Death in Babylon and Legacy

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Alexander is one of the most famous people in all world history. So how did you want to reshape our image of him with your new biography? Honestly, just the thought of writing about this guy, like Why would you want to write about this guy after so many people had done so many thousand books about him? It seemed like Such a fool's errand. And when I first thought about it, I was like, this is the worst idea I've ever had. I can't do a book about this guy, anything but this guy But what I found of the course several years chasing after him. was that so many of the things we've assumed about Alexander, so many of the parts of his story that seemed fixed and certain, actually anything but and also so many of the parts of his story which seemed mysterious. so many of the questions which should for a long time seemed absolutely impossible to even try to answer. New discoveries and new technology and new approaches are starting to open up ways to address them. So In many ways, I wanted to write about him because there was suddenly a chance to tell a very different kind of story about someone who has, as you said, been one of the most written about people in human history. Yeah. And as you alluded to, in that answer In the book, you quite often talk about actually very recently discovered sources that can really add to or change our understanding of him I wonder if there might be one or two of those that you could point to as being particularly significant in the writing of this book. So one of the things that has been very constant in writing about Alexander all the way back to The the first generation of historians the people who followed Hon campaign is that when they were writing about Persia, the Persian Empire, the world of the Great Kings, which Alexander conquered. They were very much writing about it as outsiders, as people who really didn't understand the language, couldn't read the letters, didn't know how the history worked, didn't know how the bureaucracy worked. In many ways we've understood or tried to understand the world that Alexander conquered through the eyes of people who really did not know more than a couple of very basic things about her And what are the exciting things about Some of the most recent discoveries in archaeology and papyarlology is that we started to see the world of the Persians on its own terms. And to hear the voices of great kings, of provincial officials, of child children of people trying to you know dispel fever demons and to understand the world that Alexander habited far far more vividly That sounds incredibly generally, so I just want to give you one one example. Just recently, a team at Oxford and also the brilliant John Mart Columbia published the letters of a Persian provincial governor called Arsama for the first time These are sort of strange looking Aamaic letters and They show this glittering world of the G Kings of Persia Glden vastness and wonder which the Greeks wrote about. They show it exhausted oververwhelmed bureaucrats just want the demands to stop Asama is the governor of Egypt in a time of peace. He had it really good as provincial governors in Persia go. But everything always seemed to be going wrong Someone was getting looted. There was an angry letter from Babylon saying, whereere's the money? He had to adjudicate disputes. a bunch of his goons got kidnapped. someone was robbed by his slaves. So this this guy who's meant to be, you know running this glittering King's W just always sounds like he is exasperated, he's overwhelmed He writes as if he's surrounded by idiots. He says, like He keeps on saying you're going to be punished for this. I'm going to find you and I am going to punish you He absolutely writes like someone who hates his job And it was that kind of immediacy that I was going for sense of voices that we really hadn't heard before and people we hadn't had a chance to meet as fully rounded. In a lot of the ancient historians, we learn little about that Alexander passed through other than the names of the cities he destroyed and the battles he won to make that world come to life in as much as it was possible to do. Okay, And to come to the life of Alexander himself then born in Macedon, the son of the king What can you tell us about his parents and the kingdom that his father ruled? His parents, Philip II of Maccedon A Olympias. to Incredible people. and Each of them in their own way, shaped Alexander and shaped as well Philip kind of tricked his way onto the throne. He wasn't really in the line of succession, but he kind of hoodwinked and bamboozled and muscled his way into power And the rest of Greece thought of Macedon as, you know, Northern Hali kingdom that was semi civilized at best, the great Athenian orator Demosenes famously said of Philip He's not a Greek. he's Nothing like a Greek He's not even a decent barbarian. He's from Macedon. You can't even buy a decent slave from Macedon. And Philip really liked it when people underestimated him and During Alexander's childhood. gradually extended his power and Macedon's power F the Northern Hills down through Greece and gradually bent the Greeks to his well. And as he did, he built the army that Alexander would unleash on Persia. By a long way, the most ruthless and professional and well disciplined army in the world at that time and it absolutely tore through E Greece sent against it. Alexander's mother was from The Hill tribes She was said in the ancient historians to be a great admirer of the snake worsipping cult of Dionysus