Alexander the Great with Dr. Patrick Wyman

Summary

Podcast Summary: "This Guy Sucked" - Episode on Alexander the Great with Dr. Patrick Wyman

Introduction

In this episode of "This Guy Sucked," host Dr. Claire Aubin delves into the life and legacy of Alexander the Great with guest Dr. Patrick Wyman. Contrary to popular admiration, they argue that Alexander deserves criticism for his ruthless conquests and the lasting negative impacts of his actions. The discussion challenges the glorified image of Alexander, presenting a more nuanced and critical perspective.

Background: Alexander the Great’s Rise

Alexander III of Macedon, commonly known as Alexander the Great, lived from 356 BCE to 323 BCE, dying at the young age of 32. Despite his brief lifespan, Alexander's military campaigns reshaped the ancient world, leading to the establishment of the Hellenistic Era. Dr. Wyman emphasizes, “Alexander is one of the most consequential historical figures of all time,” noting his unparalleled conquests from Greece to the Indus Valley (07:01).

Alexander’s War Addiction

A central theme of the episode is Alexander's insatiable desire for warfare. Dr. Wyman draws parallels between Alexander and modern depictions of war addicts, likening him to the protagonist in The Hurt Locker. He states, “Alexander is first and foremost a war junkie. He loves fighting, he loves getting stuck in” (12:13). This addiction drove him to continuously seek larger battles, often disregarding the immense loss of life his campaigns caused.

Consequences of Alexander’s Conquests

The duo discusses the devastating human cost of Alexander’s expansion. They estimate that Alexander’s campaigns resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not over a million people, particularly in regions like Central Asia and South Asia (25:20). Dr. Wyman highlights the systematic plunder and slaughter, such as the massacre at Thebes in 335 BCE, where 6,000 people were killed and 30,000 enslaved to fund further military endeavors (39:19).

Critique of Popular Historiography

A significant portion of the conversation critiques the hagiographic portrayal of Alexander in historical sources. Dr. Aubin points out that ancient historians like Arrian and Plutarch romantize Alexander, often ignoring his brutality (51:03). Dr. Wyman adds, “These sources are written by people who benefited from Alexander's conquests, ensuring a biased and glorified narrative” (51:10). This biased historiography has perpetuated a sanitized and heroic image of Alexander, overshadowing his more destructive actions.

Legacy: Inspiring Future Conquerors

Alexander’s influence extended beyond his lifetime, inspiring future military leaders to emulate his conquests. Dr. Wyman discusses how figures like Pyrrhus of Epirus and later Hellenistic kings modeled their aggressive expansions after Alexander, perpetuating cycles of violence and imperial ambition (54:04). This legacy, according to Dr. Aubin, contributes to the ongoing romanticization of Alexander as a "great man," ignoring the systemic forces and sheer brutality behind his reign (55:50).

Systemic Forces and the Macedonian Military Machine

The episode underscores that Alexander was a product of his environment, trained from a young age in a militaristic culture. Dr. Wyman emphasizes, “The Macedonian aristocracy is basically a bunch of hard-drinking, hard-fighting bros” (20:49). Alexander’s capabilities were not solely his own but were enabled by the robust military infrastructure established by his father, Philip II. This systemic support facilitated his extensive and destructive campaigns.

Conclusion: Reassessing Alexander the Great

Dr. Claire Aubin and Dr. Patrick Wyman conclude that Alexander the Great, often hailed as a military genius and cultural icon, should be critically reassessed for his role in widespread violence and imperial excesses. They argue that recognizing his flaws provides a more balanced understanding of his impact on history and cautions against the uncritical glorification of historical figures.

Notable Quotes

• Dr. Patrick Wyman [07:01]: “Without him, I think it is extremely hard to imagine any Greek or Macedonian king conquering that much of Asia... someone who fundamentally remade the world that he found. But he sucked.”

• Dr. Patrick Wyman [12:13]: “Alexander is first and foremost a war junkie. He loves fighting, he loves getting stuck in. He wants to be there at the point where the sword meets the shield.”

• Dr. Claire Aubin [29:09]: “This is their reasoning. When you look at Alexander, that is not there. There is no sense that like, well if we don't go into Central Asia... It’s purely in service of his own desires.”

• Dr. Patrick Wyman [51:10]: “A lot of these sources were written by people who had benefited from Alexander's conquest. So Ptolemy, who writes this history... he is not going to lend a critical gloss to anything Alexander did because it undermines his own position.”

• Dr. Patrick Wyman [54:04]: “He inspired generations of future [conquerors] to be just as bad as he was. And that to me is the ultimate why this guy sucked.”

Final Thoughts

"This Guy Sucked" presents a provocative examination of Alexander the Great, challenging listeners to rethink the glorified narratives often associated with him. By highlighting his destructive tendencies and the biased historical accounts that have shaped his legacy, the episode encourages a more critical and comprehensive understanding of one of history's most renowned figures.

Transcript

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

A list of sensitive themes and topics covered in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked. The the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly for the purposes of this show, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Dr. Patrick Wyman, who is of course also a historian, writer, and podcaster. He's got a book called the reformation renaissance in 40 years that shook the World, a wonderful substack called Perspectives, and an incredible history podcast that is significantly more famous and successful than this one called Tides of History. Welcome to the show, Patrick.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Thank you so much for having me for that lovely introduction.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I try my best. We just for people listening at home, we were supposed to start recording this 35 minutes ago, but we just ended up talking for so long.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

It's really important when two podcasters get together that you have to do the pre podcast before the actual podcast. This is the workflow to get us into the space where we can do.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

The actual work 100%. And especially because I have a different guest on every week. Like sometimes it'll be someone I've never ever spoken to in my life and I have to like, at least establish a small amount of rapport going into it before we, like, share how much we hate someone.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

I had one where I was interviewing a Dutch woman who's a scholar of the Hellenistic period, and we were talking about soldiers wages and, and the labor market. And I was really interested in this. I was so stoked. But she was so Dutch and like, yeah, you know, you knew exactly what I meant when I said that, right? And so like, I'm trying to do like two minutes of like pre warmup stuff and she's like, when are we going to start the recording? I tried so hard and I just couldn't do it. So when you get the chance to do the podcast or back and forth beforehand, you. You gotta, you gotta to hop into it. You got to embrace it.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

It's very important. Speaking of some pre patter slash chat, I have a question for you. It's one of my standard questions, but I think it's particularly interesting as Someone else who has a sort of general history podcast. If you could retrain in another field or go not stem or go back, I mean, it could be, I guess, or go back and do a PhD on a different period or subject in history, what would you do?

