← Dan Carlin's Hardcore History
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History
Show 74 - Mania for Subjugation IV
04:01:20
The stage is set for an in-person showdown between Alexander and Persia's Great King. The resulting Battle of Issus, although often ignored by Hollywood, is one of the most important battles in all ancient history. It gets its due here.
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Dan Carlin
What 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.
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Ben
If you've missed parts one through three
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Dan Carlin
and you want to know what happened to get to this point, well, check them 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 7, 1941. It's history.
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Ben
A date which will live in infamy.
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Dan Carlin
That's one small step for man. The events one giant leap for mankind. This would have finally
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Ben
from this time
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Dan Carlin
and place, I take pride in the words ich bin ein billion drama. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this world. Marine Six now it too has had a major explosion and what appears to be a complete collapse surrounding the entire area.
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Ben
I welcome this kind of examination because
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Dan Carlin
people have been to know whether or not they're presidents of a deep question.
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Ben
I'm not a crook.
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Dan Carlin
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 guess 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. And you think about the relationship when the military force that one of these people is commanding is small. I think of these Apache leaders like Mangus Colorados or Cuchillo Negro or Pizago Cabezon. 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 everyone 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 in 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 special 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 hard to believe.
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Ben
But, I mean, remember when Napoleon comes
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Dan Carlin
back from his first exile from the island of Elba and he lands in France with his small little bodyguard, and they start marching, and you can almost feel the worm turning now.
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Ben
And he's back.
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Dan Carlin
He's confronted on the road by, I think it's a battalion of 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 start yelling, viva Emperor, and it's on. Right? But I mean, that's a special relationship where he's got this connection.
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Ben
And none of those troops, I think they were all, like, recent recruits, too.
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Dan Carlin
It's not like they knew him from 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
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Ben
though he's fought with this army a
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Dan Carlin
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 Arrian or not, but after the Battle of the River Granicus, he's got Alexander sitting down with the troops afterwards, and
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Ben
he says some famous things about him
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Dan Carlin
listening to their stories and letting them brag all they want and asking them about Their injuries and their tales. You can see a data point here where the relationship that's going to propel this army to do amazing things for this man, where this relationship is growing. As I said, it's only been a year, but if you look at a timeline of this guy's career, I mean
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Ben
he had all the battles already against
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Dan Carlin
the so called barbarians north of Macedonia, he had the destruction of Thebes, now he's got this 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 and going all the time in terms of people being recycled through the forces so that new people are arriving all the time. Alexander's going to get reinforcements from time
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Ben
to time and send troops back home
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Dan Carlin
from time to time, but the majority, this core of this army, is going
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Ben
to stay the same.
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Dan Carlin
So the relationship that he's developing with these people gets deeper and deeper because
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Ben
it's the same people.
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Dan Carlin
And as we move on in this story, the 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 to show. I mean, up till now one could make a case that there was almost
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Ben
an equal amount or you know, 60,
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Dan Carlin
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 Arrian II, a shipment that has 300 suits of Persian armor, battlefield spoils taken off the dead to be placed in the Acropolis as a sacrifice to Athena and on says according to Arian. And this would have been there for a long time. Lots of people would have seen this.
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Ben
Alexander, the son of Philip and the Greeks, except for the Spartans, dedicated these spoils from the barbarians occupying Asia.
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Dan Carlin
As we said in the last installment, everything Alexander seems to do here is operating in 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
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Ben
Persian Wars 150 years previously.
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Dan Carlin
Plays right into that.
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Ben
He sends the offering to one of the big two city states that sort
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Dan Carlin
of made their name in that war, right, it was Athens and Sparta. The Athenians fought at the Battle of
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Ben
Marathon, so famously made a lot of hay with that ever since. The Spartans, of course, had that made for TV moment at the Battle of Thermopylae where 300 of them are wiped
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Dan Carlin
out but they hold off the Persians forever. It was more than 300, of course, but we won't talk about that.
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Ben
But that's a famous number associated with that.
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Dan Carlin
And how many suits of armor did Alexander send back to Athens? 300.
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Ben
And who did he specifically leave out in the inscription for everybody to see for long?
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Dan Carlin
Well, the Spartans.
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Ben
Yikes.
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Dan Carlin
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,
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Ben
we've won, we're still going.
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Dan Carlin
And he sends a bunch of the Greek survivors from the battle of the Granicus, 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, Arrian 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 what 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 a 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 notice it. Maybe I'm previewing here, but you can already see the dude's energy and the speed. And the speed is 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 last? And so on. 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 these 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 the city. It'll be four straight days of marching. He's gonna 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 gonna 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 leaders on the Napoleon Alexander type chart, speed and energy. This guy is 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's got massive walls and could hold up for a long time, and also has the treasury for the region and just surrenders to Alexander. So there's some good fortune right there. Alexander quickly turns toward the coast and begins to go down 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. But 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
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Ben
ancient sources spent a little time on it. So it's clear that all these cities
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Dan Carlin
are factionalized in terms of their politics, and can't we relate to that? But they have factions that will favor a democracy, factions that'll favor an oligarchy, factions that want to 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 Aryan 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 seen as almost humanitarian. He marches the army in full parade, we're told, through the city and everything. But 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 the city from Persian rule. The hated Persians, who've been so terrible to you.
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Ben
We wrote plays about it.
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Dan Carlin
Miletus shuts its doors to Alexander. Now, a good number of histories from a long time ago to 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 locking the doors and stiffening their resistance. Diodorus has our friend the Greek movie figure that the audience in Greece can relate to Memnon, 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. But 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 they 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, well, 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 that 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. 400 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 there firstest with the mostest. Well, he gets there firstest with the leastest. And in the particular constraints of 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 those islands because he gets there first, drops 4,000
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Ben
or so Thracians on one of the
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Dan Carlin
main ones to make sure it's occupied, and then takes his smaller fleet and
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Ben
faces it outward with the prow sticking
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Dan Carlin
outward, sort of ship to ship to
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Ben
ship, in like a long line barring
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Dan Carlin
entrance to that area.
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Ben
And in a way, if you want
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Dan Carlin
to visualize it, turning it into like a mini passive thermopylae. And the Persian fleet, bigger though it is, can't get into the key harbor area to do anything to help to resupply, whatever. And Alexander gets a visit from someone representing the leadership of the city. According to Arrian, the mercenaries are part of the people in charge, and they offer Alexander an arrangement.
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Ben
And it seems like the perfect kind
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Dan Carlin
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 Valdemar Haeckel says is a neutrality proposal. How about we let you go into
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Ben
the city and use the harbor and
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Dan Carlin
let the great king do that too? Alexander just says, go back in your city and prepare to be assaulted. Now, Arrian 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, haven'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 Arrian anyway, and Alexander said, we can't wait.
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Ben
And full steam ahead.
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Dan Carlin
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. Little bit of role reversal there. But here's the way Arrian puts it in the Aubrey de Selencourt translation of his work.
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Ben
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.
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Dan Carlin
I 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
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Ben
a long time after Alexander, that they
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Dan Carlin
still all kind of believe this stuff. So this is a legitimate argumentative point for Parmenio to make as far as
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Ben
Arrian's concerned, hey, he saw an eagle, man.
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Dan Carlin
What do you want him to do? But there are some practical realities too. Arrian continues.
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Ben
He pointed out that a victory in present circumstances would be of great strategic advantage, 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.
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Dan Carlin
I can't help but think of, like, athletes, you know, who, I guess they never gave up the sport if we're using Parmenios as an analogy here.
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Ben
But I'm thinking of like these hockey
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Dan Carlin
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. Parmenia is going to get on that ship. I mean, these dudes were kind of amazing.
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Ben
But anyway, so he says to Alexander, I'll go do it myself.
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Dan Carlin
And this time Alexander's the one being cautious. And Arrian has him saying, quote, alexander
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Ben
replied that Parmenio was mistaken and that he'd wrongly interpreted the Omen.
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Dan Carlin
Let me stop here and point out
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Ben
that once again it's an argument point. Alexander has to address the Omen thing. You got the Omen wrong, Aryan.
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Dan Carlin
Continues quote in the first place, this is Alexander talking.
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Ben
It was absurd to rush blindly into a naval engagement against 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 Persian success at sea, end quote.
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Dan Carlin
So some logical points we would say, in addition to the Omen stuff.
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Ben
But then, according to Arian, again, who believes this too, Alexander goes back to the Omen.
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Dan Carlin
Don't get me wrong here, the Omen's important, but you've misinterpreted.
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Ben
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 seen 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.
- [24:25]
Dan Carlin
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 ideas sort of revolves around ancient naval warfare in a way that we need to take a second and understand it. Ancient naval warfare deals with the same thing naval warfare always deals with, which is the range a fleet has, how far away from its base or between bases can it go. 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
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Ben
very far at all.
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Dan Carlin
In general, these navies from the ancient world, these triremes and everything, they would find a place 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 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
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Ben
go farther and farther away. Right.
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Dan Carlin
If Alexander's gonna send forces to take all the possible areas that would be a good landing site for the Persian fleet.
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Ben
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
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Dan Carlin
city Alexander's trying to attack is too far.
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Ben
Can't get to and back to the base.
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Dan Carlin
I mean, he's basically curtailed their available 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 timeline 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 seem like it's going to take very long. Aerion and Diodorus both have accounts. Diodorus says Memnon was there, so Alexander had to attack the city. Arrian doesn't mention Memnon at all, but says that, well, why don't we just quote the Martin Hammond translation of Arrian and let the ancient writer explain it for himself. And he says he, meaning Alexander, personally
- [27:21]
Ben
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 army ready to go over where the wall had been broken down or shaken loose. All this was shadowed by the Persians from.
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Dan Carlin
He's talking about the fleet, right? That's now farther away because Alexander's forces captured all the good places to land
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Ben
who could be little more than spectators
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Dan Carlin
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 Melita see this, it sort of breaks their spirit and they start running.
- [28:06]
Ben
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.
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Dan Carlin
End quote. Now, somebody else might have allowed the 300 or so mercenaries that had gotten onto a very, very difficult to attack island to just sit there and rot. But Alexander being Alexander, has got to take it. And he takes, according to Arrian, his
- [28:49]
Ben
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
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Dan Carlin
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 Miletus show up carrying olive branches, the traditional token of supplication. They're basically begging for their lives.
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Ben
They have some things working in their
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Dan Carlin
favor, though, as several of the modern historians point out, the fact that. But as we said, Meletus was so much a part of the reasons for this war and their suffering against the Persians had been so played up over the years that, well, they were forgiven. Alexander basically said, you're okay.
- [29:35]
Ben
They Kill all the defenders though, did
- [29:39]
Dan Carlin
a deep dive trying to figure out how he did that. What's the mechanism for 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 of 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 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. This 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? Modern 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. What 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, which 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 quality 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
- [32:16]
Ben
disbands the fleet and he keeps like
- [32:18]
Dan Carlin
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.
- [32:34]
Ben
And all these cities like Miletus, have
- [32:36]
Dan Carlin
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. Like Miletus, only more so. Arrian 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.
- [32:57]
Ben
There's this famous incident where this queen,
- [33:00]
Dan Carlin
who's been out of power, comes to Alexander on the road between cities and basically asks him to support her in being restored.
- [33:10]
Ben
The story basically helps set the stage
- [33:13]
Dan Carlin
for Alexander putting a bunch of these local families that have long been in power in these regions back in power.
- [33:19]
Ben
It's part of the political game you play here.
- [33:21]
Dan Carlin
How do you keep these cities and these regions loyal to you after you rip them out of the Persian Empire? Well, do what the Persians were famous for doing, too.
- [33:29]
Ben
Leave the local royal family in place
- [33:32]
Dan Carlin
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, among several women who are older than him in the Alexander story that he will basically refer to as like 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.
- [34:13]
Guest or Additional Commentator
Right.
- [34:14]
Dan Carlin
As we said, our one Greek character in the story that the Greeks can all sort of empathize with and get
- [34:20]
Ben
behind, he's either the antihero or the hero on the anti hero side.
- [34:26]
Dan Carlin
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, been given command of the fleet, he's sent
- [34:47]
Ben
his family back to the royal seat
- [34:50]
Dan Carlin
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 Haeckel 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
- [35:07]
Ben
sort of the naughty list, so that
- [35:09]
Dan Carlin
if he ever found them, they're going
- [35:10]
Ben
to be in trouble.
- [35:12]
Dan Carlin
And a bunch of people who've already seen what Alexander has done to people
- [35:15]
Ben
like them in this story so far
- [35:17]
Dan Carlin
and who basically know that there's no running away from this 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
- [35:51]
Ben
for estimates, and if we said something apparently, and this is something I didn't know, apparently they're sort of like expected
- [35:59]
Dan Carlin
defenses for certain sized cities. And the next level city's gonna have a higher one. So about 45ft, 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. It's all like that around the city. And a lot of these ancient cities, I believe Halicarnassus was the same way,
- [36:25]
Ben
are built so that they're in multiple layers, so that the first layer is
- [36:30]
Dan Carlin
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.
- [36:43]
Ben
Right. Break open those first walls and run in. And now you're staring at walls that
- [36:47]
Dan Carlin
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,
- [36:58]
Ben
and I mean a child, sieges are
- [37:00]
Dan Carlin
not the interesting thing, but what you realize over time is, is how they alter.
- [37:05]
Ben
Especially until cannons can knock down walls.
- [37:09]
Dan Carlin
Walls and fortifications and stuff around cities is huge.
- [37:12]
Ben
And you can tell this fact is true by how long and how long we've been doing walls around cities and how universal it is.
- [37:19]
Dan Carlin
Right.
- [37:20]
Ben
Go look at any ancient portrait of any city anywhere.
- [37:23]
Dan Carlin
I mean, there's walls, walls protect people. Walls sort of indicate power. Walls create power equalizers. When you'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.
- [37:39]
Ben
But once he has to fight a siege with you, everything changes.
- [37:43]
Dan Carlin
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 fighting. We've talked about it all this time, right? The close order, you know, heavy infantry,
- [38:01]
Ben
phalanx with the long, 16, 18 foot pikes fighting, you know, shoulder to shoulder
- [38:05]
Dan Carlin
as a solid 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.
- [38:14]
Ben
I mean, and what about the fantastic Companion Cavalry? What's that going to do? And you see what I'm saying.
- [38:18]
Dan Carlin
All of a sudden, these things that
- [38:20]
Ben
would just terrify you.
- [38:21]
Dan Carlin
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
- [38:29]
Ben
does pretty well are sort of exalted.
- [38:32]
Dan Carlin
I mean, they've always been good missile people, right?
- [38:35]
Ben
Lots of archers, lots of people who can do that. And Alexander, when he approaches one of
- [38:40]
Dan Carlin
the outcroppings, there's, you know, these walls around Halicarnassus incorporate a lot of area.
- [38:45]
Ben
And he'll come up to sort of
- [38:46]
Dan Carlin
one place, I think it's about 10 miles away from the city itself, and
- [38:49]
Ben
he'll come to the walls and they're throwing stones at them. And it's interesting to try to conceptualize
- [38:55]
Dan Carlin
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, as 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 things, 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 and 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
- [40:02]
Ben
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 his widow, who happened
- [40:20]
Dan Carlin
to be his sister, Artemisia.
- [40:22]
Ben
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 40ft 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 attack 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.
- [41:11]
Dan Carlin
End quote. Now, the Greeks always make it sound like Persian generalship sucked, which people like Pierre Briant and whatnot would point out ways you can figure out sort of that it didn'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's gonna face here in the siege of Halicarnassus. His, you know, really coming up against Memnon, who was not in control at 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 Alexander'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 genius, but
- [42:04]
Ben
he's not a kid.
- [42:05]
Dan Carlin
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.
- [42:14]
Ben
And he's got a lot of mercenaries
- [42:16]
Dan Carlin
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 gonna happen. 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. This is their best chance to do something against Alexander. And when Alexander first shows up outside of Halicarnassus, he doesn't have his 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.
- [43:19]
Ben
I had to look this up.
- [43:20]
Dan Carlin
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 Arrian has this great story about 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
- [43:50]
Ben
and finds the walls all lined with
- [43:52]
Dan Carlin
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 being 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 and D staff 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 seem 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 this happen anyway in, like, right around 400, 390s in the Greek world anyway. Things 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.
- [45:43]
Ben
Well, if you're in prehistory and you want to take a walled town, how do you do it?
- [45:47]
Dan Carlin
Well, 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 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 period at the latest, because you can see it on the carved reliefs in 1900 BCE they're using towers and engines of one sword 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's gonna do in his military history sort of background is gonna 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 granicus. It's a different side of the brain, if you will, that's gonna be employed in this. And he has this engineering staff to work with. And they look at the. I tried 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 45ft, as we said, maybe with a 23 foot deep moat. So that's going to make the walls even seem higher. And it's 40ft 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 spy 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 Arrian. 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 torches and at least in one case a bunch of guys who are armed and their job is to prevent the people who are gonna try to stop the people that have the fire in the pitch and the people with the fire in the pitch are gonna throw that onto the siege engines and try to light em all on fire. And this is gonna 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 rhythm 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 Diodoras, 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.
- [49:27]
Ben
You can be kind of close up
- [49:28]
Dan Carlin
and perfectly safe and watch maybe 5% of the army just throwing that out. There is the one actually working on a piece of the wall at any given time while everybody else watches and they rotate. But it's a 247 job. It certainly sounds like it because both Arian and Diodorus talk about it, that
- [49:47]
Ben
there are prepared things that they put
- [49:50]
Dan Carlin
up to sort of shield the people who are working. So think of like wicker mantlets or
- [49:58]
Ben
something like a civil war rather than
- [50:00]
Dan Carlin
a First World War trench situation where
- [50:02]
Ben
you put up things. If you were a kid with a treehouse and someone was throwing dirt clods at you, you might put up a
- [50:07]
Dan Carlin
board to keep them from being able to do that.
- [50:09]
Ben
So you think about something like that
- [50:13]
Dan Carlin
because it's going to be a process as you begin to fill in the
- [50:16]
Ben
moat and you have to fill in
- [50:17]
Dan Carlin
the moat to get the siege engines close enough. Well, why don't I let Diodorus pick up the story? It's very exciting. And the difference, by the way, between Diodorus and Arrian in their accounts of this is that Diodorus has it be an extremely difficult thing for Alexander.
- [50:36]
Ben
Arrian's weird because he makes it sound
- [50:39]
Dan Carlin
like nothing was a big deal. But then when he tells you how many people were injured and whatnot in any given situation, you kind of go, sounds like a big deal 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 ass.
- [51:00]
Ben
He can't shut this city down.