and There are stories of her coming into banquets draped in giant snakes. Obviously a lot of this is factually dubious, but it's certainly the case that Olympias was someone who understood power and who understood the ways to build power and find power for herself, even in a world which seemed set up to deny that to her. And one of the most famous things that we know about Alexander's childhood is the fact that he was educated by the great Aristotle How far do you think that relationship shaped the man that Alexoter had gone to become? Alexander was indeed educated by Aristotle. He had a very strange selection of tutors. His first one was sort of a sort of no nonsense, grumpy guy called Leonidas who just believed in long walks and cold meals and seft denial Aristotle when he arrived, was very much a different sort of person was incredibly vain. he was incredibly pleased with himself, and he was by a long way the most brilliant intellectual in Greece at time. He taught Alexander and a number of Alexander's companions, his contemporaries for several years. There's every reason to believe that At least some of Aristotle's teaching shaped Alexander and the people around him profoundly Alexander was famously obsessed with Homer and Aristotle is said to have given Alexander an annotated copy of the Iliad which he took with him on campaign There are records, though the letters themselves are lost of whole books of letters between Aristotle and many members of Alexander's courourt, including is sometimes friend, sometime lover, always constant companion, Hvian. So Aristotle changed Alexander Aristotle seems to than someone who really shaped the way he saw the world in many profound ways. The irony is that he was only there in Maccedon because Philip II, Alexander's father had blackmailed him into taking the job Philip actually destroyed Aristotle's home city. and then said to Aristotle, well, you'd like me to rebuild your city and if you'd like your relatives and your family to be freed from slavery, then why don't you come teach my boy for a few years and then we'll See what we think about that? So Aristotle was essentially blackmailed into taking the job. that It does seem that there was a genuine connection between him and Alexander. And then not that long later, I think in three hundred thirty six BC, Philip himself is assassinated And I believe there remains some mystery behind what happened there. What's your take on his death? Philip was indeed assassinated and was assassinated in very puzzling styles He was killed in the middle of his wedding because Macedonian kings were very cheerfully polygamous pillarhead multiple wives and multiple multiple children He was assassinated by one of his bodyguards public in the middle of the old theatre and it was a sort of Wildly theatrical spectacle, one of the actors who was due to perform that day was later asked, well, what was the most incredible bit of stage craft you ever saw? was it something by Aeschylus? Was it Euripides? And he said, No, no, no. Nothing compared to Philip's murder And Philip's Asassin, who was a young man, as I said, one of his bodyguards never said why he did it killed before he could get away. and within hours, Alexander was on the throne. Because while there were multiple claimants to Macedon's throne and Alexander had never been formally named Philip's heir Alexander was in the same there, Alexander was indeed a few paces behind Philip when he was assassinated So he was able to move faster than anyone else secure the king's body, which was incredibly important in Macedonian custom And then get himself onto the throne. So why it happened? has been a mystery really, and one which ancient historians have sort of stoked rather than dispelled. There were rumours, of course. L there were always rumours. One historian said that it was because of an affair had gone wrong. Another one said that it was because of a punishment taken too far There were of course rumors that Alexander himself or his mother Olympias might have been behind Philip's assassination and It's been argued about vehemently ever since. I think it's probably unlikely that Alexander himself had much or anything to do with The assassination He may possibly have whispered in some ears, he may certainly have known that If Philip stayed on his throne for decades, then It would be highly likely that Alexander would not be his heir because his new wife would have children and they would take Alexander's place But What happened we can understand? Why it happened is far more of a mystery, I'm afraid. But as you say, regardless of the cause of Phillip's death, the result is Alexander takes the throne and pretty quickly he's tearing into the Persian empire Why does he decide to take on such a mighty adversary at this point? He needs some money. He's broke. He opens the treasury after Philip's death. He realizes that he's got maybe thirty days pay for the army barely that One of his first acts as king is to abolish all direct taxes in Maccedon he has no way to raise revenue there. After that, His options are for the arrmy to realize they're not going to be paid and then put someone else on the throne Yeah Try to find the money as best you can And so He turns the Macedonian state into a predator It has to keep consuming others to survive. And he attacks Persia not because he's confident he'll succeed, but because he knows that if he doesn't He really has No options left Now earlier on, you talked about the fact that in your book, you've done a lot of research about the Persian perspective on this period So what can you