Show 74 - Mania for Subjugation IV

0:00What you're about to hear is part four of a multi-part series on Alexander the Great, a subject I've talked about since the very first Hardcore History show, and I've finally tried to get the definitive version down. And that would, of course, include a long conversation about his father, the military his father built, the connection between the two. And so there's quite a bit of backstory, which is why we're on part four now. If you've heard the other parts and are ready to get started, we'll get right to it. If you've missed parts one through three and you want to know what happened to get to this point, well, check

0:32them out. And if you haven't heard those and don't care at all, well, here we go. Part four of Mania for Subjugation. December 7th, 1941. It's history. A date which will live in infamy. That's one small step for man. The events. One giant leap for mankind.

0:58I take pride in the words, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their

1:37presidents are coming. The deep questions. I'm not a crook if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine. And remember that we are not descended from fearful men. It's hardcore history. I was thinking the other day about when the role of army commander, war leader, general, whatever we want to refer to it as, when that started, what was the first one of them? And I

2:11guess we would have to sort of lay down some parameters of what we were talking about. But in the way I'm framing it in my head, I got to think Neanderthals had war leaders.

2:24And you think about the relationship when the military force that one of these people is commanding is small. And I think of these Apache leaders like Mangus Colorados or Cuchillo Negro or Pizago Cabazon, these guys would have known all their warriors. And part of the reason they are who they are is because there's this bond between them and trust and a whole bunch of other things. Easy to understand the relationship when it's amongst a small group like that where

2:54everyone knows one another. But as armies get larger, you know, it's not hard to see that that might be more difficult to maintain that relationship when you have 60,000 troops or something. I mean, and if you're Dwight Eisenhower commanding the allied forces in Europe and the, you know, after D-Day, I mean, hard to have a personal relationship with the troops, even when you meet with them, you know, when you have these photo opportunities and they trust you to win battles for them and keep them safe and all these kinds of things. I mean, so there's one level of connection there, but it's not the same as when you have this really

3:27special thing going on. And you see this in the great commanders when the armies get very large because they're rarer. I mean, look at Napoleon's relationship with his army. I mean, I don't know if it really happened this way because it's so freaking dramatic. It's just, it's hard to believe. But I mean, remember when Napoleon comes back from his first exile from the island of Elba and he lands in France with this small little bodyguard and they start marching and, you know, you can almost feel the worm turning now when he's back and he's confronted on the road by, I think it's a battalion

3:59of French troops whose orders are to stop him. And they're there and they're armed. And at one point they're pointing their guns and he gets, instead of a battle breaking out, he gets off his horse famously and, you know, let's hope truthfully and walks up to the line of men who are aiming at him and says, you know, don't you recognize your emperor or something like that. And there's this silence and instead of firing, they, you know, start yelling, vive la emperor. And it's, it's, it's on, right?

4:29But I mean, that's a, that's a special relationship where he's got this connection. And none of those troops, I think they were all like recent recruits too. It's not like they knew him from the, you know, the long wars in Russia or whatever. I mean, that's an institutional loyalty to a general or a emperor in this case, but you develop that. I said earlier in the story where we are in this Alexander, the great tale that you could have won with his army if you just let it go on autopilot. Well, up to this point, remember, even though he's fought with this army

5:04a bunch now, we're a year into his command basically of his dad's army. And he's really beginning to put his stamp on it. And I don't know if you believe Arian or not, but after the battle of the river Granicus, he's got Alexander sitting down with the troops afterwards. And he says some famous things about him listening to their stories and letting them brag all they want and asking them about their injuries and their tales. And he's, you can see a data point here where the relationship that's going to propel this army to do amazing things for this man with this relationship is growing. As I said,

5:40it's only been a year, but if you look at a timeline of this guy's career, I mean, he had all those battles already against the so-called barbarians north of Macedonia. He had the destruction of Thebes. Now he's got this, you know, battle of the river Granicus under his belt. And he and this army are beginning to know one another. And unlike a giant modern force, you're not having people coming going all the time in terms of people being recycled through the forces so that new people are arriving

6:11all the time. Alexander is going to get reinforcements from time to time and send troops back home from time to time. But the majority of this core, this army is going to stay the same. So the relationship that he's developing with these people gets deeper and deeper because it's the same people. And as we move on in this story, this sort of tug of war between Alexander's father's generals, especially Parmenio and Alexander and his new cabal of underlings that are his people is going to start

6:44to show. I mean, up till now, one could make a case that there was almost an equal amount or, you know, 60-40 relationship between Alexander and Parmenio with Alexander at the 60 and Parmenio at the 40. But this is going to change. And you can see it develop with a big victory like this, right? The credibility goes way up when you've done this. And he makes sure everybody back in Greece knows about it because he will send back a shipment to Athens. This is told in Arian 2, a shipment that has

7:16300 suits of Persian armor. Battlefield spoils taken off the dead to be placed in the Acropolis, as a sacrifice to Athena. And on it, it says, according to Arian, and this would have been there for a long time. Lots of people would have seen this. Alexander, the son of Philip, and the Greeks, except for the Spartans, dedicated these spoils from the barbarians occupying Asia.

7:51As we said in the last installment, everything Alexander seems to do here is operating, you know, like three-dimensional chess. He's doing a lot with a little. That one inscription, well, that plays right into all of the propaganda that he's fighting this war against the Persians as payback for what the Persians did in the Greek and Persian Wars 150 years previously, plays right into that. He sends the offering to one of the big two city-states that sort of made their name in that war, right? It was

8:22Athens and Sparta. The Athenians fought at the Battle of Marathon so famously, made a lot of hay with that ever since. The Spartans, of course, had that, you know, made-for-TV moment at the Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 of them are wiped out, but they hold off the Persians forever. It was more than 300, of course, but we won't talk about that. But that's a famous number associated with that. And how many suits of armor did Alexander send back to Athens? 300. And who did he specifically leave out in the

8:53inscription for everybody to see for long? Well, the Spartans. Yikes, that's a turning of the knife right there. The Athenians must have had mixed feelings because they would have loved, I imagine, to have been honored and had the Spartans shafted by the same honor, but they don't like Alexander either. So mixed sort of feelings, maybe. But Alexander's letting everybody know, we're here, we've won, we're still going. And he sends a bunch of the Greek survivors from the Battle of the

9:24Granicus who fought for the Persians back to Greece in chains as a message that this better not happen again because, you know, under the terms of our Leagues of the Greek thing, we are not supposed to be fighting against one another. This is a war of Greeks against barbarians. Fight on the other side, expect to die, or come home in chains and be a slave. The good news for us after the Battle of the River Granicus is our two main sources, Arian and Diodorus, who had such terrible disagreements about how that battle went. Get back into line, broadly speaking. And so we're on firmer ground for

10:00what happens in this next part of the story. And Alexander's in a consolidation phase here. He has to sort of collect his winnings from defeating that Persian army, that regional version, I guess you could say, of a Persian field army at the Granicus. But he's got to deal with now the cities in Asia Minor, right? Anatolia, modern-day Turkey. It's a big area. And I can't help but notice, if you zoom out and look at the big strategic situation, I mean, he's at a real disadvantage here because he's got

10:33a lot of work to still do to make sure that area is subdued and it's going to involve, you know, wearing and tearing on the army and all this kind of stuff. Meanwhile, the arch foe, the one he knows he's going to have to deal with in some huge knockdown drag-out battles, is free to sort of muster up a completely tan-rested and ready army in the interior of Persia to throw at him, you know, as soon as it's ready to go. Here's the thing, though. Alexander, I already noticed it. Maybe I'm previewing here. But you can already see the dude's energy. And the speed. And the speed

11:11is exhausting. I mean, this is where we start to see a differentiation between, you know, the way Alexander operates and the way the king some dude, remember we talked about that in the last episode, the King Tommy boy, any other Macedonian king, you start to say, okay, what's different about Alexander? The pace. And if not now, then soon. I mean, and look, I'm a 21st century wimp. And I realize people in the ancient world walked everywhere and they were much more used to this and that and the other thing. But already the march totals are exhausting to me. He's got

11:45these guys marching all the time, every day. I mean, he'll go from one city to another and it sounds like, oh, you're just, you know, taking a quick trip to this. It'll be four straight days of marching. He's going to go 167 miles between two places and just don't even think about it. But that's wear and tear, isn't it? And the Macedonian army is going to be absolutely wonderful at this for a very long time, but nobody's got this guy's energy. And again, this is part of what sets him apart. If you have four or five adjectives, you're allowed to, you know, give each of the great leaders on the Napoleon Alexander type chart speed and energy.

12:21This guy, it's just already watching him move as he moves and sends forces like Parmenio and other detachments all around, at least the Western part right now of Anatolia to take surrenders and submissions by cities. The capital of the entire region, Sardis, who has got massive walls and could hold up for a long time and also has the treasury for the region, just surrenders to Alexander. So there's some good fortune right there. Alexander quickly turns toward the coast and begins to go

12:53down the coastline there where all those Ionian Greek cities are. The ones that were, well, let's be honest, they're one of the main seeds in the entire story of how the Greeks and Persians first started fighting each other all those centuries ago. Those are the, you know, they're the ones who kind of been asking for help and they have rebellions. And I mean, there's Greek plays written about the suffering that cities like Miletus, one of these Ionian Greek cities have gone through under Persian rule. That'll make you want to get a little payback, right? Liberate those people, save them.