- [51:04]
Dan Carlin
Diodorus, in my C. Bradford Wells translation, picks up the story with Alexander arriving right outside Halicarnassus and starting the siege. And Diodora says, quote, alexander encamped near
- [51:17]
Ben
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 of 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 numbers 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.
- [52:27]
Dan Carlin
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 engines
- [52:39]
Ben
of war, as they're called, artillery, as he breaks into these places.
- [52:45]
Dan Carlin
Once he knocks the walls down, I mean, that 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 whether or not they could use their giant long spears together, because this is hand to hand
- [53:09]
Ben
stuff, as I said, with engines of
- [53:10]
Dan Carlin
war shooting at you. Now, in the Aryan version of this story, he basically says it was no problem, and then he gives the casualty reports and it sounds like it wasn't all that easy.
- [53:24]
Ben
He writes, quote, a knight 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 Amyntas, one of those who had deserted to Darius. The losses among Alexander's troops 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.
- [54:07]
Dan Carlin
That from my Martin Hammond translation, by the way.
- [54:12]
Ben
But any way you slice it, that's a lot of injuries, right? This wasn't such a minor affair and
- [54:18]
Dan Carlin
this will be done by the defenders several times, if you believe the ancients. Some weird crap happens with Perdiccas, 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,
- [54:39]
Ben
it was Perdiccas troops that attacked sort of without orders, allegedly, and dragged the
- [54:45]
Dan Carlin
rest of the army in to support them. Right. There's a whole school of thought out there that Perdiccas is sort of a whipping boy for any decision Alexander makes where the outcome is stupendously overwhelming somehow. It was Perdiccas fault. And lots of analysis over the eras
- [55:01]
Ben
as to whether or not the bias
- [55:02]
Dan Carlin
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 Perdiccas 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 Perdiccas unkindly because I will be writing that history. So Perdiccas gets the short end of the stick sometimes, whether he deserves it or not. He is a little like, if you.
- [55:35]
Ben
I mean, you'd be forgiven if you
- [55:36]
Dan Carlin
were starting to see him as the Dennis the Menace of Alexandrian generals at this point. How he keeps his job, who knows? But here's the way that A.B. bosworth in his Conquest and Empire, sort of describes the situation that happens here.
- [55:51]
Ben
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 Perdiccas 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.
- [56:35]
Dan Carlin
He then writes about Arian sort of finding a way to gloss over this reverse.
- [56:40]
Ben
And he says, quote, most of this is slurred over by Arrian, 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, the attack was pressed home and the situation of the defenders became critical.
- [57:18]
Dan Carlin
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 thousand are going to get into a closely packed phalanx and attack anyone who comes and tries to stop the
- [57:49]
Ben
people from lighting the fires.
- [57:51]
Dan Carlin
This is where the heads of the
- [57:52]
Ben
mercenary forces go out themselves. I mean, it's a little like a last stand situation, because if this fails, then what?
- [58:02]
Dan Carlin
To show how the different sources handle this and where maybe the bias is, Arrian portrays this as easily sort of crushed because the great veterans, Alexander's old
- [58:13]
Ben
time, it's almost like his father's old
- [58:15]
Dan Carlin
guard, if you will, these guys who
- [58:17]
Ben
are exempt from the grunt sort of
- [58:19]
Dan Carlin
work that would be most of a siege, that they're brought into the situation
- [58:23]
Ben
to show the youngins how it's done.
- [58:25]
Dan Carlin
And so no problem, Aryan points out. But Diodorus and the more modern sources
- [58:31]
Ben
point out that the fact that the guard is brought in at all shows
- [58:36]
Dan Carlin
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. Right? These professional mercenaries who know they've got,
- [58:57]
Ben
you know, everything to fight for, because
- [58:59]
Dan Carlin
if they don't win here, they're done for. And in my Robin Waterfield translation of
- [59:05]
Ben
Diodorus, Diodorus says, quote, ephialtes therefore put together a force of 2000 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 set 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.
- [59:39]
Dan Carlin
End quote. Now Alexander gets involved personally. Once again, it's hard to emphasize how,
- [59:46]
Ben
and it may have been something a
- [59:47]
Dan Carlin
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
- [59:57]
Ben
in, in the mix of something like this.
- [60:00]
Dan Carlin
And Diodorus Continues.
- [60:03]
Ben
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. A 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 Ephialtes 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 high.
- [61:09]
Dan Carlin
I think I read that that was like 15 stories or something like that
- [61:14]
Ben
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.
- [61:31]
Dan Carlin
End quote. It's at this point, Diodorus says, that the old guard is called in and they're going to show the youngins you know how it's done. And they do. From my C. Bradford Wells translation of Diodorus quote.
- [61:49]
Ben
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 rebuked 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.
- [62:46]
Dan Carlin
End quote. I like the way Peter Green describes the tragedy that happens next as the tide turns in the battle, and you
- [62:55]
Ben
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?
- [63:09]
Dan Carlin
Well, often this is mistimed. And Peter Green in his Alexander of Macedon writes, quote,
- [63:17]
Ben
in a matter of minutes, the whole Persian assault group crumbled and began a stampede back to the city. There 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 escape a victory at all. The Macedonians withdrew to their camp. Alexander knew when not to press his luck, end quote.
- [64:03]
Dan Carlin
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 Persian 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. Cause he disbanded his fleet and right after this time period he's gonna 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 steps into the city, it's smoking and burning 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 hundred cubit, that's 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 this is unlikely. He'd already promised it to that old lady who he was calling mother. He 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 holed 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 and 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 in 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.
- [66:36]
Ben
They go back and retake Miletus, for example, behind him.
- [66:40]
Dan Carlin
And you can see this Memnon's going to be 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 was, you know, who had held off Alexander's father and now was holding off Alexander. And with him gone, what are you going to do? But meanwhile, while this 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 what we're talking about. And if any of this is to be believed. I like that disclaimer, don't you? But Halicarnassus might have been like a 40,000 person city, Sardis. The even bigger city might have been 50,000. Some of the so called large city states in this region might be 10 to 15,000. And there's a lot of like thousand person little city states. And so Alexandria, for example, will be in one region and there'll be like 30 of these cities that sort of surrender to him or accept his kingship or what have you. So those are small places, though. The problem is that some of these places resist. And this is a hidden part of the Alexander story, when you try to figure out what's going on in between the big 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
- [68:31]
Ben
other side, well, now you start to
- [68:33]
Dan Carlin
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 through 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? Diodora 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. So 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 Diodora 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, and 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
- [70:09]
Ben
people there and this forest tribe there. And I mean, it starts to add up, right?
- [70:14]
Dan Carlin
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 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, 333 BC BCE, basically everything you'll read will tell you that he's in constant motion and
- [70:39]
Ben
that these people are marching.
- [70:41]
Dan Carlin
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 the first among equals. And this is clearly very important to him.
- [71:10]
Ben
So when he fights even these little battles against these peoples who are nobody,
- [71:14]
Dan Carlin
he's right there in the front. It's crazy. It'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 him 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 fighting 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. The Gordian Knot story, for those of you who can see a lot of similar ones around history, it's the Excalibur
- [72:09]
Ben
sword in the stone story, isn't it?
- [72:11]
Dan Carlin
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 this 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 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 tradition 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 in the stone situation. If you just decided to take a jackhammer to the stone, I'll get that sword out 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 is 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 this is to liberate the Greek city states of Ionia. Well, getting kind of tired now that Alexander's been basically done that. Nevermind 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, there'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, and 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 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 claims of territories you haven't even discovered yet. That's what the Gordian knots telling Alexander, if we buy that rationale, but clearly if the Pope can do it in the age of discovery, it's not a new idea right now. 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, 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. One 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 money that nation states have. I mean, that's just that level of money. If we halved it by 75%, 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%. Nonetheless, a lot of people want to kill Alexander. And there are some stories that occur during this interlude period, right, we're in early 333Bce which kind of show the precariousness of, 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, Killed 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 1000 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.
- [77:09]
Ben
And Alexander always blamed the king of Persia for his involvement in that.
- [77:14]
Dan Carlin
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.
- [77:23]
Ben
Maybe you just keep doing that till
- [77:24]
Dan Carlin
you get a loser, till you get a lemon. Alexander gets a letter from his mother, according to Diodorus. And remember, 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, right? 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 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 careful 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 we arrest 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.
- [78:50]
Ben
So I mean, what you start to
- [78:52]
Dan Carlin
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 not really paranoia if they are out to get you totally applies to Alexander. And a thousand gold talent bounty on your head is 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.
- [79:48]
Ben
And he's in full armor, we're told,
- [79:51]
Dan Carlin
and he decides to jump off a 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 thoughts 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 their lives. Right.
- [81:01]
Ben
He's too dangerous to treat.
- [81:03]
Dan Carlin
And this one doctor who's known Alexander apparently a long time, Philip, he prescribes this 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 1000 talents trying to assassinate you. And the doctor hands the potion to Alexander. Alexander hands the letter from Parmenio warning
- [81:35]
Ben
about the doctor to the doctor. As the doctor's reading the letter containing
- [81:38]
Dan Carlin
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.
- [81:53]
Ben
You don't know if they're true or not. But continually there will be things like
- [81:58]
Dan Carlin
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 situations. 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 the wind changes and Alexander's able to, like Moses parting the Red Sea.
- [82:37]
Ben
The sea holds back from hitting the
- [82:40]
Dan Carlin
coastline so that his army has space to march. I mean, I don't know what to do with some 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.
- [82:58]
Ben
And it's difficult to know how to deal with.
- [82:59]
Dan Carlin
And as we've said many times in many shows, a lot of this stuff can affect reality even if it's not
- [83:05]
Ben
true, if the people in the story
- [83:06]
Dan Carlin
think it is magic, as we've said, if you believe has power. So this sickness of Alexander's is 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 between 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 Kolikia, as he's on his
- [84:06]
Ben
way down to what sort of, we
- [84:09]
Dan Carlin
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
- [84:17]
Ben
in the hills trying to chase down Cilician guerrillas.
- [84:21]
Dan Carlin
And again, he's in the 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. I keep track of the damage as it begins to add up, right?
- [84:45]
Ben
There's acute damage, like you get hit
- [84:46]
Dan Carlin
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 possible CTE building up over time. There's a lot of fighting, and Alexander's in the midst of it.
- [85:06]
Ben
There's something going on where either he
- [85:07]
Dan Carlin
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
- [85:28]
Ben
time for him to say, listen, we just got here.
- [85:31]
Dan Carlin
I'm gonna meet with the men and do some strategizing. Send a little force out there and deal with those Kolikian guerrillas in the hills. But you have to do it yourself. It's gonna 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. Speaking 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 those 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 Briand 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.
- [86:55]
Ben
Well, 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
- [87:01]
Dan Carlin
in that region 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
- [87:25]
Ben
a fat and happy apex predator, one that might not be able to defend itself against another apex predator, but it
- [87:32]
Dan Carlin
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 longest 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 to head up to where Alexander is 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. Engels and he said that the trip was made by the Persians in like 48 days, which is crazy fast. But in conQuest and Empire, AB 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? 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 behind it. And the things the Persians don't get enough credit for by people who focus, and 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 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 the 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 when you find, 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 cimbri coming down from the mountains. But how would you feed them, right? Even if they stayed in a place for five minutes, they're going to be like locusts.
- [90:22]
Ben
What allows you to feed large armies,
- [90:24]
Dan Carlin
as Hans Dell Brook 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.
- [90:34]
Ben
But even being that good, they can't
- [90:36]
Dan Carlin
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. Reminds me a little of the way the Mongol khans, although they came from a nomadic empire until it settled down, obviously, but I mean, they had a sort of an empire on the move. But the Persian king brings like a treasury with him and his relatives, and there's concubines and everything you need.
- [91:02]
Ben
The soldiers all have assistance, and I
- [91:05]
Dan Carlin
mean, that swells the size.
- [91:06]
Ben
I mean, those are all mouths to
- [91:07]
Dan Carlin
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
- [91:14]
Ben
especially, this is a display. The army on the march serves a
- [91:19]
Dan Carlin
lot of purposes, doesn't it? And one is to sort of reinforce royal authority.
- [91:25]
Ben
And Alexander and the Macedonians would use
- [91:27]
Dan Carlin
their army for the same thing, but
- [91:29]
Ben
in the Persian sense, it's exalted.
- [91:32]
Dan Carlin
And the Greek authors love to make the comparison, by the way, because it plays into their wonderful.
- [91:37]
Ben
We would today call it a racist
- [91:39]
Dan Carlin
sort of approach to this whole thing where the Greeks are one level of humanity and these barbarians are beneath us. And one of the ways 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 Greek. And it's really the Macedonians, but these Greek authors like to make it a 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.
- [92:17]
Ben
I mean, this is a sign of
- [92:18]
Dan Carlin
our dominance, the fact that we're covered in jewels. Right.
- [92:22]
Ben
I like the way. And remember, this is all filtered through a bunch of people that are trying
- [92:27]
Dan Carlin
to throw crap on these Easterners for their womanly ostentatious ways. But there's a different way to view it. And that'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
- [92:50]
Ben
had a royal army show up in 150 years, when one does show up,
- [92:54]
Dan Carlin
well, you hope it impresses, right? And Quintus Curtius has an army description of the Persian king on the march. That is, by any standards you want to use. Impressive. And in my John Yardley translation, Quintus Curtius Rufus writes, it is a tradition
- [93:17]
Ben
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 in front, on silver altars was carried the fire which the Persians called sacred and eternal.
- [93:44]
Dan Carlin
Let me stop you here. This is part of the Persian religion, right? Ahura Mazda, Zoroastrianism. This flame's never supposed to be extinguished.
- [93:52]
Ben
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
- [94:00]
Dan Carlin
are gonna see it too, and they're gonna 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.
- [94:13]
Ben
Next came the magi singing the traditional hymn. And they were followed by 365 young men in scarlet cloaks, their number equalling the days of 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.
- [94:39]
Dan Carlin
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, Jupiter is Alexander's Zeus, is Egypt's Ammon, and is Ahura Mazda from the Persians. As far as these people are concerned, they obviously did not worship Jupiter per se. Curtius continues.
- [95:07]
Ben
Those driving the horses were equipped with golden whips and white robes. Not far behind were 10 carts amply decorated with relief carvings in gold and silver. And these were followed by the cavalry of 12 nations of different cultures, variously armed. Next in line were the soldiers whom the Persians called the Immortals, some 10,000 in number. 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 15,000 men they call the king's Kinsmen, this troop was dressed almost like women, its extravagance rather than its fine
- [95:58]
Dan Carlin
arms catching the eye, end quote. So here you go, right, we're going to slam them now for their feminine like qualities. Because the Persians would wear robes, there would be the eye makeup that the Egyptians used to wear too, the coal around the eyes, all this sort of stuff struck the, you know, the Western Greek world as effeminate.
- [96:19]
Ben
They'll find that they like it later, but at the moment it's bizarre and
- [96:23]
Dan Carlin
strange and allows them to sort of explain to their audience why their weak culture fell under the masculine virility of the West.
- [96:35]
Ben
And he continues by pointing out, you
- [96:37]
Dan Carlin
know, that this is a partial fashion
- [96:39]
Ben
show and says, quote, the column next to these comprise the so called.
- [96:44]
Dan Carlin
I don't know how to pronounce this word. Looks like doryfoi or doryfery, the men
- [96:49]
Ben
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 studded with flashing gems, and from it arose two golden images, each a cubit high, of Ninus and Belus, respectively. Between these was a consecrated eagle made of gold and represented with wings outstretched.
- [97:21]
Dan Carlin
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
- [97:32]
Ben
these people to be cowardly, but at
- [97:35]
Dan Carlin
the same time magnificent and deadly.
- [97:37]
Ben
What did we say in the last installment? Right? The Persians are all like stormtroopers or
- [97:41]
Dan Carlin
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.
- [97:59]
Ben
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 other 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 kadarus by the Persians, was encircled by a blue ribbon flecked with white. 10,000 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 200 of his most noble relatives. At the end of this column came 30,000 foot soldiers followed by 400 of the King's horses. Now that's not the whole army, that's just sort of his entourage.
- [99:00]
Dan Carlin
Now while Curtius can give us sort of a sense of sort of the grandeur of, 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, Arrian and Plutarch say that the army that the great king is leading here is like 600,000 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 teach us? Or for that matter, the Mongols, right? You break them up into smaller little armies and, and have all of those things sort of take parallel paths and then converge on the target. I mean, that's what modern warfare kind of, well, modern warfare since Napoleon's or the Mongols time teaches. But back in these days it was one big clump, right? And well, 600,000 men.
- [100:13]
Ben
How do you feed a clump like
- [100:14]
Dan Carlin
that, no matter how many supply dumps you station along the way? And it's fascinating. I mentioned Engels work earlier. I believe Alexander the Great in the logistics of the Macedonian army.
- [100:26]
Ben
And he describes, I mean, it's a
- [100:28]
Dan Carlin
whole science we don't think about as much anymore.
- [100:31]
Ben
The science of how you choose paths
- [100:33]
Dan Carlin
for your army to take. And the paths have to have enough
- [100:36]
Ben
stuff along the way to feed them, right?
- [100:39]
Dan Carlin
Grain, growing water. Engels was saying it was 100,000 gallons a day he estimated the Macedonian army needed. He was talking about their trip from where the Gordian knot was cut to where this battle's going to happen. And he said that I think it took like a month. And he said it ate up 8
- [100:59]
Ben
million pounds of grain.
- [101:02]
Dan Carlin
That's 4,000 tons, he said, and if that's what an army of something like 40,000 or so, 45,000 maybe guys needs,
- [101:12]
Ben
what's the Persian army need, especially if
- [101:15]
Dan Carlin
it's really 600,000 men, which it isn't, but it's a lot. Whatever it is, by the standards of the day, it's a lot. If it is a much more credible hundred or 120,000 men in the great king's army, that's a ton. I like the way historian George Cockwell, in his famous work the Greek the Failure of Persia, written in the 1980s, late 1980s, he pointed out, though, that you don't need to have tons and tons of people to be able to have extremely effective and, let's be honest, deadly militaries.
- [101:51]
Ben
And he writes, in general, the great invading armies of antiquity were not, it
- [101:57]
Dan Carlin
would seem, to modernize large.
- [102:00]
Ben
Hannibal set out from Spain, according to Polybius, with 50,000 foot and about 9,000 horse. By the time he reached Italy, they were down to 20,000 foot and 6,000 horse. And yet with these for 16 years, he remained undefeated for the great attack on Antiochus III In 189, the Romans had an army of about 30,000 and were confronted by 70,000 of all sorts of troops from all parts of the Seleucid realm, including the most eastern peoples. Alexander Coquell writes, began his invasion of Asia with something like 43,000 foot and 6,100 horse and confronted the might of Asia at Gaugamela with about 40,000 foot and 7,000 horse.
