Hello there students, welcome to our next lecture. This one is on Alexander the Great. Kind of finishing up our sort of little mini unit we've been doing on Iron Age Mesopotamia and the Iron Age Mediterranean Basin. We had two lectures on the Greeks and then a lecture on the Hebrews and a lecture on the Persians. This one's on Alexander the Great.
Alexander the Great is a kind of a Greek. who conquers all of Persia and is easily one of the most famous and most influential people to ever live. We'll look at his legacy here at the end of the lecture. And then the next lecture, we'll look at the developments of China around the same time that Alexander is doing things. And I sort of use Alexander and the Chinese as...
sort of compare and contrast between two different ways to conquer the world. Alexander will conquer the world through military force, whereas in China it's more of a religion and sort of trade way of dominating the world, right? The Chinese will dominate the world through the spread of the Buddhist religion and Chinese trade goods.
Again, we'll talk about that more in the next lecture, but that's sort of why the lectures are ordered the way that they're ordered. All right, so again, Alexander the Great. Let's go ahead and start the slideshow. There we go. So before we talk about Alexander, it's probably good to update what the Mediterranean world is like, right?
So we basically stopped our discussion of the Greeks at the end of the Peloponnesian War. Sorry, excuse me. Which is basically in 400 BCE, where Sparta technically wins the war against Athens, the Peloponnesian War, that is.
But both sides are shattered. from the effort of fighting such a terrible war. So in Greece, the next 25 years or so are called the period of Theban hegemony.
We had the brief period of Spartan hegemony at the end of the Peloponnesian War, and then that transitions to the Theban hegemony because the polis of Thebes is the most powerful polis in Greece. Thebes does not make a very good hegemon. However, basically they are very greedy and try to gobble up... too much too soon and their nascent empire collapsed before it really got going.
And so Greece then is kind of in a bad way, right? So in other words, there's not really a dominant power in Greece. Sorry, excuse me.
So, you know, Greece is, again, there's kind of a political vacuum, right, in Greece where there's no dominant polis, there's no dominant sort of political or military force to sort of guide Greece. into the future, say after 345 BCE or so. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean world, the Persians rule, right? They basically rule, again, everywhere in the Mediterranean world other than Greece.
Though prior to 350 BCE and the rising to the throne of Artaxerxes III, who I mentioned in the previous lecture, right, their influence is on the wane. In other words, they're getting less and less authority. in their territories or in some territories like Egypt.
It's gone completely. Basically, Egypt is independent by 350 BCE. Not fully independent, right?
But more or almost independent basically in Egypt. And then remember that the Persians are organized in a feudal system of satrapies. So every region in Persia was called a satrapy. And then the The ruler of a satrapy is called a satrap. And remember, one of the problems of feudal systems is that they're prone to rebellion.
And so because Persian rulers, say from 400 to 350 BCE, had been sort of not very good rulers, the satraps were rising in rebellion. So there's a lot of issues in Persia as well. There's issues in Greece. There's issues in Persia.
We talked about Artaxerxes III as sort of this last great Persian ruler. Sorry, excuse me. I'm lecturing in a different spot in my house, and I feel like my posture in this chair is causing me to yawn. Sorry for that. So Artaxerxes III will rise to the throne around 350 BCE, and he begins going down and getting rid of these rebellions.
Remember in feudalism, the reason feudalism is so prone to rebellion is that each region has its own army, right? So every satrapy has its own army controlled by a satrap. And so Artaxerxes III does away with that, right? They begin disbanding the various armies of the various satraps, and then he begins going after the rebels, particularly in Egypt, right?
Because again, Egypt was... practically independent. And so Artaxerxes III brings them back into the Persian fold. And the Greeks and Persians are both making each other's lives miserable. And so again, as you can see, both the Greeks and the Persians, at least the Persians prior to 350, but with Artaxerxes III, the Persians get better, right?
But prior to 350, both the Greeks and the Persians, again, they're on the wane. They're just not as powerful as they had been. And they do meddle constantly in each other's affairs to try to weaken each other because they still don't really like each other, even though they're not actively fighting.
The Greeks and Persians will never really get along. A couple of the more famous examples of meddling are the 10,000. These were Greek mercenaries hired to help Cyrus the Younger, who was one of these Persian emperors that we don't know very much about.
Under Artaxerxes II... A bit of Persia was actually invaded by Sparta, but then Artaxerxes II was able basically to buy Sparta off, right? So the Spartan army is coming at him and he says, hey, instead of fighting me, how about you take all this gold? And the Spartans go, that's a great idea.
And then he says, and actually, there's this other polis over there. They're really annoying me. Would you go fight them? And here's more gold.