13:29But as Alexander goes down the coast and his money problems are disappearing as more and more places hand over the treasuries and start paying their tribute that they used to give the great king, giving it to him instead. As he goes down the coast and he liberates these cities, it becomes apparent and the ancient sources spent a little time on it. So it's clear that all these cities are are factionalized in terms of their politics. And can't we relate to that? But they have factions that'll favor a democracy, factions that'll favor an oligarchy, factions that want to,

14:03you know, stay loyal to the great king, factions that want to come over to Alexander. And it gets murderous sometimes. I mean, he shows up at Ephesus, one of the first cities that he goes into down the coast. And they're starting to kill each other in anticipation of Alexander coming, the faction that favors Alexander's killing the people. I mean, and in a move that Arian says is one of the high watermarks of Alexander's morality, he comes in and he sort of settles things and he stops them from killing one another. Very gracious, you know, by later Alexandrian standards. And it's, it's seen as

14:39almost humanitarian. He marches the army in full parade, we're told, the city and everything.

14:46But then he keeps going down the coastline and runs into Miletus. And Miletus is uncomfortable. It's an awkward situation. I think A.B. Bosworth described it because here's the city that should most be the great propaganda coup for Alexander to say, here we are, we've liberated, you know, the city from Persian rule, the hated Persians who've been so terrible to you. We wrote plays about it and Miletus shuts its doors to Alexander. Now, a good number of histories from a long time ago

15:18to now suggest that the remnants, although it might have been a lot, of the survivors of the Battle of the River Granicus are sort of fleeing. And when they get to these cities, they're, you know, locking the doors and stiffening their resistance. Diodorus has our friend, the Greek movie figure that the audience in Greece can relate to. Mamnon, you know, in the city of Miletus for five seconds before he flees to the next city, next big city down the coast. But no real proof of that.

15:48But when Alexander gets to Miletus and they shut the doors, I mean, this is a moment of, well, it's a problem for Alexander. Let's put it that way. And it's not a problem because he can't handle a siege. I mean, along with the greatest land army in the world, he's got probably the greatest siege forces in the world at this time. Although let's not rule out the Chinese who are always fantastic at that. But that's not going to concern him either. The problem is, is Miletus, like all these Ionian cities on the coastline, obviously have fantastic harbors. This is how

16:23they make a living from the sea, right? And the commerce and everything. It's going to be the kind of area where navies are important. And unfortunately, this is the area of Alexander's military operation where he is weakest. The Persians are not a seafaring people traditionally, but they rule over a bunch of people who are some of the best of all time. I mean, any of your top five seafaring peoples in history list is going to have the Polynesians on it, but it's going to have the Phoenicians too. And

16:55well, guess who controls the Phoenician fleet? That would be the Persians. And the Cypriots. I mean, just all these wonderful seafaring people in an era where the little things like how you row and handle your oars and the timing, I mean, all that stuff, it is such a specialized art. But there's no way that Alexander's fleet, even though it includes a lot of Greeks who are also pretty darn good at seafaring, are going to be able to compete with that fleet in a qualitative sense. And the problem is, is that they're absolutely dwarfed in a quantitative sense.

17:27400 or so Persian ships, allegedly, to about 160 that Alexander has, trying to deal with the city surrounded on three sides by water. And we see Alexander and his proverbial speed come into play again. And the hard thing when you're looking at it 23 or 2400 years later is we sort of give Alexander the credit for everything. I mean, his admiral moves quickly, so it's Alexander's fault. Well, maybe it is. But his admiral takes 160 or whatever it is ships. And what's the old Civil War line gets

18:05there firstest with the mostest? Well, he gets there firstest with the leastest. And in the particular constraints of, you know, this area of naval operations, that's enough. Because there are a couple of key islands that sort of wall off access to the inner part of the port and the city and everything you would want to do if you wanted to come in as a Persian fleet and help your Persian city. Well, that area is going to be walled off by these islands. And Alexander takes possession of

18:36those islands because he gets there first. Drops 4,000 or so Thracians on one of the main ones to make sure it's occupied. And then takes his smaller fleet and faces it outward with the prow sticking outward, sort of ship to ship to ship in like a long line, barring entrance to that area. And in a way, if you want to visualize it, turning it into like a mini pass of Thermopylae. And the Persian fleet, bigger though it is, can't get into the key harbor area to do anything, to help, to resupply,

19:08whatever. And Alexander gets a visit from someone representing the leadership of the city, according to Arian. The mercenaries are part of the people in charge and they offer Alexander an arrangement. And it seems like the perfect kind of arrangement if you're trying to save your skin from heavy duty punishment by the great king and at the same time not be punished by Alexander. They essentially do what the great Voldemar Heckel says is a neutrality proposal. How about we let you go

19:43into the city and use the harbor and let the great king do that too? Alexander just says, go back in your city and prepare to be assaulted. Now, Arian has a story that he tells that's supposed to happen right before Alexander meets with this representative of the city leaders. And of course, it involves one of those discussions with his top general, his marshal, Parmenio. And we've seen this movie before,

20:13haven't we? Where he and Parmenio disagree over what to do. At the Battle of the Granicus, remember, Parmenio told Alexander to wait, according to Arian anyway. And Alexander said, we can't wait and full steam ahead. Now the positions are inexplicably reversed or maybe completely understandably reversed, depending on how you want to look at it. But Parmenio tells Alexander he should be fighting a naval battle. And Alexander says, no. A little bit of role reversal there, but here's the way Arian puts it

20:48in the Arbery de Selencore translation of his work. Quote, the Persians had about 400 ships, but Parmenio, in spite of their numerical superiority, urged Alexander to engage. He did, undoubtedly, believe that a sea fight would go in favor of the Greeks. But the real reason for his confidence was a sign from heaven, an eagle which had been seen on the beach just astern of Alexander's ships. End quote.

21:19I love this because this is why we all love ancient history, right? But as we'd said earlier, these sources are so long ago, even though they're a long time after Alexander, that they still all kind of believe this stuff. So this is a legitimate argumentative point for Parmenio to make as far as Arian's concerned. Hey, he saw an eagle, man. What do you want him to do? But there are some practical realities, too. Arian continues, quote, He, meaning Parmenio, pointed out that a victory in present circumstances would be of great strategic

21:55advantage, while a defeat would not be very serious, as Persia, in any case, had command of the sea. He was fully prepared, he said, to go aboard himself and share the perils of the day. End quote. I can't help but think of, like, athletes, you know, who, I guess they never gave up the sport if we're using Parmenio's as an analogy here. But I'm thinking of, like, these hockey players, like Gordie Howe or something, coming back at really heavy-duty ages and trying to get in there and mix it up physically with the youngsters. Parmenio's going to get on that show. I mean,

22:31these dudes were kind of amazing. But anyway, so he says to Alexander, I'll go do it myself. And this time, Alexander's the one being cautious. And Arian has him saying, quote, Alexander replied that Parmenio was mistaken and that he'd wrongly interpreted the omen. Let me stop here and point out that, once again, it's an argument point. Alexander has to address the omen thing. You got the omen wrong. Arian continues, quote, In the first place, this is Alexander talking, it was absurd to rush blindly into a naval engagement

23:07against greatly superior forces and with an untrained fleet against the highly trained Cyprian and Phoenician crews. The sea, moreover, was a tricky thing. One could not trust it. And he was not going to risk making a present to the Persians of all the skill and courage of his men. As to defeat, it would be very serious indeed and would affect profoundly the general attitude to the war in its early stages. Above all, by encouraging the Greeks to revolt the moment they got news of a

23:39Persian success at sea. End quote. So some logical points, we would say, in addition to the, you know, omen stuff. But then, according to Arian, again, who believes this too, Alexander goes back to the omen. You know, don't get me wrong here. The omen's important, but you've misinterpreted and Arian says, quote, Secondly, having given his reasons for not risking an engagement, he went on to say that his interpretation of the omen was different from Parmenio's. The appearance of the eagle was, without doubt, a favorable sign. But the fact that it had been

24:13seen on shore surely indicated that it was his army, not his navy, which would render the Persian fleet powerless. He would, as it were, win his sea battle from the land. End quote. So this is kind of a cool and, at the same time, controversial idea on Alexander's part to deal with the fact he doesn't have a fleet, you know, that can beat his opponent. What do you do then? Well, his idea sort of revolves around ancient naval warfare in a way that we need to take a second and

24:45understand it. The ancient naval warfare deals with the same thing naval warfare always deals with, which is, you know, the range a fleet has, right? How far away from its base or between bases can it go? I mean, look at the whole need to annex territories all over the world in the late 19th century. So you had coaling stations for your fleets, right? Well, in this era, they can't go very far at all. In general, these navies from the ancient world, these triremes and everything, they would find a

25:18place to camp every night, pull the ships up onto the beach. The crews would camp and eat and find water then. So if the Persian fleet, for example, wants to leave from Egypt to operate, you know, in the area that's now the Turkish coast, it can't go from Egypt to there. It's going to go point to point to point along the coastline all the way up, camping every night, you know, sort of at sundown. If you take away those areas where they can camp, well, they have to go farther and farther away, right? If Alexander's