- [102:47]
Dan Carlin
And we should recall that like a lot of armies, especially the Persians who
- [102:51]
Ben
traveled the opposite of light, there's a
- [102:54]
Dan Carlin
lot of hangers on and people who take care of things and servants and I mean, it's a virtual town. I loved the way Engels described it. He said basically, and he was talking again about Alexander's army, not the much larger one the Persians are leading.
- [103:08]
Ben
He said that if you take this
- [103:10]
Dan Carlin
army and just look at it in
- [103:12]
Ben
terms of its numbers, it is one of the largest cities in the world
- [103:16]
Dan Carlin
and it's moving around and needs to be fed.
- [103:18]
Ben
And it's larger than almost any of
- [103:20]
Dan Carlin
the cities it's going to sort of hang out by. So if Alexander's army's 45,000 men, that is a large ancient city, isn't it?
- [103:29]
Ben
The great King's army is 120,000 men.
- [103:32]
Dan Carlin
That is a massive city in the ancient world. It's interesting to think about it that way, isn't it? But the need to feed these people is a huge part of the deal. One of the ancient authors, I don't remember who it was, but it gets quoted by the modern authors quite A bit had said that this army, I think they were talking about Alexander, but again, equally applies to both that it could not retreat if it had to
- [103:56]
Ben
retreat through the territories that it had
- [103:59]
Dan Carlin
already passed through, because they were denuded of any food. Right. So if you have to go back
- [104:05]
Ben
home or retreat from this battle, you
- [104:07]
Dan Carlin
have to pick a different path, one that hasn't been scoured by locusts yet. Fascinating. Heck, I love the way Donald W. Engels in his book actually points out how less efficient the farming yields and methods were back then. So that when he says The Macedonians required 4,000 tons of food to get from Gordium to the battle site here, it's even harder for the ancients to come up with that 4,000 tons of grain than it would be for the people in that region today using modern farming methods and whatnot. So the question of food is paramount. I mean, Hitler talks about it in Mein Kampf because he's still a man of the previous eras, when instead of looking at something like oil, he's looking at what people have worried about forever, food. And one of the national security advantages that some states have over others, as we said, and it's a Hansdale, Brooklyn, going back to Hansdale, Brookline. But I mean, the ability for a civilization to create, the ability to feed larger forces and put them in the field, and especially when people like the Assyrians can then project power over distances, because you can feed these armies over distances, that's a huge advantage over people that can't do that. There's a direct connection, isn't there, between power projection and logistics. I find it interesting that as large as this Persian army is, and as long as it's taken to put it
- [105:27]
Ben
together, it still doesn't have all the
- [105:30]
Dan Carlin
units from its version of the Far east and Far Northeast frontier.
- [105:33]
Ben
Some of their best units aren't going
- [105:35]
Dan Carlin
to be at this battle because they didn't make it in time, or they weren't even called by the king because the king knew they wouldn't make it in time. Alexander will run into those in another battle. But it means as large as the Persian army is, it could have been larger, but no matter what the size the actual army of the great king was, whether you want to take some of the higher numbers or go all the way down into the Del Brukian minimizations and start talking about 50,000 men or whatever, from the relative standpoint, this is going to be one of the greatest, largest battles up to this time. I was hoping I could say that it Was, you know, top two or top three. But there are some Chinese battles that were very large right around the same time. And of course, since we don't know how many people fought in any of these battles before this time, including this one. I mean, how do you compare a bunch of, of numbers? You don't have to begin with, but it would have been an awe inspiring event. And one of the things I try to get my mind around as somebody, and I know many of you are the same way, who finds military history fascinating, is there's a huge difference between seeing what war is like in a relatively modern era versus someone who could have gone to the battle that's shaping up here as a pure spectator. I mean, if you look at people like Winston Churchill or Adolf Hitler, who both were in the First World War when Churchill had his failure at Gallipoli, he goes and commands some troops in the war and Hitler of course, was a runner. Both those guys saw what some of the First World War was like right from their vantage point, from their part of the front. I mean, but they didn't see the entire First World War.
- [107:21]
Ben
Heck, they didn't see the entire battles they were associated in. Those were such large battles, you couldn't
- [107:26]
Dan Carlin
see to the end of the battle fields, right?
- [107:27]
Ben
They're miles.
- [107:29]
Dan Carlin
But you could watch the Battle of Issus that's about to take place here, you know, from a hill and you know, watch the whole thing start to finish. Might take a day, might take the amount of time it takes to watch a movie in a movie theater. That blows my mind. And anybody else who even saw one of these armies pass by saw the greatest thing they were ever going to see. Like I said about the, you know, earlier, the showing off of the army to sort of cement one's rule. You'll tell your grandchildren about this, you'll write books about it. I mean, these guys that we're using as our primary sources in air quotes here because they're, you know, 400 years after the event, are 400 years after the event and they're still talking about it. So made an impression, right? If you're looking at how these armies maneuver though, it's, it's fascinating and it's through an interesting area. Basically the best way to think about it, you can actually go. They don't know exactly where the battle that we're about to talk about happened, but it's within a narrow little area. So you can kind of say, well, it either happened at this river or a little farther back at this river. But It's a narrow coastal plain right between the sea and some mountains.
- [108:41]
Ben
And once you get past sort of
- [108:43]
Dan Carlin
that, it broadens out into a larger plain. The larger plain is Syria, right? The northern part of Syria where it abuts Turkey. And the area that Alexander's passing through is sort of this area where the southwest of Turkey and the northwest of Syria kind of come together. And the maneuvering, because let's remember that's an enormous part of generalship always and especially maybe even more so in Alexander's time because once he puts himself in the front rank, you know, he's not going to be able to influence the battle as it goes, like a Napoleon would be. A much higher percentage of what he does in importance is handled in things like pre battle maneuvering. Is he going to go out into the plain to fight the Persians out on a big old wide expanse or are you going to have them come
- [109:31]
Ben
to you and try to fight you
- [109:33]
Dan Carlin
in this area between the sea and the mountains? It's about two miles wide at its narrowest and then that becomes part of the maneuvering.
- [109:41]
Ben
But first Alexander, he's got his army
- [109:44]
Dan Carlin
separated, doing a bunch of things and eventually the Persians show up.
- [109:47]
Ben
And you know, I was reading some
- [109:49]
Dan Carlin
things and I hadn't read that before. It's interesting, this Persian advance is so slow and so well known that people
- [109:56]
Ben
back in Greece are talking about it.
- [109:58]
Dan Carlin
I guess Demosthenes was saying, you know, the Alexanders are going to get trampled, the Persians are coming.
- [110:03]
Ben
So I mean, if the Star wars
- [110:05]
Dan Carlin
ominous Darth Vader music is playing and we can start to feel the tension and the, you know, suspense, it's going on for a long time, but somehow catches Alexander off guard. Anyway, I like the way Adrian Goldsworthy and Philip and Alexander sets it up
- [110:22]
Ben
and he writes, quote, a narrow strip of coastal plain led into Syria, fringed by mountain ranges that an army could only cross via one of three routes. Parmenio had gone ahead to secure the entrances to these, taking with him most of the non Macedonian troops. Alexander busied himself in Cilicia, clearly feeling it safe for his army to be divided for the moment, until news arrived that Darius and his army were at Sochi in Syria, far nearer than he had suspected and not far from the pass near the Pillar of Jonah. He hurried to reunite the army and then together with Parmenio's men, he advanced to Issus, where a depot was established for the heavier baggage and the wounded and sick left behind. The king discussed with his officers whether it was better to wait for the Persians to come to them or to advance. And all seemed to have favored aggression. This meant taking one of the three passes. And Alexander decided to head to the southernmost, perhaps because this would keep him by the sea for the longest, allowing bulkier supplies to be brought by water, end quote. The supplies again, and it's partly why
- [111:39]
Dan Carlin
we spent some time on it, are going to determine what these armies can do.
- [111:44]
Ben
I mean, if you can sort of
- [111:47]
Dan Carlin
stop the enemy from moving, they have
- [111:50]
Ben
to figure something out because they can't
- [111:52]
Dan Carlin
just stay there because of the supply problems.
- [111:54]
Ben
And this plain that the Persians want to fight in isn't adjacent to the sea.
- [111:59]
Dan Carlin
Right.
- [111:59]
Ben
It would be better if it was, then they could be supplied by sea. But that's the area Alexander's blocking.
- [112:04]
Dan Carlin
So this maneuvering which is such a large part of generalship is happening. And once Alexander gets back to his
- [112:10]
Ben
army and pulls it all together and chooses this southernmost route and expects to
- [112:15]
Dan Carlin
sort of ambush the Persians, who I was reading, they were making some estimates
- [112:18]
Ben
of how long the Persian line along the road, if you could caught it in column would be.
- [112:26]
Dan Carlin
And you have to imagine Alexander's army just waiting for him in battle formation
- [112:30]
Ben
and the Persians show up stretched out
- [112:32]
Dan Carlin
in a 4, 5, 6 person wide
- [112:35]
Ben
column, 30 miles long or something.
- [112:39]
Dan Carlin
You could see how that would be a huge disadvantage. But apparently Alexander's hoping to catch the Persians in a situation like that. And instead in a moment that, you know, when we're talking about one of the greatest generals who ever lived, maybe number one on the list is mind boggling. Alexander's told all of a sudden that the Persians are behind him and only about 12 and a half miles away. Boom. What? How does that happen?
- [113:09]
Ben
Alexander has to send. He doesn't believe it. All the sources say he doesn't believe
- [113:13]
Dan Carlin
it in my Aubrey de Selencourt translation of Arian. And Arian is usually pretty forgiving about Alexander shortcomings. Aubrey de Selencourt has Arrian saying, quote,
- [113:25]
Ben
alexander not trusting the report that Darius was in his rear, dispatched a party of his companions in a galley with orders to sail back to Issus and find out for themselves whether or not it was true. The coast by Issus, Arrian says, is deeply indented. And this fact enabled the party in the galley the more easily to see what they wish to see, that the Persians were there. So back they went to Alexander with their news. Darius was indeed at hand.
- [113:56]
Dan Carlin
End quote. Speaking of hands, there's in tradition a couple of the ancient sources refer to one aspect of it or another. Of Alexander finding out that the Persians were behind him when some of his own men, some of the sick and wounded he left behind, you know, in the town of Issus, show up at his current location, you know, minus their
- [114:18]
Ben
hands, having had their hands chopped off
- [114:20]
Dan Carlin
recently and cauterized, and they show up
- [114:23]
Ben
and say, the great King did it. He took the whole supply depot you
- [114:27]
Dan Carlin
left behind, killed or tortured the people you left behind and sent us to tell you about it. One source has that wonderful trope, and you see it all throughout the Greek and Persian wars. A couple of Persian kings are supposed to have done this.
- [114:40]
Ben
So. So either they did this routinely, which
- [114:42]
Dan Carlin
is a possibility, or this is just one of those tropes you see all the time that they.
- [114:47]
Ben
It's a combination of depending on how
- [114:48]
Dan Carlin
you want to look at it, confidence or hubris, where the Persians will take the spies and instead of just killing them outright, will just say, hey, you
- [114:57]
Ben
wanted to see what our army looks like?
- [114:58]
Dan Carlin
Let me show you. And you know, show the vastness of it. Cut off their hands because they are spies after all.
- [115:04]
Ben
Send them back to, you know, in
- [115:07]
Dan Carlin
this case, Alexander, but whomever, and say, you know, we don't care what you tell him. Tell him how big the army is that's coming for him. But all that makes Alexander do.
- [115:16]
Ben
I read once about Joe Frazier that
- [115:17]
Dan Carlin
he looked at opponents as something good to eat in the boxing ring. That's how Alexander looks at this.
- [115:22]
Ben
He wants this. That's the difference. The Great king had gotten different information,
- [115:26]
Dan Carlin
supposedly, by the way, just before this time did Alexander wanted no part of him.
- [115:31]
Ben
This is part of the explanation that
- [115:33]
Dan Carlin
the ancient sources give for why the great king came up here into the
- [115:37]
Ben
Narrows to begin with.
- [115:39]
Dan Carlin
Because it's a long standing question, if
- [115:40]
Ben
you have such a great position for
- [115:42]
Dan Carlin
your army and your cavalry in northern
- [115:44]
Ben
Syria, why leave and go up in
- [115:46]
Dan Carlin
the Narrows where Alexander is? Well, because maybe you think he's not coming down. This is supposedly part of a debate and all of our major sources have it where when Alexander is sick, remember after the Gordian knot thing, he had malaria or something, there's this delay. It's uncharacteristic, airy. And other sources here point out that the Great king was wondering, what the hell's going on? Where is he? Why isn't he coming? And his flatterers, Arryon talks about this as yes men, his bootlickers, which of course is part of that prejudice and bigotry and ethnocentrism that the west would have of the east, the bootlickers are just saying. Cause he's afraid of you. He's delaying because he doesn't want to
- [116:23]
Ben
face your greatness and our cavalry and all these. And the only people, of course, as
- [116:26]
Dan Carlin
usual, now that Memnon is dead, you have to find some other Greco Macedonian source who can be the one who gives the great king the only competent advice out there. And there's a couple of people, it's actually one person, but the different sources give it a different name and a different background. But it plays the same role. This Greco Macedonian in the Persian court,
- [116:45]
Ben
he's the only one who could be
- [116:46]
Dan Carlin
trusted to give halfway decent advice. And the decent advice is don't move, stay here, this is a good spot. And don't kid yourself, he's not afraid of you.
- [116:56]
Ben
The minute he knows where you are,
- [116:57]
Dan Carlin
he's coming for you. And in typical fashion they are brushed aside or they are ignored, or in one of the stories they're actually killed for insinuating that the Persians are a bunch of women and the great king heads up north. Now this brings us to the other situation that has been talked about for thousands of years.
- [117:16]
Ben
Did the great king mean to outflank
- [117:18]
Dan Carlin
Alexander or was that an accident? And you will find very good people on all sides of this question. Alexander fans will get into fist fights about it, putting words into the mouth of people like the great Pierre Briand, but they're always defending the Persian side from the typical sort of slurs they would get from the fact we have the Greek sources. But I mean, I can see them
- [117:41]
Ben
saying if Alexander had outflanked the Persians, we would have no problem saying, aha, look at his operational brilliance here, look what he's done. But when the Persians do it, it's an accident.
- [117:51]
Dan Carlin
And maybe it was.
- [117:53]
Ben
But here's the way I look at it, just so you know, my own
- [117:55]
Dan Carlin
biases, you should understand where I'm coming from him. But I find it hard enough to believe that if the Persians are running with an army of 100,000, 120,000, how that can get within 13 miles of Alexander and he not know about it, got to wait till a bunch of guys with no hands show up to tell him. With Parmenio operating, you know, with scout cavalry all through those passes, that's hard enough for me to believe.
- [118:21]
Ben
But then you're going to tell me
- [118:23]
Dan Carlin
that the Persians with an army, as we said, of 100, 120,000 tons of light cavalry, tons of scouting, operating in
- [118:30]
Ben
their own land, where they would Expect,
- [118:32]
Dan Carlin
of course, get all kinds of extra information from the locals. They're unaware of a 40 to 50,000 man army within 13 miles of them. I don't know, maybe it's just me that seems like a lot, but just know historians have debated that forever. It's an open question. In one way or another, the Persians are on, you know, Alexander's line of supply, which one would think is a negative. And yet maybe he would come back with the counterargument that, yeah, but I got him out of northern Syria, maneuvered
- [119:01]
Ben
him out of that area.
- [119:02]
Dan Carlin
Now they're in my neck of the woods, the narrows, where my army size isn't a problem and their army size is. Speaking of that, probably worth updating Alexander's army size here, or at least the range that can be expected. Far more consistent and realistic than Persian numbers. Depends on who you want to choose, of course, but the range is much more narrow. Anywhere from like 35,000 men to just under 50,000 is the sort of acceptable range in there. Out of that, there's probably something like 25,000 sort of of the close order heavy infantry types, a lot of them Phalangites, but more hoplites than you might think. Mercenary hoplites, allied hoplites. There's about 3,000 or so of the hypaspists that are sort of a combination of guards and sort of specialists, 8 to 10,000 sort of light infantry. You've got your Thracians and your Illyrians who are a little like going and getting your native troops in the colonial era. You gotta have some of the people who are used to fighting in broken country and tracking signs and. And they're just maybe from the Alexandrian point of view, a little cannon fodderish. But you gotta have guys like that. Then you have a thousand guys who are the Igranians and the archers that Alexander loves, his Gurkhas and special forces, and he uses them all the time. They've become elite. They weren't elite before, they're elite now just by experience alone. And then something like 5,000 cavalry or so, a decent number of them. The core of them are those heavy cavalry lancers, the Macedonian Companions, and sort of their mirror images, the Thessalians. And normally they're in equal numbers just under like 2000 of each of them. And when I was a kid, we used to think of these as almost ethnic units. But more of the modern histories want you to see, especially since Alexander's dad's time where he was taken just almost like Freebooters and soldiers of fortune and any people who actually met the qualifications and looked like they deserve it. I mean, there was an Arthurian knight of the roundtable kind of view of it. If you want to look at it in a high minded way, a 1977 Oakland Raiders viewpoint. If you want to look at it another way, all the castoffs and all these people you can't find elsewhere. And in addition to those guys, you probably have 1000, 1500 other Greek or other light cavalry. That is a large, very large army by ancient sort of Greek standards. But if we're looking at this in terms of some of the largest battles in the ancient world, which the battle of Byssus is going to be somewhere on the list. This is a pretty nimble army. I mean, size wise, you don't feel like it's going to be some gigantic immobile force.
- [122:11]
Ben
The Persians, as we said, I mean,
- [122:13]
Dan Carlin
you could go the numbers can be anywhere from 50 or 60,000, which if those are the numbers, it's a whole different situation than everybody's been looking at to something more in the 80,000, 100,000. You just don't know. We did mention that the Persians are going to have some units now with the royal army that they didn't have at the Granicus, because that wasn't a royal army. And there's two groups specifically I'd like to bring up because they're worth talking about, because they're impact units, or at least there's a lot of them. In some cases the impact units are
- [122:45]
Ben
you get some of this heavy cavalry,
- [122:48]
Dan Carlin
the guys we used to call them in wargaming, extra heavy cavalry, men who have armor all over them and horses
- [122:55]
Ben
who have a lot of armor. Not quite the cataphracts of the Parthian
- [122:59]
Dan Carlin
or the Sassanid era, but, but very armored comparatively.