tell us about the nature of the Persian Empire and the power of the Persian Empire at the time that it's up against Alexander? So this is the world's superpower by any and all measures. Persure is last when mostost Greek city states had Barely a few thousand Citizens Pia as a population Tens of millions It has a massive storehouse of wealth, hundreds upon hundreds of tons of gold in the treasuries of many many of the great cities. But more than that, it has just a remarkable ility J sh the world and shape what it's meant to be human The Persian Empire stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the plains of India It's divided up into provinces which tend to take relatively predictable forms. Egypt, for instance is one. mododern Afghanistan is divided into a few. It's ruled essentially in an incredibly centralized way. so provincial governors handle day to day work, so for instance, that overworked governor of Egypt I mentioned a little earlier. And then It's ruled in absolute fashion by the Great King Now the G Kings of Persia did not start out as world beating emperors. They started out as small time nomad princes And then Cyrus, Cyrus, the great as he's often called built Persian power into a level and a scale like nothing else on Eth. Persia has resources that are beyond the dreams of most Greeks both in terms of population In terms of wealth but also in terms of knowledge, it controls the temple libraries of Egypt. You could almost say some of the first scientists, the astronomer priests of Babylon Predict eclipses of the moon from ten years into the future, they control a level of knowledge and a level of history and a level of wealth which is simply on a different level to anything in the West at the time and When Alexander is attacking Persia, he is not just trying to get a whole heap of gold and make a run for it. He's taking on a vast ancient civilization, which had been telling its stories for thousands of years before Alexander was even born. So considering the scale of the adversary that Alexander's facing. How is it that he iss able to win battle after battle? I mean, I believe he never lost a battle How could he with his smaller army continually keep defeating the Persians? This is the mystery that people have puzzled about How on earth did he do it The answer as with all of these things doesn't come down to just one thing Partly, he's very lucky And this is a thing that every general needs. He always dies several times He has to learn very quickly how to face the Persian armies The first time he does at the Granicus, it's borderline disastrous. He charges straight into a prepared position. He is almost killed several times And he's utterly, utterly shaken. He's so shaken by how close he came to death that he massacres Thousands of Greek mercenaries who' been fighting on the Persian side at the end of the battle. But he's extremely adaptable and he has I for a terrain and an opposing army almost no one else in human history So He's able to figure out tactics Different on each occasion which nullify the vast numbers of the Persian forces For instance, it is first battle against Darius III, the great King of Persia at Isssus in November thirty three, he sort of faits Darias into facing him on a narrow coastal plain And because Darius has got the sea on one side and the mountains on the other His vast army can't really spread out He's kind of bunched up on the plane whereereas Alexander can sort of fight on his own terms But he's also got truly remarkable army traamed the course of many years by Philip II. blooded in campaigns in Greece and now unleashed in Persia He's got two units in particular, which people talk about as being incredibly difficult for the Persians to counter. The first is his cavalry, like companions U Alexander leads personally in battle and who he sort of uses to kind of break open Persian formations, you will Look at the Persian lions looking for a gap And we'll charge straight at that with the companions and we'll sort of split opposing armies in two. The second thing that he has, which the Persians find very, very difficult to counter is the Macedonian phalax. Now this is a sort of solid these are solid blocks of infantry armed with gigantic sort of spears which charge towards you sccreaming this eerie war cry, looking all the world like this incredibly angry porcupine. And these spears that they have project far, far, far beyond the front lines of the phalanx which makes it almost impossible for opposing armies to come to grips with them If the phalanx is handled correctly, by the time the opposing soldiers actually get to the front line of the phalanx, they are very much already dead So those are the two things that help him win battles What helps him win the war is a little bit more complicated Firstly, he doesn't run out of food He thinks really carefully about making sure his army doesn't start That is to be underestimated in the ancient world, because once you're a few hundred miles from home, you generally can't resupply an army particularly well Alexander goes thousands of miles from home for many years And only at one moment towards the end of the campaign does his army significantly run out of food and water and resources. But possibly his final seecret weapon is his technology. He has a group of remarkable and remarkably obsessed military engineers with him Most notably someone called Dity apella And Dies has been learning his craft for years in The army of Phip the Sacer And it's deies and the engineers who allow Alexander to win a few otherwise unwinnable battles, which could