And the Spartans go, yes, great, we'll do that. The Spartans go and they get engaged in this war in this other polis and then Artaxerxes III Hires a bunch more Greeks to go and fight the Spartans Right and so Sparta basically learned you don't invade the Persians right because the Persians double-crossed them So as you can see they're holding each other down right the Greeks and Persians again They're constantly at each other's throats and so neither one can really thrive And in the Mediterranean world has descended into this very odd kind of malaise right where this had been sort of the the center of the world the most exciting place in the world right in the 400s right with all the greek philosophy with the incredible military and political conquest of the persians with the persians new system of government that was kinder and more humane right this is sort of the most innovative energetic part of the whole world prior to 400 but from 400 to 325 or so it's just not right the energy is gone the excitement's gone um in the mediterranean world is again just kind of treading water uh and into this uh just morass of uh you know just unenthusiastic old uh polities right emerges a new political force, Macedonia, also called Macedon. I'll say Macedon, but a lot of people say Macadone, and it's also Macedonia. You can say any of those, they're all the same.
And Macedonia is on the periphery of this Mediterranean world we've been discussing. They border both the Persians and the Greeks at various times in the centuries prior to 400. Macedonia had been conquered by the Greeks and or conquered by the Persians, right? So they're very much a part of the Mediterranean world, but again, geographically, they're kind of on just the very fringe of it. And Macedonia will emerge under the rule of Philip II. So Philip II was a very unlikely king because he was the third son of the king of Macedonia.
So the king has three sons, right? The first son is going to inherit the kingdom. If the first son dies, the second son gets to inherit the kingdom. And if by some chance the second son would also die, both the first and second sons both die, Philip II as the third son would get to inherit the kingdom, but only if the first and second sons died before they had children.
So in other words, if the first son of the king has a kid, then that kid will inherit when his dad dies, even if the dad was never king. And then if the second son, if the first son dies without having kids, but then the second son has a kid, and then the second son dies without being king, his kid would still inherit. So the only way a third son can become the king of a kingdom that determines who's going to be king by inheritance, which is most kingdoms.
So the only way the third son would ever get to be king is if both of his older brothers died and died childless. This is precisely what happens to Philip II. So Philip II is a very unlikely king, and this is a...
It's quite the historical coincidence because Philip II being king of Macedonia has absolutely enormous historical importance. But again, very rare that he would, you know, the chances of him being king were extraordinarily low. And they were so low that he spent his youth in Thebes as a royal hostage. So we haven't talked about royal hostages, but they're quite common in history.
And Philip II, this is... probably the most famous example. So the way a royal hostage worked was basically when one kingdom would conquer another kingdom, they would often, when the peace deal was made, if they gave the conquered kingdom its independence back, they would often take part of the royal family as hostages for good behavior. So basically this is what happened.
Thebes conquered Macedonia. whenever that war was over and they negotiated the peace, Macedonia was given its independence back, mostly because Macedonia was on the border and sort of served as a good thing to have on the border. Anyway, so Macedonia gets its independence back, but Thebes wants to make sure that Macedonia will basically follow Thebes'orders.
Thebes wants Macedonia to be independent. but also wants Macedonia to follow the wishes of Thebes. And so the way that Thebes ensures that Macedonia will do this is that the Theban king takes a child of the Macedonian king and brings him into his own household, right?
So Philip II becomes a royal hostage. The king of Thebes basically legally kidnaps Philip II and brings him to Thebes and then raises him as his own child. And then...
if the Macedonian king violates the wishes of the king of Thebes, then the royal hostage will be killed, right? So basically Philip II is held in Thebes to make sure that Macedonia follows the wishes of the king of Thebes. Again, otherwise they will kill Philip II, right? That's a royal hostage. Again, they are extraordinarily common, but this is definitely the most opportune moment to talk about them.
So he grows up in Thebes in the royal household as a hostage. As I've already said, his brothers do die childless, as does his father. Well, not childless, but his father dies as well. And so Philip II will inherit the kingdom in 359 BCE. And the kingdom he inherits is a kingdom in crisis.
The succession is very unsure just because he's a third son, and that's, again, very odd. And so, you know, no one really knows if he should even be the king. And then the kingdom is also plagued by multiple problems, particularly to its north. To the northeast of Macedonia is the kingdom of Thrace. And the Thracians were really good raiders, right?
They were constantly raiding into Macedonia or through Macedonia to try to get to Greece. Because even though Greek culture and Greek... So society is on the wane, the Greeks were still very wealthy. And so the Thracians were constantly raiding through Macedonia.
So that's the northeastern border. The northwestern border of Macedonia are the Illyrians. And the Illyrians were also good raiders, but they were master pirates. And it was actually Philip II's brothers and father all died fighting the Illyrians.
And so the kingdom is in crisis because, again, no one's really sure if Philip II should even be king. And then Macedonia is just plagued by these pirates and raiders. And then, of course, the Greeks are to the south, and the Greeks are traditionally considered more powerful.