- [123:03]
Ben
And again, you don't armor people like
- [123:05]
Dan Carlin
that usually to have them ride around and shoot you from a distance because it slows you down. These guys are more meant to carve their way through enemy cavalry mainly and certainly to go after enemy leaders or what have you. These guys were not around at the River Granicus. And then you have an interesting troop type, these so called cardasses. And there are arguments forever about who these guys are. But the reason that it's worth pointing out that they exist is because there are allegedly a lot of them at this battle, maybe 60,000 of them.
- [123:43]
Ben
They seem to be hoplites.
- [123:46]
Dan Carlin
Maybe the Persian attempt to recreate a troop type that traditionally they were weak in. They didn't generally manufacture hoplites of the Greek style. And if you look at the enemies they usually fought, they didn't need to. I mean, if you're fighting Scythians on your northeastern border, remember the Persian Empire, almost the size of the United States, if you're fighting a bunch of Scythians on your northeastern border, they're a bunch of horse archers.
- [124:11]
Ben
What do you want? You want archers yourself?
- [124:12]
Dan Carlin
You don't need a bunch of hoplites,
- [124:14]
Ben
but against hoplites, you do.
- [124:16]
Dan Carlin
And so the Persians have been hiring them. At this battle, they allegedly hired 30,000 of them.
- [124:21]
Guest or Additional Commentator
Them.
- [124:23]
Dan Carlin
Now, there's a lot to unpack here, and it's important because these 30,000 Greek mercenary hoplites, or however many there actually are, form sort of the heart of the great king's at least infantry portion of his army here. I mean, they're the spine that he sort of builds the battle line around. So they're kind of important. And you will see people argue about the numbers all the time, and the historians run the gamut. I mean, and it's a wide range from those who believe you couldn't find 30,000 mercenary Greek hoplites for hire across the entire Mediterranean world during this time period, to those who think it would be no problem. And everywhere in between, it does seem pretty clear that the great king was recalling and scouring the Greek hoplites he already had in his service from everywhere else. They were busy. I mean, part of the reason that Memnon's idea to take the fighting back to Greece, or at least the Greek islands, is supposed to have stalled is because the great king took all the
- [125:25]
Ben
mercenary hoplites he was using, brought them
- [125:28]
Dan Carlin
back so they could be here for this battle at Issus, you know, in late October, early November, 333bce. So however many there are, he clearly put quite a bit of effort and sacrificed quite a bit of progress in other areas to get them here. But 30,000 would mean that they would probably slightly outnumber Alexander's heavy infantry contingent all by themselves. And remember, his heavy infantry contingent probably only has about 12,000. Let's just say 12,000 or so actual Phalangites, the rest being hoplites, like these guys. And I remember one of my professors saying, not all hoplites are created equal, even if we think so in our head. There could be quite a bit, a lot of difference between a hoplite, for example, who is a citizen soldier, mostly a farmer in a small place like Plataea, who trains with his neighbors, a Few times of the year, keeps the armor above the hearth if necessary. And maybe a few times in his life actually has to put it on and really go out there and fight.
- [126:35]
Ben
Big difference between that guy and these
- [126:37]
Dan Carlin
people who fight professionally for the great king. Because this is all these people do. They aren't part time warriors and they aren't anytime farmers. They're professional soldiers. Their officers usually have tons of experience. A lot of times these units are actually enrolled in the service of their employer as whole units. So they're used to fighting together. At least on the unit level. These are probably as good as hoplites get. The problem for them is that Alexander's phalangite phalanx was designed by his father specifically as a hoplite killing machine. We talked all about that in the early installment of this series. But if that's still the best heavy infantry the great king can get his hands on, what are you gonna do? And as far as what these cartesys are, well, majority opinion has leaned for quite some time that they are the home, as we said, homegrown version of a Persian hoplite. But there's still a significant minority position out there that they may be some other kind of troop type, maybe a hybrid light and medium, or medium and heavy infantry. Hard to know. All I can say is this, if
- [127:45]
Ben
they were anything like that, to put
- [127:48]
Dan Carlin
60,000 of them in front of Alexander on the battle lines, well, you're going to get what you deserve then. And finally, besides this heavy infantry and the large numbers of Persian cavalry, which is their war winning or their at least battle winning arm of their army, you have the innumerable and the ancient sources always make it sound innumerable. But it's not hard to believe that they could bring out all kinds of people with bows, with slings, with javelins, just as many as you want who can just run around skirmishing. And so they have tons of those people too. Now the first thing we should know before we talk about the night before this battle is that in order to get to this battle, Alexander has to retrace his steps and turn around as we said. And what that means is when you look at a schematic of this battle, or if you're looking at it from a satellite image, the battle looks like it's upside down or backwards or reversed. The Persians look like they should be where the Greeks are and vice versa. But that's because both sides have kind of turned around, right? One got behind the other, then they both reversed facing. So the Persians look like they're where the Greeks should be and vice versa. The Greeks are facing north, the Persians are facing south. They have a river between them. We are not sure which one, as I mentioned, but whichever one it is, it seems to be more of an impediment or an influence on the battle than the Granicus was. And interestingly enough, at least to me, we are told that in the places where the river is more fordable, right, the parts where it'd be more likely to get troops trying to run across it, the Persians have placed defenses. Now as a longtime owner of a Persian war gaming army, I love this idea. I want as many defenses as I can get when I'm facing Alexander's army. But Arrian, who should have one, would
- [129:52]
Ben
think no better since he comes from the Roman era.
- [129:55]
Dan Carlin
And who builds more fortifications when they're just sitting around with their army than the Romans do? But Arrian says that basically the Macedonians, when they saw that there were fortifications, took it as a sign of weakness. They knew that the Persians were beaten from the moment they saw that.
- [130:10]
Ben
No spirit.
- [130:13]
Dan Carlin
But what these fortifications weren't exactly how they were laid out is not exactly known. A lot of speculation. I have three versions of Arryon in front of me. All use, I mean, well, two of them use the word stockade to describe the fortifications. The panel Amench version calls it a palisade. In his book in the Path of Conquest, the great Valdemar Haeckel calls it an abatis which I had to go look up. Seems like they're all variations though on the, you know, get yourself a tree trunk, sharpen both ends of it, stick one sharpened end in the ground at an angle, stick the other end out, and then put a bunch of, you know, very similarly carved tree trunks next to it. Might resemble a sort of frontier era fort. But to me that looks like a great idea. As we said, Arrian, who comes from the Roman era where Marius mules were a thing, well, that was the Republican era. He's a little later than that. But I mean, Julius Caesar's guys were building fortifications if they sat around for five seconds. But the Persians are women for wanting fortifications. These fortifications, by the way, will come in handy. No one knows exactly what this river looked like during this time period because they're not even sure which of three rivers it is. But none of them probably look the way this one did. This one was probably deeper, wider, faster flowing, higher banks, all that stuff. Once you start damming things up, once you start needing more water, once things get whatever I mean, it's just probably the case in all the rivers in that area. It might have been a little bit more natural during this time period. And between dealing with those kinds of banks, the riverbed, the rocks, the steepness of the sides, and the fact that the few natural places where you would want to sort of use as pathways up the other side's bank, those are going to have the stockade or palisade or abattis blocking the way. Now, we should recall, because we're going to deal with the night before in a second, because I'm fascinated with the night before. And the night before an ancient or medieval battle is somewhat different than the night before one in the first or the Second World War, for example. And we talked about this with the River Granicus, and we've discussed it before. It's the snakes. They were just so few battles in wars in the earlier histories than there are later that each battle took on greater significance.
- [132:45]
Ben
I mean, in a lot of ancient wars, it was one battle and you're
- [132:48]
Dan Carlin
done, and the battle took the afternoon. Entire dynasties and the fate of kingdoms and everything rested on a day. So imagine what the night before that's like. I'm not trying, by the way, to denigrate or downplay what it's like for the British Tommy waiting for the kickoff of the Battle of the Somme the next morning or anything like that.
- [133:09]
Ben
It's a very different sort of hellish
- [133:12]
Dan Carlin
foreshadowing for that guy than it is for Alexander's troops. But, you know, well, God forbid the Persians think about them.
- [133:21]
Ben
Similar, but different, right? The same, but different.
- [133:24]
Dan Carlin
In the case of the Tommy, he's going to wake up, there's going to be a lot of shelling that goes on for a long time ahead of time that'll get you ready. Then you have the hellish first day of the Psalm, which was terrible.
- [133:34]
Ben
But the fact that you survived, that doesn't mean you survive, because then you
- [133:38]
Dan Carlin
get to try to sleep because you're going to be exhausted and the whole
- [133:40]
Ben
thing, and do it the next day, right?
- [133:43]
Dan Carlin
So if you don't die the first day, you have plenty of days in the future to die. It's different for Alexander's troops because if
- [133:49]
Ben
they're going to die, it's probably going to be tomorrow. If you're the Persians, if you're going
- [133:53]
Dan Carlin
to die, it's probably going to be tomorrow. So the thoughts that must be running through one's head as you think about where you will be 24 hours from now, well, that's what I think about. They say that Alexander's doing some significant religious sacrificing. And I bet the Persian king is too. Because after all, what did they say? There's no atheists in foxholes. Well, in this period, very few atheists anywhere. And even if the great king didn't believe this stuff, and he probably does, he's got a show to put on for his troops because they're going to look for all the help they could get. And the same is true for Alexander's. And nobody wants. Wants, you know, even if you don't think the gods are going to help you, you sure as heck don't want them against you. And there's a significant amount of activity, we're told, the night before in the early morning hours.
- [134:39]
Ben
I'm just thinking about how tired these
- [134:41]
Dan Carlin
guys are going to be once they get to the battlefield. Cause, you know, the night before. Arrian talks about all this, by the way. And this has become one of the great early military conflicts in history, where we get all kinds of details that are hard to come by before this era. That's why when we started this entire conversation about Alexander installments ago, we mentioned that this is where military history starts to blossom out a little bit. And we get some of the nuts and bolts stuff. I mean, you're gonna see it in Alexander's approach to the battlefield here, where you get a chance to see the march order and how he maneuvers troops to deal with difficult terrain. I mean, it's gonna be very insightful. And part of it is Arrian's talking about, you know, Alexander's getting his troops together the night before at like 3 in the morning. They sort of march down into this other area. He lets them rest for a while, and 40, 50,000 guys rest for a while on some rocky outcropping. And then in the very early morning hours before the sun comes up, they're out there getting their act together because they've got three or four miles of marching to get to the battlefield and hours of deployment in front of them. I love the way that AB Bosworth, the late, great Ab Bosworth, the Australian
- [135:48]
Ben
historian, he sort of runs it down.
- [135:50]
Dan Carlin
But Arian's the one who gives us the broad information for this. Although Curtius also does this, where they go into depth now about how Alexander's going to approach the battle because the Persians are waiting for him. Arrian, by the way, says in order to sort of keep Alexander from messing with him while deployment is happening, he throws out 30,000 cavalry and 20,000 light troops.
- [136:16]
Ben
So his screening force to sort of
- [136:18]
Dan Carlin
just mess with Alexander and just, you know, keep him at bay is larger than Alexander's army, if we believe those kind of numbers. But remember, Arrian has the Persian army at multiple hundred thousands of men. So what's 50,000 as a screening force? The way Alexander approaches this battlefield is he's coming up from in like a narrow. If you imagine the battlefield from Alexander's point of view, remember reversed, it's a
- [136:43]
Ben
funnel shaped, and he's coming from the
- [136:45]
Dan Carlin
narrow part of the funnel and as he advances, it's broadening out. What he's trying to do is not have a flank. That's where the Persians are deadly, right, with their cavalry. If it gets around your flank, well,
- [136:58]
Ben
that's the whole point of wanting to have the battle in northern Syria, right
- [137:01]
Dan Carlin
in those great open plains so that the Persians can outflank the Macedonians here. Alexander's got him in the narrows, but
- [137:06]
Ben
there's still some art in making sure
- [137:08]
Dan Carlin
they don't outflank you here. And that's the art that Arrian and Curtius both sort of point out. Because what happens is Alexander is continually
- [137:18]
Ben
lengthening his line, right, Taking from depth,
- [137:20]
Dan Carlin
from a column depth, and as the land allows it, expanding to the side
- [137:25]
Ben
so that he covers the entire distance
- [137:28]
Dan Carlin
from the sea on one side to the mountains on the other. And as the land gets wider, so does his battle line and he allows there to be no flank. And those are his orders. And Bosworth, extrapolating the Curtius and Aryan information in Conquest An Empire writes, quote,
- [137:50]
Ben
at dawn, the Macedonian army moved down to the plain. First infantry and then cavalry. The process of filtering through the narrows was of necessity slow and took up most of the morning. As the plain widened, the infantry were able to deploy itself into battle formation. At first 32 ranks deep, then 16, finally 8. It was a gradual process. Files would move up to the front as spaces opened up for them, and the phalanx would gradually expand in length and contract in depth. Consequently, he writes, Alexander had a battle line capable of facing and repelling any cavalry sortie during his advance to the battle. There were, he writes, inevitable delays as the army crossed the ravines and the streams that intersected the plain. But as the afternoon began, the Macedonian
- [138:42]
Dan Carlin
line closed on the Persians, End quote. Arrian and Curtius talk about the many
- [138:49]
Ben
halts that the army makes in order
- [138:52]
Dan Carlin
to sort of dress its lines and let everybody catch up.
- [138:55]
Ben
Curtius says that Alexander is stopping and making everybody slow down. He's riding in front of the lines, slowing everybody down so that they maintain
- [139:04]
Dan Carlin
the integrity of the formation rather than allow any gaps to develop because they're
- [139:09]
Ben
worried about the Persian cavalry, right?
- [139:10]
Dan Carlin
So just dress your lines. And the Persians aren't moving. You know, they're sitting there waiting on the opposite side of the river. So there's no pressing need to really hurry up. But this takes hours.
- [139:21]
Ben
It's the part we forget. Same thing.
- [139:22]
Dan Carlin
Like if you look at your Napoleonic battles, right, Something like Waterloo. These take forever to get everybody where they're supposed to be. And then there's the speeches. And I'm combining it because Arian says
- [139:36]
Ben
that there are speeches the night before,
- [139:38]
Dan Carlin
then there are speeches before the.
- [139:39]
Ben
These speeches are hard to figure out
- [139:42]
Dan Carlin
because they're sort of the stock in trade of all these ancient authors. And before we condemn them too much for potentially likely making up all this, you know, speaking type stuff, we should point out two things. Thing number one is they weren't necessarily asserting that this was exactly what.
- [139:58]
Ben
What was said.
- [139:59]
Dan Carlin
They take a little dramatic license. Point number two, we do the same thing. Heck, you think any of the dialogue in any of the Alexander the Great movie, I mean, you see what I'm saying?
- [140:09]
Ben
And if the dialogue from those movies is true, they're taking it from here.
- [140:13]
Dan Carlin
So take all of it with a grain of salt. But what's more useful, perhaps is the general gist of what was said. And if you're asking, by the way, where any of this could come from, like, why would we assume that the any of it might be true? One of the famous sources for some of this stuff is a guy named Clytarchus. And he went around after the Alexander wars were all over and interviewed veterans, got stories, war stories, if you will. But depending on how high up some of these people were and how much they remembered, although, let's be honest, some of this stuff is going to be the greatest thing in their lives. He might have a little bit of the gist for what this stuff was. But as we said, some of this stuff is typical stock stuff in the ancient literary world. Some of it is material that Aryan wants to transmit to the reader and this is a good way to do it. Again, we still use that in movies and film and entertainment today, don't we? It's a vehicle, it moves the story along, right? But what is a vehicle for the writer here because of the writer's importance? Arrian is so huge in the Alexander story that this has become virtual dialogue for the king of Macedonia, right? Whether or not he said it. It's become part of the known legend of this guy, and they include it in the movies. I mean, I can remember Richard Burton uttering some of the same lines from Aryan I'm about to utter to you. It's fabulous. And so I'm going to quote it at length from the Aubrey de Selencourt translation.
- [141:53]
Ben
For example, he says Alexander now sent for his infantry and cavalry commanders and all officers in charge of allied troops and appealed to them for confidence and courage in the coming fight. Remember, he said that already danger has often threatened you, and you have looked it triumphantly in the face. This time the struggle will be between a victorious army and an enemy already once vanquished. God himself, moreover, by suggesting to Darius to leave the open ground and cram his great army into a confined space, has taken charge of operations in our behalf.
- [142:34]
Dan Carlin
Let me just stop here. Is this the ancient Macedonian version of God Mitons? Arian continues in Alexander's voice.
- [142:42]
Ben
We ourselves shall have room enough to deploy our infantry, while they no match for us either in bodily strength or resolution, will find their superiority in numbers of no avail. Our enemies are Medes and Persians, men who for centuries have lived soft and luxurious lives. We of Macedonia, for generations past have been trained in the hard school of danger and war. Above all, we are free men and they are slaves. There are Greek troops, to be sure, in Persian service, but how different is their cause from ours? They will be fighting for pay and not much of it at that. And we, on the contrary, shall fight for Greece, and our hearts will be in it. As for our foreign troops, Thracians, Paeonians, Illyrians, Agranians, they are the best and stoutest soldiers in Europe, and they will find as their opponents the slackest and softest of the tribes of Asia. And what, finally, of the two men in supreme command, you have Alexander. They, Darius,
- [143:53]
Dan Carlin
how can you not love that?
- [143:54]
Ben
Whether or not Alexander said that he
- [143:56]
Dan Carlin
should have, Then the next stage, and again worth quoting in full, talks about.
- [144:05]
Ben
First you appeal to them on that
- [144:07]
Dan Carlin
level, right, where they're fighting for freedom, the Greeks and the stoutest men and all that kind of stuff. And of course, then what would a
- [144:13]
Ben
good salesperson do after that? You tell them what they're gonna get after they beat these weak people in
- [144:19]
Dan Carlin
a fight that won't be worth anything because it's you against them and me against him. And from my Martin Hammond translation of Aryan, the next part of the great
- [144:30]
Ben
speech tells everybody what's in it for them. After listing all these factors which made for Macedonian superiority in the coming contest, Alexander went on to emphasize the great value of the prizes which they stood to win. The victory this time would not be over.
- [144:49]
Dan Carlin
Darius satraps right as corporate vice presidents,
- [144:52]
Ben
not over the cavalry raged at the granicus or the 20,000 foreign mercenaries, but over all that was of any worth among the Persians and the Medes and all the other nations in Asia subject to the Persians and the Medes and over the great king himself, who was there in person. Nothing would remain for them to do after this contest except to assume rule of all of Asia and put an end to all their long hardship. And there was more.