not have been achieved through brute force alone He captures cities which no army has been able to capture before. changes landscapes in ways that are incredibly advantageous for him. And he deploys kind of experimental technology on a grand scale in order to sort of win this campaign. Now during his extensive Persian campaign, there's this really fascinating moment where he takes this detour through the Egyptian desert to visit the Shrine of Amoun. Why does he do this? and why does this become such an important moment in his life story? It's a wonderful way in to Alexander He keeps on doing things that don't make sense. He keeps on doing things which by any reasonable measure he shouldn't do or which should be disastrous And as he said One of the most famous ones is his decision, just at one of the most delicate points of his campaign when he has just secured Egypt But when Darias III is very much still in power and could show up at any time with another army. He leaves most of his forces behind And he takes The small number of men, a few hundred He sets out into the western desert of Egypt. to the shine of the Egyptian Skygard I'm in and This journey makes no sense because there's no garrison at Amon's shrine S her. usn Persian military force there's nothing that needs to be captured. there's no vast hoard of treasure. And of course once you're over the horizon from your army in the ancient world, you are definitively out of touch with if The troops have decided to revolt, decided to just say all right, we've had enough of this. let's go home If they'd had to face Dorias, Alexander would not know a thing about her until it was too late But he sets out into the desert. Pretty soon he's lost. The guides have lost the way as sandstorms have covered the tracks and they have to navigate by the stars And Pretty soon the water bottles are empty and they're starting to wonder if they're going to die here no purpose in the desert see birds circling overhead are in the distance and they realize that This is the oasis of Sua, the shrine I'm in Now I'm in Of course' an Egyptian c He's a well traveled one as well She was worshipped throughout the ancient Mediterranean We have records before Alexander of many Greek generals and politicians sending Messengers were sending envoys to the shrine of Amun to askk. This gos saidvine Be Sia is a very strange and special place. It's like a rip in reality for Greeks and Egyptians It's one of the few places where It was possible to Speak almost directly to the guards Ask them questions. and for them to actually reply Alexander arrives needing help. He wants to keep going, He wants to lead his army into the Persian heartland in Mesopotamia And Fight Darias III again H army don't want to do that They are now richer because they've defeated Duras once and plundered many of his coastal cities, they are now richer than any Europeans in history have more money that they'll be able to stand and Many lifetimes. They want to go home They want to spend their money, they want to see their families. they want declare victory And declaring victory at this point makes sense. There's no reason to think that Alexander would have intended to seize the whole Persian emmpire when he first crossed into Asia. But he wants more But he knows that to get his men to follow him into the Persian heartland to face forces beyond their imagination. He needs the gods on his side. He doesn't just need a cheery speech and a slap on the back. he needs divine purpose. So that's what he's looking for in Siua. He's looking for the support of the guards and he's looking to find a way to lead his army onward. But what happens in Sia is something that even Alexander does not expect. them. The shhrine of our mooon, we've actually been able to excavate this,'s thanks to some really great archaeological work. We know quite a bit about it. It's perched on a rocky outcropping at a little distance from the settlement And it looks it's a sort of squat and sort of unassuming building But it's kindind of more to it than meets the eye Sorange essentially is a series of courtyards. it's the first open courtyard Followed by a second Bad Bothered by the shrine itself Obviously, the further you go, the more restricted the area gets, the more sacred the space becomes. The shrine itself is this like window sort of windowless like low ceiling space at the heart of the temple It's low ceiling, by the way, because there were hidden spaces in the roofs where the priests could crawl up and watch because they did not believe in leaving the Word of God to chance Alexander leads a few men, a few of his closest companions U to the shrine of Aman And that's where it goes straight Because the priests, the high priest of ourmon has been coached. and he's been told to greet Alexander with a couple of words of Greek, which is the standard sort of greeting for An important person seeking answers in a Greek Oracula shrine. Oh Pyon O my son, but the priest stumbles over his words and instead of O pyion, He sence Y O Son of God And that is what Alexander here And it's like a sort of shiver runs through the world Because this seems to be confirmation just to Alexander's men to Alexander himself that he is in fact more than human There's something divine, something superhuman about him And he'd sort of danced around this idea before But hearing it straight from the mouth of the priest from one of the most sacred and trustworthy shrines of antiquity absolutely sends him reing He's struggling to process what's happened. His manner kind of incredulate. He just follows the priesthood