25:48going to send forces to take all the possible areas that would be a good landing site for the Persian fleet, they have to camp farther away. And the range between this new camp away from Alexander's troops and where you want that fleet, maybe right outside this city Alexander's trying to attack is too far. Can't get to and back to the base in time. I mean, he's basically curtailed their available, you know, area of operations. And this is profoundly demoralizing to the defenders in the city when they see it. And Alexander seems to have very little trouble with this city. If you go read a

26:22timeline of his career, the timeline always makes it sound like this siege lasted something like a month. But when you dive deep into it, you realize, well, that's an assumption sort of made by the fact that it takes a month out of Alexander's, you know, sort of calendar here. But that doesn't mean the siege itself did. And you get a real sense when you read the sources that once he brought up the siege engines, it didn't take very long at all. And he's got all the good ones. He's got stone throwers. He's got rams. He's got underminers. He's got the towers where you can shoot down on the walls. It doesn't

26:56seem like it's going to take very long. Arian and Diodorus both have accounts. Diodorus says Memnon was there. So Alexander had to attack the city. Arian doesn't mention Memnon at all. But says that, well, why don't we just quote the Martin Hammond translation of Arian and let the, you know, ancient writer explain it for himself. And he says, quote, he, meaning Alexander, personally supervised the application of siege engines to the walls. And after quickly demolishing a section of wall and weakening a longer stretch, he brought up his

27:30army ready to go over where the wall had been broken down or shaken loose. All this was shadowed by the Persians from, he's talking about the fleet, right? That's now farther away because Alexander's forces captured all the good places to land, who could be little more than spectators of the siege of their friends and allies. End quote. Then he says that the Macedonian admiral brings the fleet up close to the harbor. When the people of Meletus see this, it sort of breaks their spirit and

28:03they start running. Quote, the Milesians and the mercenaries were now threatened by the Macedonians on all sides. Some of them threw themselves into the sea and paddled on their upturned shields to an unnamed island facing the city. Others boarded small boats and desperately tried to outrun the Macedonian triremes, but were caught by the triremes at the harbor mouth. Most of them were killed in the city itself. End quote. Now, somebody else might have allowed the 300 or so mercenaries that had

28:38gotten onto a very, very difficult to attack island to just sit there and rot. But Alexander being Alexander, he's got to take it. And he takes, according to Arian, his boats with ladders sort of strapped to them so that they could swing the ladders onto the rocky, sheer sides of these islands to kill the last 300 mercenaries on there before Alexander decides they've been very brave and maybe he should just offer to bring them into his army. The people of Meletus show up carrying olive branches, the

29:10traditional token of supplication. They're basically begging for their lives. They have some things working in their favor, though, as several of the modern historians point out. The fact that, as we said, Meletus was so much a part of the reasons for this war and their suffering against the Persians have been so played up over the years that, well, they were forgiven. Alexander basically said, you're okay. They kill all the defenders, though. Did a deep dive trying to figure out how he did that. What's the mechanism

29:42for Alexander doing something like that? And I couldn't find anything good. The Mongols, supposedly, as we've said before, had a system. Every trooper gets several people whose job it is to kill, right? So maybe you give 30,000 men 12 people each, and it's a rather efficient affair, and then you count the years afterwards to make sure it was all done. What I looked up seemed to suggest that maybe Alexander just used his army as a giant sort of executing mechanism, cornered enemy troops in a part

30:15of town or something, and then just attacked them from all sides. No good answers, but he's going to do this a lot. And so wondering, you know, exactly how the physics of a giant mass killing occurred when Alexander did it is something, well, that we'll wonder about again in the future. Bottom line, though, is he takes Meletus. Doesn't seem to take too long. It was fascinating to watch how the Navy situation was handled, and at this point in the story, Alexander decides to disband his navy.

30:48This is one of the most controversial decisions of Alexander's career, as you Alexander fans already know, and apparently was being questioned in antiquity. I mean, Diodorus is talking about it, and that's, he wrote during, like, Julius Caesar's time, which is hundreds of years after Alexander, but you get the point. It's been debated a long time. Is this the right move or not?

31:11Modern day historians have different opinions, too. And I honestly don't know what to think myself. I'm really, I mean, I'm just watching from afar, because there's good arguments on both sides, and without being able to get someone like, you know, Ptolemy up here on the stand, under oath, it's going to be difficult to figure out.

31:30What appeals to me in terms of, like, trying to sense what's going on is I was reading some of the good histories that I was, I'm using as sources here, and they were talking about the difference between, you know, Alexander dealing with the Persian fleet close up when it's with him, like at Miletus, versus what happens if the Persian fleet just goes and causes trouble elsewhere? That's when you're going to miss a navy, for example. What if they go, start causing problems in Greece, or what if they sort of go behind your flank and retake stuff you've already taken,

32:00which is actually what's going to happen? But some of the other arguments have to do with the fact that, what, Alexander's fleet is heavily outnumbered, it's out-qualified as well, do you just want it to stay there until the Persians catch it and kill it? So, a lot of arguments, but he disbands the fleet, and he keeps, like, 20 triremes and supply ships to sort of just, you know, for food, and they carry the siege train, and then he keeps going down the coast. And this, again, is a problem with your navy also not being there. You're fighting a bunch of coastal battles, and all these cities like

32:35Miletus have harbors, and they're able to be resupplied from the sea and whatnot, and the next city he's going to run into, the next big one's going to be the same way, but worse. You know, like Miletus, only more so. Arian and Diodorus both say that he kind of takes some cities in between Miletus and Halicarnassus, which is the big city in the distance. Some of them come over to him. There's this famous incident where this queen who's been out of power comes to Alexander, you know, on the road between cities and basically, you know, asks him to support her in being

33:08restored. I mean, the story basically helps set the stage for Alexander putting a bunch of these local families that have long been in power in these regions back in power. It's part of the political game you play here. How do you keep these cities and these regions loyal to you after you, you know, rip them out of the Persian Empire? Well, do what the Persians were famous for doing too. Leave the local royal family in place and then just have them be subordinate to you. So there's a story about him doing that, and supposedly when he meets this queen who he's going to call mother

33:39among several women who are older than him in the Alexander story that he will basically refer to as mother. But once she, you know, basically throws her support behind him, a bunch of these smaller cities come over to him, and then he arrives at Halicarnassus. Halicarnassus is the birthplace of Herodotus. It's the capital of Caria. It is the satrap, you know, seat of power in this region. And the satrap, the commander, the governor of this territory, the regional vice president, he's there, and with him is old Memnon of Rhodes, right? As we said, our one Greek character in the

34:16story that the Greeks can all sort of empathize with and get behind. He's either the anti-hero or the hero on the anti-hero side. But earlier we had talked about in the last edition, you know, whether his involvement and his importance had been sort of exaggerated by the Greek writers. But there's no denying the fact that he's very important here and now, because he's been put in command of the whole region by the great king, Darius, and given command of the fleet. He's sent his

34:47family back to the royal seat of power with the Persian king. And, you know, the Greek sources make it sound like they're hostages, and maybe they are. But I love that Voldemort Heckel had pointed out something that's easy to forget. But in Halicarnassus are a bunch of people that hate Alexander. A bunch of people who are on sort of the naughty list, so that if he ever found them, they're going to be in trouble. And a bunch of people who've already seen what Alexander has done to people like them in this story so far, and who basically know that there's no running away from

35:20this in terms of their own personal fortunes. So everything is sort of on the line here. There's going to be a sense of desperation in this Halicarnassus incident that would make a good movie all by itself. The ancient sources say that Memnon's been sort of topping off, if you will, the already fantastic defenses of the city, making ready for an upcoming siege. And the ancient sources don't tell us how tall the walls are. I was doing a lot of research for estimates. And if we said something,

35:54apparently, and this is something I didn't know, apparently there's sort of like expected defenses for certain size cities. And the next level city is going to have a higher one. So about 45 feet though, tall, maybe in some of the higher spots is not unreasonable. With the same sort of design at the top of the walls that you see on a castle, you know, where there'll be an outcropping and then a place to shoot arrows. And it's all like that around the city. And a lot of these ancient cities, I believe Halicarnassus was the same way, are built so that they're in multiple layers. So that the

36:29first layer is built lower than the second one, which towers over the first. And that allows there to be sort of a stepping stone ever higher, where as you advance as the besieger, you're actually running into even higher ground, right? Break open those first walls and run in. And now you're staring at walls that are higher than the ones you just broke through. And they're shooting at you. I mean, see, sieges are a whole different thing for me. As a guy who got interested in military history as a kid, and I mean a child, sieges are not the

37:00interesting thing. But what you realize over time is how they alter, especially until cannons can knock down walls. It's walls and fortifications and stuff around cities is huge. And you can tell, you know, this fact is true by how long and how universal, how long we've been doing walls around cities and how universal it is, right? Go look at any ancient portrait of any city, anywhere. I mean, there's walls. Walls protect people. Walls sort of indicate power. Walls create equalizers when

37:31you're fighting armies that you could never defeat in the field, like Alexander's, you know, the greatest army of his age. You're not going to defeat that in the field probably. But once he has to fight a siege with you, everything changes. All those things that we've been salivating about as military history fans are nullified in a siege. For example, I love, and you do too probably, the formation that the Macedonians fight in. We've talked about it all this time, right? The close order, you know, heavy infantry phalanx with the long 16, 18-foot pikes fighting, you know, shoulder to shoulder as a

