Alexander the Great: life of the week

Summary

HISTORYEXTRA PODCAST – “Alexander the Great: Life of the Week”
Release Date: June 15, 2026
Guest: Prof. Edmund Richardson (Durham University), author of God King Man
Host: Rob Attar

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Episode Overview

This episode offers a fresh look at Alexander the Great, challenging common assumptions about one of history’s most mythologized figures. Professor Edmund Richardson, drawing on recently discovered Persian sources and new scholarly approaches, discusses Alexander's life, conquests, motivations, and enduring legacy. The conversation reevaluates both the human cost of Alexander’s campaigns and the shaping of his myth across centuries.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Rethinking Alexander’s Story (03:46–05:12)

• Richardson explains his motivation: Despite the saturation of books about Alexander, new findings allow for "a very different kind of story."
• Notable Quote:
  “So many of the things we've assumed about Alexander, so many…seemed fixed and certain, [are] actually anything but.” — Edmund Richardson (03:54)
• Recent archaeological and textual discoveries—including newly published Persian documents—offer perspectives previously missing from Greek-dominated histories.

Persian Voices and the Empire Alexander Conquered (05:28–08:58; 20:04–22:58)

• Traditional accounts come from Greek outsiders; now, Persian administrative letters (e.g., governor Arsama’s correspondence) reveal a more nuanced world.
• “They show this glittering world…as exhausted, overwhelmed bureaucrats who just want the demands to stop…he absolutely writes like someone who hates his job.” — Edmund Richardson (06:43)
• Persia’s scale, wealth, bureaucracy, and knowledge—including the temple libraries of Egypt and Babylon’s astronomers—presented a real superpower, not just an easy target.

Alexander’s Background: Family and Education (08:58–13:39)

• Philip II, Alexander’s father, “tricked his way onto the throne,” was underestimated by Greeks, and forged a formidable military (09:08).
• Olympias, Alexander’s mother, maneuvered for power despite a male-dominated world (10:45).
• Aristotle was his illustrious but reluctant tutor—blackmailed by Philip to teach Alexander, profoundly shaping Alexander’s worldview and love for Homer (11:31–13:39).

The Death of Philip II and Alexander’s Ascension (13:39–16:32)

• Philip was assassinated at a public event; rumors swirled about who was responsible (possibilities included Alexander or Olympias, but Richardson doubts Alexander was directly involved).
• Alexander’s quick, decisive action secured the throne in a moment of chaos.

Why Invade Persia? (16:32–17:42)

• Alexander inherited a bankrupt state—“He needs the money. He's broke.” (16:45)
• From necessity, he launched an audacious campaign; the Macedonian state became a kind of predator.

How Alexander Defeated the Persian Superpower (22:58–28:11)

• Success attributed to adaptability, tactical brilliance, and an elite, highly trained army (Companion cavalry and Macedonian phalanx).
• Alexander excelled at exploiting terrain and improvising—won key battles by forcing Persians into disadvantageous positions (e.g., narrow plains at Issus: 23:50).
• Relied on talented engineers (notably Diades) for siege warfare and innovative military technology.
• Notable Quote:
  “He has an eye for a terrain and an opposing army like almost no one else in human history.” — Edmund Richardson (23:25)

The Shrine of Amun: Alexander’s Quest for Divinity (28:11–34:56)

• Alexander risked everything to visit the Siwa Oasis, seeking divine endorsement (seemingly irrational, arguably decisive for his morale and legitimacy).
• At Siwa, a priest’s linguistic slip is interpreted as calling Alexander “Son of God”—a momentous event for his self-perception and legend.
• Notable Quote:
  “It's like a sort of shiver runs through the world because this seems to be confirmation…that he is in fact more than human.” — Edmund Richardson (32:43)

Conquest and Rule: The Messy Realities (34:56–40:34)

• Despite victory at Gaugamela and the death of Darius III, consolidating the empire proved arduous—endless revolts, tenuous control, and years of guerrilla warfare.
• Alexander relied heavily on existing Persian administrative structures. Local governors and priests continued as before; little was changed except the overlord.
• “Politically and administratively, he doesn't do that much. Possibly he's planning to do something…but he doesn't impose one political system on it apart from his own rule.” (38:28)

Unfulfilled Plans and Untimely Death (40:34–44:56)

• Alexander was preparing for new campaigns (Arabia, possibly West to Carthage or Italy) and training new armies but died suddenly at 32.
• Richardson's research attributes the cause to typhoid, brought on by contaminated water near Babylon.
• Notable Quote:
  “The stories are brilliant and each one more implausible than the last…All of it's bunkum, I'm afraid.” (On poisoning myths; 42:56)

Alexander’s Family, Personal Relationships, and Heirs (46:32–48:29)

• Married multiple women, including Roxane and Statira; had two known surviving children, neither of whom retained the throne.
• Closest bond was with Hephaestion, whose death deeply affected Alexander.
• Dynastic chaos post-Alexander: power struggles, murder, and the infamous hijacking of his body by Ptolemy triggered the fragmentation of the empire.