of the shrine And after that everything's different. Because after that, many of the Greeks think that Amun has claimed Alexander as his son and Alexander himself starts to wonder if perhaps he is more than humans So as you alluded to, when we're talking about his visit to the shhride in Egypt, at this point he hadn't yet defeated the Persian Empire completely. how does he ultimately to conquer their entire empire. Oh, it's a mess. It's an absolute mess. He wins a second set pece battle against Doras III at Gagameelo in Mesopotania. It is a truly remarkable victory. Darius throws absolutely everything he can at Alexander. He spends months preparing the s of the battle, He drills his army, he brings in every kind of sort of new super weapon he can think of to sort of defeat the Macedonians But nevertheless, he still loses. But that's not the end of the story because While Alexander tries to capture Darius both times, They face each other in battle each time Darias gets away And that allows him to flee further east and to try to rebuild his power But after Galabela He's really more of a refugee than a king running from one city to another summoning armies which simply do not come calling on power which has long since deserted him. Alexander hunt him down over the course of several bloody campaigns And gradually catches up with them in the far east of the Persian Empire. He finds that when he catches Darius, he's caught not a king But a prisoner, Darius is downed in chains and has been assassinated by his former courtiers before Alexander is able to catch up with him It's a few of Diasis Ambitious nobles decided to essentially hold him prisoner and then when they realized that Alexander was almost drawing level with them to stab her eyes to death and run for it themselves So that should be the end of the story, right But again, it isn't. becausecause there's another Persian noble who sets him outount himself up as a great king and tries to build an alternative empire. in the Far East and then when Alexander gets him, there's another rebel and then when he gets him, there's another and another and another. sort of Several years of just grinding campaigning against ever smaller armies and ever more elusive enemies, where instead of facing the massed ranks of the greatreat King's armies, you are essentially hunting ghosts in the mountains of Afghanistan and question of how much Alexander actually controls much of Persian Empire, much of this territory is really an open one because While he defeats a lot of the rebellions, Spring up as soon as his army is over the horizon more start forming and The Persian immperial bureaucracy really just starts to break down in many places. So a lot of these provinces, a lot of this land is more theoretical empire than actual empire. But even despite that, are there ways that Alexander attempts to impose his rule on the areas that he's conquered? Does he try and change things up from how the Persians were governing the empire? Much less than you would think He's not terribly interested in government and the mechanics of rule What we found with a lot of rather brilliant archaeological discoveries of the last few few years is that a lot of the old Persian and pure bureaucracy just goes on as normal The same guys do the same jobs they figure out Fig rations, they figure out. resupplying couriers. they figure out reinforcing garrisons and they do it riding with the same kind of crabbed aramaic hand as they always did We also see in certain parts of the empire that Alexander's rule touches things very lightly in Egypt He barely sort of stirs the waters of the Nile. The old priests and administrators simply go on doing their jobs as they had before. In India He fights an incredibly bloody and difficult campaign against one local ruler, Porus only to put him straight back on his throne at the end of the battle. So the question of How Alexander transforms the world is a really good one But the strange thing is that Politically and administratively, he doesn't do that much. Possibly he's planning to do something, possibly he's planning to reorganize the emmpire But he doesn't impose one political system on it, apart from his own rule Instead, we see a sort of patchwork of political systems, all of which are running simultaneously across the empire. so sort of Grumpy, disaffected Democrats in Greece, priests in Egypt Local hereditary rulers in Asia Mina Bureaucrats in Babylon local kings in Northern India. And so we see really that what Alexander does is He's incredibly good at taking over territory But once he's done that He doesn't really have a grand plan for what to do with that. Now, Alexander died in three hundred and twenty three BC when still in his early thirties Do we have a sense of what he would have intended to do had his life not been cut short? We've got a whole series of plans. Some are more plausible than others Many I think have a bit of truth to them It's likely that He would have struck south and then west So south around Arabia because we know that there was a whole new fleets being built ready to take the army. south around the Arabian peninsula and then North up the Arabian coast to the Red Sea ports of Egypt. One of his generals, one of his most trusted commanders, Crderus had been sent west to Maccedon ultimately, but along the way, his instructions were to build a series of dockyards and a series of giant ships on the Mediterranean coast And we think that the army that circumnavigated Arabia would probably land Egypt march to the Mediterranean coast and then embark and sall well Carthage is