38:05solid block. That's not going to work over building rubble and walls that are crumbling and you're trying to shoot through holes you've made through. I mean, and what about the fantastic companion cavalry? What's that going to do? And you see what I'm saying? All of a sudden, these things that would just terrify you, well, and that were so effective at the Battle of the River Granicus that we just talked about, that stuff doesn't matter as much. And the things that the Persian side does pretty well are sort of exalted. I mean, they've always been good missile people, right? Lots of archers,

38:35lots of people who can do that. And Alexander, when he approaches one of the outcroppings, there's, you know, these walls around Halicarnassus incorporate a lot of area. And he'll come up to sort of one place, I think it's about 10 miles away from the city itself. And he'll come to the walls and they're throwing stones at them. And it's interesting to try to conceptualize how these things work. Again, for a guy who's always been fascinated with the field battle side of things, you start to realize what a different challenge the sieges are and how we can see Alexander's true extra ability now come to the fore. I said in the last edition,

39:09as we had talked about, that Alexander's got this army which can just do amazing things without him. The sieges require all kinds of different, almost engineering ways of thinking about problem solving. And Alexander turns out to be really good at this. And the energy that he's got is really helpful. But there's a big difference between using your sort of energy and dash and, you know, lead from the front sort of approach in a battle that at most is going to last the entire day and then have it be done in something that can grind on for days

39:43and days and weeks and weeks. It's a different sort of test of an army's endurance and staying power. And that's what you're going to get at Halicarnassus. I like the way that historian Ian Worthington in By the Spear sort of sets up the Halicarnassus challenge here. And he writes about it by saying, quote, Halicarnassus was famous as the birthplace of the father of history, Herodotus, and the home of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the mausoleum, the tomb of Mausolus, satrap of Caria, who had died in 353 and which was eventually completed by

40:18his widow, who happened to be his sister, Artemisia. Halicarnassus, he writes, was built on a hillside and was seemingly impregnable with enormous six foot thick defensive walls on top of which were fortified battlements and a series of high towers for protection. In front of the walls was a deep moat at least 40 feet wide and behind them were the main city and its two citadels which the people could retreat to and fight on if necessary. The city's harbor, he writes, was well shielded from

40:51attack and the Persian fleet was now riding at anchor in it. Because Alexander had dismissed his own fleet, the defenders could ferry in supplies or even escape unhindered if need be, whereas his own supplies were starting to run out and had to be ferried in from Miletus at least two days away. End quote. Now the Greeks always make it sound like Persian general ships sucked, which people like Pierre Briand and whatnot would point out ways you can figure out sort of that it

41:23didn't. But they have no problem, the Greek authors that is, praising other Greeks. And that's why you get a chance to see them openly talk about the quality of generalship that Alexander is going to face here in the siege of Halicarnassus is, you know, really coming up against Memnon, who was not in control of the Battle of the Granicus, but is in control here. And the combination of this guy who was a fine enough general to sort of get the better of Parmenio's beachhead force, you know, when

41:54Alexander's dad was first landing on the Persian coast, he was facing Memnon. This guy is not a kid like Alexander, doesn't have Alexander's, you know, genius, but he's not a kid. He's a hard-bitten, very experienced veteran, whose brother, by the way, is also a general or was also a general. He's going to be formidable. And he's got a lot of mercenaries with him who are professional fighters who do this for a living and who know because they've watched what Alexander did at the Granicus. They know what the, you know, League of the Greeks says happens to people that, I mean, they know what's going to

42:27have, they're desperate too. And they don't have to face the scary Macedonian pike phalanx that Philip Alexander's dad designed specifically to destroy units of hoplites. They don't have to fight that in the field. They get to have a great equalizer and fight over rubble, broken ground, and in places where this becomes a much wide open, fluid affair, or where it's just crowds trying to find gaps. I mean, this benefits the mercenaries in a way that they would have fully understood.

42:59This is their best chance to do something against Alexander. And when Alexander first shows up outside of Halicarnassus, he doesn't have a siege stuff with him. That's actually coming with one of those 20 or so ships that are, you know, left to him. And you hope the Persian fleet doesn't intercept those. And he tries to take a little, I had to look this up, it's a little port city, like about 10 miles from Halicarnassus itself. He thought if he could take that, then we could just use that as a place to land the siege engines. And Arian has this great story

43:29about how Alexander finds out from some of the loyalists in the city. Remember, there's all these different political factions and some of them favor Alexander. He hears that there's a plot, you know, show up with the army and the city will, you know, come over to you. So he comes at night with a, you know, picked force, but it sounds like it was pretty large. Phalangites, cavalry, the whole thing shows up in the middle of the night, expecting the city to come over to him and finds the walls all lined with troops and they're all bristling with spears and they're all ready. Being Alexander, he attacks it anyway, brings down a tower or two, we're told, before

44:02being pelted with so many missiles and stones that they decide to back off and wait for the siege engines to show up. Once they do, this siege kicks into a different gear. And as we have talked about already, Alexander's dad invented a secret weapon when it comes to winning conflicts and it is the siege train. He has engineers, a staff of them. I've seen them called an R&D

44:32staff of people who've actually invented new weapons to be used in sieges. People who would show up at something like this Halicarnassus siege and look at that as a challenge. From a military history standpoint, someone like yours truly can't help but notice that what makes this Halicarnassus siege seems somewhat different to me is the fact that both sides are basically going to be employing artillery against each other. Because you only start seeing

45:08this happen anyway, in like right around 400, 390s in the Greek world anyway.

45:14Things like bolt shooters and stuff and you get different kinds of catapults, torsion instead of tension. I mean, all sorts of different things that really date from recent history here and now all of a sudden here we have a battle where they're going to have them on both sides shooting at each other and they're going to be using the towers. Quick little recap of how siege warfare goes for those who may not know. We mentioned that walls are basically ubiquitous, right? Going back to like prehistory. Well, if you're in prehistory and you want to take a walled town, how do you do it?

45:47Well, the way that was the tried and true and easiest way is you just surround it and starve everyone out or you build something that acts as a ladder or a ladder to, you know, try to storm the walls. At some time in prehistory, somebody figured out sapping where you dig out the soil underneath the walls and create sort of a vacuum that the stone can then collapse down into bringing down the walls. Sometime in prehistory, you get the battering ram and we all know what that is. By the Assyrian time

46:18period at the latest, because you can see it on the carved reliefs in 1900 BCE, they're using towers and engines of one sort or another. And the famous Trojan horse from the Iliad may be an allusion to something like a siege tower. But half of everything Alexander is going to do in his military history sort of background is going to be siege stuff. And it's sort of the other side, as we said, of what he brings to the table. Because he can't use the same skill sets that make him so useful at the

46:55Granicus. It's a different side of the brain, if you will, that's going to be employed in this. And he has this engineering staff to work with. And they look at the, I try to look it up. I don't know what the right number is. But if we imagined a circumference of the city walls here being somewhere between four and five miles, that's probably not too far off. With the height of the walls at the highest point being like 45 feet, as we said, maybe with a 23 foot deep moat. So that's

47:25going to make the walls even seem higher. And it's 40 feet wide. It has towers. It has a couple of citadels. It's going to be employing artillery on its side too. And when Alexander is going to build giant towers to overlook these walls so that you can shoot at them from above, and so that you can have platforms for your siege engines, they're going to do the same thing on the other side. And this siege of Halicarnassus is really a case of parry and thrust in sort of a fencing sense or a

47:57spy versus spy where Alexander the Besieger does something and the people inside the city try to counter it. We'll knock down a wall here. We'll rebuild a wall there. I mean, the key element, if you read the ancient sources though, and it happens multiple times, I'm trying to add up the number of times in Arian. I think it's three, but I might be wrong by a factor of one, but at least three, let's put it that way, times that the people inside the city have a sort of a mad, they open the gates and have a mad rush with people who are carrying buckets of pitch and

48:29torches. And at least in one case, a bunch of guys who are armed and their job is to prevent the people who are going to try to stop the people that have the fire in the pitch. And the people with the fire in the pitch are going to throw that onto the siege engines and try to light them all on fire. And this is going to happen multiple times. And there's going to be a significant amount of fighting at night. It's hard to keep track of kind of, but you do get this sense of over time, remember, this is days that you have stuff going on. And like I said, a very different

49:00rhythm than the normal battles in the ancient world that are over in a day. This is something where you have people working all the time. And I was trying to get a sense of the pace, and I'm not sure I got the right one. But when you read Diodorus, for example, he talks about this happening in relays. So imagine most of the army isn't working. They're just sitting around watching. Again, another aspect of ancient warfare that's different. You don't have shells and bullets that can hit you from a distance. You can be kind of close up and perfectly safe and watch. Maybe 5% of the army just throwing that out there is the one actually

49:33working on a piece of the wall at any given time while everybody else watches and they rotate. But it's a 24-7 job. It certainly sounds like it because both Arian and Diodorus talk about it, that there are prepared things that they put up to sort of shield the people who are working. So think of like wicker mantlets or something like a civil war rather than a First World War trench situation where you put up things. If you were a kid with a treehouse and someone was throwing

50:04dirt clods at you, you might put up a board to keep them from being able to do that. So you think about something like that because it's going to be a process as you begin to fill in the moat and you have to fill in the moat to get the siege engines close enough. And well, why don't I let Diodorus pick up the story? It's very exciting. And the difference, by the way, between Diodorus and Arian in their accounts of this, is that Diodorus has it be an extremely difficult thing for Alexander. Arian's weird because he makes it sound like nothing was a big deal. But then when

50:40he tells you how many people were injured and whatnot in any given situation, you kind of go, quote, sounds like a big deal. So the real problem Alexander has is that because Halicarnassus has a giant open harbor controlled by the Persian fleet and Alexander really doesn't have a fleet, that that he can't shut this city down. Diodorus, in my C. Bradford Wells translation, picks up the story with Alexander arriving right outside Halicarnassus and starting the siege.