The Empire’s Collapse and Alexander’s Legacy (48:29–52:47)

• No succession plan; generals and governors divided his territories.
• Richardson’s summary: Alexander left more ruin than order—his life created chaos, but the cultural exchange in the resulting Hellenistic world truly reshaped history.
• Notable Quote:
  “He wanted, he said, to liberate the Greeks from Persian rule. He killed and enslaved more Greeks than anyone else in history…Probably around 1% of the world's population died as a direct result of his campaign.” (50:58)

The Myth of Alexander and Global Cultural Resonance (52:47–55:13)

• Alexander reinvents himself across cultures—as a romantic hero, a villain, a saint, a prophet.
• His story’s gaps and ambiguities allow each era and civilization to remake him as their own.
• “It's not a story of what it means to be superhuman. It's a story of what it means to be all too human.” — Edmund Richardson (54:45)

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• On the Persian bureaucracy:
  “He absolutely writes like someone who hates his job.” — Richardson (06:40)
• On Alexander’s army:
  “Looking all the world like this incredibly angry porcupine.” (on the phalanx; 24:44)
• On divine endorsement:
  “O Paidion, O my son…[the priest] says, O Pa, O Son of God.” (32:13)
• On legacy:
  “Few people shaped reality more profoundly than he did. But almost all of that transformation happened in the ripples that his life and his death set in motion.” (50:58)
• On myth-making:
  “He’s someone who goes further than Greeks imagined it was possible to go, does things that were meant to be beyond even the gods.” (53:41)
• On his all-too-human nature:
  “It’s that side of him…trying desperately to figure out what to do next…that in many ways…I think, connect people to Alexander.” (54:45)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:46 – Why write another book about Alexander?
• 05:28 – Using new Persian sources
• 08:58 – Alexander’s parents and Macedon
• 11:31 – Aristotle’s impact
• 13:50 – The assassination of Philip II
• 16:45 – Alexander’s motives for invading Persia
• 20:19 – Inside the Persian Empire
• 23:12 – How Alexander won: tactics, technology, engineers
• 28:25 – The journey to Siwa and claim of divinity
• 34:56 – Final defeat of Persia and the challenges of rule
• 38:28 – Alexander’s approach to governance
• 40:44 – Alexander’s unrealized plans
• 42:56 – Theories (debunked) about Alexander’s death
• 46:41 – Alexander’s personal life and relationships
• 48:42 – Collapse of the empire after his death
• 50:58 – Assessing Alexander’s real legacy
• 53:07 – Alexander as cultural phenomenon across centuries

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Tone and Style

Richardson’s contribution is scholarly yet vivid, often wry and colorful in his language. He is intent on demythologizing Alexander, emphasizing the uncertainty, chaos, and human cost alongside the grandeur and legend. The host’s questions are direct and clear, aiming to make complex historical insights accessible.

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Summary Statement

This episode offers a rich, nuanced portrait of Alexander the Great. It challenges the hero-worship that surrounds him and suggests that while his conquests created unprecedented chaos and violence, the connections and cultural exchange triggered by his wars had lasting, world-changing effects—effects that played out not through his own design, but through the “ripples” left by his life and death. The conversation concludes by explaining why Alexander’s ambiguous, flawed story remains so potent and adaptable across differing cultures and ages.

Transcript

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[Rob Attar]

Stretching from Greece to India, Alexander the Great's empire was one of the largest in human history. And he'd conquered it all by the time he was 30 years old. So how did this young king of a small Greek kingdom defeat the mighty Persian empire and become a godlike figure in the process? Alexander's astonishing journey is explored by Edmund Richardson in a new biography. And in this History Extra podcast episode, Edmund is joined by Rob Attar to explore Alexander's remarkable life and mysterious death.

[Interviewer]

Alexander is one of the most famous people in all of world history. How did you want to reshape our image of him with your new biography?

[Edmund Richardson]

Honestly, just the thought of writing about this guy, like, why would you want to write about this guy after so many people had done so many thousand books about him? It seemed like such a fool's errand. And when I first thought about it, I was like, this is the worst idea I've ever had. I can't do a book about this guy, anything but this guy. But what I found over the course of several years chasing after him was that so many of the things we've assumed about Alexander, so many of the parts of his story that seemed fixed and certain, actually anything but. And also so many of the parts of his story which seemed perpetually mysterious, so many of the questions which for a long time seemed absolutely impossible to even try to answer. New discoveries and new technology and new approaches are starting to open up ways to address them. So in many ways I wanted to write about him because there was suddenly a chance to tell a very different kind of story about someone who has, as you said, been one of the most written about people in human history.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. And as you alluded to in that answer in the book, you quite often talk about actually very recently discovered sources that can really add to or change our understanding of him. Or I wonder if there might be one or two of those that you could point to as being particularly significant in the writing of this book.