- [145:20]
Dan Carlin
Let me just stop and say, isn't that what they always say in those infomercials?
- [145:24]
Ben
And there was more. He reminded them of what they'd already achieved for the common cause, so brilliantly citing individual acts of conspicuously noble bravery and naming the man, as well as describing the deed. And in the most tactful way, he touched on his own record of dangers
- [145:42]
Dan Carlin
faced in their battles. End quote. Now, some of this is the sort of thing any general's gonna do, and Arryon even says that later on where he'll say, and several more such things as generals do.
- [145:54]
Ben
So, I mean, everybody understands that speeches
- [145:57]
Dan Carlin
to the at least people down to the officer level is normal and expected. But this is also how the great ones fuse their sort of personality and charisma into the loyalty of their army. When you talk about Napoleon coming back from exile and the troops that are sent there to kill him, throwing down their arms and raising their hands and
- [146:21]
Ben
saying, vive la emperor, this is something
- [146:23]
Dan Carlin
that Napoleon has done, not just with his actual physical people that he knew and fought with, but with the institution itself. And that's what all of this is a data point towards doing. And you add victory after victory to that. Well, my goodness, it's not just a guy who talks a big game. It's a guy who's promising things and who's delivered every other time he's ever done that previously. Right. His track record is perfect. The last part of his speech has Alexander comparing his army to Xenophon's famous army of a previous era. If you've ever read Xenophon's Anabasis, the 10,000 Greeks who were in Persian service fought in a Persian civil war and made it all the way back safely with the Persians at their heels the whole way. It's very famous. All these Greeks and Macedonians would have known it well. And he points out that if Xenophon could get out of Persia with the Persians nipping at his heels for an
- [147:19]
Ben
extended period of time without all of the combined arms that the Macedonians have with fewer people, et cetera, et cetera,
- [147:26]
Dan Carlin
why shouldn't they do far better? It's a great argument. He then, in a more cover all the basis sort of sense says that Alexander then added all the usual encouragement which a brave commander gives to brave troops at a time like that, right. To firm their resolve. So in other words, Alexander's giving the usual speeches, but he's got some specifics he throws in there. I love that. In the courteous version of this speech, which happens right before the clash of arms. Right. So there's a difference in the timing of some of this stuff. Alexander actually turns to like the Illyrians and the Thracians. And Curtius, showing his own biases, says that since those people make a living by looting, Alexander tells them to go and look at all the, the gold and purple on the other side. Right. Look at all the stuff you can loot over there. So everybody's got their motivations sort of tailored to their proclivities. Right. Set up the incentives differently for different folk. Now as Alexander approaches and he's not going to get right up to the Persians, you know, on just the opposite side of the river because that is too close, that is within missile range. And the Persians are a missile army. That's what we used to say in war gaming, that the Persians are a missile army. If you like bow fire and javelin. The Persians are your army, not necessarily your hand to hand army, but you don't want to get too close to them and Alexander doesn't, the Persians sort of sit there too. Because when you have a very large army in a very constricted space and you have them laid out just the way you want. Because didn't we say Alexander's taking hours to get to him and dress his ranks and do all that? Well, the Persians have already done that. They're in place. Why move? They're looking. Adrian Goldsworthy says they want to win on both sides. They certainly want to win on one side and that's where they've placed a ton of cavalry. You know, their best troops sort of maybe not like the guard troops around the king, but their best arm. And it's over on the very seaside side of things because once the river sort of gets near the ocean in this battlefield, it, it branches out and sort of forms a little beach and you can have cavalry operate in that kind of terrain. So that's where the Persians put all their cavalry. As Alexander approaches, he will have been outflanking himself. And that's because as he gets nearer to the river, the hills on his right begin to become closer and the foothills sort of encroach. And there are troops all over those hills and the foothills range right up to the mountains and they're crammed with Persians, light troops. Historians don't know whether these are just archers and javelineers and slingers, or whether there are more formed troops there also. It's not gonna be like hoplites and close order phalangites or anything. They can't operate in that kind of terrain. But it could be tribesmen, the same kinds of things Alexander uses his Gurkha type of granians for, but lots of them. You believe aereon, there's like 20,000 of them up in those foothills. That's a modern division. I'm not gonna think that 20,000 of them are there. But since Arrian has the entire army at like 600,000, 20,000's a miniscule, tiny detachment, by the way, I should point out that according to Arryon, the 600,000
- [150:49]
Ben
people are all there, they're just in depth.
- [150:53]
Dan Carlin
So it's like a giant army of orcs that are behind the front lines. So when we talk about the entire Persian deployment here, all we're talking about is the little crust on top, the layer and that as far back. If you could drone this thing and look from above, as far as the eye can see, it's just orcs off into the horizon, right? The defense in depth, if you will. But all these light troops up in the foothills on Alexander's right is going to cause problems. The ancient authors say if you look at the Persian deployment, it resembles, well, they use a letter of their own, but for us it would be like an upside down L. And the Persian front line is the stalk of the L. And then there's a right hand turn and that's where the light troops all are. They're on Alexander's side of the river, they're on his right. There's a minority opinion though, that the river itself flows up into the mountains and that the Persian deployment is in the. The light troops pushing forward, but is instead just the natural extension of the Persian line, you know, up into the foothills. Either way, what do you do about that? And as he moves forward, he is outflanking himself more and more. So his deployment is going to reflect the fact he has to deal with that threat. And as he approaches the river, I was reading several different accounts as to how far away he would have wanted to. To sort of halt. The Persians were just sitting there watching all this. And historian Adrian Goldsworthy had an interesting point which reminds us of exactly what happened with Alexander way back when he was facing the Illyrians and he was able to scare the crap out of them just by doing drill in front of them. Adrian Goldsworthy says that the order and the precision of Alexander's slow advance, which they would have been able to watch for hours, was in itself, he says, eerie and intimidating. So think about the psychology now of this warfare here. You have hours to think about it. You're the night before and you're wondering where you're gonna be in 24 hours. And then you get there in the morning and you're anticipating and you're anticipating. And then the first thing you would have seen is clouds of dust. Then you would have seen. And Goldsworthy said this, and I didn't think about it, but it's a perfect movie scene too. Then you would have seen the tips of the pikes, remember 17, 18, 19 foot tall. And when they march, they're holding the pike straight up. So the first thing you would have seen is this, like, forest of pikes appearing, getting longer and longer as the troops get closer. And Goldsworthy was saying with the nature of the land there, with its dips and dead zones and sorts of things, the troops that you're watching will disappear for a while and then all of a sudden they come over the rise. I mean, the psychological building of fear would be fascinating. And at some point in the march, both of these armies are now going to be, you know, form, door forming and completely visible to one another. This was the same thing that we mentioned during the siege earlier, that this is a strange aspect of pre modern warfare where the killing distance is so short that you can watch in relative
- [153:56]
Ben
safety from pretty close by.
- [153:59]
Dan Carlin
In this case, these armies could be a few football fields apart from one another.
- [154:04]
Ben
But remember the scene. This is either the first or second
- [154:07]
Dan Carlin
largest battle in the Greek world in air quotes that's ever happened up to this point. It's either this one or the battle of Plataea 150 years previously, where the Persian king invaded Greece.
- [154:18]
Ben
Take your choice.
- [154:20]
Dan Carlin
I mean, when the two armies can actually visibly look at each other and remember, whatever size they are, this confined space is going to crowd them together more.
- [154:31]
Ben
So it's going to look incredibly dense.
- [154:35]
Dan Carlin
We've harped endlessly and maybe even Too long on the physical and involuntary things human beings sometimes do in times of extreme fright. And the ancient Greek playwrights would allude to it sometimes, right, the chattering of the teeth that's audible, the losing control of one's bowels. And the funny thing about it is
- [154:55]
Ben
you're going to have people on this
- [154:56]
Dan Carlin
battlefield that aren't really afraid at all. Fearless people, Parmenio for example, and Alexander, they're not worried. But amongst this vast crowd of people
- [155:09]
Ben
on both sides are the less sure, the more frightened. The ones who are experiencing the moment
- [155:15]
Dan Carlin
that someone in the first World War who's waiting for the whistle to be blown so that they go over the
- [155:22]
Ben
top of the trench into the storm of steel.
- [155:26]
Dan Carlin
I mean that's the feeling that person has. And so there's going to be this moment where you see the enemy in front of you. And what's more, you see if you're Alexander, your counterpart, the head of state
- [155:42]
Ben
of the empire you're trying to topple
- [155:44]
Dan Carlin
on the other side because they're going to both be Alexander and Darius, ostentatious about their look, they want their side to see them. Can you imagine what it must have been like for the Persians? You know, the people in this area haven't seen a Royal army in 150 years. Well, they sure as heck probably haven't seen the king either. And the Persian king is not a pharaoh, he's not a God king, but he's a, I think it's safe to say you could call him a near God king, a demigod king. If you have this idea that God
- [156:16]
Ben
is with you in this battle, well,
- [156:18]
Dan Carlin
having the Persian king here would be the next best thing. How could you lose with this guy here? Surely you can't. But to quote another very confident, maybe even arrogant, self assured blonde guy, to be the man, you gotta beat the man. And this is Alexander's moment to do just that. And he can see him on the other side. And if you can see him, this is what we used to say about modern combat, tank combat. If you can see it, you can kill it. If you can see the king on the other side of the battlefield, whose empire you want, you can kill him. And Alexander continues to march forward, we don't know how far away from the Persians. He stops, but as he's advancing, he's deploying. At some point he decides to punch the light troops up in the hills. What did we say? It's like if you believe Arion's numbers, it's a modern day infantry Division, a modern day reinforced infantry division up in the foothills, you know, going up into the mountains. Alexander sends some troops, notably his special forces, a granian javelin men and some support troops up there. They punch these light troops in the nose, they quickly go scurrying back up the hills. They want no part of that. And Alexander determines that if he puts a couple hundred cavalry over there and some light troops, those people in the hills won't bother him very much. And he was right. But as he begins to finish his deployment, there will be, and you Alexander fans know about this already, a famous, shall we put it in air quotes, last minute adjustment on Alexander's part. He will look on the other side and the Persians, you know, to avoid confusion, we should not do left and right flanks as much as just saying
- [158:01]
Ben
the mountain side of the battlefield and
- [158:04]
Dan Carlin
the sea side of the battlefield. And it sounds like the Persian king had had plans to put some cavalry up against the mountains on his side, right, his left. And then when they got there, determined it was terrible cavalry country. So he moves them over to the seaside where he already has the hammerhead of his hammer blow stationed and turns
- [158:24]
Ben
the hammerhead into a sledgehammer head.
- [158:26]
Dan Carlin
He's got basically. What would you say?
- [158:29]
Ben
I was gonna say all but most of his cavalry over there.
- [158:31]
Dan Carlin
And it's at least 10,000, could be 15, we don't know how many in a confined space. That's an overwhelming sort of sledgehammer. And it looks like Alexander was planning
- [158:40]
Ben
the exact same idea in reverse, in
- [158:44]
Dan Carlin
a mirror image, because he was gonna
- [158:45]
Ben
put his, you know, hardcore striking cavalry
- [158:48]
Dan Carlin
on the far right up against the mountains. And then when he saw what the Persians did, he determined that he better call an audible, better just send about half of the cavalry that he had
- [159:00]
Ben
on his side, the far right, send them all to the other side, because otherwise you're going to have that entire
- [159:07]
Dan Carlin
sledgehammer head of 10. How many thousand Persian cavalry facing, you know, a few hundred Greek allied cavalry? Well, that's not going to work. So Alexander sends the Thessalian cavalry, arguably as good as the companion cavalry, but as I said, arguably. And you will get punched in the nose if you say that to the wrong people. Arrian says that Alexander told the Thessalians to make this maneuver, this, you know, going in motion from right to left, from mountainside to seaside, behind the big block of human beings, that is the phalanx, so that the Persians won't see
- [159:45]
Ben
it,
- [159:47]
Dan Carlin
but it still means that when they get there, the entire Persian sledgehammer has to be held off by a mere 2,400 or 2,500 cavalry. That job sucks. And you wouldn't want to be the guy that has it. And the guy that has it is Parmenio, the only great general Alexander's dad ever found, he said. One of the two Jack Lalanne Macedonian generals that are still around, both approaching 70 years old. The other one's Antipater, back in Macedonia, ruling in Alexander's stead and getting headaches from Alexander's headstrong mother. But if you recall, Parmenia was only recently volunteering to lead a ship assault in person in the front ranks. So, Holy cow, approaching 70 years old.
- [160:36]
Ben
And now his job is to hold
- [160:38]
Dan Carlin
off tens of thousands of Persian cavalry outnumbered three or four or five to one. Alexander will do some other finagling, putting troops in different places, and by the time he's done, it looks something like this. And remember, when you see historians creating maps recreating the deployments here, they all look a little different from one another because everyone's reconstructing it from Arion, who's got some ancient source and, well, who knows, right? But the way it looks is, as we said, there are some light troops and some tribesmen and a little bit of cavalry holding off any possible sortie by those Persians that have been driven back up into the heights, up into the mountains on the far right, as Alexander would see it. So now on the far right of Alexander's forces are in the position of honor, by the way, the Companion Cavalry. Normally he's with them, and he may be, traditionally he is with them in this battle. But there's a growing sentiment amongst many modern historians that he may indeed have been with the unit to the left of The Companions, the 3000 elite Hypaspis infantry. Now, Alexander's dad, Philip often fought with the elite infantry back in his day. We'll get into the arguments for why Alexander might have done it in this battle. But traditionally most historians have had him again with the cavalry in the front rank, tip of the spear, all that kind of stuff. The Hypaspis to the left of the Companion Cavalry. All kinds of roles, capable of anything, can fight with anything. I mean, just fantastic troops. They are normally the hinge between the fast charging cavalry of Alexander on the
- [162:10]
Ben
far right and protecting the flank of
- [162:12]
Dan Carlin
the giant block of human beings to their left, the phalanx. The phalanx is the center of the Alexandrian battle line. It is the most awe inspiring unit I can think of. Remember, Alexander's dad is as far as we know, the first person to ever create a true pike phalanx, 16, 17, 18 foot, whatever, pikes, as we've said, a lot of long spear phalanxes going back to, say, mesopotamia, you know, 12 foot, whatever. This is a whole different animal. And you know how effective it is because human beings will be using it up until gunpowder becomes really effective. I mean, the whole era called the pike and shot era, involves pike phalanxes. 2000 years after this time period. And Alexander's pike phalanx is only a few decades old by this time. So interesting and important weapon system. I would love to see it from a drone, from the air. I mean, if the hypaspis in this battle line at the Battle of Issus, take a look to the left, they can see it. Reportedly 12,000 men strong. If it's at full strength eight ranks deep, that can vary. We're told. Eight ranks deep in this battle, which means it would have stretched the better part of a mile long anywhere from like, you know, I did the math, 0.8 miles to 1.2 miles, whatever you want to say. It's a long distance of human beings holding giant pikes to create the equivalent of a no man's land, a dead zone for many feet in front of their unit. Seeing it would be incredible. 165 years after this battle, a Roman general saw his first version of a Macedonian phalanx and proclaimed it the most terrifying thing he'd ever seen in his life. The phalanx is broken down into smaller units. Call them battalions, call them regiments, whatever you want. Taxus, I think, is the Greek name. And each of those battalions are commanded by famous people, people who made it into Arian, whose names are recorded. And when I tried to imagine how crazy it is that unit commanders would be famous like this, I tried to remember that for the ancient peoples like the Greeks, they didn't fight far flung wars with many armies out there like we did in the World wars, where we'd have these famous commanders in charge of theaters. Their famous commanders were the equivalent of unit commanders. And their wars were often fought on battlefields. So when they have an Amyntas or a Ptolemy or a Perdiccas commanding these units, and we question why they're famous today. Well, what if we just change their name a little? And imagine one battalion of the phalanx is commanded by Patton and another by Eisenhower and the one to the left of them by Douglas. The situation, MacArthur, and all of a sudden it doesn't seem so strange. Does it? But a lot of valiant killer, not scared of anything. Human beings in the officer corps of this phalanx, and they're ready to go. To the left of them, we are told, some more light troops, maybe some more tribesmen. To the left of them are the 24, 2500 cavalry with Parmenia we just mentioned. And behind all this, we are told, a reserve made up of the mercenaries. A battle cry, if you believe the vulgar tradition Diodorus talks about it will ring out from both sides, echoing off the hills. Tens of thousands of human beings, you know, screaming their war cries at the same time. And now let's just picture the scene for a second, if we will. Historian Arthur Farrell says the battle line's about two, two and a half miles long. Estimates are that the time of day is the late afternoon. Based on how much marching has already occurred to get us to this point. Arthur Farrell says figure 4pm he also says in this part of the world, in this time of year, sun starts setting at 5, it's pitch black at 6:30. What that means is we've got an X to fill in for the algebraic equation that are the unknowns about this battle. If it starts at 4 and it's pitch black at 6:30, it's not lasting all that long. The date is anywhere from November 5th to November 12th. You'll find different dates. 333 BCE. Alexander's army has been marching since at least 3am and who knows what kind of a sleep they had the previous few nights before that. Lots of stopping, starting, dressing the lines. It's probably warm. And by the time you get there and you're all set up and it's 4pm, I would think you would be tired, worn out, but who knows? Maybe the adrenaline's kicked in and you're ready. But no matter what, at least the Persians have been sitting around waiting. They may be scared, but they shouldn't be worn out. And Alexander will ride, the stories say, and any movie is going to have this up and down the front line. He's still out of missile range, so no problem. You can be that close to the enemy and you're perfectly safe. Ride up and down the battle line, pick out individuals he wants to tell. Hey, you did great in the last battle, you're going to do great today, all that kind of stuff. And then after that last stopping and dressing of the lines or so, still outside of missile range, the last advance start. And it starts at a sort of a marching normal pace. Everybody's trying to sort of Stay together, the line unbroken. Everybody go at the same pace. But as soon as they get to the area that you would call, if we were talking about artillery, the beaten zone where the missiles can hit you, the farthest range missiles, that would be the Bowman. Once Alexander gets to that point, everybody's supposed to go double time and the running starts, or at least the cantering. This is where things will start to get funky, though, because imagine between 30 and 45,000 men and horses trying to stay in any semblance of order when beginning to move at this pace, while under fire. The under fire part, well, who knows where that. That starts. Would you say 50 yards? Certainly. But 75 yards, maybe away. And once that begins to happen, this is the wild card in all of the attempts to recreate ancient warfare. I've seen some wonderful recreations lately by basically scientists who get people out on the field, they train them for years, they get them out there and they're working on things like crowd dynamics and how routes work. And it is fascinating. But what it can't show are the things that would get people hurt or worse if you tried to recreate them in a modern sense. And one of the things is what the missiles do. And if they don't hurt or kill you, they require you to react to them. For example, if you've got the high pacifists right to the left of the companions, and they're trying to keep pace with the companions, who are moving quick because they want to avoid all the missiles, but the infantry has to, you know, sort of hide behind their shields. They have to try to create a sort of a close bond with all of their shields to protect themselves from the missiles. Even if they're trying to do this on the run, it's going to slow them down. It's going to impact the ability to move fluidly on the field. And I still. And you know, you're getting the Dan Carlin version of this story, but you've gotten everybody else's if you're an Alexander fan, so why not get mine? But I'm still trying to figure out how once Alexander and his forces get to this river, how the heck they don't get shot to heck trying to cross it. You ever seen a sporting event where they start throwing beer or something at a participant or a referee or something like that, and you just see unbelievable numbers of these things flying out from the rafters on this person? Well, Alexander's going to be everybody's favorite target. And you have to imagine instead of, you know, beer or Bottles or something being thrown at a modern sporting event. Those are javelins. And as Alexander's cavalry approaches the river, the Vulgate tradition, as it's called, would like you to see Alexander as this force of nature hitting the river, crossing it and engaging with the Persians. The problem is this is the sort of river, if you believe the historians who are writing about it. And why wouldn't you? That sounds like it is made to order for breaking your horse's legs and recall. And, you know, people don't think about this very much, but all the sources talk about the fact that the Persians had massive amounts of scouting forces out there as Alexander approached. You know, what did they say?