51:13And Diodorus says, quote, Alexander encamped near the city and set in motion an active and formidable siege. At first, he made continued assaults on the walls with relays of attackers and spent whole days in active fighting. Later, he brought up all sorts of engines of war, filled in the trenches in front of the city with the aid of sheds to protect the workers and rocked the towers and the curtains between them with his battering rams. Whenever he overthrew a position

51:44of the wall, he attempted by hand-to-hand fighting to force an entry into the city over the rubble. But Memnon at first easily beat off the Macedonians assaulting the walls, for he had large numbers of men in the city. Where the siege engines were attacking, he issued from the citadel at night with numbers of soldiers and applied fire to the machines. Fierce fights occurred in front of the city, in which the Macedonians showed far superior prowess. But the Persians had the advantage of

52:15numbers and of firepower, for they had the support of men who fought from the walls, using engines to shoot darts, which they then killed some of the enemy and disabled others. End quote. Well, if you read Arian, you see that there's a lot that is sort of, you know, covered in all that stuff that he's talking about. But it's clear that Alexander's facing, you know, engines of war, as they're called, artillery, as he breaks into these places once he knocks the walls down. I mean,

52:46that is literally overcoming all of the typical battlefield advantages the Macedonians have and putting them in a really, really tough situation. This is where you get to see that they would be good and dangerous soldiers, regardless of the formation they were using and regardless of, you know, whether or not they could use their giant long spears together, because this is hand-to-hand stuff, as I said, with engines of war shooting at you. Now, in the Arian version of this story, he basically says it was no problem, and then he gives the casualty reports, and it sounds like it

53:22wasn't all that easy. He writes, quote, A night sally from Halicarnassus to set fire to the towers and the other engines which had been moved up or were nearly in position was countered and easily beaten back within the walls by the Macedonian guards, supported by other troops roused by the alarm. About 170 of the men from Halicarnassus were killed, including Neoptolemus, the son of Arabeus, the brother of Amentas, one of those who had deserted to Darius. The losses among Alexander's

53:55troops amounted to 16, but some 300 were wounded, as this was a sudden action at night, and they were not wearing any proper protective armor, end quote. That from my Martin Hammond translation, by the way. But any way you slice it, that's a lot of injuries, right? This wasn't such a minor affair, and this will be done by the defenders several times. If you believe the ancients, some weird

54:25crap happens with Perticus, who, if you recall, some weird crap happened with when the besieging of Thebes was going on a while back. And in that situation, if you recall, it was Perticus's troops that attacked sort of without orders, allegedly, and dragged the rest of the army in to support them, right? There's a whole school of thought out there that Perticus is sort of a whipping boy for any decision Alexander makes where the outcome isn't stupendously overwhelming. Somehow it's Perticus's fault.

54:57And lots of analysis over the eras as to whether or not the bias of one of the main sources here, Ptolemy, friend of Alexander, one of his generals, one of the successors, the guy who started the whole dynasty in Egypt that was ended with Cleopatra, he didn't like Perticus very much. And so when he's doing the opposite of what Churchill was supposed to do, Churchill said, allegedly, I know history will treat me kindly because I will be writing that history. Ptolemy's a little like, I know history will treat Perticus unkindly because I will be writing that history. So Perticus gets the short end of the stick sometimes, whether he deserves it or not.

55:33He is a little like if you, I mean, you'd be forgiven if you were starting to see him as the Dennis, the menace of Alexandria generals at this point, how he keeps his job, who knows? But here's the way that A.B. Bosworth in his Conquest in Empires describes the situation that happens here. He says, quote, The most notable incident came when the walls were almost breached. Two towers and an intervening curtain wall had been demolished, and a night attack developed when two drunken members of

56:04Perticus's battalion tried to scale the defenses in a fit of reckless bravado. More of the battalion followed their example until there was a full-scale engagement. The Macedonians, he writes, suffered heavy casualties, and the defenders were forced back into the walls only after intense fighting. The dead remained unrecoverable, thanks to the raking fire from Halicarnassus, and Alexander was compelled to parlay for a truce, a humiliation unique in his reign. End quote. He then writes

56:36about Arian sort of finding a way to gloss over this reverse, and he says, quote, Most of this is slurred over by Arian, who focuses upon the Macedonian successes and represents the siege as a series of effortless victories. The reality was very different. Even when the Macedonians penetrated the outer wall, they found themselves enclosed by a secondary crescent-shaped defensive brick, and they became vulnerable in the flank and rear. The defenders had even mounted a large wooden tower on the wall, which housed arrow-firing catapults. Despite the losses,

57:12the attack was pressed home, and the situation of the defenders became critical. End quote. And this is where you get the final sallying forth of 2,000 picked men, according to the ancient sources. This is the sortie where the picked men are divided in half, half of them with torches and pitch to light the siege engines on fire. As I said, like the third time they've tried this or something, but this is the time where the other 1,000 are going to get into a closely packed phalanx and

57:46attack anyone who comes and tries to stop the people from lighting the fires. This is where the heads of the mercenary forces go out themselves. I mean, it's a little like a last-stand situation, because if this fails, then what? To show how the different sources handle this and where maybe the bias is, is Arian portrays this as easily sort of crushed, because the great veterans, Alexander's old time, it's almost like his father's old guard, if you will. These guys who are

58:16exempt from the grunt sort of work that would be most of a siege, that they're brought into the situation to show the young'uns how it's done. And so no problem, Arian points out. But Diodorus and the more modern sources point out that the fact that the guard is brought in at all shows that it was a difficult situation that needed rescuing. The Athenian head of the mercenaries here, by the way, is a man named Ephialtes, and he's the one who leads this sallying forth out, this last great effort to destroy the siege engines with the picked men,

58:53right? These professional mercenaries who know they've got, you know, everything to fight for because they don't win here. They're done for. And in my Robin Waterfield translation of Diodorus, Diodorus says, quote, Ephialtes therefore put together a force of 2,000 picked men, half of whom were given lighted torches while the rest were to engage the enemy, and suddenly opened all the city gates. It was daybreak, and emerging from the city with his men, he had some of them

59:24set fire to the siege engines, the flames leapt up straight away, while he led the rest who were formed into a deep and closely packed phalanx in an attack on the Macedonians who were coming to try to save the contraptions. End quote. Now Alexander gets involved personally. Once again, it's hard to emphasize how, and it may have been something a Macedonian king was expected to do, but Alexander's always Johnny on the spot. He's right there. He's in the front. He's fighting. And remember, this is a very dangerous situation for a king to find himself in, in the mix of something like this.

59:59And Diodorus continues, quote, When Alexander realized what was happening, he posted the foremost fighters among his Macedonian troops in front, with a body of picked men to relieve them. And then behind these, he posted a third division, all men of exceptional valor. Then he led this unit into battle with himself at the head, and the enemy, who had thought that their numbers would deter opposition, found themselves having to fight. Alexander also dispatched men to put out the fires and save the siege engines.

1:00:32A great shout arose from both sides at once, and the trumpets sounded the signal for battle. The soldiers fought with such skill and extraordinary determination that a ferocious struggle ensued. The Macedonians managed to stop the fire from spreading, but Efealtes and his men were winning the fight. He was by far the strongest man on the field, and everyone who came up against him lost his life. The Macedonians were also losing many men to the relentless volleys of missiles fired from the top of the recently built counter wall, where the defenders had built a wooden tower a hundred cubits

1:01:08high. I think I read that that was like 15 stories or something like that, and filled it with bolt-shooting catapults. Many Macedonians died, and the rest were beginning to fall back under the onslaught of the countless missiles that were raining down on them. And when Memnon brought his reinforcements into play in large numbers, even Alexander had no real response." End quote. It's at this point Diodorus says that the old guard is called in and they're going to show the young'uns, you know, how it's done,

1:01:40and they do. From I. C. Bradford Wells' translation of Diodorus, quote, Just at that moment, as the men from the city were prevailing, the tide of battle was surprisingly reversed. For the oldest Macedonians, who were exempt from combat duty by virtue of their age, but who had served with Philip on his campaigns, and had been victorious in many battles, were roused by the emergency to show their valor, and, being far superior in pride and war experience, sharply

1:02:14rebuked the faint-heartedness of the youngsters who wished to avoid the battle. They then closed ranks, with their shields overlapping, and confronted the foe, who thought himself already victorious. They succeeded in slaying Ephialtes and many others, and finally forced the rest to take refuge in the city. Night had already fallen as the Macedonians pushed within the walls, along with their fleeing enemies. But the king ordered the trumpeter to sound the recall, and they withdrew to their camp.

1:02:46End quote. I like the way Peter Green describes the tragedy that happens next as the tide turns in the battle. And you see this in some ancient battles where the people in the city start panicking because the troops that have just defeated your defenders are close on their heels. When do you shut the gates to keep out the bad guys, right? Well, often this is mistimed. And Peter Green, in his Alexander of Macedon, writes, quote, In a matter of minutes, the whole Persian assault group crumbled and began a stampede back to the city.