[Edmund Richardson]

So one of the things that has been very constant in people writing about Alexander all the way back to the first generation of historians, the people who followed him on campaign is that when they were writing about Persia, the Persian Empire, the world of the great kings which Alexander conquered, they were very much writing about it as outsiders, as people who really didn't understand the language, couldn't read the letters, didn't know how the history worked, didn't know how the bureaucracy worked. So in many ways we've understood or tried to understand the world that Alexander conquered through the eyes of people who really did not know more than a couple of very basic things about it. And one of the exciting things about some of the most recent discoveries in archaeology and paparology is that we started to see the world of the Persians on its own terms and to hear the voices of great kings, of provincial officials, of petulant children, of people trying to, you know, dispel fever demons and to understand the world that Alexander inhabited far, far more vividly. Now that sounds incredibly generalist, so I just want to give you one example. Just recently, a team at Oxford and also the brilliant John M.A. columbia published the letters of a Persian provincial governor called Arsama for the first time. Now these are incredibly sort of strange looking Aramaic letters and they show this glittering world of the great kings of Persia, all gold and vastness and wonder, which the Greeks wrote about. They show it as exhausted, overwhelmed bureaucrats who just want the demands to stop. Asama, as the governor of Egypt in a time of peace, he had it really good, as provincial governors in Persia go. But everything always seemed to be going wrong. Someone was getting looted. There was an angry letter from Babylon saying where's the money? He had to adjudicate disputes. A bunch of his goons got kidnapped, someone was robbed by his slaves. So this guy who's meant to be running this glittering part of the great king's world just always sounds like he is exasperated, he's overwhelmed. He writes as if he's surrounded by idiots. He keeps on saying, you're going to be punished for this. I am going to find you and I am going to punish you. He absolutely writes like someone who hates his job. And it was that kind of immediacy that I was going for in the book, this sense of voices that we really hadn't heard before and people we hadn't had a chance to meet as fully rounded people. In a lot of the ancient historians, we learn little about the world that Alexander passed through other than the names of the cities he destroyed and the battles he won. And I wanted to make that world come to life in as much as was possible to do okay and to

[Interviewer]

come to the life of Alexander himself then. He was born in Macedon, the son of the king. What can you tell us about his parents and the kingdom that his father ruled?

[Edmund Richardson]

His parents, Philip II of Macedon and Olympias are two incredible people. And each of them in their own way shaped Alexander and shaped his world. Philip kind of tricked his way onto the throne. He wasn't really in the line of succession, but he kind of hoodwinked and bamboozled and muscled his way into power. And the rest of Greece thought of Macedon as, you know, this northern hilly kingdom that was semi civilized at best. The great Athenian orator Demosthenes famously said of Philip, he's not a Greek, he's nothing like a Greek. He's not even a decent barbarian. He's from Macedon. You can't even buy a decent slave from Macedon. And Philip really liked it when people underestimated him. And during Alexander's childhood he gradually extended his power and Macedon's power from the northern hills down through Greece and gradually bent the Greeks to his will. And as he did, he built the army that Alexander would unleash on Persia. It was by a long way the most ruthless and professional and well disciplined army in the world at that time. And it absolutely tore through everything that Greece sent against it. Alexander's mother was from the hill tribes. She was said in the ancient historians to be a great admirer of the snake worshipping cult of Dionysus. And there are stories of her coming into banquets draped in giant snakes. Obviously a lot of this is factually dubious, but it's certainly the case that Olympias was someone who understood power and who understood the ways to build power and find power for herself, even in a world which seemed set up to deny that to her.

[Interviewer]

And one of the most famous things we know about Alexander's childhood is the fact that he was educated by the great Aristotle. How far do you think that relationship shaped the man that Alexander would go on to become?

[Edmund Richardson]

Alexander was indeed educated by Aristotle. He had a very strange selection of tutors. His first one was sort of a sort of no nonsense, grumpy guy called Leonidas who just believed in long walks and cold meals and self denial. Aristotle when he arrived, was very much a different sort of person. He was incredibly vain, he was incredibly pleased with himself and he was by a long way the most brilliant intellectual in Greece at the time. He taught Alexander and a number of Alexander's companions, his contemporaries for several years. And there's every reason to believe that at least some of Aristotle's teaching shaped Alexander and the people around him profoundly. Alexander was famously obsessed with Homer, and Aristotle is said to have given Alexander an annotated copy of the Iliad, which he took with him on campaign. There are records, though the letters themselves are lost, of whole books of letters between Aristotle and many members of Alexander's court, including his sometime friend, sometime lover, always constant companion, Hephaistian. So Aristotle changed Alexander. And Aristotle seems to have been someone who really shaped the way he saw the world in many profound ways. The irony is that he was only there in Macedon because Philip ii, Alexander's father, had blackmailed him into taking the job. Philip actually destroyed Aristotle's home city and then said to Aristotle, well, if you'd like me to rebuild your city, and if you'd like your relatives and your family to be freed from slavery, then why don't you come teach my boy for a few years and then we'll see what we think about that. So Aristotle is essentially blackmailed into taking the job. But it does seem that there was a genuine connection between him and Alexander.

[Interviewer]

And then not that long later, I think in 336 BC, Philip himself is assassinated. And I believe there remains some mystery behind what happened there. What's your take on his death?