- [170:49]
Ben
More scouting forces than Alexander had.
- [170:52]
Dan Carlin
Troops, if you want to believe Arian's ridiculous numbers. But what that means is those scouting forces prevented any of Alexander's recon forces from checking out the battlefield in advance and reporting back. Alexander gets to find out. And we said this at the Granicus also, didn't we?
- [171:07]
Ben
Alexander gets to find out what this river's like when he steps in it.
- [171:11]
Dan Carlin
And if he charges into it with
- [171:13]
Ben
1800 or 2000 cavalry, you know, this is a river that's supposed to have,
- [171:17]
Dan Carlin
you know, the same steep banks as the Granicus, brambles all over, reinforced with a stockade of spikes, you know, cut into tree trunks and big boulders, some of the historians believe big boulders in the river itself. So doing that with thousands of missile weapons. I do enjoy how some of the ancient authors portray it. It's a bit of a trope. But I wonder what it would be like if the Persians held their fire and fired in volley. It might look like what the ancient authors say, which they said there are so many missiles in the air that it's actually counterproductive because the missiles are all firing sort of at the same unit. So imagine Alexander's companions are drawing thousands of missile fire troops to shoot at it. The missiles actually, the ancient authors say, collide with each other in the air. So a bunch of it is actually nullified by the fact that there are so many. But if there are so many, how many are getting through? And if Alexander is managing through whatever devices for personal protection, he has to not get hit by one of those. How the heck is the horse surviving? Which brings us to the other possible way this all could have gone down. Maybe Alexander's with the high pacifists. This theory only. First time I ever encountered it was in the 1980s when Arthur Farrell wrote about it in his History of War. And he wrote about it so that he could sort of take the opposing viewpoint. But since then, a bunch of historians have come to the conclusion, for a lot of the reasons I just mentioned, that Alexander likely would not have forded the river and been the tip of the spear in this situation with cavalry. His father often fought with the elite infantry. In this case, if Alexander did fight with the elite infantry, a lot of things start to make sense. Other things make less sense. The things that make sense is all this missile fire is much more survivable if you're with the heavy infantry. You guys with your big shields fighting as hoplites. Hoplites are traditionally not very vulnerable to missile fire anyway. You could cross the stream at kind of a walk, holding up your shields over your head. And then when you get to the far bank, instead of a horse trying to clamber up over a stockade of sharpened spikes, you can begin to fight over that. The problem with this idea comes later because we know there's going to be a cavalry charge with Alexander at one stage in the battle.
- [173:44]
Ben
And if you buy into the idea
- [173:45]
Dan Carlin
that he's fighting on foot with the hypospis here, at some point he has to mount up. So we'll get to that in a minute. But it's either the hypaspis that cross first with Alexander leading them, or the companions that cross first with Alexander leading them. But the infantry in front of Alexander freaks out. Remember, it was always said that the battlefield is ruled by phobos and pan, right? Fear and panic. And if you've ever been in a crowd that panics, maybe that's a little bit like what the feeling is when, you know, we had said you could see this whole battle if you're on some high vantage point. But if you're not, and if you're right down in it, oftentimes, like in a panicked crowd, you don't know what's going on. But when people start running, often you do, too. You don't know what they're running from. You just know that whatever they're running from is right behind them. And in a minute it's gonna be on you. And when people start to run, it's contagious. And this is why, you know, when people say, why don't you just. Just mobilize the whole population to swamp Alexander with half a million men? That's because you're bringing a bunch of people more likely to run, and that's more likely to make everyone else run. Routing is contagious. Trying to figure out what happens here is difficult There are lots of theories. I say that all the time. One is that there were a bunch of light troops and archers sort of at the edge of the river in front of whatever the formation of the cardices represented. And those are the guys in front of Alexander, you know, that he's going to have to run into. And they're supposed to be, most people think, kind of hoplites, so heavy infantry. That would be a very bad group for Alexander to charge uphill, coming from a river, through the brambles, up a sheer cliff when they're facing down.
- [175:32]
Ben
In other words, this is the setup
- [175:34]
Dan Carlin
that the Persians should have had at the Granicus, right. Instead of putting their cavalry on the edge of the riverbank, put your guys with long thrusting spears looking downward at the people trying to charge up into them. It'd be suicide unless the infantry with their long thrusting spears at the edge of the sheer river wall, were disordered. If they'd lost their formation, if they were confused, if they were pressed together, and if Phobos and Pan got ahold of them. One of the theories is that the light troops that were in front of those cartes, those hoplites from Persia, that they panicked, turned around and ran with Alexander's either cavalry or hypospis right behind them, and they disordered the Persian cardices. Now, even if that didn't happen somehow, they panicked. They got. The other word you'll hear sometimes is shaken. A unit is shaken. And there's a whole theory on cavalry warfare that says that that's what they do to infantry, that they don't ever charge formed infantry, but they sort of fake it. It's like a giant game of chicken. Or if you ever played the game of, you know, made you flinch, the cavalry charges you. And if the infantry sort of panics, then the cavalry continues the charge, right? Completes it. If they don't panic, if they stand fast, the cavalry wheels away at the last minute. But even if that's something you can do on a nice flat field of battle, what the heck's going on here? This is broken country. I can't see that kind of maneuvering. And what that means is if Alexander's really with the cavalry and he charges that infantry, hoping that they're gonna flinch, what happens if they don't? That's a heck of a roll of the dice. If, however, he's with the hypaspis, even if they don't flinch, you have a good chance of beating them. It just might be more of a slogging match. Regardless of what Happens either. And again, different theories. Either they run away before Alexander even contacts them, where basically there's two seconds of contact and everybody runs away on that flank. You fans of the famous Xenophon work the Anabasis. He talks about fighting in a Persian civil war, and the Persians that he and his Greek mercenaries were facing ran away before they even got within a bow shot's range. So you imagine they get within like a football field of view, a unit of thousands of Persians, an oblong formation, he described it. And then they get a good look at you and turn around and run away. War gaming screws people up mentally from accepting this reality too, because very few rule sets make it as common as it was for troops to just run away. Because who wants to play that game? Get everything set up, paint your figures, put them out on the floor, spend all day, set up your army against your buddy and you're gonna kick his rear end and your army runs away. But it happened more often than people like to talk about. And a lot of it has to do in this ancient period with our natural unwillingness to face cold steel. This is very similar, by the way, in my mind, to the whole idea that you Napoleonic fans and you American Civil War fans already know all about. It's the myth of the bayonet charge. The idea that people would charge into each other wielding the pointed ends of the blade at the end of a musket and fight each other with it as though they were using spears. We used to think that's what happened. And historians have disproven that by looking at the cause of death in all these wars and finding out that very, very, very few people were ever killed by bayonets. And the majority of those who were were often more of a finishing off sort of deal. I mean, I think the numbers are in the Civil War, I think it's less than it's 1% or something. In the Napoleonic wars, it's like 2 or 3%.
- [179:16]
Ben
It's nothing.
- [179:18]
Dan Carlin
But it indicates something. It shows you that when confronted with cold steel, in a line of hundreds
- [179:25]
Ben
of human beings holding cold steel, most
- [179:28]
Dan Carlin
people figure out they've got better places to be. And if they can't figure it out for themselves, Phobos and Pan help them to understand it. And in this case, one way or another, no one stood around very long. And that works out wonderfully well for Alexander. But then again, that was the plan. It has to. It's everywhere else where Alexander's troops are being put in positions where, well, I can't think of any troops that would be expected to win in the sorts of circumstances that, oh, say the phalanx finds itself in right here because the phalanx has been splinched. Broken is a word that usually means routing and running away. But when applied to the phalanx, sometimes you will reach read accounts where they will talk about how at this point in the battle the phalanx is broken, meaning the 12,000 or so men that make up this giant block of human beings has gotten separated from itself and now it has to cross this river. And remember, the Persians have fortified it in places so rows of tree trunks that have been sharpened and bonded together in parts of the river or right when you're getting out of the river. And These guys have 17, 18 foot spears that they're holding straight up over their heads. And their real value is that they're so close together in a pincushion, but they can't be a pin cushion in
- [180:46]
Ben
this sort of circumstances.
- [180:47]
Dan Carlin
And there's a steep wall of, you
- [180:49]
Ben
know, riverside in front of them and
- [180:51]
Dan Carlin
a bunch of guys, as we said, with long thrusting spears pointed down at them and brambles.
- [180:55]
Ben
And what's the thinking here?
- [181:00]
Dan Carlin
As you might expect, it gets very hairy. And the late great A.B. bosworth, who is by the way a proponent and always has been that Alexander charged at the head of his cavalry. This is his account and I'm going to give Arrian's account and some other ones. And they all kind of start, if you don't mind us going a little chronologically backwards for a second, usually right before Alexander makes the charge. And here's the way Bosworth puts it,
- [181:24]
Ben
quote, Darius stood firm behind the Pinarus river, leaving the offensive to the Macedonians. It was carefully launched, a measured advance in slow time to preserve the alignment of the phalanx.
- [181:38]
Dan Carlin
And then at missile range the charge
- [181:41]
Ben
led by Alexander himself. His cavalry was attacking across a stream and its momentum cannot have been enormous. But even so, the lightly armed Persian infantry could not cope with the shock. Alexander's cavalry drove forward, pushing left towards Darius, who was in the center of the Persian levy surrounded by his personal guard. Elsewhere, things went less well. The phalanx could not keep pace with Alexander's charge.
- [182:07]
Dan Carlin
He writes, and a gap opened between infantry and cavalry.
- [182:11]
Ben
What was worse, the cohesion of the
- [182:13]
Dan Carlin
infantry line broke down while they were
- [182:15]
Ben
forcing the river and further gaps developed. The mercenary hoplites in Darius service could then insinuate themselves between the lethal sarissa the Pykes and attack the Macedonians from the side where they were most vulnerable. It was a tactic, he writes, used by the Romans to destroy the Macedonian armies in the second century bc. And at Issus, the phalanx was more closely challenged than at any other time
- [182:39]
Dan Carlin
in the reign, meaning his kingship.
- [182:41]
Ben
There was a real danger of it
- [182:43]
Dan Carlin
being dislocated and routed, end quote. At this point in the Alexander movie. Well, no Alexander movies actually covered the battle of Issus, which is interesting considering it's the nearest run thing to disaster Alexander ever had. But at this point in the battle, there are two ways of looking at it. Normally in our movie where Alexander's the hero, here you're worried. This is a moment of great, you know, danger. It could go both ways. But if you're looking at this from the time period from the point of view of anyone or most people in the Persian empire and a lot of
- [183:15]
Ben
people in Greece and a lot of people else who are Demosthenes and people
- [183:18]
Dan Carlin
in Athens, this is the opportunity to destroy the person oppressing you.
- [183:24]
Ben
You're rooting for the Greek mercenaries just like the great king is rooting for
- [183:27]
Dan Carlin
his Greek mercenaries and they are fighting for their lives. Remember what Alexander is doing to Greeks who fight on the other side, even though the other side is really for Greek freedom. In the case of people who would have been from places in Greece that don't like Alexander's thumb, how about if
- [183:42]
Ben
you're a Theban and he destroyed your whole city, you're hoping the mercenaries here
- [183:47]
Dan Carlin
cut the Macedonian phalanx, this invincible Macedonian phalanx into pieces. And this is the best opportunity you're ever gonna see anybody ever have of doing this, to be honest. And they give it their best shot. It's unclear where they are sort of in relation to the steep wall we're told, and the fortifications. The fortifications I'm envisioning. You could envision it your own way that what they did here was do it to channel them in places where the crossing may have happened. They can put these tree trunks that are sharpened and create sort of narrow channels that the phalanx then has to go through where the Persians are waiting for them, including, and imagine it, all the tons of missiles that are flying through the air. The Persians are known for this. So every bit of operation you're trying to accomplish here with all the other
- [184:37]
Ben
things that are, are impeding you, including
- [184:39]
Dan Carlin
that 18 foot spear and the fact you can't have a big shield and they're throwing the air is filled with this stuff. But very quickly the casualties mount in the phalanx as the mercenaries somehow get their way into the flank of it and the officers are getting crushed. The leaders in the phalanx are actually getting crushed. The Eisenhowers, MacArthur's and Pattons that are fighting in the phalanx are getting crushed. You know, famous names go down quickly. Mentioned by name is the son of Seleucus, one of Alexander's good friends and a successor who founded a multi generational dynasty in the Middle East. His name, Ptolemy. No confusion there. But let's remember Ptolemy is a little like Mike or Dan for that matter. In the ancient world, his son Ptolemy just happens to be the unlucky guy, the unlucky officer who's in command of the phalanx battalion that gets hit in the flank by the Persian kings, Greek mercenaries, and every account of this battle you will read is somewhat different from each other. I like the way historian Frank Knighton in Soldier, Priest and God describes this moment when Ptolemy's phalanx battalion gets speared in the flank by the hoplites of the great king. And they'll be using a 9 to 12 foot spear, which I love is described as a short spear by Kniden, but that is relative compared to the 15 to 19 foot pike of the Macedonians. And Frank Knighton writes, quote, ptolemy now
- [186:10]
Ben
stood some dozens of yards away from the Greeks. He marched to the right of his men, hurrying them along, conspicuous in his purple cloak. The Greeks smashed into them. Their short spears, ha ha. Caught the Macedonians in the side. As the Macedonian officers stepped forward to rally their companies, they made themselves targets and were stabbed. Ptolemy fell dead. So did one officer after another. When junior officers stepped forward to reform the companies, the Greeks speared them too. Square by square, the companies disintegrated. Most of Ptolemy's hundred or so officers were now slain, fatally wounded or trampled to death.
- [186:51]
Dan Carlin
End quote. So here's the crisis moment. When was the last time the phalanx of Macedonia had been defeated? Well, didn't happen at any point in Alexander's career. And while all this is going on, you could drive yourself crazy diving down the rabbit hole trying to figure out what's going on. To the phalanxes, left, right, the people,
- [187:16]
Ben
you know, at the sea where the
- [187:17]
Dan Carlin
big Persian sledgehammer, you know, is waiting to fall on poor Parmenio and his cavalry and some Thracians and some archers
- [187:25]
Ben
and a bunch of people who shouldn't be able to deal with them. What's going on over there?
- [187:31]
Dan Carlin
Well, good luck figuring it out. You will find yourself being Confronted at some point with Polybius math, which is, you know, then interpreted by a guy like Hansdell Brooke and others, where they're trying to figure out how many cavalry
- [187:43]
Ben
you can even get into this space. And if you're cramming a bunch of
- [187:46]
Dan Carlin
cavalry in there, which is used to these flowing battles and backs and forth and you know, looking like kind of a dance between large formations of cavalry,
- [187:54]
Ben
well, what do you do if you
- [187:55]
Dan Carlin
don't have any space for that? I mean, here's the Del Bruckian calculation of Polybius. Numbers of how many, you know, how much space just a mere 5,000 cavalry would take. And all the ancient sources have quite a bit more cavalry than that in that zone.
- [188:08]
Ben
And Delbruck writes, quote, Polybius estimates 800 horsemen per stadium.
- [188:13]
Dan Carlin
That's a unit of ancient Greek measurement
- [188:16]
Ben
with the deepest normal formation of eight horses and therefore six feet per horse with intervals. It is also probable, however, that they were sometimes drawn up deeper and they may very well have been much closer together. 5,000 horsemen, he calculates eight horses deep with six feet to a horse would extend even without intervals, more than a kilometer.
- [188:37]
Dan Carlin
A kilometer is something more than a half mile. So if that's what 5,000 horsemen on one side is going to be like, well, do the math. That's how these Prussian sorts of guys from a hundred years ago figured out their battlefield situations. And the math doesn't add up to a lot of movement on that flank. And maybe the best way to view it, because something doesn't happen there. How about that? That's Yogi Berra issue. Something doesn't happen there and it becomes one of those Sherlock Holmes dog that didn't bark sort of deal. And you start asking yourself, if the Persians have this mammoth numbers advantage, maybe even a qualitative equal with the Macedonian side, why aren't they blowing through here
- [189:19]
Ben
like the sledgehammer head should be doing?
- [189:22]
Dan Carlin
And it's possible that it's because there's an echelon sort of deal happening here. We mentioned it in another battle, didn't we, where we set it flash a wave crashing on a beach and the wave could be breaking way down the coast, whereas it's still cresting down by you. And maybe Alexander's winning the battle on the far mountain side of the flank here before the sledgehammer of the Persian assault really gets going. But if the middle falls apart, none of that matters. The middle needs to call for help and apparently does. There's a 911 red alert put out in the form of a trumpet that also according to Frank Knighton, and he writes about the moment where the phalanx calls for help.
- [190:04]
Ben
He says, quote, surviving officers sounded trumpets calling men to regroup and other units to help. Alexander's nearby strike force heard the call better than Parmenio's wing. Alexander halted his advance on Darius and turned to observe the fighting some hundreds of yards behind him. Sinis, commander of the front half of the phalanx, turned and watched. Also, he was closer to the beleaguered regiment in the Persian army. A man in Koinos position would have waited for orders from the king. Not in this army. As Alexander watched, Koinos gave the order for his regiment and those beside it to turn around and head toward the fighting. Once Koinos arrived on the scene, he positioned his men so that they could hit the Greeks on the side. What the Greeks had done to Ptolemy Coinus now did to them.