one possible target Southern Italy is another possible target We know that Alexander was training new armies that army built essentially of young Afghans trained up to form a Macedonian phalanx armed with phalanx weapons, which we think Alexander was planning to take with him on this future expedition And of course, the possibilities of what might have happened if this expedition had gone ahead historians have obsessed over for centuries. Roman historians spent so much time wondering about what would have happened if Alexander had hit southern Italy with his new armies and with the great King's resources and what would have happened in a war between Alexander and Rome? But of course, all of these plans do not ultimately come to ition because Alexander dies Ver suddenly in Babylon at the age of thirty two. And yes, coming on to his death, a bit like his father, there is quite a lot of mystery and debate about exactly what the cause of Alex's death was and I've certainly heard Some people say perhaps he was murdered, perhaps it was fever Where do you come down on that debate? The stories are brilliant, and each one more implausible than the last, possibly he drank himself to death. possibly he got some kind of illness, possibly malarious possibly some other kind of sickness orr possibly he was poisoned And the stories about his poisoning are many and varied and are often told after his death by his successors in order to pull down the reputations of many of their rivals or in order to attack people whose power that they were hoping So there are stories of, you know a lead line vessel born secretly from macodon with a poison that would destroy anything. All of its bunkum, I'm afraid. The ancient world has many poisons of course, and one of them could plausibly have been administered to Alexander But it has no poisons which work in the way that Alexander's last illness took shape. So a very slow acting thing which would have gradually killed him over the course of two weeks those ones simply don't exist. It's almost S He died of Pline and he died of typhloid because of contamination in Babylon's water supply. Babylon had an incredibly obsessive water supply. They cod of Hamurabi the first law codes of Babylon. set out incredibly detailed rules about drinking water and keeping The water clean, but when Alexander arrives in Babylon for the last time becausecause of the route his armi takes when they approached the city The entire, almost the entire army camps. Upstream from the city close to the banks of the Euphridates Unfortunately, that means that tens of thousands of men Basically drinking, washing Uurinating, etceter to the river O the course of several weeks and months, not just men, donkeys, horses Elephants. Everything Now that's okay when Alexandera zie arrive because the Ephridus is flowing quickly when it starts to slow down when the flow and the water level starts to drop. we ran and for the book as sort of computer modeling of what would have happened and what would have happened was that The water in Babylon would have very quickly over the course of a couple weeks, got incredibly toxic. terrifyingly toxic, full of salmonella, full of E coli, and particularly full of typhoid bacteria. Alexander seems to have caught the disease some point Tay And it essentially would have been dormant in his body, multiplying for a couple of weeks And then there's a drinking party where the symptoms start to overtake him. He drinks too much. He falls into a kind of stupor and he spends the next ten days or so sort of trying to recover and trying to control the symptoms of the fever, but it gradually overtakes him because of course, ancient medicine had nothing that could sort of effectively treat an infection of typhoid and gradually. paralyyses Alexander and it gradually kills him. onene thing we haven't talked about that much so far is Alexander's personal life, his family, his children. Could you tell us a little bit about that side of him? Like his father Philip II, Alexander is cheerfully polygamous. as one of the most complicated and elaborate collections of sexual partners in history from The women we know he married. so Roan, an aristocrat from the East, Statya, the daughter of the former King Darias III to aongo Basina who Alexander actually knew from his childhood because she was in exile at the Macedonian court while he was growing up and whoie seems to have them exxceedingly spent in w Alexander had two childildren is survived him At least one of the women was also pregnant at the time of his death and Ast D Tyra was probably heavily pregnant but was murdered soon after Alexander's death with Pasina He had a son called Heracles. And with Roan, he had a song called Alexander on of the foot. Now, that's not the end of Alexander's relationships. Of course, there was his really the closest relationship of his life with his childhood friends If Vice team, Alexander and if vice team W. Friends were companions, were sometimes lovers and Avesteans's death just a few months before Alexander's own abbsolutely broke him. grief that he just simply never recovered from So in many ways it's a complicated family and it resembles in many ways a traditional Macedonian royal house because there are multiple Children, multiple families, multiple power bases, everyone kind of looking over their shoulders and everyone trying to get Alexander's attention. But unlike with Philip after his death where Alexander took over and enhanced the emmpire, after Alexander's death, things begin to fall apart. Why is it that his heirs weren't able to consolidate his