[Edmund Richardson]

Philip was indeed assassinated, and was assassinated in very puzzling style. He was killed in the middle of his wedding because Macedonian kings were very cheerfully polygamous. Philip had multiple wives and multiple children. He was assassinated by one of his bodyguards in public in the middle of the old theater. And it was a sort of wildly theatrical spectacle. One of the actors who was due to perform that day was later asked, well, what was the most incredible bit of stagecraft you ever saw? And was it something by Aeschylus? Was it Euripides? And he said, no, no, no, no. Nothing compared to Philip's murder. And Philip's assassin was a young man. As I said, one of his bodyguards never said why he did it. He was killed before he could get away. And within hours, Alexander was on the throne. Because while there were multiple claimants to Macedon's throne and Alexander had never been formally named Philip's heir, Alexander was in the same theatre. Alexander was indeed a few paces behind Philip when he was assassinated. So he was able to move far faster than anyone else, secure the king's body, which was incredibly important in Macedonian custom, and then get himself onto the throne. So why it happened has been a mystery, really, and one which ancient historians have sort of stoked rather than dispelled. There were Rumors, of course, like there were always rumors. One historian said that it was because of an affair had gone wrong. Another one said that it was because of a punishment taken too far. There were of course rumors that Alexander himself or his mother Olympias might have been behind Philip's assassination. And it's been argued about vehemently ever since. I think it's probably unlikely that Alexander himself had much or anything to do with the assassination. He may possibly have whispered in some ears. He may certainly have known that if Philip stayed on his throne for decades, then it would be highly likely that Alexander would not be his heir because his new wife would have children and they would take Alexander's place. But what happened we can understand why it happened is far more of a mystery, I'm afraid.

[Interviewer]

But as you say, regardless of the cause of Philip's death, the result is Alexander takes the throne and pretty quickly he's tearing into the Persian empire. Why does he decide to take on such a mighty adversary at this point?

[Edmund Richardson]

He needs the money. He's broke. He opens the treasury after Philip's death and he realizes that he's got maybe 30 days pay for the army, barely that. One of his first acts as king is to abolish all direct taxes in Macedon, so he has no way to raise revenue there after that. His options are wait for the army to realize they're not going to be paid and then put someone else on the throne. Or try to find the money as best he can. And so he turns the Macedonian state into a predator. It has to keep consuming others to survive. And he attacks Persia not because he's confident he'll succeed, but because he knows that if he doesn't, he really has no options left.

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[Interviewer]

Now earlier on you talked about the fact that in your book you've done a lot of research about the Persian perspective on this period. So what can you tell us about the nature of the Persian Empire and the power of the Persian Empire at the time that it's up against Alexander?

[Edmund Richardson]

So this is the world's superpower. By any and all measures, Persia is vast. When most Greek city states had barely a few thousand citizens, Persia has a population of tens of millions. It has a massive storehouse of wealth, hundreds upon hundreds of tons of gold in the treasuries of many of the great cities. But more than that, it has just a remarkable ability to shape the world and shape what it's meant to be human. The Persian Empire stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the plains of India. It's divided up into provinces which tend to take relatively predictable forms. Egypt, for instance, is one. Modern Afghanistan is divided into a few. It's ruled essentially in an incredibly centralized way. So provincial governors handle day to day work. For instance, that overworked governor of Egypt I mentioned a little earlier. And then it's ruled in absolute fashion by the great king. Now the great kings of Persia did not start out as world beating emperors. They started out as small time nomad princes and then Cyrus, Cyrus the Great, as he's often called, built Persian power into a level and a scale like nothing else on earth. Persia has resources that are beyond the dreams of most Greeks, both in terms of population and in terms of wealth, but also in terms of knowledge. It controls the temple libraries of Egypt. You could almost say some of the first scientists, the astronomer priests of Babylon who can predict eclipses of the moon from 10 years into the future. They control a level of knowledge and a level of history and a level of wealth, which is simply on a different level to anything in the west at the time. And when Alexander is attacking Persia, he's not just trying to get a whole heap of gold and make a run for it. He's taking on a vast and ancient civilization which had been telling its stories for thousands of years before Alexander was even born.

[Interviewer]

So considering the scale of the adversary that Alexander's facing, how is it that he's able to win battle after battle? I mean, I believe he never lost a battle. How could he, with his smaller army, continually keep defeating the Persians?

[Edmund Richardson]