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Archeology, hands down, no question. I love archeology. I. I probably spend as much time now reading archaeology and talking to archaeologists as I do history. When I was an undergrad, there just wasn't really an archeology program. There was a kind of a tiny little subfield within the classics department, but it was really focused on the Bronze Age. It wasn't into the Bronze Age at that point in time. So I didn't really know that archaeology was like a thing that you could study until I was doing my master's degree in Ireland. And then I had the good fortune of knowing tons of archaeologists and going drinking with archaeologists, which, if you've ever done it, is one of the most fun things that you can do. So I very nearly stayed in Ireland to do a PhD in archaeology. One of the instructors at Nui Galway when I was there, a guy named Kieran o', Connor, was trying to get money to excavate the Battle of the Boyne Battlefield, and he was looking for PhD students to help him with it. And had I not gone back to the States, that's probably what I would have been doing and I would be living in Ireland and hopefully doing excavations and that would have been cool. I am curious as to what that would have been like. I love archaeology. I'm.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I miss Ireland too, but yeah, I mean, I understand. I did my PhD in Edinburgh and Edinburgh has a very robust archeology department and classic department, but they're all housed together at the university in hca. So history, classics and archeology. And yeah, archaeologists are great. Shout out to all my archaeologist friends doing archaeology in Britain and Ireland. Also really cool because they have so much stuff to excavate around them. So the things that they can work on are so exciting. One of my first employers at Edinbrooks, I worked when I was at a PhD student there. I worked in the writing center in the History, Classics and Archeology writing center as like a writing teacher, tutor person was an archaeologist. Louise Blanc. She's amazing. Anybody going to Edinburgh for archeology, you should get her as your supervisor. She rocks. She's also written me a lot of job references since then. So this is my shout out to Louise Blanc. Let's get into what we're here for. The point of the podcast which now we are 40 minutes into us meeting and haven't done. Who do you want to talk to me about today?

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Today we are going to talk about Alexander the Great. The first true great. I mean, actually probably the first true great is Cyrus the Great, but one of the first greats that we have, King of Macedonia, conqueror of about half of Asia, went everywhere from Greece to the Indus Valley of what is now Pakistan. So really got around, did a lot of stuff. A lot of people died during Alexander the Great's conquests. Forged an entire new era, the Hellenistic era, out of the legacy of his conquests, often kind of caricatured as bringing Greek culture to the East. That's not really what the Hellenistic period is, but that's part of it. Alexander is one of the most consequential historical figures of all time. To the extent that there is any validity whatsoever to the idea of great man history, that somebody individually changes the course of the future, Alexander is that guy. Without him, I think it is extremely hard to imagine any Greek or Macedonian king conquering that much of Asia, toppling that many established structures and states and replacing them with the vacuum that eventually gives us the Hellenistic kingdoms. I tried to do it as a thought experiment and did it pretty rigorously I think, trying to imagine, is there someone else who could have done this? What would history have looked like had Alexander, like there's a moment in 334 BC, Alexander is fighting in a battle on the Granicus River. He very nearly dies. A Persian is right behind him, is about to kill him. One of Alexander's bodyguards comes up, chops the guy's arm off. Alexander is saved. But you can imagine that would have been right at the beginning of the conquests. Alexander dies at the Granicus River. He's just one more Greek guy who got into trouble in Asia. And then there's no more of that. There's none of that happens. It's really hard to imagine someone else doing it if we're thinking about it seriously and rigorously. So a guy who changed the course of history, was immensely important, is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, if not more, and someone who fundamentally remade the world that he found. But he sucked.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I was gonna say I couldn't have stated it better myself, but obviously I couldn't have because I'm not an expert on him. So, yeah, probably not. Yeah. Some other things to add just so that people have some context on him and his life. He alive from 356 BCE to 323 BCE so very young. When he dies. 32. Can I do math? No. Did I have to Google that? Yes. But he's, he's. He's only alive for 32 years. So when we talking about the sort of enormous impact he has on the world, it's given a very, very short time in which to do it. He is, like you said, one of the most studied figures in history. There's an enormous number of resources one can find on him, some of which are better than others. I will. He's very much admired by other famous military leaders like Napoleon, Caesar, Patton. One of my guys who I think fucking sucks.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Oh, he did. He sucked so bad I could. I got a whole Patton sucking thing too. But we'll come back to that 100%.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Maybe you can come back and we can do a joint episode on why we hate Patton. Because I hate him and I have different reasons for hating him than you do, probably. So together, collectively, we could really hate him comprehensively. 100%.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

That's our goal with any one of these figures. Hate them comprehensively, absolutely.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And I will say, also admired by military leaders like Napoleon, someone who by the time we finish recording this, like a week from today, an episode on him will come out. I am certain that a Caesar episode is going to happen at some point. If any Roman historians would like to come on the show any more. Roman historians like to come on the show to get back to Alexander the Great. He's this sort of near mythical figure. Like there's this huge amount of mythologizing that happens around him both during and after his lifetime. He's not the first person we've talked about on the show who has this sort of like, mythological narrative around him. But he becomes this sort of symbol of ambition, of conquest, cultural fusion, although even that is a little iffy on some parts of that. But, you know, he becomes a really, really symbolic figure. A lot of people will have heard his name coming into this, but might not know that much about him or about his life. So we want to give you the correct opinion on him.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

The one singular correct Alexander the Great opinion will be promulgated through this show. Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

What absolute. He's born in Pella. Am I saying this right? Yeah. There are going to be a lot of moments where I ask you if I'm saying this right.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

That's okay. And we actually don't necessarily know how the Macedonians pronounced a lot of things. There's a lot of confusion about the Macedonian language. Macedonia is a wild place. So it's just to the north of Greece proper. Some of the Greeks consider the Macedonians to be Greeks. Other Greeks do not consider them to be Greeks. They were Greeks. I mean they were. By any reasonable standard, they were. Their language was probably a Greek dialect. We don't have that many texts that are written in it. Can't be entirely sure what it sounded like, but it's, it's Greek. They're Greek in every way that matters. The distinction though is that they do not live in city states, they don't live in police. The polis is what we think of as kind of the foundation of this Greek world. It's the autonomous city community that is rooted in its place, that has a really fierce sense of identity. And every year the guys from the polis go out and they fight the guys from the next polis over. As one historian put it, small amounts of not very good land. And that's the Greek way. That's how they do it. Macedonia is a little bit different. Macedonia is a kingdom. It is defined by being a kingdom from the very earliest period of time. To be Macedonian is to be a subject of the king. That is the unique thing that Macedonia has going for it. Kind of a weirdly strong sense of identity in a place that is still pretty fractious. Like Macedonian nobles don't get along with each other. The royal families don't get along with each other. There's constant infighting and assassinations. It's just this. When the southern Greeks, the people who are living in the Greek mainland, look north at Macedonia, they think they're basically barbarians because they're surrounded by non Greeks. They're surrounded by Illyrians, Thracians, a number of other barbarian peoples whose names I won't pronounce here because they don't really matter. But there's a whole bunch of these groups. And to the Greeks in the south, Macedonians are almost more like them than they are the polis dwelling Greeks.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Okay, that's good to know. I also did not know this. So he's born, like I said, In 356 BC, so the 4th century BCE in Pella, the capital of Macedonia. His parents and this matters are King Philip II of Macedonia and Queen Olympias. Olympias, a very important and famous thing about him. He's tutored by Aristotle. He is who instills in him a love of learning, of symbol science, of Greek culture. And again, this is part of the mythology around him that he's this like child who's like, I love science and learning and thinking and, and Greek culture. Matters a lot to me. Which, again, like, I'm sorry, I doubt a child cares that much about culture.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

This is a really fascinating aspect to him. And this gets directly at why I think he sucks, because he was into that stuff. And when he went on campaign in Asia, Alexander actually took with him Aristotle's annotated copy of the Iliad.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Huh.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

So he took it with him, he read it, he read Aristotle's annotations, but he liked it. Not because it was an exemplar of this superior Greek culture, he liked it because it had fighting in it. Alexander the Great, if you want to understand him as a person, the fundamental thing you have to get is not the conquering, it's not the Greek stuff, it's not the cultural fusion. It's that he is first and foremost a war junkie. He loves fighting, he loves getting stuck in. He wants to be there at the point where the sword meets the shield. He wants to be in the heat of the melee. That is what he wants. And if we want to understand Alexander's entire career, from the very beginning to the very end, we can view it all. The assembling armies, the grand campaigns of conquest, the years and years and years of killing huge numbers of people as a never ending quest to find bigger and bigger battles for him to fight in.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

