having done that, kind of open up questions about, well, was he great? How did he come to be seen as great? And actually, kind of slightly like with our previous episode, to what extent are the stories that we tell about Alexander actually likely to be true? But to begin with, Alexander is born to Philip the second of Macedon, which is kind of like the Scotland to the England of classical Greece. I think that's being generous to Macedon, actually. But you're right that Macedon was on the northern margins of what we call ancient Greece. And until the reign of Philip II, it wasn't much to write home about. So in fact, its turning point comes in the reign of Alexander's dad.

And they persist in being issues, you know, right up. to now, but going back to the ancient world of whether we really thought, do we really think that Macedon is part of Greece, or isn't it? Because there's always kind of debate about whether the Kings of Macedon should be allowed to compete in the Olympic Games. That's right. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And also, back in the 5th century, Macedon had been a part of the Persian Empire, which is

the great superpower of the day, had tried to conquer Greece and been flung back. And so the relationship of Macedon to Persia, is also part of the story. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of looking two ways. It's looking at what we would call Greece proper, and it's also looking at Persia. And it's not making any great shakes until Philip II,

from his capital, a place called Pella, actually exerts more or less control, both diplomatically, politically and militarily, over the Greek world and clearly is already and this is mid-fourth century BCE is already beginning to think about what his relationship with Persia is going to be

you have to go back here in order to understand what an earth either Philip or later Alexander is trying to do in moving east to Persia You have to go back to the idea that Persia is the dominant power in the East, which clashes, famously in the 5th century, clashed in what we call the Persian Wars with the Greek world. There were, in the end, the Greeks, those that hadn't gone over to Persia were victorious, but there is a sense that there's unfinished business.

And it clearly is the case that somebody like Philip, while he's putting his thumb pretty firmly in his new found kind of military power, quite how that arises, I think a big mystery, that he can leverage the Greek world by saying, and we're going to get vengeance on the Persian Empire. And there are kind of two factors perhaps that would encourage someone in the Greek world to think that they could have a crack at. Persia. And the first is the sense that perhaps Greek military manpower has the beating of Persian armies. So there's a famous account written by the Athenian Xenophon of a squad of Greek mercenaries who find themselves stranded in Mesopotamia and then are able to march all the way through the Persian Empire and get back home. So that seems exciting. But the other thing is a sense that rather than attacking the Persians, the great powers of the Greek world, Athens, Thebes, Sparta are just tearing chunks out of each other and that it needs a strong man, perhaps,

to crack heads together and to say, come on, guys, let's go and attack the person. And he doesn't manage to crack any Spartan heads together. No, Spartans have always left out, aren't they? And Thebes? Yeah, so Thebes, really, when Philip is a young man, is the great city-state, Philip has gone there as a hostage, and it's kind of the cutting edge of Millie. military development in the Greek world. But when Philip becomes king, he has developed quite a kind of formidable military apparatus, cavalry phalanxes with very, very long spears. I'm sure

you'd love to talk about Macedonian spears. But I mean, it's important that he has kind of developed military technology in a way that, as it turns out, has the beating of the Thebans and the Athenians. And they win, the Macedonians win a great victory, a place called Chironia outside Thebes. And this is where Alexander is very young. He's only 18, I think, and he commands the cavalry there. And Thebes and Athens are kind of brought to submit to Macedonian labor lordship. Athens does better than Thebes. Thebes is well and truly thrashed. Athens is humiliated, or at least in the eyes of some, although there were others who were quite happy to go in with Philip II. But I think what you say is interesting because there are

backstories to all of this. But, you know, Thebes has got a history with Philip the Second of Macedon. The Greek world has got a history with the Persian Empire. And you can't really understand what's going on in the 4th century without seeing the old scores are being settled. Yeah. So Philip is kind of basically, he's conquered Greece and he's gearing up to invade the Persian Empire and then he gets assassinated. Alexander takes over and succeeds him as king. look at Alexander's upbringing, as it is told by biographers and historians writing very much later. Famously, he is the son of a mother who has a thing about snakes.

Olympias, right? And she is the most glamorous of Philip's wives and has some kind of religious affect with snakes. But one thing that's really unusual about Philip, and it may explain something behind the assassination we don't know, is that he has many wives. Macedonian monarchy is polygamous, and that provides you with a lot of potential heirs, but it provides a lot of rivalry at the same time. And so Olympias is not Macedonian. She's from Epirus. And Alexander is the son, but Philip subsequently marries one of the many women in the Greek world called Cleopatra. So this is a theme, isn't it?

Loads of people with the same name. And she is bona fide, Macedonian. And so you've clearly got in the idea when you're thinking of succession plans, Every monarch in the ancient world is always thinking of succession planning and never getting it right. It looks as if Olympias and Alexander are beginning to be worried that they're going to be sidestepped by the true blood of the Macedonian race. Thanks for listening. You can subscribe to The Rest is History Club at The Rest is History Club at The Rest is Hing. History.com to hear the whole episode, to hear the whole series, in due course, and to get

a massive, insanely brilliant range of other benefits. Mary and I will be back next week and we'll be looking at the collapse of the Roman Republic and Julius Caesar.