This is the mystery that people are puzzled about. How on earth did he do it? The answer, as with all of these things, doesn't come down to just one thing. Partly he's very lucky, and this is a thing that every general needs. He almost dies of several times. He has to learn very quickly how to face the Persian armies. The first time he does, at the Granicus, it's borderline disastrous. He charges straight into a prepared position. He is almost killed several times, and he's utterly, utterly shaken. He's so shaken by how close he came to death that he massacres thousands of Greek mercenaries who'd been fighting on the Persian side at the end of the battle. But he's extremely adaptable, and he has an eye for a terrain and an opposing army like almost no one else in human history. So he's able to figure out tactics, different on each occasion, which nullify the vast numbers of the Persian forces. For instance, at his first battle against Darius III, the great king of Persia at Issus in November 333, he sort of baits Darius into facing him on a narrow coastal plain. And because Darius has got the sea on one side and the mountains on the other, his vast army can't really spread out. So he's kind of bunched up on the plain, whereas Alexander can sort of fight on his own terms, but he's also got a truly remarkable army. Trained the course of many years by Philip ii, bloodied in campaigns in Greece. And now, unleashed in Persia, he's got two units in particular which people talk about as being incredibly difficult for the Persians to counter. The first is his cavalry, the Companions, who Alexander leads personally in battle and who he sort of uses to kind of break open Persian formations. He will look at the Persian lines, looking for a gap, and will charge straight at that with the Companions and will sort of split opposing armies in two. The second thing that he has, which the Persians find very, very difficult to counter, is the Macedonian phalanx. Now, this is a sort of solid. These are solid blocks of infantry armed with gigantic sort of spears which charge towards you, screaming this eerie war cry, looking all the world like this incredibly angry porcupine. And these spears that they have project far, far, far beyond the front lines of the phalanx, which makes it almost impossible for opposing armies to come to grips with them. If the phalanx is handled correctly, by the time the opposing soldiers actually get to the front line of the phalanx, they are very much already dead. So those are the two things that help him win battles. But what helps him win the war is a little bit more complicated. Firstly, he doesn't run out of food. He thinks really carefully about making sure his army doesn't starve. And that is not to be underestimated in the ancient world, because once you're a few hundred miles from home, you generally can't resupply an army particularly well. Alexander goes thousands of miles from home for many years, and only at one moment, towards the end of the campaign, does his army significantly run out of food and water and resources. But possibly his final secret weapon is his technology. He has a group of remarkable and remarkably obsessed military engineers with him, most notably someone called Diades Apella. And Diades has been learning his craft for years in the army of Philippines ii. And it's dietes and the engineers who allow Alexander to win a few otherwise unwinnable battles which could not have been achieved through brute force alone. He captures cities which no army has been able to capture before. He changes landscapes in ways that are incredibly advantageous for him, and he deploys kind of experimental technology on a grand scale in order to sort of win this campaign.

[Interviewer]

Now, during his extensive Persian campaign, there's this really fascinating moment where he takes this detour through the Egyptian desert to visit the shrine of Amun. Why does he do this? And why does this become such an important moment in his life story?

[Edmund Richardson]

It's a wonderful way in to. Alexander keeps on doing things that don't make sense. He keeps on doing things which by any reasonable measure he shouldn't do or which should be disastrous. And as you say, one of the most famous ones is his decision just at one of the most delicate points of his campaign, when he has just secured Egypt. But when Darius III is very much still in power and could show up at any time with another army, he leaves most of his forces behind and he takes a small number of men, a few hundred, and he sets out into the western desert of Egypt to the shrine of the Egyptian sky God Amun. And this journey makes no sense because there's no garrison at Amun's shrine in Siwa, there's no Persian military force, there's nothing that needs to be captured, there's no vast hoard of treasure. And of course, once you're over the horizon from your army in the ancient world, you are definitively out of time. If the troops had decided to revolt, if they decided to just say, all right, we've had enough of this, let's go home. If they'd had to face Darius, Alexander would not know a thing about him until it was too late. But he sets out into the desert and pretty soon he's lost. The guides have lost the way as sandstorms have covered the tracks and they have to navigate by the stars and pretty soon their water bottles are empty and they're starting to wonder if they're going to die here to no purpose in the desert. They see birds circling overhead far in the distance and they realize that this is the oasis of Siwa, the shrine of Amun. Now Amun of course is an Egyptian God, but he's a well traveled one as well. He was worshipped throughout the ancient Mediterranean. And we have records before Alexander of many Greek generals and politicians sending messengers, were sending envoys to the shrine of Amun to ask this God's advice because Siwa is a very strange and special place. It's like a rip in reality for both Greeks and Egyptians. It's one of the few places where it was possible to speak almost directly to the gods, to ask them questions and for them to actually reply. Alexander arrives needing help. He wants to keep going. He wants to lead his army into the Persian heartland in Mesopotamia and fight Darius III again. His army don't want to do that. They are now richer because they've defeated Darius once and plundered many of his coastal cities. They are now richer than any Europeans in history. They have more money that they'll be able to stand in many lifetimes. They want to go home they want to spend their money, they want to see their families, they want to declare victory. And declaring victory at this point makes sense. There's no reason to think that Alexander would have intended to seize the whole Persian empire when he first crossed into Asia. But he wants more. But he knows that to get his men to follow him into the Persian heartland, to face forces beyond their imagination, he needs the gods on his side. He doesn't just need a cheery speech and a slap on the back, he needs divine purpose. So that's what he's looking for in Siwa. He's looking for the support of the gods and he's looking to find a way to lead his army onwards. But what happens in Siwa is something that even Alexander does not expect. Now, the shrine of Amun. We've actually been able to excavate this. It's thanks to some really great archaeological work. We know quite a bit about it. It's perched on a rocky outcropping at a little distance from the settlement. And it looks just a sort of squat and sort of unassuming building, but it's kind of more to it than meets the eye. It's arranged essentially, is a series of courtyards, the first open courtyard, followed by a second, followed by a third, followed by the shrine itself. And obviously the further you go, the more restricted the area gets, the more sacred the space becomes. The shrine itself is this windowless, low ceiling space at the heart of the temple. It's low ceiling, by the way, because there were hidden spaces in the roofs where the worldly priests could crawl up and watch because they did not believe in leaving the word of God to chance. But Alexander leads a few men, a few of his closest companions, up to the shrine of Amun. And that's where it goes. Strange, because the priests, the high priest of Amun has been coached and he's been told to greet Alexander with a couple of words of Greek, which is the standard sort of greeting for any important person seeking answers in a Greek oracular shrine. O Paidion, O my son. But the priest stumbles over his words and instead of, he says, O Pa, O Son of God. And that is what Alexander hears. And it's like a sort of shiver runs through the world because this seems to be confirmation not just to Alexander's men, but to Alexander himself, that he is in fact more than human, that there's something divine, something superhuman about him. And he'd sort of danced around this idea before, but hearing it straight from the mouth of the priest, from one of the most sacred and trustworthy shrines of antiquity absolutely sends him reeling. He's struggling to process what's happened. His men are kind of incredulous. He just follows the priest into the shrine. And after that everything's different. Because after that, many of the Greeks think that Amun has claimed Alexander as his son. And Alexander himself starts to wonder if perhaps he is more than human.