So there's a sort of like adrenaline thing that is really key to him and that you can see early on in his life, this obsession with war, with being in the throes of battle. And I think you're right and we'll get to it. But that is like, I think, very key to understanding him and what the problems with him are. Or it's key to understanding how these problems are manifest. Because you have to know that.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah, it's because you think about this like the comparison that I use. I think this is the best present day depiction we have of someone that you can call a war junkie is the Hurt Locker movie, came out 2008, 2009, somewhere in there, starring Jeremy Renner as a bomb disposal technician who keeps going back to Iraq, keeps going back over and over and over again, even when it's clear that it's hurting the people around him. It's clear that this is damaging his family, that this is causing pain, that it's getting other people hurt or killed. And he keeps doing it because he needs the fix. And this is an important counterpoint to the emphasis on PTSD that we get. I think when we're talking about warfare nowadays, we are very strongly conditioned to see the long term negative effects that fighting has on people. Right. And that is 100% important. I'm so glad that we're doing that. Far more people are going to suffer from the long term consequences of exposure to extreme violence than not. But there is this subset of people who want nothing more than to be in the most dangerous and violent scenarios possible because that gives them a adrenaline boost that you cannot match anywhere else. It is the most potent drug you can imagine. I used to train in Muay Thai and jiu jitsu and mixed martial arts. I got in there with some people who were really good at it. And I can tell you that it is an intoxicating sensation to be fighting not for your life, at least knowing that bodily harm is a real possibility. It is a drug. It hits you, you want more of it and you're willing to hurt yourself and you're willing to hurt other people to get it. And there's something really dark and bleak about that. What makes Alexander the best exemplar of this is that he's the king and he has all of these resources. He's not just going to go out and fight somebody after he's had a bucket of wine. Alexander was also a horrible alcoholic. He's not just going to go fight someone after that. He's going to assemble an army of 40,000 men and go on a rampage into the heart of the largest empire in the world at that point. That's where being a war junkie gets you when you have those resources at your disposal.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Hi there, it's Claire. The episode you're currently listening to is free for everybody, but the next one won't be. Because we're trying to make this show independently and sustainably. We switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you're a fan of good, accurate public history made by actual experts, consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. For the price of a pair of socks, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the bi weekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives. To sweeten the deal, just head over to patreon.com thisguysucked or follow the link in the episode description to sign up. Yeah, so it's not just that he wants these things, but he has the power and the resources in order to be able to ensure that he gets that thing and that he can subject a lot of other people to that feeling as well, or to what he imagines to be that feeling for them as well. For some more background on him. So in 336 BCE, his father Philip, again the king, is assassinated and 20 year old Alexander becomes king. So he has the mantle of king kind of thrust upon him. Very early in his life there are some internal revolts. He very swiftly deals with them and reasserts Macedonian dominance over Greek city states writ large. Even though, as you've just discussed, Macedon does not have the same relationship to the sort of general Greek city state format. Then he sets his sights on Persia, which is the dominant empire of the region. And then as a fuckload of military campaigns basically that are legendary for scope and speed. And so that's how he becomes known. The way that we think of him now as this like incredible military thinker, military mind person who is able to engage in these enormous conquests. And these conquests last from 334 to 323. So there are several major battles, many of which names I will struggle to pronounce, but he has the battle of Granicus, he has the battle of Issus, the battle of Tyr, Gaugamela, I googled that and there are seven different ways to Tyre. Gaugamela, Galgamela. Well, I googled this and all of these had several pronunciations, so I just picked one and went for it. Someone else, I tweeted about that and. Or I posted on Blue sky about that and someone said, isn't it Gargamel is a guy who hates all the Smurfs. Shout out to Corey Soper, who's one of my friends. That's who, that's who.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Like big Gargamel vibes there.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, he has this enormous imperial expansion. He conquers Egypt, where he's hailed according to this, as this sort of God king. He founds Alexandria, he pushes east towards Mesopotamia, Persia, into modern day Afghanistan and Pakistan. He reaches the Hyphasis river in India and then his army says, absolutely, fuck this, we're going home.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And yeah, his personality online, based on all of the research that I've done and for people who are just, who are new to this show or just listening to this episode, I basically do like base research, right. Because I'm not the expert on this, I do base research. And the idea is that I can take that base research and apply A critical historical lens to it. But then people like Patrick are the experts on this, so they're able to give us far more nuance than I ever could. But according to the way that he's remembered traditionally, he's very charismatic and daring. He leads from the front, which I think also goes to your point. Right. Like we remember him as this guy who leads from the front, which actually means he's just wants to be in the fray. He inspires loyalty through this. He's. But he's also ruthless. He has does a lot of massacring, a lot of destruction of cities. He allegedly seeks to blend cultures. He encourages intermarriage. He also founds over 20 cities named Alexandria.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

No ego there. No ego there at all.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I can't imagine it. You know, actually he's one of several people we've had on the show, had on talk. Welcome to the show. Alexander the Great. He's one of several people we've talked about on the show who has a lot of like landmarks in cities named after him. Like way more than is reasonable. All of this happens up until 323 BCE when he dies at age 32. There's no clear heir. His empire is divided amongst his generals. Decades of conflict ensue. And that's my overview. Is that right?

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yes, that's absolutely correct. Yeah. So he dies in 323 BC in the city of Babylon. To me the most reasonable conclusion is that he just drank himself to death. He had been such a drunk for so long. Like we have to understand the Macedonian aristocracy is basically a bunch of hard drinking, hard fighting bros. That's the best lens that we have to grasp them. Imagine just a bunch of guys like a rugby team who go out, do the thing, then they get real hammered.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Afterwards drinking wine out of a boot.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah, I mean multiple day drinking binges, right? Like day after day after day where they are shit faced from dawn to dusk. And that's the lifestyle. So if you start doing that when you're 13 or 14 years old, which Alexander did, and you're fighting that whole time like so you mentioned a while back, Alexander was very young by our standards when he came to the throne. But there's chronological age and then there's prepared age. So his father knew from the very beginning that Alexander was going to be his heir. So he trained him to be his heir from the very beginning. Alexander leads his first military campaign with supervision from experienced soldiers. When he's 16, he leads his father's Companion cavalry, the kind of decisive battlefield army at the decisive point in the decisive battle, when he's 18 and 338 BC at the battle of Chaeronea. So clearly his father, who was not an idiot, his father was, if anything, a much more talented administrator and diplomat than Alexander was, and almost as good a military mind. The fact that his father is trusting him with the key responsibility in the key battle that's going to decide whether Macedonia rules the Greeks or not, when he's 18 years old, you think the guy's probably ready for it, you know what I mean? Like, so he's already been living this lifestyle for years by the time he becomes king. And if you're 33 and you've spent 20 years drinking hard, fighting hard, like his body by the end of his life is covered in scars. Right. Like he's been injured dozens and dozens of times, he's basically aged in dog years by that point when he dies. Like he's lived a few full life. And a lot of the guys who fall into that category, kind of his peers, some of them live to be very old. There are a few of them who live to be 80. Most of them are dying young. They're either dying while they're fighting, you know, they're having an aneurysm at 45. This is really, really common because the lifestyle is just punishing. If you want to be a kind of a Macedonian warrior aristocrat, either you're going to live for no particularly good reason until you're 80 or 90, or you're going to die young. There's no real middle ground in that.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