- [190:56]
Dan Carlin
End quote. Now, when Knidon is referring to what Alexander is doing, by this time, Alexander is beginning with a couple of units of infantry, phalanx guys too, to make
- [191:09]
Ben
his way slanted towards the great king's
- [191:13]
Dan Carlin
chariot in the middle. This is where, as we said earlier, the problem with the theory, that is with the hypaspis and not with the companions, right on foot instead of by
- [191:23]
Ben
cavalry at the initial part of this
- [191:24]
Dan Carlin
battle comes into play, because where's the
- [191:28]
Ben
time for the grooms to bring all the horses, right?
- [191:31]
Dan Carlin
Thousands of horses, at least a thousand,
- [191:34]
Ben
closer to two across the river behind Alexander's foot advance so that they can now mount up again. But space is a priority here, and
- [191:43]
Dan Carlin
we're dealing with a crowded situation. At this point, I was looking up, because I was fascinated by it, whether there was a kind of law of thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, one of those kinds of things for crowds of people. And it was interesting that I found out there was. And the term connected with this, I thought it was a fascinating term, is that crowds behaved like thinking fluids. And so the people packed into this small space are a key component in what's going on. For example, when you think of Alexander pushing the Persians at the front and how a maneuver like that would ripple like an accordion all the way down the ranks and people would get shoved backwards. And the ancient writers in military affairs, in lots of different battles, would talk about how often the crowdedness would get to such a degree that people couldn't raise their arms. You're in such a packed group of people, and we've all been in crowds like that. You couldn't get your arm up if you wanted to, and if you did get it up, you couldn't get it back down again. Well, how would you use a weapon? This is actually part of what armies want to do sometimes to each other. I mean, shove them so close together that they become useless as fighters. The Roman legionaries used to have to have something like 6ft of space around them to do what they wanted to do. So you can see how something like this would be an impediment. And I'm trying, and I've never been able to mentally envision it, trying to imagine how the horses play into all this, because where are they in the crowds? And I mean, the whole thing has always been tough for me to envision, but I'm trying to imagine that as these crowds are coming together, that people are slowly making their way through them. I mean, again, if you were in a crowd of people and somebody needed to get to the front of the crowd to deliver a message, think about how they would work their way through it slowly but surely.
- [193:36]
Ben
Now, if they were killing the people in front of them as they did
- [193:39]
Dan Carlin
it, well, that's another dynamic entirely too. And that seems to be what it's like. It's like carving your way towards a destination. In this story, the destination is the great king of Persia, and the person carving his way inch by inch towards him is Alexander. And he is so conspicuous in his dress as the great king of Persia is too. We explain that they want to be
- [194:04]
Ben
conspicuous, but that means everybody sees him.
- [194:07]
Dan Carlin
If you happen to have a nice little javelin in your hand you're not using at the moment, wouldn't you fling it over there? I mean, it's crazy to think about how long you're caught in this crowd and people are after you. But at a certain point he's approaching the great king. And we come to the interesting part of this story where, as we said earlier, you've got the actual head of
- [194:27]
Ben
state right there in front of you.
- [194:30]
Dan Carlin
I mean, the war is between, you know, the president of one country today and the prime minister of another. Well, here they are facing off Churchill and Hitler yards from each other. And in the Vulgate tradition, the Diodoruses and the Curtiuses and stuff, they like to get much more sort of descriptive about it, all tropes and everything else. So remember, you know, these guys weren't there. Some of this stuff is standard fare, but it does color it up for us a little bit. In my wonderful Robin Waterfield translation of Diodorus, Diodorus explains colorfully what this moment is like and says, quote, the officers
- [195:08]
Ben
in command of each unit led from the front, and by their example stiffened the resolve of their men. The scene before a spectator's eyes would therefore have been one of men wounded and being wounded in countless different ways, and struggles of every imaginable kind erupting on the field in the pursuit of victory. When the Persian axiothres, a brother of Darius, who was renowned for his courage, saw that Alexander was making for Darius in a seemingly unstoppable charge.
- [195:38]
Dan Carlin
Let me stop you here. Or a slow carving his way through the crowd toward the great king Theodorus continues.
- [195:46]
Ben
He resolved to share his brother's fate. He collected the best of the horsemen in his command, and with them at his side, he swooped down on Alexander, certain that this demonstration of brotherly love would bring him great fame among the Persians. He fought in front of Darius chariot, engaging the enemy fearlessly. And such was his skill that many fell dead before him. But Alexander had the advantage in terms of valor. And soon a great pile of corpses was heaped around Darius chariot. For in his longing to break through to the Persian king, every Macedonian contended passionately with his comrades and gave no thought to personal safety.
- [196:25]
Dan Carlin
End quote. Diodorus says in this pushing forward and killing towards Darius chariot, Alexander was wounded in the thigh. This is a long running part of the story that some sources say and some don't, interestingly enough, considering we talked about this at the battle of the Granicus too, and I often do, by the way, because I think it's key, one of the key variables on an ancient battlefield. But once again, the psychology of animals comes into play. And Diodorus writes, quote, the horses yoked
- [197:00]
Ben
to Darius chariot received multiple wounds, and they were so startled by the number of corpses piling up around them that they attempted to shake off their bits and almost bore Darius off into the midst of the enemy, end quote.
- [197:16]
Dan Carlin
The ancient writer Curtius is also sort of part of the same tradition as Diodorus and has a version of that story. And he says by this time Darius
- [197:26]
Ben
horses had been pierced by lances and were distracted with pain. They had begun to toss the yoke and were at the point of hurling the king from his chariot, end quote.
- [197:37]
Dan Carlin
I read an interesting theory a while back because the whole horse thing is so interesting to me. And it was about how they might have trained horses to do things that people don't think they should do, like charge solid objects. And the suggestion was that they would have these horses and train them to charge these ranks. And then the ranks would always open up in training. So they would get this idea that, oh, that's what they'll always do. And then in a real battle, they would, you know, assume that the people in front of them with the pointy spears would move and they didn't. And in that theory, a horse is a one shot weapon because it will only do that once and if it survives, it'll never do that again. So psychologically you have to train sort of the horse to do things it wouldn't otherwise do, because the horse psychology is key. Well, how long would one expect chariot horses to sit there in the midst of what I just described and not lose it?
- [198:27]
Ben
Heck, people lose it all the time.
- [198:29]
Dan Carlin
All those people that would run away before they even came into combat. And those poor horses find themselves where they do well one way or another. It's an integral part of the story that they're not going to stick around. And can you imagine if they go crazy with the great king of Persia in the chariot pulled by them? Arian has it a much more cowardly move and has the great king deciding he's got better places to be. And in my Aubrey de Selancourt translation of Arian, Arian says the moment the
- [199:03]
Ben
Persian left went to pieces under Alexander's attack. And Darius in his war chariot saw that it was cut off, he incontinently fled. Indeed, he led the race for safety, keeping to his chariot as long as
- [199:17]
Dan Carlin
there was smooth ground to travel on.
- [199:19]
Ben
He was forced to abandon it when the ravines and other obstructions barred his way. Then, dropping his shield and stripping off his mantle and even leaving his bow in the war chariot, he leapt upon his horse and rode for his life.
- [199:34]
Dan Carlin
End quote.
- [199:36]
Ben
So the Aryan version of the Alexander
- [199:39]
Dan Carlin
movie definitely portrays the great king of Persia as a coward as opposed to a victim of thinking fluids. But in this case, horse thinking fluids, it matters not because once the great king flees the battlefield, and this also very common in ancient warfare, everyone around him starts to run too. And this sets off a chain reaction and kind of explains what's going on with the Persian sledgehammer back at the seaside part of this battle, because it sounds like it's just getting going and into it, and there's a lot of fighting going on. And then they see that the great king is fleeing and the army is sort of retreating like that wave pulling back to the ocean and they decide to go with it too. And now the killing really gets bad. This is where the crowd dynamics really comes into play. And anybody who's a person who studies things like escape routes in a crowded theater, if there's a fire, would understand what's going to happen here, because in this sort of terrain there's only a few passes that will allow anyone to get away from what's happening here. And they are nowhere near wide enough to deal with the number of people that are going to try to use them. And the metaphorical fire, the pursuing, in this case mostly Alexandrian cavalry, is burning them as they run. And the second they have to slow down because once again you reach a bottleneck in the way out and then a giant crowd, they are killing you from behind. And there is no quicker and more one sided way to die than that way. There have been some wonderful recreations, as we had mentioned earlier, showing how routes may have happened. And it's interesting to see how certain people run ahead of the pursuers and engage the people running away at speed, whereas other small groups of people running away decide to turn around and form a little block together. I mean, there's a whole bunch of dynamic going on, but once this becomes a rush toward the exits and everybody has their back turned trying to push their way through, you are nothing but corpses waiting to happen. And the killing is immense. And the Alexandrian compatriot, a guy who starts his own dynasty in Egypt, is descendant is Cleopatra Ptolemy, who's one of the main sources for some of these ancient writers of ours. He claims to have crossed a ravine absolutely full of dead bodies, and a bunch of these people were killed before the pursuers ever even got to them. The crowd itself becomes lethal, as Diodorus points out. This is from my C. Bradford Wells translation of the Ancient Historian. And he picks up the story from the moment where the Persian king exits his chariot, gets on his escape horse, the lone horse that he can ride out of there, and says, seeing their
- [202:55]
Ben
king in this state, the Persians with him turned to flee. And as each adjacent unit in turn did the same, the whole Persian cavalry was soon in full retreat. As their route took them through narrow defiles and over rough country, they clashed and trampled on one another, and many died without having received a blow from the enemy. For men lay piled up in confusion, he writes, some without armor, others in full battle panoply, some with their swords still drawn, killed those who spitted themselves upon them. Most of the cavalry, however, bursting out into the plain and driving their horses at full gallop, succeeded in reaching the safety of the friendly cities. Now the Macedonian phalanx and the Persian infantry were engaged only briefly, he writes, for the rout of the cavalry had been, as it were, a prelude of the whole victory. Soon all of the Persians were in retreat and so many tens of thousands were making their escape through narrow passes, the whole countryside was soon covered with bodies.
- [203:59]
Dan Carlin
End quote. Anyone who's taken an interest in what's sometimes called battlefield archaeology that's taken place in locations like where George Custer died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn will be fascinated by, as I am, too, by how modern technology can almost recreate the battle based on what you could call debris fields left over, whether it's ammunition, bones, equipment, whatever. And it. If you read the accounts here, this battle could almost be recreated that way. I mean, the carnage around where the great king's chariot was is remarked upon. There was a great slaughter there because that's where it all hit the fan, right? The bravest guards troops that the king has are trying to literally fend Alexander off. That's the famous scene from the Alexander mosaic with Alexander charging, spearing a guy, and the great king's right there in the chariot, and the look on his face, well, says it all, even all these years later. But they don't know how many people were killed in this battle on the Persian side for the same reason that they don't know how many people fought in this battle on the Persian side. But it's an absolutely safe bet to say, you know, it's 15 or 20 Titanics at least going down, right? 20,000 at least. You could bump those numbers up double and have a lot of people be fine with that, too. And the only thing that probably saves that from being worse is night. Remember, the battle's supposed to have started in the late afternoon, so they probably only had, by the calculations, that we even mentioned two hours or something of light. So however long it took to have the battle, I mean, Alexander supposedly himself is involved in the pursuit, and the ancient sources say he pursued for. I looked it up, it's between 20 and 25 miles. So then you have to not just go that far, but then turn around and retrace your steps to get back to where you were. And to be honest, there's a lot of things that interest me about this moment in this guy's life. It's something that's been relatively unexplored in, for example, the movie History of the Man. I mean, as we said, I think the Battle of Issus doesn't even appear in the two major movies that have been done about Alexander. But what's going through his head at this time. First of all, I mean, in my scene, you're probably going to get one of those ratings where you can't even bring people under 18 even with permission from a parent, because think about what he's going to look like at this point. Now, the thigh wound he supposedly has and very well may is going to have been bleeding, so there's going to be that. But you need to remember what these battlefields look like. And I've talked about it extensively, because in my mind I can't even picture it. And of course, you know, battlefields in the ancient world are like fingerprints. No two are exactly the same. But I believe, didn't we say way back when we were doing the Roman shows in some places they would hold tours afterwards to show people what it looked like. There's a morbid curiosity in the whole thing, but it must have been awful to behold. I remember reading some stuff historian Larry Tridle had talked about when he was talking about what the environment of the ancient battlefield would be like. And he was quoted in my copy of Combat Trauma in the Ancient Greek saying about a hoplite battle, which is similar to what we had this afternoon here.
- [207:52]
Ben
And he says, the sights and sounds of this fight, like any battle, ancient or modern, are nearly beyond the comprehension of the inexperienced. The battlefield itself would have become littered with bodies of the wounded, dying and dead, making it difficult to walk and
- [208:11]
Dan Carlin
fight at the same time.
- [208:13]
Ben
Blood and viscera would have made the ground slippery and the air foul. The noise and confusion would have been bewildering and disorienting all at once.
- [208:22]
Dan Carlin
End quote. And so here we have Alexander on this ride back. I don't know how long it would have taken him. Depends on his speed, right? Hour, maybe two. And he's got some time now to think and have absorbed. And when he arrives, you know, back where the Macedonians are near the battlefield, he must have looked like Carrie from the movie Carrie when the pig's blood was all dropped on him. How can you be in close proximity to lots of people having limbs lopped off? I mean, the arterial blood spurting all over the place. Go look at a crime scene photo of a modern murder scene. And now imagine what we. You talked about with Alexander and crowds and all this kind. I mean, this is the sort of stuff that'll get your movie rated X or something. And you won't even be able to bring people under 18 with a parent's, you know, accompaniment that'll ruin your movie right there. But that's probably Closer to the reality. I'm fascinated by several aspects of what, what's just happened, though. First of all, just Alexander leading the pursuit himself is so Alexander. Even his dad, who was no shirker when it came to being the first among equals and the whole thing, I mean, gave up his eye, limped around for the rest of the end of his life. I mean, he gave up his body for all that. But even Philip might have said, okay, let the light cavalry do the pursuing, let's start the party early, get the wine going. But not Alexander. And if this was the only time he did this, it wouldn't be worth bringing up. But all throughout his career, he does this. He doesn't miss an opportunity to be involved in the fight, wherever it is. And things to remember, and we've said this before, he is famously not as tall, not as big as the people around him. I mean, this is remarked upon and yet he's right there first. And it's going to get him into trouble, of course, because think about we said, the boxing announcement, the idea of the wear and tear. Keep track of the wear and tear on this guy. What's going on in all these pursuits. If I could transfer your brain into his mind and all of a sudden you could see the images flashing from his memory banks, I mean, you'd be
- [210:36]
Ben
traumatized, there'd be your rated X movie right there.
- [210:39]
Dan Carlin
But think about all these incidents. How many people did he kill today? How much of those things stick with him or not? It's a long running debate, by the way, and that combat trauma book I just mentioned is one of the books that talks about it. There's all kinds of versions though, Achilles in Vietnam that talk about this question about whether or not what we would call PTSD today is something that was really invented by moderns and that culture and all sorts of other things insulated earlier peoples from it, or whether or not it's more biological. And it doesn't matter what time and place you come from from that might add as a variable, but you see enough murders and participate in enough murders, it's going to affect you no matter what. It's an interesting debate, but somehow one wonders whether all the incidents that Alexander's living and going through here are having some effect on him.
- [211:31]
Ben
And if not the stuff we can
- [211:32]
Dan Carlin
argue about whether or not it's biological or cultural or any of those sorts of things. Just think about how many times he's getting hit on the head. Battle of the Granicus famously almost has its skull split open a lot of talk these days that didn't exist before cte. You know, the concussive damage that occurs in contact sports. A lot of talk now that wasn't around when I was younger about this because more is known about it. When you look at Alexander and all the wear and tear, remember he's not just stabbing people in the back during these pursuits. People are selling their lives dearly. The Battle of Canae, where Hannibal surrounded 50,000 or more Romans. That's the end of the battle as far as a wargamer is concerned. Right? That's when I pack up and go home. But you still have to kill all those people. And every one of them's gonna wanna sell their lives dearly. And so you could be a Carthaginian thinking, the battle's won. I've surrounded these guys, but I still have to kill my way to the center of a massive crowd. And everybody at the edges is gonna fight like a cornered rat. Same applies to Alexander. And that's a large part of the Alexander story that goes unrecorded. Add up all the times he does what he just did here. Take part in the pursuit, be the
- [212:44]
Ben
first over the wall, whatever it is,
- [212:46]
Dan Carlin
and you don't record the rocks that hit him in the head and all that other stuff. We'll have a chance to revisit this later because it's part of the mystery. But the other thing that occurs to me, if you're into things like the extremes of the human experience, there are other extremes beyond the bloody and the horrible. There's the extremes of emotion. I mean, what does this feel like? What is running through his emotional sense at this moment? When you try to think of, like, scoring a goal in the World cup, scoring a touchdown in the Super Bowl, I mean, what does this compare to? And what's the amplitude and what are the emotions? You know, is it jubilation? Is this sort of shock? Is it a letdown because you've had
- [213:31]
Ben
all this adrenaline and all this stress
- [213:33]
Dan Carlin
you've been looking up to, and now it's deflated?
- [213:35]
Ben
Are you simply, completely physically whipped?