[Interviewer]

So as you alluded to when we were talking about his visit to the shrine in Egypt, at this point he hadn't yet defeated the Persian Empire completely. How does he ultimately come to conquer their entire empire?

[Edmund Richardson]

Oh, it's a mess. It's an absolute mess. He wins a second set piece battle against Darius III at Gagamelo in Mesopotamia. And it is a truly remarkable victory. Darius throws absolutely everything he can at Alexander. He spends months preparing the site of the battle. He drills his army, he brings in every kind of new superweapon he can think of to defeat the Macedonians, but nevertheless he still loses. But that's not the end of the story. Because while Alexander tries to capture Darius both times they face each other in battle, each time Darius gets away and that allows him to flee further east and to try to rebuild his power. But after Gaugamela, he's really more of a refugee than a king, running from one city to another, summoning armies which simply do not come calling on power which has long since deserted him. Alexander hunts him down over the course of several bloody campaigns and gradually catches up with him in the Far east of the Persian Empire. He finds that when he catches Darius, he's caught not a king, but a prisoner. Darius is bound in chains and has been assassinated by his former courtiers. Before Alexander is able to catch up with him, a few of Darius ambitious nobles decided to essentially hold him prisoner. And then when they realized that Alexander was almost drawing level with them to stab Darius to death and run for it themselves. So that should be the end of the story, right? But again, it isn't. Because there's another Persian noble who sets himself up as a great king and tries to build an alternative empire in the Far East. And then when Alexander gets him, there's another rebel, and then when he gets him, there's another and another and another, sort of several years of just grinding campaigning against ever smaller armies and ever more elusive enemies, where instead of facing the massed ranks of the great king's armies, you're essentially hunting ghosts in the mountains of Afghanistan. And the question of how much Alexander actually controls much of the Persian Empire, much of this territory is really an open one, because while he defeats a lot of the rebellions that spring up, as soon as his army is over the horizon, more start forming and the Persian imperial bureaucracy really just starts to break down in many places. So a lot of these provinces, a lot of this land, is more theoretical empire than actual empire.

[Interviewer]

But even despite that, are there ways that Alexander attempts to impose his rule on the areas that he's conquered? Does he try and change things up from how the Persians were governing the empire?

[Edmund Richardson]

Much less than you would think. He's not terribly interested in the mechanics of government and the mechanics of rule. What we found with a lot of rather brilliant archaeological discoveries of the last few years is that a lot of the old Persian imperial bureaucracy just goes on as normal. The same guys do the same jobs. They figure out fig rations, they figure out resupplying couriers, they figure out reinforcing garrisons, and they do it writing with the same kind of crabbed Aramaic hand as they always did. We also see in certain parts of the empire that Alexander's rule touches things very lightly. In Egypt, he barely sort of stirs the waters of the Nile. The old priests and administrators simply go on doing their jobs as they had before. In India, he fights an incredibly bloody and difficult campaign against one local ruler, Porus, only to put him straight back on his throne at the end of the battle. So the question of how Alexander transforms the world is a really good one. But the strange thing is that politically and administratively, he doesn't do that much. Possibly he's planning to do something, possibly he's planning to reorganize the empire. But he doesn't impose one political system on it apart from his own rule. Instead, we see a sort of patchwork of political systems, all of which are running simultaneously across the empire. So sort of grumpy, disaffected democrats in Greece, priests in Egypt, local hereditary rulers in Asia Minor, bureaucrats in Babylon, local kings in northern India. And so we see really that what Alexander does is he's incredibly good at taking over territory. But once he's done that, he doesn't really have a grand plan for what to do with it.

[Interviewer]

Now, Alexander died in 323 BC when still in his early 30s. Do we have a sense of what he would have intended to do had his life not been cut short?