So Alexander in that regard isn't all that atypical. A 13 year reign for a warrior king is a pretty, pretty reasonable stretch in antiquity. If we compare that to the kings of the successor states, it's pretty, pretty standard. But because he starts young and dies young, he always takes on this mythical quality.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Huh. Yeah, I mean, that totally makes sense. I think you're totally right that I am projecting a sort of not even necessarily like current lens, but just a generally modern lens on age with this. But yeah, absolutely. If you start being prepared to become a king at that age and then your parent dies when you are still like, I think he's 19 when his dad dies or just barely 20 when his dad dies. If you're that age, then you're still young, but you're not like totally, utterly unprepared for, for what's going to happen. He just dies young also because the lifestyle that he leads.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Makes that happen. It's going to happen in battle, or it's going to happen because he contracts some scary illness or, you know, has liver failure.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

He'd gotten malaria too. Like, you know, if. If that's the life you lead, that's what's going to happen. I mean, I think I always like to think of Henry VIII of England as a contrast. So Henry VIII becomes king when he's 18 years old. The difference there is that because Henry had had an older brother who had been tapped to be heir, Henry didn't get a lot of that instruction and preparation that Alexander did. So when Henry became king, he prepared for the job than Alexander was. Like, when Alexander becomes king, he knows exactly what to do. He knows that the first thing you have to do as a Macedonian king is to eliminate any family members who could potentially claim the throne or have the throne claimed on their behalf by people who don't like you. So he has his infant half brother and his infant half brother's mother murdered along with her father, who was a powerful Macedonian nobleman. He does a purge of anybody who could potentially be his rival for the throne. That's pretty standard stuff, but Alexander does it absolutely ruthlessly.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And we also, just as a note, have not gotten to what your problem with him is. So, like, this is just an important backstory on him and the kind of person that he is.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah, this is background sucking. This isn't even the core thing.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Speaking of that, I think we have reached the point where we do need to talk about why he sucks. Although I think we've actually like done a lot of. Of setting that up for it to be clear where we're going with this. What is your first or primary beef with him?

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Okay, so to the extent that people agree that Alexander sucked, it is usually because they talk about the consequences of his conquests. The hundreds of thousands of people who died. This is. That's not an exaggeration. It's probably even more. It probably runs above a million people who died over the course of Alexander's conquests. A not insubstantial proportion of the number of people who were alive in Western and central Central Asia at that point. Whole cities get sacked and slaughtered. There are enormous civilian casualties, especially during his campaigns in Central Asia when he's in what are Bactria, Sugdiana, present day Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, that. That kind of region. Leaving that butcher's bill aside, what I find so incredibly disheartening about him is that the reason for this wasn't even the conquest. The conquest was almost secondary to what Alexander really wanted, which was to be Achilles. He wanted to be Achilles. So the first thing Alexander does when he crosses over to Asia in 334 BC, he's already got an army waiting there for him, an expeditionary force. He's brought another army with him. He's going to embark on this grand project of the conquest of the Persian Empire. What does he do? He goes to the site of Troy, he goes to the temple. There he gets the armor that is said to be Achilles armor and he puts it on. And that is the armor that Alexander is going to wear on campaign. He is claiming the mantle of Achilles. Now, if we think about who Achilles is as a figure, I think we should take this seriously, right? Alexander has explicitly gone to do this. He has a copy of the Iliad with him. Achilles is not leading an army into battle. Achilles is a warrior, right? He is there at the sharp end, getting stuck in. He's the greatest warrior, and that's how he's known. And I think if we take that interest of Alexander's seriously, which we ought to, because it shows up again and again over the course of his life, from his childhood onward. That's who he wanted to be. And all of his military brilliance, his understanding of how to get people to do what he wanted, his charisma, was all secondary to his personal desire to fight and kill as many people as possible in the most public, glorious way possible. It's like he wants to do these conquests and cause these decisive battles purely to give himself the opportunity to be there leading a cavalry charge so that everybody can see how fucking badass he is. And that, to me, is so much bleaker than wanting to conquer and create a new world. It's like, oh, you did all that stuff just so you could lead a cool cavalry charge. That's so much worse to me, just.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

So people would think you were cool. And also you get the brief adrenaline high of getting to do this. I mean, like, his invasions have little to do with defense, little to do with liberation. His campaign into the Persian Empire, from what I understand, was one of basically unprovoked aggression or barely provoked aggression. It's framed as revenge, but it's executed as personal ambition for him. The ambition being both to have a specific kind of legacy and memory and to be seen in a certain way. And also for him to, like, have fun. His own propaganda refers to him as the son of Zeus, and he demands divine honors during his lifetime. So there's this sort of, like, unprecedented assertion of imperial religious authority at the same Time, the fusion of king, God, conqueror, help justify what I would describe as kind of unlimited violence in the name of what he sees to be his destiny, or what I see as him seeing to be as his destiny. So it's kind of this ancient analog, perhaps, to divine right absolutism or even totalitarian cults of personality, where it's all about, like, I want to be the cool guy. I want to be the guy who's known for doing this thing. Whether successful or not, I still enjoy what I'm doing. And everyone's going to think I'm this cool, badass guy.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah. So to your point, even the what I think from our perspective, we can see as kind of cool cultural fusion things that he does are still in service of this overarching goal. The reason that he does the cultural fusion stuff is because he knows that his Macedonians are getting tired of fighting because they're rich now, right? They've plundered the richest empire in the world. They have all the money they could ever spend. What more do they need to keep fighting for, right? Like his father, who was, I think, every bit the general Alexander was, would have stopped no later than Babylon, right? Like, they get to Babylon, okay, you've got all of Western Asia. Why do you need to keep going into the Iranian plateau? Like, there's nothing there. Like, especially once you get past, like, the imperial cities that are along the western edge of Iran, like Susa, Persepolis, like, places like this, Ecbatana. There really is not a whole lot of reason for you to keep going into Central Asia, aside from the fact that it's there. His Macedonians understood that these guys are experienced soldiers. They know how to read intelligence reports. They know how to talk to people. They know what's out there. They know it is endless wasteland, desert, mountain, high plateau that doesn't have that many people. There's not that much money there. There isn't even that much glory to be won. But Alexander wants to keep going. It is not a coincidence that he starts doing the cultural fusion stuff at the same time as his soldiers are saying, do we really want to keep doing this? He does it because he wants a new supply of soldiers. And he knows that if he appeals to his new Asian subjects and he offers them a place in the hierarchy of his empire, in this new state that he's building, then they will fight for it. And when we reach the very end, his last major campaign into India, his army is full of Bactrian and Persian noblemen, because those guys haven't been with him doing this for eight or nine years already. It's fresh blood. They're ready to fight. And he has to consistently put up with mutinies, disagreements. He has to pension off soldiers at different points because they just say, we're done, man. We don't want to keep marching into the unknown just so you can get your kicks.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. I mean, and needing a sort of unlimited supply of those people is pretty important to doing this because like I mentioned earlier, like a lot of this conquest thing kind of stops when his army says we're done. Like we don't want to do this anymore. This is horrible. It is also interesting that some of the things that people will say about him, right. Like in this sort of imperialist model that he really embodies and that his empire embodies, obviously, is there's this really extractive nature to it in terms of both tribute and labor. The wealth of Persia and India and all these places are, is not actually being shared. It's looted and redistributed to Macedonian elites and soldiers. And so even some of these things where it's like, well, he spread culture and he did all okay. Yeah. But what's happening is he's doing that and then all of the money, all of the riches, whatever, are going back home. They're not going to the people that he's conquering and supposedly like inspiring to join Hellenistic culture.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah. The amount of money that is stockpiled in the Persian treasuries that Alexander takes is staggering. It is more money than you ever hear about in the ancient world. We are talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of talents. Talent is a measure of the weight of silver. It's used as a common shorthand for currency here. Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of talents. And most of that Alexander doesn't even spend during his lifetime. He just has it. It's just sitting there. A lot of it he doesn't even turn into coinage. You know who does turn it into coinage? His successors. Because they have soldiers to pay to fight their wars. So what's the legacy in financial terms of Alexander the Great's conquest? It's taking all of the accumulated wealth of the Persian Empire and giving it to a few hundred thousand Macedonian and Greek soldiers in order to perpetuate another 40 year long cycle of violence after Alexander dies. That is his legacy. Plundering the wealth of Persia, spending it on more soldiers, and then bequeathing that money to his successors who then spend it on still more soldiers, still more Violence and still more misery.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I think what's also really interesting here, and I think this fits with what we're talking about. I want to talk a little bit about these conquests generally, too, because I think understanding the scale and the consequences of them is really important to getting, like, why it's so bad that this guy is just sending people to war and wants to be in war in general. Because when we'll say something like hundreds of thousands of people die, it's like, okay, yeah, that's obviously very, very terrible. But sometimes thinking about the scale of it for people doesn't really work. Or it doesn't click the same way. Because especially when we think about what I would call temporal distance, right? Like the chronological distance between us and someone, you know, thousands of years ago or 2000s of years ago, people sometimes miss that the consequences of someone like Alexander the Great's actions affect a human being. Like, you and I are a human being, right? Like a hundred thousand people dead or hundreds of thousands of people dead, are hundreds of thousands of you and me dying for this person, Essentially, to put.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