1:03:23There was savage hand-to-hand fighting by the curtain wall, while so many men crowded onto the bridge crossing the moat that it collapsed. The defenders inside the city gate panicked, and in their eagerness to stop the Macedonians forcing an entry, shut out considerable numbers of their own men. Some were trampled to death in the rush. The rest died by the spears of their Macedonian pursuers. By now, night was falling, and Alexander had the retreat sounded. In the circumstances, he was lucky to have

1:03:54scraped a victory at all. The Macedonians withdrew to their camp. Alexander knew when not to press his luck, end quote. Arian says about a thousand of the defenders from inside the city had died, to only about 40 Macedonians, by the way, but some named people that were remembered by their names by the ancient authors. And as Alexander pulls back for the night, Memnon, we are told, decides it's time to pull back permanently. And he pulls the equivalent here of like a Dunkirk-type maneuver. Remember, the

1:04:31Persian fleet's at anchor in the harbor, and they just take Memnon and a lot of the soldiers and a ton of the cargo, apparently, and maybe even a bunch of the city dwellers, and they leave. Nothing Alexander can do about it, because he disbanded his fleet. And right after this time period, he's going to reconstitute it. So maybe decided he needed it after all. But there's no fleet here, so nothing to stop Memnon and everybody from leaving. And in the morning when Alexander, you know, steps into the city, it's smoking and

1:05:02burning, and the main people who were fighting him are gone. They did all the damage they could do to him, you know, having him have to assault a citadel, and now they've left to fight another day. They set fire, by the way, to the 100-cubit, that's a 150-foot tower that had all of the artillery on it that the defenders were shooting the Macedonians with. It's burning. They burn a bunch of the buildings, and if you believe Arian Alexander, then steamrolls the entire city. Peter Green thinks

1:05:32this is unlikely. He'd already promised it to that old lady who he was calling mother. You don't want to turn a bunch of ruins over to her, but who knows? The bottom line, though, is that there'll be Persian defenders hold up in the citadels there, and it's going to take Alexander's garrison like a year to wheedle them out. He puts a big moat around it in a wall and just keeps going, and so does Memnon. And if we zoom out and try to look at the situation here and see all the pieces moving into place, by now the Persian king is somewhere down, probably

1:06:06in the area of Iraq, bringing together an army, Memnon takes the fleet and begins to go to a bunch of islands offshore. You know, some of the ancient authors make it sound like he's going to go back to Greece, and he's going to work with the Spartans, and he's going to start a war back at home. Looks more like, I mean, Pierre Brion makes a very good case that what he's really doing here is operating nearby on these islands offshore, and in some cases they're going back and retaking the places Alexander's already taken and moved on. They go back and retake Miletus, for example, behind him. And you can see this. Memnon's going to

1:06:42be a problem. Unfortunately for the great king, he catches something during a siege of a city off on one of these islands off what's now the Turkish coast and dies. It's the ancient world after all. That can happen. But the Greek authors make it sound like this is like the nail in the coffin for the poor Persians because they have no good generals themselves, and now they lose this wonderful Greek general who had held off Alexander's father and now is holding off Alexander, and with him gone, what are you going to do? But meanwhile, while

1:07:14this is going on, Alexander splits his forces, sends Parmenio to some areas in the region, and he goes to the others, and he's essentially, as we had said earlier, consolidating his winnings here. And he is accepting the surrender of a lot of these cities and towns. I had to go look up, like, sizes to give myself at least sort of a ballpark idea of what we're talking about. And if any of this is to be believed, I like that disclaimer, don't you? But Helicarnassus might have been like a 40,000-person city. Sardis, the even bigger city, might have been

1:07:4550,000. Some of the so-called large city-states in this region might be 10,000 to 15,000. And there's a lot of, like, thousand-person little city-states. And so Alexander, for example, would be in one region, and there'll be, like, 30 of these cities that sort of surrender to him or accept, you know, his kingship or what have you. So those are small places, though. The problem is, is that some of these places resist. And this is a hidden part of the Alexander story when you try to figure out, you know, what's going on in between the

1:08:18big data points? How's he filling his time between all the big battles? He's filling his time with a bunch of little ones. And these are asterisks in his career. But if you try to imagine what it's like for the people on the other side, well, now you start to see some of the points of view from the historians from the Alexander as Butcher school. And the perfect example is recounted for posterity in Diodorus' work where he talks about one of these people that decides to resist Alexander and attacks his baggage train when he's passing

1:08:53through their neck of the woods. So he goes to punish them. It's a couple of days with the siege engines before those people realize they're doomed. And then Diodorus tells the story about the young men. And it sounds like there's about 600 warriors. So this gives you a sample size, maybe, of the community. And the warriors who are the young men, Diodorus says, go to the old men and say, what do we do? And the old men say, surrender to Alexander under the best terms you can get. And this they refuse to do. They will not compromise their freedom.

1:09:24So the elders say, well, if that's going to be your position, we recommend that you kill your wives, you kill your children, and then you try to break out of the city and make for the nearby hills. They decide to do this. And so Diodorus says they decide to hold this last grand evening with their loved ones, the best food and drink, and enjoy them for one last time before you kill them. But they decide they can't kill them. So they decide they're just going to keep them holed up at home and then light everything on fire. He says their homes became their tombs.

1:09:57And then the 600 warriors break out and run away. But I mean, this gives you an idea right there. Magnify that by a lot. Because Alexander's whole career, he's going to be attacking this hill people there, and this river people there, and this forest tribe there. And I mean, it starts to add up, right? And pretty soon you're talking real numbers of human beings here. And for them, it's this massive worst thing that's ever happened in their, you know, people's history. For Alexander, it's on the way from this place to that place. But if you look up the pace of this winter of 334,

1:10:30333 BC BCE, it basically, everything you'll read will tell you that he's in constant motion. It is a, and that these people are marching. And some of this is really, you know, you're beginning to get to be terrible terrain through mountain passes and rain. And I mean, this is a heck of a pace already. And one of the things we can say about Alexander, and we'll say it this whole time, is he's not one of those guys who stays in the velvet tent by himself while having the grunts, you know, have to bear the brunt of all this. He's right there sharing every hardship, trying to be

1:11:06the first among equals. And this is clearly very important to him. So when he fights even these little battles against these peoples who are nobody, he's right there in the front. It's crazy.

1:11:18It's during this time period between Halicarnassus and reaching Gordium, more on that in a second, where Alexander at one point sends a bunch of the young men who've been fighting with them home to get married, right, and have children, and to send back reinforcements. So we said earlier that unlike a modern army where there's reinforcements and people rotating out all the time, there are just intervals where this happens. And this is one of them. So some people go home, several thousand men will arrive pretty soon to help bolster the ranks of the people who've been

1:11:50fighting all this time. And then during this little interlude that we're in right now, we get that fabulous story of Alexander running into the Gordian Knot.

1:12:03The Gordian Knot story, for those of you who can see a lot of similar ones around history, it's the Excalibur sword and the stone story, isn't it? I mean, well, the sword and the stone is not really Excalibur, but you know the story. I mean, he gets the Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake later, but that's neither here nor there. But in terms of the Gordian Knot, the one who is able to solve this problem is destined to rule the world or what have you. There are a couple of different stories. Plutarch tells both of them. The less satisfying one is that he's confronted with

1:12:39this knot that you can't see the ends of that's hitched to like a yoke on a wagon and people have been trying to untie it forever and nobody can even figure out what to do. And so Alexander's, you know, surmising the situation. And the less satisfying answer, Aristobulus, Plutarch says, gives this answer, is that he simply pulled out the yoke part that was holding it all together and it just sort of came apart, which seems a little easy and very unsatisfying. The other

1:13:11tradition is that he just pulled his sword out and chopped it, which of course is sort of significant about concerning the methods by which he's going to secure Asia, right? It's a little like the sword and the stone situation. If you just decided to take a jackhammer to the stone, I'll get that sword up by eliminating the stone itself. I was reading one historian who had an interesting line and he was tying it to one of the ancient historians, but he was saying that this

1:13:42is a new rationale for why Alexander is involved in this war, right? We need to change the rationale. This whole idea of making the number one reason we're doing all of this is to liberate the Greek city-states of Bione is getting, well, getting kind of tired now that Alexander's basically done that. Never mind the reconquest of some of these cities on the coast. Basically, though, if that's your reason for the war, why would you go on from here? Well, if another person who's able to deal with that Gordian knot situation is the one destined to rule all of Asia, well, there you go.

1:14:16There's your rationale right there. And we should point out that based on what the Greeks knew of the world, I mean, as far as they're concerned, ruling all of Asia is a little like that deal that the Spanish and the Portuguese got from the Pope, where the Pope basically told them, you know, from this line this way and from that line that way you guys own the world when you didn't even know what was in the world. You have claimed territories you haven't even discovered yet. That's what the Gordian knot's telling Alexander if we buy that rationale. But clearly,

1:14:50if the Pope can do it in the age of discovery, it's not a new idea, right?

1:14:57Now, there's some things that happen during this little interlude when we are sort of collecting our winnings, as I said, in what's now modern-day Turkey. And the clash, the inevitable clash that's coming when the army that the great king of Persia is raising in Babylon, which is in modern-day Iraq, you know, comes northward to deal with Alexander. Alexander, as we said, is fighting this whole time. And at some point, according to the ancient authors, but it would make total sense, the great king puts a huge bounty on Alexander's head.