[Edmund Richardson]

We've got a whole series of plans. Some are more plausible than others, but many, I think, have a bit of truth to them. It's likely that he would have struck south and then west so south around Arabia, because we know that there was a whole new fleet being built ready to take the army south around the Arabian peninsula and then north up the Arabian coast to the Red Sea ports of Egypt. One of his generals, one of his most trusted commanders, Craterus, had been sent west to Macedon ultimately. But along the way his instructions were to build a series of dockyards and a series of giant ships on the Mediterranean coast. And we think that the army that circumnavigated Arabia would probably land in Egypt, march to the Mediterranean coast and then embark and sail west. Carthage is one possible target. Southern Italy is another possible target. We know that Alexander was training new armies. It's an army built essentially of young Afghans trained up to form a Macedonian phalanx armed with phalanx weapons, which we think Alexander was planning to take with him on this future expedition. And of course, the possibilities of what might have happened if this expedition had gone ahead. Historians have obsessed over for centuries. Roman historians spent so much time wondering about what would have happened if Alexander had hit southern Italy with his new armies and with a great king's resources, what would have happened in a war between Alexander and Rome. But of course, all of these plans do not ultimately come to fruition because Alexander dies very suddenly in Babylon at the age of 32.

[Interviewer]

And yes, coming onto his death a bit like his father, there is quite a lot of mystery and debate about exactly what the cause of Alec's death was. And I certainly heard some people say perhaps he was murdered, perhaps it was fever. Where do you come down on that debate?

[Edmund Richardson]

The stories are brilliant and each one more implausible than the last. Possibly he drank himself to death, possibly he got some kind of illness, possibly malaria, possibly some other kind of sickness, or possibly he was poisoned. And the stories about his poisoning are many and varied and are often told after his death by his successors in order to pull down the reputations of many of their rivals or in order to attack people whose power that they were hoping to take. And so there are stories of a lead lined vessel born secretly from Macedon with a poison that would destroy anything. All of it's bunkum, I'm afraid. The ancient world has many poisons, of course, and one of them could plausibly have been administered to Alexander, but it has no poisons which work in the way that Alexander's last illness took shape. So a very slow acting thing which would have gradually killed him over the course of two weeks. Those ones simply don't exist. It's almost certain that he died of typhoid. And he died of typhoid because of contamination in Babylon's water supply. Babylon had an incredibly obsessive water supply. The Code of Hammurabi. The first law codes of Babylon set out incredibly detailed rules about drinking water and keeping the water clean. But when Alexander arrives in Babylon for the last time, because of the route his army takes when they approach the city, almost the entire army camps upstream from the city, close to the banks of the Euphrates. Unfortunately, that means that tens of thousands of men are basically drinking, washing, urinating, et cetera, into the river over the course of several weeks and months. Not just men, donkeys, horses, elephants, everything. Now, that's okay when Alexander's army arrive, because the Euphrates is flowing quickly. When it starts to slow down, when the flow and the water level starts to drop. We ran for the book a sort of computer modeling of what would have happened. And what would have happened was that the water in Babylon would have, very quickly, over the course of a couple weeks, got incredibly toxic, like terrifyingly toxic, full of salmonella, full of E. Coli, and particularly full of typhoid bacteria. Alexander seems to have caught the disease at some point in May, and it essentially would have been dormant in his body, multiplying for a couple of weeks. And then there's a drinking party where the symptoms start to overtake him. He drinks too much, he falls into a kind of stupor, and he spends the next 10 days or so sort of trying to recover and trying to control the symptoms of the fever. But it gradually overtakes him because, of course, ancient medicine had nothing that could sort of effectively treat an infection of typhoid. And it gradually paralyzes Alexander and it gradually kills him.

[Interviewer]

One thing we haven't talked about that much so far is Alexander's personal life, his family, his children. Could you tell us a little bit about that side of him?

[Edmund Richardson]

Like his father, Philip ii, Alexander is cheerfully polygamous. He has one of the most complicated and elaborate collections of sexual partners in history. From the women we know, he married so Roxanne, an aristocrat from the East, Statira, the daughter of the former king Darius III to a woman called Basine, who Alexander actually knew from his childhood because she was in exile at the Macedonian court while he was growing up and whom he seems to have been exceedingly smitten with. Alexander had two children who survived him, though we think at least one of the women was also pregnant at the time of his death. And Tyra was probably heavily pregnant, but was murdered soon After Alexander's death, with Barcino, he had a son called Heracles. And with Roxane, he had a son called Alexander, Alexander iv. Now, that's not the end of Alexander's relationships, of course. There was his, really the closest relationship of his life with his childhood friend Hephaistein. Alexander and Hephaestion were friends, were companions, were sometimes lovers. And Hephaestion's death, just a few months before Alexander's own, absolutely broke him. It was grief that he just simply never recovered from. So in many ways, it's a complicated family and it resembles, in many ways, a traditional Macedonian royal house because there are multiple children, multiple families, multiple power bases, everyone kind of looking over their shoulders and everyone trying to get Alexander's attention.

[Interviewer]

But unlike with Philip after his death, where Alexander took over and enhanced the empire, after Alexander's death, things begin to fall apart. Why is it that his heirs weren't able to consolidate his power?