This in context, the total population of Macedonia, the Kingdom of Macedonia, around this time is probably about half a million million. So Alexander's armies, in the course of their conquests, kill at least as many, if not substantially more people than lived in the entire Kingdom of Macedonia that they had come from. That's one way of thinking about it. I mean, we're talking like, especially in the later campaigns when Alexander gets frustrated, his response to that is, well, okay, we took this town, let's just kill everybody in it. And then 2,000 people are dead. And they did this over and over and over and over again. So it's not like they lined them all up in some sort of holocaust. It's that they rampaged through half of Asia and killed people there. And so this reaches its peak in Central Asia and South Asia when they're really frustrated doing years of guerrilla warfare in present day Afghanistan and adjoining regions. It's not an exaggeration to describe what they're doing as genocide. There are whole regions that they are depopulating. They are going in and they are killing everyone that they find. And that is a price that Alexander is happy to pay. It does not bother him in the slightest. There is not an indication that he loses a moment's sleep over any of this. In fact, he is the one who is pushing it. It is his orders that are pushing this onward. And just to give you a sense, if we need another kind of point here to show how kind of messed up he is as a person. One night, Alexander gets really drunk with a bunch of his friends. This is something they do pretty regularly. It's again, it's part of Macedonian aristocratic culture. A guy named Black Cletus. Cletus the Black. I love the fact that Cletus is a Macedonian name. It gives you a really clear sense into who these people were and how the other Greeks viewed them. Imagine somebody, you know, named Cletus, think about where they came from. That's pretty much how the Greeks looked at the Macedonians.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Historical continuity here demonstrated by the name Cletus.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Cletus is an eternal name. Yes. And it was always one of the Macedonians favorite names. There are like dozens of Cletuses scattered over Macedonian history. So there's this guy, Black Cletus, who has been one of Alexander's closest companions, one of the people who knows him the best in the world. And they're all drunk one night and Cletus says some stuff to Alexander about, you know, I don't, don't like this cultural fusion that you're doing. Your father never would have done that. Alexander gets really mad at him, tries to attack him. They're separated. Cletus walks off. Cletus apparently pops off about something else. Alexander breaks free of the people who are holding him, grabs a spear from a guard and kills him. He kills Black Cletus just runs him through with a spear in front of all of Alexander's other closest companions. And he knows he screwed up, right? Like, not because, I mean, he's crying, he's inconsolable. This is one of the few times where you ever see Alexander show any remorse. And I think it's not because it was the killing that bothered him so much. It's like, oh, it's Black Cletus. He saved my life at the Granicus. Like, who was it that stopped the Persian nobleman from killing Alexander at the Granicus? It was Black Cletus and Alexander killed him. And so to the extent that there's any self reflection here at all, this is one of the few times when we see it, but it doesn't stop him. He has other longtime companions executed out of fear of rebellion. He sidelines people who have been with him forever. He wants to surround himself with the people who are going to allow him to keep doing the things that he wants to do. And this tells you everything you need to know again about the Macedonians. Is the explanation that Alexander's other companions eventually come up with to explain why he has Murdered Black Cletus is that he was taken in a fit of madness by the God Dionysus. Dionysus is the God of both wine and madness, right? So when he goes to India, he makes kind of a token sacrifice to Dionysus because Dionysus is supposed to have come from India, where he's like, yeah, sorry, whatever I did to offend you when you afflicted me with that bout of madness, like, okay, we're cool now.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

When you made me kill Black Cletus.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

When you made me kill Black Cletus. Yeah. And I think it's telling that even in that case, they're like, how can we shift responsibility for this obvious crime off of this person? They, you know, well, that's what the gods are for. And as time goes on, he is more and more willing to spend the lives of his soldiers in fruitless campaigns, on fruitless assaults. At the end, he drags them through a desert on the way from India back to Babylon. A bunch of his soldiers starve to death or die of thirst, die of heat exhaustion in the desert. And this is. Again, this is pure hubris. Why does he want to cross this desert? Because Cyrus the Great crossed the desert, the first Persian king, and he's got to do what Cyrus did. And if thousands of people have to die for that to happen, Alexander is fine with that. Again, no indication that he ever loses a moment's sleep over it, except insofar as what it's going to do to his ability to recruit for the next.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Campaign for some other numbers. I also think it's interesting because he's not just doing this in, like, Central Asia or in Asia in general. Like, he's not only doing this sort of, like, mass murder slaughtering thing there, he's also very willing to do it in Greek city states, too. And, like, from very early on. So, like, in 335, forces under his control commit a massacre at Thebes in response to a rebellion against Macedonian rule, which again, I think reasonable, like, reasonable to rebel his forces, sack the city, kill 6,000 people, sell the remaining 30,000 people into slavery so we can be like, okay, it's not like he's lining up and killing people, but he will kill 6,000 people and clear out the remaining 30,000 people without a problem, only to send a message to other city states.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Like, so it's actually worse than that.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Oh, good.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Because it was to send a message to the other city states, but he also needed the money for his campaign.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Well, sure, of course, while he could.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Have pardoned the Thebans and said, okay, I can take your city anytime I want to. I can kill 6,000 people anytime I want to. Nobody's going to rebel now. Selling the remainder into slavery was a financial measure designed to make sure that he could cover the costs of the next campaign. The Macedonian k practiced what we would call a rolling economy. So they have their regular sources of revenue, but they're spending money well in advance, and they rely on bringing in plunder from each campaign to fund the next year's expenditures. So Alexander's father, Philip, does a better job of kind of putting the Macedonian economy on solid footing. He opens up gold mines and timber exploitation and stuff so that you have regular sources of state revenue, but they're still enormously dependent on plunder. So the Thebans, it's not even just that he was trying to send a message. It's that he had to cover the next year's costs.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, I mean, not something a good guy would do. I personally would argue.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