1:15:33One of the ancient sources says it is a thousand gold talents, which, if true, that sounds like a crazy Persia-so-rich-you-can't-believe-it kind of exaggeration, because that's like the, you know, money that nation-states have. I mean, that's just that level of money. If we, you know, halved it by 75 percent, it's an outrageous amount of money still for an individual to have. That assumes, of course, that you could ever halve something by 75 percent. Nonetheless, a lot of people want to kill Alexander. And there are some stories that occur during this interlude period, right? We're in

1:16:07early 333 BCE, which kind of show the precariousness of the life of a great conqueror, right? They're a little, to me, like those little sea turtles that have to hatch on the coast, and they can't be a great conqueror until they deal with all of the things that might kill them or derail their career or what have you before they reach the safety of the sea. How many great conquerors were there who would have been as great as an Alexander or Napoleon, but they died along the way?

1:16:37Killed in combat, assassinated, felled by disease. Alexander's in danger of all three of those things. I mean, let's just talk about assassination first. Somebody puts it a thousand gold talent bounty on your head. It's a real danger anyway. And we described the Macedonian Royal Court as having a sort of mafia crime family type feel. So getting whacked is not unusual, let's recall. That's what happened to Alexander's dad. And Alexander always blamed the king of Persia for his involvement in

1:17:13that. And listen, I mean, what are the odds, as we said, you're going to kill the greatest man of his age and his kid's going to be bigger than he is? Maybe you just keep doing that till you get a loser, till you get a lemon. Alexander gets a letter from his mother, according to Diodorus. And remember, you know, Alexander's mother is a character that different people play with differently. But there's a Game of Thrones kind of feel to the way she handles things. And she's back in Macedonia fighting with one of the two great generals that Alexander inherited from his dad,

1:17:45right? One's Parmenio, and he's here with Alexander doing all this stuff. But he left the other one in charge of, you know, home base, right? Antipater. These guys are ancient. And Antipater and Olympias are always sort of fighting with each other. And her letters back to Alexander often complain of Antipater. And sometimes his letters complain about her. But you got to be careful. Got to be careful insulting the king's mother when he has a special relationship with her. But Diodorus says she sends a letter with all kinds of useful information, including a warning about, you know, needing to be

1:18:17careful of Antipater's son-in-law, who is with Alexander, who commands an important unit and who's, by all accounts, a great man and a great leader. But she tells him to be careful. And so he arrests him and takes him around with the army for a long time in captivity. They usually torture people in these situations. But we should recall that Alexander's already killed this guy's two brothers. Killed him when he became king on charges that they were involved in his dad's assassination.

1:18:49So, I mean, what you start to see here is a combination of the normal amount of, what did we call it earlier, pruning that a Macedonian king does on his family tree, because it's been proven over and over how dangerous your close relatives are to you in that system. But somewhere along the line, and, you know, intelligent folk may differ on the exact point, we're going to go from a reasonable amount of pruning and suspicion to an unreasonable amount of paranoia. But that old line that it's

1:19:20not really paranoia, if they are out to get you, totally applies to Alexander, and a thousand gold talent bounty on your head's going to, you know, give a lot of incentive to a lot of people to try to get you. And it creates all sorts of suspicion within the ranks, doesn't it? I mean, there's going to be another sign of just how precarious life is in the ancient world for someone in Alexander's position, where we're told that as he's marching through some of these areas, it's beginning to be the summer of 333, and it's hot as heck, and he's in full armor, we're told. And he decides to jump off

1:19:52a bridge into a river that looks very inviting in full armor, by the way, supposedly. And he had been warned that this river's water comes directly from sort of the snowy mountain heights, and it's ice cold. He didn't listen. He jumps in. Boom, we have a disaster on our hands. He starts, like, having convulsions, and he's cramped up and cold, and they fish him out of the river, and they take him in, and within, they make it sound like it's virtually immediately, but within a day or two, he's got something. Welcome to the ancient world. You can get this now, but in the ancient world, there are some

1:20:25thoughts that maybe it's malaria. These sorts of health things are going to follow Alexander around, but it's a sign of just how amazing it is any of these guys live very long, with all the things out there. Alexander has a doctor. As we've said before, some of these ancient people didn't seem to have a whole lot of names in their baby books, because we keep recycling the same ones, but same name as his dad, a doctor named Philip. And the story is that none of these doctors want to treat Alexander, because they're scared to death that if he dies, they're going to get blamed for it and lose

1:20:59their lives, right? He's too dangerous to treat. And this one doctor who's known Alexander apparently a long time, Philip, he prescribes this, you know, concoction that's going to be apparently really hard on you, but then you'll get fixed. And Alexander says he's going to take it, and the story is that he's mixing up the concoction just as a note arrives from Parmenio saying, be careful of this doctor, you know, implying that he might be in on the 1,000 talents trying to assassinate you. And the doctor hands the potion to Alexander. Alexander hands the letter from Parmenio warning

1:21:34about the doctor to the doctor. As the doctor's reading the letter containing the warning, Alexander drinks the concoction, looking him right in the eye. That's how you do it in your movie, by the way, if you're planning on framing this. But this is part of why, you know, the part that we like about this guy, those are the, and you don't know if they're true or not, but continually there will be things like this that suggest that this is the guy's personality. He's got a flair for sort of this kind of thing, or the people who wrote the history about him have a flair for setting up such,

1:22:09such, such situations. I mean, I'm not even including, by the way, we should just do this as like a footnote. I'm not including all the romantic stories about Alexander, which could be plausibly true too. But I mean, there are always stories about him, like he and the army come to this one area where the water is like bashing up against the cliffs and there's no room to march. There's no beach. But, you know, the wind changes and Alexander's able to, like Moses parting the Red Sea, the sea holds back from hitting the coastline so that his army has space to march. I mean, I don't know what to do with

1:22:44some of that stuff, but there's a ton of romance and magic and other things that come into the Alexander story from time to time. And there's a twilight zone between the reality and the magic where it could be true and it's difficult to know how to deal with. And as we've said many times in many shows, a lot of this stuff can affect reality, even if it's not true, if the people in the story think it is. Magic, as we've said, if you believe it, it has power. So this sickness of Alexander's

1:23:15is significant. I mean, the ancient authors talk about it. It lasts for a while and he's not the kind of guy who sits down and rests. Whatever this was, it was serious enough so that there's suggestions maybe in the Persian court, according to the ancient authors, that maybe this guy will die. Could be problem solved. He recovers, we're told. And then if you pay attention to an element to his life that's worth paying attention to, you'll note that even when it's almost seemingly like we're

1:23:51between things happening in the story, Alexander's actually out in the field fighting. I mean, they'll mention a week-long, it seems like, I think that's labeling it correctly, guerrilla campaign that Alexander will fight in Calicchia as he's on his way down to what sort of, we would call it just north of Syria today, that area. But he'll leave most of the army to sort of rest, take a picked force of men, spend about seven days in the hills trying to chase down Calicchian guerrillas. And again, he's in

1:24:22the front rank. You think about, well, first of all, I always figure he's killing at least one person on all these expeditions personally. So there's single combat going on. There was an old boxing line that I read once where it was a trainer talking, and he said something to the effect of, keep track of the wear and tear. Keep track of the damage as it begins to add up. There's acute damage, like you get hit in the head and you're unconscious and you're affected for the rest of your life, acute damage. But then there's the accumulated damage, right? This is where we talked a couple of installments ago about

1:24:56possible CTE building up over time. There's a lot of fighting and Alexander's in the midst of it. There's something going on where either he feels compelled to be there or he couldn't stand the idea of not being there. He either loves it or feels like to be the guy he has to be. He has to be seen to be in the front rank or maybe a combination of the two, right? Expectations and his own enjoyment of it. Because I have to believe it would have been okay from time to time for him to say,

1:25:29listen, we just got here. I'm going to meet with the men and do some strategizing. Send a little force out there and deal with those Kalikian gorillas in the hills. But you have to do it yourself. That's going to be an interesting aspect of this guy. At least I think it is. But keep track of the wear and tear between the big battles.

1:25:47Speaking of big battles, by this time, summer of 333 BCE, as Alexander's still probably feeling the after effects of this illness and recovering, the great king of Persia and his army gets on the move. And I have a little bit of a dilemma with something like this in that I've done a show where I've talked about what's about to happen here before. And some people have heard me talk about it before and some people haven't. And I need to talk about this in a way that satisfies both of

1:26:19those different groups. But I'm going to use one line because I've always found it so amazing that I know I used in Kings of Kings 3. But it's about how rare this event is to the people in this region, right? To see the great king leading the royal army into this neck of the woods. Pierre Briant, I think it was, said it hadn't happened in 150 years. Now, that's fascinating to me for any number of reasons. I mean, the first thing that I think about is I do the math. I mean, the Persian Empire is only 200 years old at Alexander's time period.