[Edmund Richardson]

Alexander made no plan to die so young, which seems absurd because he'd come so close to death so many times. He'd been stabbed, shot, walloped with rocks, knocked unconscious, had a lung collapse. He'd come close to death an absurd amount of times. But he makes no plan. He names no heir. And because of this, really, almost immediately after his death, his generals, his commanders, start to try to claim power for themselves. Ambitious provincial governors try to set up little empires of their own. And no one who actually takes the throne or even acts as Alexander's regent has the power to hold it all together. Two kings are named after Alexander's death. His infant child with Roxane, Alexander IV and Alexander's half brother, Arridaeus, who showed very, very little interest in politics or in governing at all. This is a deliberately weak setup. Both of those kings are meant to be figureheads, are meant to allow Alexander's generals, his closest friends, the people who'd served with him, to claim power for themselves. Unfortunately, any attempt to hold the whole empire together falls apart within a couple of years. It falls apart, in fact, over a battle over Alexander's own body. The plan is to bury him in Macedon, but Alexander's hearse and the body are hijacked midway along the route by Ptolemy, one of Alexander's cluttered friends and then governor of Egypt. Ptolemy steals the body, takes it to Egypt, sets himself up as Pharaoh in his own right, and then destroys the royal army that is sent from Babylon against him, and indeed schemes to have Alexander's regent, or rather the regent of Alexander's empire, murdered in Particularly brutal fashion. After that, the empire fragmented. It's everyone for themselves.

[Interviewer]

In the book you write that Alexander had hoped to remake the world, but instead he left it in ruins. I wonder if you could elaborate what you mean by that.

[Edmund Richardson]

Alexander's expedition really did transform the world in ways that are still around us today. From the words on a page to the way we see the stars overhead. Few people shaped reality more profoundly than he did. But almost all of that transformation happened in the ripples that his life and his death set in motion his actual life. His actual campaign had very, very little other than destruction to show for it. He wanted, he said, to liberate the Greeks from Persian rule. He killed and enslaved more Greeks than anyone else in history. He wanted apparently to hold power in Persia, but he barely knew a few words of the language of that. Even close to his death, he didn't understand the culture that he was ruling. He built cities, yes, Alexandrias, scattered across the known world. But during his lifetime, few if any of them rose above the rank of bleak garrison towns, nothing like the glittering cities that they would later become. He destroyed a huge number of cities from Greece to Asia Minor to Indian. He left one settlement after another in ruins. Probably around 1% of the world's population died as a direct result of his campaign. Now his life and his death would set off a remarkable era of cultural contact, transformation, and of the world becoming closer and more connected and knowledge spreading faster than any time before in history. But it wasn't Alexander doing that. Alexander, if he had a plan to remake the world, died long before he could set it in motion.

[Interviewer]

Something else that's really interesting you talk about in your book is the way that his story and his life have been co opted by so many different cultures around the world and across the centuries. Considering, you know, his life was one of so much brutality, so much killing, why has he been adopted by all these different people? Why have so many people been so fascinated and mythologized him?

[Edmund Richardson]

Alexander is a story with so many open questions, so many blank spaces, but it's also a story that has incredible resonance. Versions of his story have been told across the known world, the Greeks and then across the wider world today. He's become everything from a romantic hero to a culture villain, to, you know, a Christian saint to Jewish holy man, Islamic quasi prophetic figure. And he's become all of those things because people have needed that story, people have needed to make Alexander's story their own. Alexander seems to tell us something about why the world is the way it is and about the possibilities that we have as human beings both to do good and to do harm. And he seems to offer us a way to tell a story about the limits of what it means to be human. He's someone who goes further than Greeks imagined it was possible to go, does things that were meant to be beyond even the gods. And so for many people, he challenges us to think about what it means to be human, about what the limits of humanity are, what they should be. But he also, of course, dies and gets sick and gets injured and falters and fails and weeps and gets things horribly wrong. And it's that side of him, not the Superman, the person who we see in all the ancient sources just trying desperately to figure out what to do next, trying to figure out how to survive, trying to figure out how to repair a catastrophic mistake that in many ways, I think, connect people to Alexander. Because it's not a story of what it means to be superhuman. It's a story of what it means to be all too human.

[Rob Attar]

That was Edmund Richards, professor of Classics at Durham University and the author of God King man, published by Bloomsbury. He was speaking to Rob Attar. And if you'd like to hear more from Edmund, why not check out a previous episode where he described the hunt for one of Alexander the Great's lost cities. You can find a link to that in the description of this episode. This Father's Day when you ship UPS Air at the UPS store, your items arrive on time or your money back guaranteed at no extra cost. It's like the father of all shipping services. It shows up to the airport way too early just to play it safe. It's overprotective about all the things that truly matter. And it's always prom, especially to be with family. Make it your first choice to celebrate your dad. Ship UPS Air with our money back guarantee exclusively at the UPS Store US retail locations. Visit the upsstore.com airshipping for full details. Terms and conditions apply. Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about our Associate Degree in Nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington Edu Events. For information on program outcomes, visit carrington. Edu Sci have no Fear. Chosen Foods is here to defend your favorite foods from the forces of seedy oils and sketchy ingredients with cooking oils, salad dressings and mayo, all powered by the good fats from 100% pure avocado oil and simple, delicious ingredients.

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