- [213:37]
Dan Carlin
Because you probably have never exerted yourself athletically and physically as intensely as you have today and remember the days leading up to it, or is it brain chemicals involved? We have adrenaline and serotonin and dopamine and all these things we working on him. I mean, what does this feel like? Very few people have ever been in the situation where they can feel what Alexander's feeling here. At least not at the amplitude. He'd be feeling it and I'm fascinated by what that must. To use the word again, feel like now, I'd said that no one knows how many Persians died, no one knows how many Macedonians died. Either you have the numbers from the ancient, ancient sources, which clearly sound like propaganda, or they're being misinterpreted. Right. They'll give you these low numbers and then you realize later they're only counting the Companions or something, those Thracians or those Agranians or those light troops. They weren't even mentioned in the numbers, so who knows? There have been good estimates that the numbers are probably something 1000 1500, with
- [214:44]
Ben
a 4 to 1 or a 5
- [214:45]
Dan Carlin
to 1 ratio, wounded to dead. So that's. That's four or five thousand men wounded. And that makes sense when you think about the kind of injuries you would get from all that stuff being thrown in the air. Like we talked about, all those javelins, all those arrows kicking around in the air. That's going to be a lot of people getting wounded. It demonstrates yet again, though, the difference between the kind of casualties that the winner gets versus the loser. And it's that rout and all the killing that happens after the battle's officially over that really determines who suffers a lot more. Speaking of the suffering, there's an incident here that occurs when Alexander gets back from the pursuit. The timeline is weird, so it's hard to know whether it happens sort of like right when he comes back, or if it's the next day or if it's spaced out over both of them. But it's an interesting moment and I'm fascinated with this too. We talked about it when we talked about, talked about Alexander destroying Thebes and what human beings do in situations like that. If you're a Theban and he's destroying your city and you know this is coming, what do you do? Do you stay in your home? Do you head to the, you know, city square to be with other people? And it seems like that's what a lot of people do. And when Alexander's troops overrun the camp of Darius, which is nearby, that's where they were sort of staying while they awaited the battle. Well, now the Macedonians get their hands on it. Peter Green referred to it as a looter's paradise. You have to think of, as we had mentioned earlier, something along the lines of a city. The number of people that would have been living, including the hangers on and all the support people in this Persian camp would have made a good size ancient city. And the pavilion for the great King alone. This giant tent has a courtyard. I mean, it's massive. It's far richer than most of the people in the Macedonian army have ever even dreamed of. And remember, if the speeches, you know, grain of salt here, are to be taken, you know, the ones that Alexander gave before the battle of any sort of value at all, he's literally telling people like the Thracians who get a slap in the face by being sage, you know, people who make a living off robbery.
- [217:09]
Ben
He's telling them what's there, right, to
- [217:11]
Dan Carlin
motivate them, well, guess what? Time to collect your winnings. And this camp is being ransacked to such a degree that the ancient authors talk about. You can follow the trail of stuff that people have just thrown out because they found better stuff along the way. So they throw out the stuff that they had previously because they found something better and they can't carry it all. And of course, part of the loot here are people, especially women. And they're part of the nightmare that's going on in a place like this because as we had said, the Persians bring their families with them. The great king's family is here, the family of a bunch of the people, the so called kinsmen, which is really the, let's call them the oligarchy of Achaemenid Persia. They're here too. And now they've fallen into the Macedonian hands and they are being abused. The ancient sources talk about it and you know, again, this is where you have to parse the sources a little because remember that Arrian is doing a version of Alexander that makes it really shaves off the rough edges. If he ever says anything critical, you take it as hypercritical because that's unusual for him. But in this case, Arian uses what's happening here as a setup to show, you know, one of Alexander's really good qualities, allegedly. But the vulgar tradition, guys, the Diodoruses and the Curtiuses, they fully talk about what the Macedonian troops are doing to the women. And an interesting scene develops. And again, if we're doing this like a movie, there's a scene to include here because it's interesting and you don't get a lot of these in history, but it's, it's the moment where the queen mother, who is there, so this would be Darius III's mother, she's there. She's gonna be the elderly, older power, and almost through like the power of her dignity and personality, she creates. I was trying to think of what a good term would be to create the right visuals. It's like a circle of protection around the nearby people, around her, drawing them again, this is. Is me reading into the sources, but you can read them for yourself and see what it is you think is going on here. This sort of brings them into her circle of protection and it's keeping the Macedonian looters at bay. And this whole incident includes a line from Diodorus that I love. I wonder what the ancient Greek. In the ancient Greek, how it sounds. But he's talking about the women that are being abused. And then they seek help, he says, from those who need help themselves. And that's like this queen mother. I mean, ostensibly they think, she thinks, and she's with her son's wife, which is also Darius sister, I think, and his two granddaughters and the grandson. And they think they're going to be executed anyway. And here she is, through the power of her dignity and personality, sort of keeping deluders at bay. And this is the way Diodorus, in the fabulous Robin Waterfield translation and tells the story, quote, the women who were
- [220:21]
Ben
taken prisoners suffered terribly. Previously, given their pampered way of life, they had scarcely been able to bring themselves to travel on richly appointed wagons and never exposed any part of their bodies.
- [220:35]
Dan Carlin
He's talking about these Persian noblewomen.
- [220:37]
Ben
But now they were evicted from their tents, clad only in their undergarments, bewailing their lotties and tearing at their clothes. They appealed to the gods and fell to the knees of the victors, ripping off the jewelry they were wearing with trembling hands. They fled with loosened hair over stony ground and huddled together, calling for help from those who were already in need of help themselves. Some of their captors, he writes, dragged the wretched women away by the hair, while others tore off their clothes and pawed at their naked bodies. They struck the women with the butt of their spears and acted as though fortune had granted them the right to abuse the most precious and renowned of the barbarians possessions, end quote.
- [221:27]
Dan Carlin
Well, that's where Curtius now has sort of the queen mother with her circle of protection. And in my John Yardley translation of Curtius, Curtius says, quote, however, it was
- [221:41]
Ben
Darius mother and his wife, prisoners now, who had attracted to themselves everyone's gaze and attention. His mother commanded respect by her age as well as by her royal dignity. His wife by a beauty that even her current misfortune had not marred. The latter had taken to her bosom her young son, who had not yet turned six, a boy born into the expectation of the great fortune his father had just Lost in the lap of their aged grandmother lay Darius, two grown up but unmarried daughters, grieving for their grandmother as well as themselves.
- [222:17]
Dan Carlin
Around her, he's talking about the Queen Mother.
- [222:19]
Ben
Around her stood a large number of highborn women, their hair torn, their clothes rent and their former gracefulness forgotten. They called upon their queens and mistresses, titles formerly appropriate but no longer applicable. They forgot their own plight and kept asking on which wing Darius had stood and how the battle had gone, claiming they were not captives at all if the king still lived.
- [222:47]
Dan Carlin
End quote. So you get this sense that these other women have gathered around the Queen Mother because she's.
- [222:54]
Ben
I mean, first of all, if they're all gonna die, they're all gonna die together.
- [222:57]
Dan Carlin
That's what people seem to do in these sorts of situations. But she's kinda holding off the looter.
- [223:02]
Ben
And at some point, I was reading
- [223:03]
Dan Carlin
some very good historians who were pointing out what's obvious when you think about it.
- [223:08]
Ben
At a certain point, someone of authority shows up, some officer, somebody who's not
- [223:15]
Dan Carlin
brain damaged during the looting phase and realizes who they have here and how important these people are. Alexander, they mean a lot to Alexander alive, right? He can use them for propaganda purposes, all kinds of things.
- [223:27]
Ben
So as soon as they realize what they're dealing with here, the dignity and
- [223:30]
Dan Carlin
the office of this Queen Mother does in fact save all these people around her. And then Alexander shows up and has the chance to be Superman, coming in and rescuing the vulnerable women from his own people. And a couple of different incidents happen that are related. One that involves the women freaking out during a dinner in the other room and Alexander hearing it and that they think, you know, that Darius is dead and they think they're all going to be executed. So Alexander sends in someone to calm them down and make them feel better. Then another incident where he shows up with his good buddy Hephaestion. If you imagine Batman and Robin, that's kind of Alexander and Hephaestion, except it's weird because Hephaestion is the larger, bigger sort of guy.
- [224:21]
Ben
So it would be as though Batman
- [224:22]
Dan Carlin
and Robin appear on the scene and Robin is 6 foot 2 and 215 pounds, and Batman's 5 foot 5 and 145. So just a little bit confusing. And it apparently in the stories confuses the Queen Mother who in the famous
- [224:37]
Ben
scene falls to the feet to beseech
- [224:40]
Dan Carlin
Alexander the Great, and instead of doing so, had fallen to the feet instead of Batman of Robin, because she thinks the larger, bigger sort of dude is obviously this great conqueror and he looks the part. But Alexander in the story, and he gets kudos for this too, he doesn't take any sort of offense and has some wonderful, you know, sort of amorphous kind of Eastern mysticism line where he says, we're both Alexander. So of the Batman and Robin situation, we're both Batman, but the whole affair and the way he treats these women,
- [225:14]
Ben
and he's going to be basically, by
- [225:16]
Dan Carlin
the way, he's going to say that they can stay in their offices. He's going to give them even more
- [225:20]
Ben
of an allowance than they got before.
- [225:22]
Dan Carlin
I mean, it's perfect propaganda. And Alexander plays this part.
- [225:26]
Ben
This is an underrated side of his
- [225:29]
Dan Carlin
genius, by the way, but he plays it perfectly. But it allows these ancient authors in a way that's very interesting. And this is where you have to throw a little love in the direction of the Alexander historiographers who sit here and study these things. Why it's so important for Arrian and Diodorus and Curtius and all of these guys that Alexander shows this sort of gallant nature, this Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad, sort of almost courtly love era, medieval era sort of values towards what they would have thought of as the weaker sex. Although Alexander's mother would kick his ass. I read an interesting line in one of the books that was pointing out that the fact that the ancient authors would make such a big deal of his treatment of women here was perhaps a reflection of how it was expected a person in his position would have treated them. In other words, maybe they were remarking upon something that was unusual. This is the way Arrian, who always wants to believe the best about Alexander, puts it, at the same time acknowledging that it's perhaps not a true story. But even if it's not a true story, he's still going to give Alexander credit, because it seems like it should be. And the Aubrey de Selancourt translation has Arrian saying, I record this anecdote. It's the Hephaestion story I just talked about.
- [226:59]
Ben
Not as necessarily true, though it's credible enough if such were indeed the facts.
- [227:04]
Dan Carlin
I cannot but admire Alexander both for
- [227:07]
Ben
the treating these women with such compassion and for showing such respect and confidence towards his friend.
- [227:13]
Dan Carlin
Meaning Hephaestion.
- [227:14]
Ben
If the story is just a story
- [227:17]
Dan Carlin
is what he says, it was at
- [227:19]
Ben
least inspired by Alexander's character. Thus he would have acted, thus he would have spoken. And on this account I admire him no less.
- [227:28]
Dan Carlin
End quote. Well, and the vulgar tradition has their own reason to sort of laud this moment. If it happened in Alexander's life. And that's because, as we talked about earlier, Alexander's qualities are the sorts of qualities that in the right amounts and in the right mix are creating this formidable, interesting person, somebody who can do amazing things. And we should point out that if a mosquito with malaria bit Alexander today and he died, he already would have written his name in the sands of history and be immortalized as the greatest conqueror the Greek world ever produced already just here. So let's establish that. But those same qualities, which, when they appear in the right amplitudes and amounts and mix, can get easily unmoored and out of whack. The golden mean, as we talked about earlier, is a difficult point to sustain. And the ancient authors have this moment in the Alexander story where he's starting to hit this plateau. This is the good Alexander. This is the one that the people who see him more from the philosophical king side of things. This is the era they laud. This is where Alexander really seems like something different than your run of the mill sorts of strongmen and conquerors and power mongers. And it's stories like the way he treats these Persian women and all these sorts of things that partially play into this. The ancient authors say that at this point the army and the Macedonian rank and file have gotten a taste of Persian wealth and opulence and everything else, and they're ready for more. Alexander has one of these moments recorded in Plutarch should be in every movie where he gets his exposure to the richness of this empire that he's starting to dismantle. And remember Alexander, even though they talk about the Spartan upbringing of the Macedonians.
- [229:53]
Ben
Come on, he's still the Prince Royale
- [229:56]
Dan Carlin
when he's growing up, right in the court of Philip. They may have been poor compared to Persians, but they were hardly starving. And yet when Alexander walks into the pavilion of the courtyard of the great king's tent in the Persian camp that his men are looting, Plutarch, actually all the ancient authors try to describe the opulence and richness of this. We're talking about a football field sized tent, maybe with couches. Here's the way Plutarch describes it. And then he has Alexander have this wonderful line, one of these wonderful, ambiguous, multiple ways to interpret Alexandrian lines that are classic. And Plutarch writes, quote, this is from the Dryden translation, by the way. And it picks up the story where Alexander's basically coming back from hunting for Darius during the pursuit, he's going to be covered in blood and everything. And he arrives at the tent, and his own men have gotten there, the pages have gotten there and prepped it for him with torches, and they've got a bath drawing. It's just.
- [230:58]
Ben
It's all ready for him.
- [230:59]
Dan Carlin
And Dryden has Plutarch saying, quote, but
- [231:03]
Ben
Darius tent, which was full of splendid furniture and quantities of gold and silver, they reserved for Alexander himself, who after he had put off his arms, went to bathe himself, saying, let us now cleanse ourselves from the toils of war in the baths of Darius. Not so, replied one of his followers, but in Alexander's rather, for the property of the conquered is and should be called the conquerors. Here Plutarch writes, when he beheld the bathing vessels, the water pots, the pans and the ointment boxes, all of gold, curiously wrought and smelt the fragrant odors with which the whole place was exquisitely perfumed, and from thence passed into a pavilion of great size and height, where the couches and tables and preparations for an entertainment were perfectly magnificent. He turned to those about him and
- [231:59]
Dan Carlin
said, this, it seems, is royalty. End quote. I've seen that rendered differently. This is what it means to be a king. This, it seems, is what it means to be a king. There's a couple of different ways you'll see it translated, but the discussions over what he really means. Is he taking a shot at the Persians for thinking that that's what this means, or is he just in general awe? Remember, the Persians are the inheritors of the great ancient empires, one right after another that go all the way back to the Akkadians. This is really, really ancient stuff. And Alexander's the first European to find himself in a position to start bathing in the exquisitely jeweled baths of the people who are the inheritors of that level of royalty. It's something human beings have shown a propensity to getting used to, and history shows it's often fatal if you do. What's interesting, of course, is that the Greeks knew all about was their entertainment stock in trade, for example, to talk about how people like the kings of Persia were undermined by their luxury and opulence and the yes men and the women in the harem and the bowing and the scraping and the. Well, it wasn't Sauron's ring that Alexander's put on his finger here, it was Lord Acton's ring, the one inscribed on the inside with the words absolute power corrupts absolutely. And even though he was a king, Alexander came from a culture that had more of, we could say, maybe a first among Equals kind of kingship. And he's moving into an area where, if not the God kings of Egypt, because the Persian rulers were not God kings, but they were demigods, God kings. And here we have a ruler in young Alexander who already reportedly has a tendency to wonder about his parentage and whether it's completely human or maybe a little bit divine. And his mother might not be helping that tendency. And now he finds himself beginning to inherit subjects who are used to treating their king as somebody more than human already. Well, this sort of thinking about oneself as potentially godlike, there's a little bit of a drug aspect to that can make you feel very heady, I imagine, although I've never been in that position. But like so many of the really dangerous drugs out there, you can overdose. And what happens to you as a historical figure if you do? Well, maybe as we move forward, that's what we're going to find out. Is Alexander the Great a cautionary tale? Well, let's just say that the stage is perfectly set for one of those Greek morality tales, or the Vulgate tradition version of the Alexander story, where we get a chance to watch the same sort of power that has intoxicated rulers from time immemorial, the numbers of which, it's almost crazy, think of themselves as more than human after a while. Although, listen, this is not a world of a one God. If somebody claims to be Jesus Christ, we lock them up in a mental institution. Today, if you walk around saying you're a son of Zeus or something like that, you just start doing the math, say to your buddy, well, you know, it's possible, like I got around. The point is, is it's not quite the claim back then to say you're divine than it is now. There was a lot more gods running around. The odds were better. But you're separating yourself from the rest of the species. And this is something the ancient writers talked about. The ancient moralists love this story because it's Icarus all over again, isn't it? And at this point in the Icarus story, Alexander's really starting to gain altitude. And those wings seem awesome. And the sun's getting closer and he hasn't yet noticed that the wax is heating up. But when you become intoxicated, not just on power, but on your own greatness, and the idea that you're more than human and you're going to be the best and you're going to do things no one else has done and you're going to push the limits of history, well, Just be careful your wings don't melt.
- [236:59]
Ben
Wrath of the Cons, Punic Nightmares, Apache Tears, and of course, Ghosts of the Ostfront. Just a few of the classic hardcore history titles available from dancarlin.com Every true fan has heard these favorites. Hey, they make great gifts too.
- [237:16]
Guest or Additional Commentator
If you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar, Dan and Ben would love to have it. Go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show.
- [237:25]
Dan Carlin
There's an old phrase that keeps popping into my head. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. And it's a hunting idea, bird hunting idea. That better to bag a single bird with a conservative sort of approach than to gamble and reach and, you know, end up having had a chance maybe at two and going home with none. I think about that when we get to where we are in this story upcoming, because the crowd that would suggest that everything we've seen up until this point in the story we could have seen if Philip had lived, if Alexander's dad had not been assassinated. This could have been Philip doing all this. And that's not impossible to imagine. Important to remember, though, that after the battle of the River Granicus, Philip, had he done it, would have inherited from the great king, would have snatched from the great king Anatolia, modern day Turkey, which is like four or five times what he already possessed in terms of land and resources, would have turned him into sort of a regional superpower. It would have been an enormous, enormous thing. Some people would have been okay with that. That might have been the bird in the hand for some people. But maybe, you know, Philip is not the sort of guy to maybe stop after an easy victory like the Granica. So easy to see Philip doing this too. As we had said, when you have an army like Philip had and you have this wealth imbalance between a sort of a restless Macedonia who's now subdued Greece. And what are they going to do now? Well, Persia's right there, can't even defend themselves. It's, you know, it was drawing the Macedonian army, but how far was it going to draw them after the Battle of Issus? You know, you could basically say a giant chunk of the Persian Empire's problem, probably yours. And the fact that the great king got away, even if Arrian and those people, you know, will call him cowardly and all that sort of stuff, well, he lives to fight another day. He's still out there ready to make deals, ready to raise armies. I mean, Persia's still existing and Alexander still has to deal with it because Darius got away. But this is the point in the story upcoming where the fact that Alexander is Alexander drives the story forward in a way that it almost certainly wouldn't have gone otherwise. Because we're going to start to see people peel off from this. What do we refer to this Macadonna Tech, this startup company that's with this disruptive technology, some of these really early founders in the enterprise under Philip, these people are going to start to look at what they've won and think that's awesome. You know, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. And they're dealing with a guy who's operating with a completely different sort of metric. He's not counting the money, he's not trying to, you know, just be one of the great conquerors out there in his day and age. He's playing as we said earlier and this has always been part of the guys appeal. He's playing for a celestial position here, a greatest of all time position. He's clearly drawn in a way that makes his psychology fascinating to historians ever since. Because we all want to know what are this guy's motivations? And the reason it matters is because when is enough enough? I mean, what are this guy's victory conditions ever? He's going to become a poster child for a guy who's addicted to conquest. A guy who has a mania for subjugation. More on this in part 5 of Mania for Subjugation.