1:26:55Well, if you haven't seen a royal army in 150 years, that means you haven't seen a royal army throughout most of the history of the Persian Empire in that region. It means nobody living has ever seen one. It really emphasizes, doesn't it, this idea about how it's sort of like a company that runs each of its different districts with its own regional vice presidents. And there's no interference from the royal government unless there needs to be. And in the Persian Empire, and I believe we mentioned this in one of the earlier installments, the Persian Empire is kind of like an apex predator, like a fat and happy apex predator, one that might not be able to defend

1:27:28itself against another apex predator, but it doesn't have anybody like that. They face problems with revolts. They face problems with satraps going rogue. They face problems with, you know, the dynasty and the royal succession and civil wars and stuff like that. But they don't face and have not faced throughout their entire history, somebody threatening their existence, an existential threat from another state until now. And it's at about this time that even the people who've delayed the

1:28:02longest suggesting that the Persian king is not taking this seriously now understand that he is. And there have been people who've been suggesting he's been taking it seriously the whole time. And because you don't know things like when the Persian army departed from Babylon, you know, to head up to where Alexander is, you know, north of modern day Syria, it's about 600 miles. Because you don't know when that army left, there's a lot of other things you can't figure out. I was reading my Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army by Donald W.

1:28:33Engels. And he said that the, you know, trip was made by the Persians in like 48 days, which is crazy fast. But in conquest and empire, A.B. Bosworth said it took at least three months, which is much more what you would expect from the Persians. The Persian army is notoriously slow to muster. It is notoriously slow moving. But it is like a giant ship or something, right? It takes forever to get to where you want it to go. But when it arrives there, it arrives with a ton of force and mass and weight

1:29:10behind it. And the things the Persians don't get enough credit for by people who focus, and, you know, I'm probably one of those people too, inordinately on the battlefield day of the combat sort of version of what turns up that morning and doesn't focus enough on all it takes to get that army to the battlefield, right? Up to that point. Think about the supply dumps that the Persians would have set up in advance at locations designed to meet the march totals for each day so that when

1:29:43the army arrives, there's food and there's everything it needs to repair, anything that got broken. I mean, the Persians are fantastic at this stuff. And this is what allows you to get armies of incredible size. Because otherwise, you know, when you find them, and this has been an interesting sort of aspect of ancient warfare that's been looked at differently more recently than it did when I was a kid. When I was a kid, you used to talk about ancient so-called barbarian armies of 150,000, 200,000, these two-tones and these Kimberi coming down from the mountains. But how would you

1:30:17feed them? Right? Even if they stayed in a place for five minutes, they're going to be like locusts. What allows you to feed large armies, as Hans Delbrook said so long ago, are the logistics of providing the food and what they need. And that's what the Persians, one of the things they were so good at. But even being that good, they can't leave a large army sitting in one place for too long. It has to continue moving, even if it moves slowly, because it seems to bring everything with it. It reminds me a little of the way the Mongol Khans, although they came from a nomadic empire until

1:30:51it settled down, obviously. But I mean, it was, they had a sort of an empire on the move, but the Persian king brings like a treasury with him and his relatives and their concubines and everything you need, the soldiers all have assistance. And I mean, that swells the size. I mean, those are all mouths to feed, as the old saying goes. But in the ancient world, I mean, in the modern world too, but in the ancient world and in the East especially, this is a display. The army on the march serves a lot of purposes, doesn't it? And one is to sort of reinforce royal authority. And Alexander and the

1:31:26Macedonians would use their army for the same thing. But in the Persian sense, it's exalted. And the Greek authors love to make the comparison, by the way, because it plays into their wonderful, we would today call it a racist sort of approach to this whole thing where, you know, the Greeks are one level of humanity and these barbarians are beneath us. And one of the ways, you know, that they show this is their wealth is turned into ostentatious displays and lots of references to women, whether it's makeup or clothing or whatever, whereas the Greeks and, you know, it's really the Macedonians,

1:31:59but these Greek authors like to make it the West versus East thing. They're just into their weapons and their poverty and it's part of the trope, right? I mean, if we were ourselves being the Persians today, we would say, what are you talking about? This is our wonderful kit. We're showing off. I mean, this is a sign of our dominance, the fact that we're covered in jewels, right? I like the way, and remember, this is all filtered through a bunch of people that are trying to, you know, throw crap on these Easterners for their womanly, ostentatious ways, but there's a different way to view it. And

1:32:34that's, I mean, this is, as Alexander will say later, this is royalty. And Quintus Curtius, who probably has no idea what one of these really looked like, but he gives you the standard rundown. And some of this is going to probably be close to true. Remember, as we said, if you haven't had a royal army show up in 150 years, when one does show up, well, you hope it impresses, right? And Quintus Curtius has an army description of the Persian king on the march that is, by any standard you want to use, impressive. And in my John Yardley translation, Quintus Curtius,

1:33:12Rufus writes, quote, It is a tradition among the Persians not to begin a march until after sunrise, and the day was already well advanced when the signal was given by trumpet from the king's tent. Above the tent, so that it would be visible to all, a representation of the sun gleamed in a crystal case. The order of the line of march was as follows. In front, on silver altars, was carried the fire, which the Persians called sacred and eternal. End quote. Let me stop you here. This is part of the Persian religion, right?

1:33:47Ahura Mazda, Zoroastrianism. This flame's never supposed to be extinguished. And, you know, like the Olympic torch or the John F. Kennedy eternal flame, I mean, you just carry it with you. It's a sign. And all the people on the march are going to see it, too, and they're going to tell their grandchildren about it. Quintus Curtius continues talking about the people whose job it is to sort of oversee the flame, the religious people, the magi. Quote, Next came the magi singing the traditional hymn, and they were followed by 365 young men in scarlet cloaks, their number equaling the days

1:34:24of the year. Then came the chariot, consecrated to Jupiter, drawn by white horses, followed by a horse of extraordinary size, which the Persians called the sun's horse. End quote. Now, typical of ancient writing, they assume that their gods are the same gods everybody else is worshiping, just under different names. So, Quintus Curtius is Jupiter, is Alexander's Zeus, is Egypt's Amman, and is Ahura

1:34:57Mazda from the Persians. As far as these people are concerned, they obviously did not worship Jupiter per se. Curtius continues, quote, Those driving the horses were equipped with golden whips and white robes. Not far behind were ten carts, amply decorated with relief carvings in gold and silver, and these were followed by the cavalry of twelve nations of different cultures, variously armed. Next in line were the soldiers whom the Persians called the Immortals, some ten thousand in

1:35:32number. No other groups were as splendidly bedecked in barbarian opulence. Golden necklaces, clothes, interwoven with gold. Long-sleeved tunics actually studded with jewels. After a short interval, he writes, came the fifteen thousand men they call the king's kinsmen. This troop was dressed almost like women. Its extravagance rather than its fine arms catching the eye. End quote. So here you go, right?

1:36:02We're going to slam them now for their feminine-like qualities. Because the Persians would wear robes. They would, you know, there would be the eye makeup that the Egyptians used to wear to the coal around the eyes. All this sort of stuff struck the, you know, the Western Greek world as effeminate. They'll find that they like it later, but at the moment it's bizarre and strange and allows them to sort of explain, you know, to their audience why their weak culture fell under the masculine virility of the

1:36:32West. And he continues by pointing out, you know, that this is a partial fashion show and says, quote, the column next to these comprised the so-called, I don't know how to pronounce this word, it looks like Dorifoe or Dorifere, the men who usually looked after the king's wardrobe. And these preceded the royal chariot on which rode the king himself, towering above all others. Both sides of the chariot, he writes, were embossed with gold and silver representations of the gods. The yoke was

1:37:05studded with flashing gems, and from it arose two golden images, each a cubit high, of Ninus and Bellus, respectively. Between these was a consecrated eagle made of gold and represented with wings was outstretched, end quote. Then he talks about the king. And this is the weird sort of dichotomy of these ancient Western writers. And the dichotomy is that they want these people to be cowardly, but at the same time magnificent and deadly. What did we say in the last installment, right? The

1:37:38Persians are all like stormtroopers or guys in red shirts in Star Trek. They're nameless and faceless, and they don't matter except as, you know, it matters to the Greek side of the story, except for one character on the other side. The real bad guy, the Ming, the Merciless, the Darth Vader. In this case, it's Darius. And Quintus Curtius writes, quote, The sumptuous attire of the king was especially remarkable. His tunic was purple, interwoven with white at the center, and his gold-embroidered cloak bore a gilded motif of hawks attacking each

1:38:14other with their beaks. From his gilded belt, which he wore in the style of a woman, he had slung his scimitar, its scabbard made of a precious stone. His royal headdress, called a cadaris by the Persians, was encircled by a blue ribbon flecked with white. Ten thousand spearmen carrying lances chased with silver and tipped with gold, followed the king's chariot. And to the right and left, he was attended by some two hundred of his most noble relatives. At the end of this column came thirty

1:38:46thousand foot soldiers, followed by four hundred of the king's horses. End quote. Now, that's not the whole army. That's just sort of his entourage. Now, while Curtius can give us sort of a sense of sort of the grandeur and the opulence and the awe-inspiring nature of something like this, I'm not sure we can trust him on the details. You don't get a sense of the numbers that you can trust from any of these ancient authors. I mean, Arian and Plutarch say that the army that the great king is leading here is like

1:39:19600,000 men. Diodorus has it at more like 400,000. Curtius says it's like 250,000 infantry and 62,200 cavalry, which is rather specific. But none of those numbers can be right. I mean, there's a reason that we don't, as I believe we said, there's a reason we don't have armies of 600,000 men marching around, even if your army has that many men, right? You break them up. What did Napoleon

1:39:50teach us? Or for that matter, the Mongols, right? You break them up into smaller little armies and