No, I do think it's important to note that, like, the brutality of Alexander's campaigns is not out of the ordinary for the time.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

The ancient Mediterranean world is a anarchic and brutal place by our standards. The duty of every male citizen and practically every polity in the Mediterranean, the most fundamental one, was to serve in war. So every citizen male in pretty much every Greek polity, every Italian polity in Carthage, in among the more tribally organized peoples, pretty much every adult male is going to have experience of warfare, and pretty much every adult of any stripe will have had experience of war being done to them. So this is part of the texture of the world that they live in, the treatment of the defeated. Everybody in this world agreed that the conqueror had the absolute right to dispose of the conquered in any fashion he chose. Any fashion, whether that's killing, slavery. There was no moral sanction associated with that. That was your right as the conqueror. But the scale on which Alexander does it, the deliberation that goes into how he makes these campaigns happen over enormous stretches of space, that's something different. There's a point at which a difference in scale becomes a qualitative difference. And with Alexander, I think we are well past that point by about 333 BC. So 10 years before he dies, he's still got another 10 years of killing people at the point when he has surpassed the scale that everybody else has ever operated on. There are all sorts of reasons for that. I mean, there are processes of state formation and interpolity competition. And like we could put all sorts of fancy poli sci or international relations terms on it, but basically, Alexander is the key figure who ensures that the wars continue to get bigger. So there is an ever increasing scale of warfare in the Mediterranean world from the 350s BC or from the Peloponnesian War, actually, all the way up until the wars of the successors. But Alexander is the key figure in that transformation. If not for him, that other stuff may never have happened and maybe the suffering that came afterward would not have been quite so widespread.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. And I will say something that's been made clear over the course of the show and, like, maybe needs to be stated more explicitly, no matter what, whether someone is doing something for the glory of themselves, the glory of their state. In this case, clearly for his own glory. Like, primarily for his own glory.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

He didn't even care about Macedonia.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. Like, the cost of this imperial glory is human suffering. Like, that is the cost of it. And the thing is, at this point in time, like, being willing to pay that cost is normal. Right. The question is the scale on which he is willing to pay that cost. And that's what the problem is. And that's why the way that we look at him historically needs some alteration, because it's very easy to say, well, everyone is doing this and he's just the best at it. But again, the necessity, whether it necessitates this scale is pretty like it's not even. You can't even, like, argue that it does necessitate this. Unless what he is doing is solely for his own benefit or primarily for his own benefit it. Which I think it is.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah. So there's a lot of scholarship on the application of international relations theory and systems theory to thinking about the relationships between Mediterranean states, more like in the third century B.C. and the second century B.C. but the same ideas apply here. This is an anarchic world. Right. There is no international law. There are no methods of enforcement. And what that does is it makes things pretty bleak. There's a great historian named Arthur Eckstein who wrote a book on this called Mediterranean Interstate War and the Rise of Rome, I think is the title of the book. Great book. But Eckstein's point is that this is the world that everybody was living in. It was, to some extent, kill or be killed. If it wasn't you this year, conquering your neighbors and selling them into slavery, the next year, it could be your city. And this is a real thing. Everybody within living memory would have known of a city that had been destroyed, that had Its population sold into slavery. These are existential threats. The difference with Alexander is that after a specific point there is no more existential threat. There is no defensive imperialism where you're like, okay, I can see how in 5 or 10 years these people are going to be an enormous threat. They're going to launch an invasion. This is how the Romans eventually get involved in the Greek east is they have a legitimate fear that if they don't intervene now, several years later there will be enemies here who are in a position to invade Italy and finish the job that Hannibal started. That Hannibal's invasion of Italy is right in their mind as they're doing this, that is an explicable thing, right? We may not agree with it, we can see the negative consequences, but we can understand their thinking. In this anarchic and violent world where it's like, okay, yeah, we send an army to Greece now, then maybe we won't have to fight them in Italy in a few years. And they're explicit about this. This is their reasoning. It survives in the sources. When you look at Alexander, that is not there. There is no sense that like, well if we don't go into Central Asia, you know, then maybe we'll have to fight them. No, there's no risk of that. There's no danger of an army coming from Bactria to conquer Babylon. There is no risk of an army coming from the Indus Valley to conquer the Levant. There is no risk of an army coming from Carthage to conquer Egypt. He's got plans about Carthage too. Eventually when he's done with Arabia, which was supposed to be the campaign he was working on when he died, that's not there. It's not defensive. It is purely in service of his own desires. And to the extent that there's anything good that comes out of this, there's a new broader interconnected world which somebody who studies migration and long distance connections and trade and things like that, that's pretty cool for me, right? Hundred percent not worth the hundreds of thousands of people who died to have to bring that world into being.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. For you to be able to study it later, probably not worth it.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

No, not worth it.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Hi everybody, it's Claire here with a quick mid roll shout out to tell you about other multitude shows I think you might be interested in. So this week I want to talk to you about Pale Blue Pod. If you, like me, are overwhelmed by the universe but also kind of want to understand it and possibly befriend it. This show is for you. You might know her from her wonderful TGS episode on ancient Greek astronomy freak Ptolemy. But on pill blue pod, Dr. Moya McTeer sits down with a new guest each week to demystify space one topic at a time. They do it with open eyes, open arms, and open mouths from so much laughing and jaw dropping, obviously. I recently recorded an episode of Pale Blue Pod with Moya where we review the worst Bond film of all time, and I can personally attest to the fact that by the end of every episode, the cosmos will feel somewhat less scary and a lot more fun. New episodes of Pale Blue Pod come out every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts. For example, the app you're currently using to listen to me go give it a listen. I also wanted to make sure that we talk about some of the massive issues in terms of the popular historiography around him. Every once in a while we'll get like a review or a comment being like, you talk too much about historiography and not about the guy and the thing itself. So luckily I think we've done that enough. But I think a lot of the issues with some of these people is the historiographic memory of them and popular historiography around them, which is what most people like. Most people are not reading the academic books that you and I are reading about the people that we're talking about. Most people's knowledge is often based on popular historiography. Commonly what I see, and I think this happens with people who are really into classical antiquity but don't necessarily have methodological training. Popularly, you'll see someone without historical training engage with a source that they see as reputable in order to deepen their understanding of someone like Alexander, which is wonderful and people should be doing that. But in the case of a lot of primary sources. So for people who aren't historians, sources that are written or created at or near to the time being studied that might offer kind of unique insights, unique evidence. In the case of a lot of these primary sources being written during or about the ancient world in particular, non historians, or even just untrained or unfamiliar historians can give a lot of argumentative weight to these sources without considering the position of the people writing them. So for example, Greek and Roman historians writing about Alexander, like Arrian, Plutarch, Curtius, Rufus, are often basically taken at their word despite having written about Alexander centuries later. In a lot of these cases, this is also I feel like every episode I do a little bit of a rant. Here's my rant. Because these sources are viewed by the non or untrained historian as sufficiently ancient themselves. People kind of assume that what's being said about their subjects is like pure unfiltered truth. Right. In reality, a lot, lot of these historians, like again I'm talking about like ancient historians, were actively romanticizing Alexander's legacy. So later Greco Roman historians, especially Arrian, who bases his accounts on pro Alexander sources like Ptolemy, they present Alexander as this sort of noble ideal and they downplay this brutality or they find ways to excuse it. Like Arrian calls Alexander a philosopher king, Plutarch romanticizes his emotions, his regrets. What that leads to is a general population who just believes that that's the case because they're saying, okay, the people writing about him thought he was so great, so he probably was so great. And there's no critical lens on why someone might be writing that, why it's useful for someone who like later is supporting Roman Empire, might want to cast earlier empires in a particular light and it filters down into the world much, much later as just being like essentially gospel on him. And that's what I found while doing a lot of this research where I was like, like hm, this person is really taking this historian at their word without thinking about why a historian might write what they wrote. Is that a source of frustration for you too or just me?