power? Alexander made a plan. to die so young whichich seems absurd because he'd come so close to death so many times. he'd been stabbed, shot, wed with rocks, knocked unconscious, had a lung collapse. He'd come cllose to death an absurd amount of times But He makes up plan He names Nohere And because of us, really almost immediately after his death his generals as commanders stop to try to claim power for themselves Abitious provincial governors try to set up little empires of their own. And no one who actually takes the throne or even access Alexander's region has the power to hold it all together. Two kings are named after Alexanderstad his infant child with Rxan as iss under the fourth. and Alexander's half brother Aadias showed very, very little interest in politics or in governing at all This is a deliberately weak setup Both of those kings are meant to be figureheads and meant to allow Alexander's generals closest friends, the people who'd served with him. cllaim power for themselves. Unfortunately, any attempt to hold the whole empire together Falls apart within a couple of years He falls apart in fact over a battle over Alexander's own body plan is to bury him in Macedon But Alexander's Hearse and the body are hijacked midway along the route by Ptolemy, one of Alexanders's. Chartered frowns them than governor of Egypt. Ptolemy steals the body, takes it to Egypt. sets himself up as Pharaoh in his own right and then destroys the royal army that is sent from Babylon against him and indeed schemes to have Alexander's regent or rather the regent of Alexander's emmpire. murdered in particularly brutal fashion After that the Empire fragments everyone for themselves. In the book, you write that Alexander had hoped to remake the world, but instead he left it in ruins Oonder if you could elaborate what you mean by that? Alexander's expedition really did transform the world. in ways that are still around us today, from the words on a page to the way we see the stars of Rir Few people shaped reality more profoundly. that he did But almost all of that transformation in the ripples that his life and his death set in motion. H actual life, his actual campaign had very, very little other than destruction to show for it He wanted, he said to liberate the Greeks from Persian rule killed and enslaved more Greeks than anyone else in history. He wanted Apparently to hold power in Persia, but he barely knew a few words of the language of that. Even Close to his death, he didn't understand the culture that he was ruling. He built cities, yes, Alexandrias, scattered across the known world. But during his lifetime, few if any of them rose above the rank of bleak garrison towns Nothing like the glittering cities that they would later become. He destroyed a huge number of cities. Chriestter. is a minor Indian, he left One settlement after another in Rins. Probably around one percent of the world's population died as a direct result of his campaign Now, his life and his death would set off a remarkable era of Cultural content Cansirmation the world becoming closer and more connected and Knowledge spreading faster than any time before in history. It wasn't Alexander doing that And Alexander, if he had a plan to remake the world died long before he could set it to motion. Something else that's really interesting you talk about in your book is the way that his story and his life have been co opted by so many different cultures around the world and across the centuries Considering, you his life was one of so much brutality, so much killing, why has he been adopted by all these different people. Why have so many people been so fascinated and mythologized him? Alexander is a story with so many open questions So many blank spaces. But it's also a story that has incredible resonance. versions of his story have been told and across the known world Greeks and then across the wider world today. he's become everything from a romantic hero to Cltra villain too Christian saint Jewish holy man. Islamic quizi prophetic figure. and he's become all of those things because people have needed that story. people have needed to make Alexander's story. They're around Alexanda seems to tell us somethingomet about Why the world is the way it is The possibility is that We have as human beings, p to do Gden, to do harm He seems to offer us a way to tell the story about the limits of what it means to be human. is someone who goes further than. Greeks imagined it was possible to go does things that were meant to be beyond even the guards And so For many people, he challenges us to think about what it means to be human about what The limits of humanity are what they should be. but he also, of course dies and gets sick gets injured and falters and fails and weeps and gets things horribly wrong. and it's that side of him, not The superman, the person who we see And all of the ancient sources just Trying desperately to figure out what to do next, trying to figure out how to survive, trying to figure out. How to repair a catastrophic mistake? That In many ways, I think connect people to Alexander because It's not a story of what it means to be superhuman, it's a story of what it means to be. All too human. That was Edmund Richardson, prorofessor of Classics at Durham University and the author of Alexander, God, King Man Published by Bloomsbury. He is speaking to Rob Attter And if you'd like to hear more from Edmund, why not check out a previous episode where he described the hunt for one of Alexander the Great's lost cities. You can find a link to that in the description of this episode