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Oh, constantly. And I, I would say that recent scholarship on Alexander has been much better.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Sure, absolutely.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

About disentangling the kind of tortured nature of the sources that we have for him. We do not have a lot that is contemporary to Alexander. Pretty much everything that gets written about him is written with the benefit of hindsight and by people. Not so much the sources we have, but the sources the people we have were drawing on. A lot of them were written by people who had benefited from Alexander's conquest. So Ptolemy, who writes this history, Ptolemy is one of Alexander's companions. He becomes king of Egypt because of his connection to Alexander. He founds a dynasty because of Alexander. There is no world in which he is going to lend a critical gloss to anything Alexander did because it undermines his own position and his own legitimacy as king of Egypt. And this is true for everyone in that world. And by the time even one generation has passed and the people who actually knew Alexander have started to pass into oblivion. He's a legend. He is not a real person anymore. And at that point he becomes a model to aim for for other ambitious conquerors. And again, from my perspective, that's a really, really under discussed negative. Part of his legacy is that the fact that Alexander existed Gives guys like Pyrrhus of Epirus, who's one of my favorite classical figures. If you've ever heard the term Pyrrhic victory, it comes from this guy, Pyrrhus of Epirus, who invaded Italy in 280 BC with an army that was organized along Hellenistic lines. He was from the Molossian royal house, so he was a relative through the maternal line of Alexander's mother. This guy Pyrrhus had spent his youth. He was, he still wasn't even that old. In 280 B.C. he'd spent his youth surrounded by people who had ridden with Alexander. So he was a protege of Antigonus, the one eyed, who had been one of Alexander's generals. He was surrounded by people who had known the man. And the formative things that make Pyrrhus a conqueror who's willing to kill thousands and thousands and thousands of people in his own right is that he wants to be Alexander, that he wants to do in the west what Alexander had done in the East. A century later you have these two kings of the great Hellenistic monarchies, Antigonid Macedonia and the Seleucid Empire, Philip V of Macedonia and Antiochus III of the Seleucid Empire, who embark on a joint pact to carve up the third Hellenistic kingdom, Egypt. And in so doing, they inaugurate a series of wars. Why did Philip and Antiochus do that? Because they both fucking thought they were Alexander. They both wanted to be him. Him because he existed as a model, as the Hellenistic warrior king par excellence. He inspired generations of future shitheads to be just as bad as he was. And that to me is the ultimate why this guy sucked. It's not just the terrible things he did in his lifetime, it's that he inspired future generations of spoiled handed power on a platter kings to do even worse.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I think that also kind of goes to show the power that we as historians have, if this makes sense in the stories that we tell about people and why we tell them and who we're telling them to. Because if we're not careful, you could end up with total fucking dickheads doing stuff because you're not careful or because there's some other. And ancient historians are not thinking necessarily about their jobs in the same way that we are right now. But when we think about Alexander, right, like what is happening now, which is really important or has happened more recently, is a move towards thinking about things like archeological and comparative evidence rather than working with what we as historians would call hagiographies. So this term has come up in several episodes, so I'm not sure if people at home know it or not, but just in case. And I don't think I've ever defined it. Hagiography, some people say hagiography, whatever, is a biography that idealizes its subjects. It originally is used to describe biographies of saints, but now historians mostly use the term to talk about biographies that treat their subjects like saints. So, again, literally the opposite of his show. But because of things like that and that style of history and of historiography, we've essentially inherited this sanitized, elite, approved version of Alexander and largely gone like, okay, that sounds good. And there are people like you and lots of other historians who now have to work really hard against that because it has been so ingrained in our historical memory and culture. Because it's a more fun story. Like, this guy's. So he does all this crazy stuff. He's the. Well, as you said, not the first great, but he's this. You know, he's Alexander the Great. People like Charlemagne look up to him. People like Napoleon look up to him. He's this cool guy.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

One of the most popular texts in the medieval Muslim world is an Alexander romance because it's filtered through Persian sources. I mean, I think the closest parallel here that we have is imagine if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War. And our perspective on Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was all, like, pro Southern historians, and that was how modern military men, let's say Patton or Norman Schwarzkopf, were reading the biographies of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson that were written by pro Southern historians. Imagine the impact that would have on the way that you waged war, on what you thought the point of war was, the virtues of war. Imagine that. And that's kind of the situation that we have with Alexander.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I hate that.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Like, it's. I mean, you're right. And it just, it. I think there. I'm not, like, comparing myself to Blue Tar, but I think there is something there where you're kind of like, wow, it actually matters what I say and put out into the world and what I think about this person, even if it's just in a history podcast where I'm saying there are some problems that we need to think through here. You actually do have an impact on the world, like, in a broader sense. So much of the world is impacted by the historical memory of someone like Alexander the Great. The world we have now, like, currently today, is not possible without both him, but then also people behaving or trying to shape the world in his image afterwards. And it's really important to understand that and to get also that he's a total douchebag. Like, you know, like, yeah.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Would Julius Caesar have committed genocide in Gaul if Alexander the Great hadn't existed? Maybe, but also maybe not. Because when Julius Caesar is 30 years old and he is thinking about his career, what does he do? He weeps. Because he's Alexander's age and he hasn't accomplished what Alexander has. So would Julius Caesar over the next let's 12 years of his life after that have led an army into Gaul to kill probably a million people and sell many thousands more into slavery if he hadn't had that comparison with Alexander the Great in his mind? I don't know. But it's a question that's worth asking.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

And I think there's obviously the kind of oppositional viewpoint of this show is the great man theory, right? Like that's like this show, if nothing else is doing the opposite of that. There are great men in the sense that there are people like Alexander who loom very large over historical memory and long term historical narratives. They don't necessarily become these people solely as a result of their unique intellectual, political, whatever, gifts. And we've already established that Alexander does have a lot of things that make him specifically unique as a person, like as an individual. But what happens with people like Alexander and the culture of permissibility that shows up around people like him happens when we become really dedicated to the idea of the individual talent, the individual greatness of a person. And then in order to do that, we kind of by definition have to, to excuse or ignore all of the other structures around them that make this greatness or underpin this greatness that make this greatness possible. So in Alexander's case, there are a lot of things that we need to pay attention to when we talk about his great man legacy. And I think this is applicable to a lot of other great men throughout history, which again as I mentioned, a lot of these other great men are doing things because they want to be Alexander the Great. So he doesn't conquer the Persian empire on like charisma and tactics alone. He does it with a massive logistical network, the best trained army in the ancient world. Both things that he is certainly not solely responsible for.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Also a warrior aristocracy that has been corralled into submission by his father and turned into a service aristocracy which they hadn't been even a generation before.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, he's the product, as are we all really of systemic forces is really important to this also again, he becomes Alexander the Great because his father is a king. Like, it's not like he came out of, you know, the slums and like that's not what happened.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Every good history of Alexander and the Macedonian conquests spends as much time as possible on Philip before Alexander ever even enters the picture. That's how important a figure Philip is.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I mean like, yeah, this sort of Macedonian military machine is built by Philip and then Alexander makes all of his conquests possible by taking it over. But like without Philip it wouldn't have been possible in the first place. The Greek cultural expansion is a systemic force. This Persian political instability be also is not Alexander's fault that there's this political instability that enables a lot of this conquest to happen. The heroic framing of Alexander erases the contributions of thousands of soldiers, engineers, bureaucrats. This is a heavily bureaucratic point in time who make his conquest possible. Like it's very easy to say this person is a great man. And like that is sure a style of approaching history. But like every time we do that, we kind of lose all of the other things that make that possible in the first place. The political landscape, the geographic landscape, the economic system, like everything makes this possible. It's not just like a dude who comes in, shapes the world and leaves. Like. And so I think that's kind of a real danger with looking at Alexander and the way that people just like deeply romanticize him as a person is, is I would say worrisome.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah, I, if you're talking about what historical figure do you want your present day leaders idolizing? Alexander the Great would be near the bottom of my list.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, not that one, please.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

No, no, that's, that's going to be a hard no for me, dog.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

We already know that if given the opportunity, he would bomb the out of Iran. Because he basically did that.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

He did. Because he did bomb the out of Iran. Yeah, I mean the, he did the, the 4th century BC equivalent. I mean they burned down the palace, this wonderful palace in Persepolis because he and his buddies got drunk and possibly with a courtesan, very famous courtesan who may have encouraged them to do it, but at the end of the day they did burn the fucking city. And for fun, for kicks.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I also see this, that a common thing where because people will also kind of retroactively try to be like, well actually he probably did it for this reason. Right? Like, it's clear that he did that because they, that he and the people around him did that because they wanted to. And later People are like, well, it might have been as revenge for the Achaemenid Empire's burning of Athens 150 years earlier. And it's like, probably not. Like, also the people being punished by them very much were not alive when that happened. So I don't think that this is a real kind of form of revenge.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah. So I'm a huge fan of stupidity in history. Like, people just do stupid stuff. Yes, we see people do stupid things in the present. People in the past also did stupid things. People in the past were drunk a lot. And Alexander the Great and all of his boys were drunk all the time. Like when I talk about buckets of wine, they literally drank buckets of wine. These people were like hardcore binge drinking alcoholics in a way that is socially acceptable almost nowhere in the world today. And so you want to talk about impaired decision making also, you got to remember these are people who have a lifetime of brain training, trauma.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Well, yeah, right.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Like these are people who have been getting knocked around over the head since they were children, falling off of horses, getting battered, beaten. Like, these people are not thinking rationally in the sense that we understand it. Certainly not when they burned Persepolis to the ground, certainly not at many other points where they're making important world altering decisions. So like when you look around today and you see certain political leaders or business leaders who may be on some stuff, just know, like, like people have been doing that for a while. You know what I mean?

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. Well, people are like, I can't believe that this man. It's like, well, I'll tell you, the Nazis were very drunk and high a lot of the time.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Yeah.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

I can tell you that from being an expert on. They were doing a lot of fucked up stuff and so were everyone else that they were fighting. Like, it's just people have been making decisions impaired forever, basically, and making really terrifying, terrible, world altering decisions like that. And when we romanticize someone like Alexander, sometimes to avoid the fact that he was just an asshole doing asshole stuff in order to avoid that, often we'll be like, well, he is just such a sweet, beautiful, young. Like, I don't know. No people can see this, but like thumbs down. Like, boo. I think that's so. I don't know, I don't like, I hate it.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

One of the hard things about Alexander is you have to hold these two thoughts in your head simultaneously. That he is both, by pretty much any reasonable standard, a bad person who did really, really bad things. And also that he is extraordinarily gifted not just in one way. He is one of, I think, one of the most gifted people in the historical record who was prepared for the life he had by the finest tutors, teachers, instructors imaginable. So this is a guy who was given enormous talent, who made the most of that talent in the way that he understood it and the way that he chose to use that talent inflicted enormous harm on huge numbers of people all across the world. He's perhaps the most gifted tactician on a battlefield in all of human history. He is gifted enough at ruling that we can only wonder what he would have done if he had actually tried to create an empire, because he never did. He's got a ramshackle conquest state that's basically bound together by violence and the extraction of tribute. There are no defined bureaucratic structures that he puts in place to the extent that there are. He's picked them up from the Persian Empire. And you wonder, like, with that talent, what could he have done otherwise? What wonders could he have accomplished that weren't, you know, the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the creation of a power vacuum that led to hundreds of thousands of more deaths.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah. Like, if his main thing wasn't, I want to always be at risk of intense bodily harm, what could he have done if that wasn't his sort of primary desire in life? And unfortunately we're historians, so we don't know what the answer is to what he could have done if he was, personality wise, a different person. But it, it is. Yeah, I mean, it's the same. It's not the same thing, but we talked about a different Ptolemy on another episode showed the science Ptolemy, not the pharaoh Ptolemy, but we talk about him and like, where would modern astronomy be if geocentrism hadn't been the dominant perspective on astronomical models? And it's that same thing where so much of history is kind of this, like, disappointing optimism where you're sort of like, wow, the world could be so different or so beautiful or so many wonderful things could have happened. Happened. Unfortunately, they did it. And that's kind of one of the, the, I think one of the saddest parts about studying history and also one of the most important parts. But yeah, there is a. It's easy to kind of daydream a little bit about the world we might have had, but unfortunately, do not imagine.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

If this immensely talented, influential person didn't suck. Is a fun game to play.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

That's a different contest, unfortunately.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Unfortunately, one that I wish we got to do more often. I wish we didn't have to do that as often as we bonus episode.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

For when we have too many sad ones, we'll do like another this guy rocked episode and then we'll also do a what world A thought experiment on what the world could be. Unfortunately, I do think we are out of time on this episode. Unless people want to hear us talk for even longer about and we can come back and talk about him some more.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Well, two hours.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Thank you so very much for coming on. I think think I can stop saying on these shows that like whether you've convinced me or not that someone sucks because we go into this knowing that that's where we're going to get to. But he sucks. Thank you so much for coming on. Patrick can be found on Twitter at Patrick Wyman Blue sky is Patrick Wyman on Instagram wymanpatrick by the way, it's very confusing. Some amalgamation of Patrick and Wyman on all of the things. If you follow him on Instagram, you can watch him lift a frankly astonishing amount of weights and you can get yourself a copy of his book the Verge at the link in our episode description and go listen to Tides of History wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dr. Patrick Wyman]

Hey, thank you so much for having me. This is just an absolute pleasure. You've got a wonderful show going here and I hope to come back on in the future to talk about someone else who sucked too.

[Dr. Claire Aubin]

Yeah, you don't know this, but he gave me some other people he would want to talk about so we'll have him back and we can talk about them. Teaser for everyone else. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude Podcast Collective, this episode was Hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Patrick Wyman, and edited by Julia Sheffini. All of our theme music was written and produced by Vinnie's favorite father, Marshall Bean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month, and access to our full archive of episodes, you can [e-mail] thisguysucked See you next week.