So they have a very powerful neighbor to their south. And then farther to the east on the other side of Thrace are the Persians. And obviously the Persians are quite powerful. And so this is bad to make matters worse.
The Illyrian pirates had also wiped out the entire army when they killed the king and the two crown princes. Philip II takes this very terrible starting point and makes Macedonia into a regional power. They will emerge as the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean, in fact. And Philip II does this by revolutionizing the Macedonian military and then... going after first the Illyrians and then the Thracians.
As I've already mentioned, Thrace is to the northeast. The territory it covered is today mostly modern-day Bulgaria, and the Thracians were considered to have an enormous population, but this area was heavily forested, and so the Thracian population lived very spread out in small villages in the forest with very few cities. They were a tribal people with no central leader. You could fight them one by one. This is basically what the Macedonians under Philip II will do.
They'll fight the Thracians sort of village by village, town by town, tribe by tribe. And they never have to fight all the Thracians at one time. So even though the Thracians far outnumber the Macedonians in terms of overall population, the Macedonian army was always bigger than whatever little tribal army of the Thracians they happened to be fighting.
Again, the Thracians never unite into one single force. If they had, they would. probably could have taken on the Macedonian. Maybe a similar thing to what you would see, say, when in the United States, right, when white settlers would fight Native Americans, right, the white settlers would be fighting as one big group, whereas they'd be fighting the Native Americans as small little tribes, or even sub-tribes often.
So it's sort of the same sort of tribal disunity that dooms Thrace. And Philip II will fight... These two societies, the Thracians and the Illyrians, for almost 20 years in various scattered campaigns and would ultimately subjugate most of Thrace and all of Illyria by 340 BCE.
And so he's turned around a kingdom in absolute crisis and made them a kingdom again that's becoming something of a political and military juggernaut on the edge of the eastern Mediterranean. So just to give you a visualization, all of this would be considered Illyria, and the Macedonians will conquer it. This is Greece. This is the Persians.
Here's all of Thrace. You can see how big Thrace is, but again, there are very few cities. And the Greeks, of course, are quite disunified. So let's talk about how Philip revolutionized. What is it?
that he did that revolutionized the Macedonian army that allowed this major turnaround because it really is sort of a case of military training military tactics and military technology that sort of allows the Macedonians to emerge again in the context of an eastern Mediterranean that's in flux or in transit transition anyway right again the Greeks aren't the power they used to be the Persians aren't the power they used to be And so, you know, there is some historical luck for the Macedonians as well. It's not just that they have this incredible military, right? They also have a lot of luck.
But let's talk about their incredible military because it is quite dominant. So Philip II's chief reform was the invention of a military unit called the Macedonian Phalanx. And he learned this basically watching the Greeks during his childhood when he was in Thebes.
You know, he'd watch the various Greek hoplites. out training at war and he observed what they did and sort of said, ooh, that's a really cool idea, but I can improve on that. So that's basically where this idea comes from, just watching other militaries train a lot in Greece. And his chief invention here, the chief military technology that Philip II comes up with is a new weapon called a sarissa. A sarissa is an 18-foot long...
double-pointed pike. We probably aren't exactly aware what a pike is. A pike is like a spear with a little bit of an axe head. It's not quite an axe head, but it's a spear, but a spear with multiple points. So if you think of a spear, a spear has one point.
A pike would usually have two or three. The two or three points made pikes more useful against cavalry. They were better at sort of harming horses or camels than a standard spear.
So that's why you would go with a pike. And again, the Sarissa has the points on both ends, right? Whereas a spear would only have a point on one end and then the other end would just be like the butt end of the spear, right? The Sarissa has points on both ends.
And again, both ends are pikes with two or three points instead of just one. And if you think about it, this is an extraordinarily strange weapon, right? It's 18 feet long. You can't do much with an 18 foot long pole, right?
Try it, right? Go to Home Depot. go to the lumber section and go find the two by fours that are 18 feet long you won't even find them the longest they have are 16. so go pick up a 16 foot 2x4 and then try to swing it around like a sword or something right in other words the sarissa is not for hand-to-hand combat right it only makes sense uh in a large formation right this is again this is not a weapon for personal protection or hand-to-hand combat in other words the macedonians like the Greeks are going to fight in formation. And so every soldier in a Macedonian phalanx would carry a sarissa. These soldiers are called phalangites, right?
That's what the infantry in the phalanx was called, right? Phalangites comes from the word phalanx, right? So the infantry would carry a sarissa, right? The phalangite, they would carry a sarissa and they would be formed in tight squares, 16 by 16. So 16 soldiers across, 16 soldiers deep, every square is 256 soldiers. And they would make a very tight shield wall, and they would stick their sarissas out.
And there would be five layers of sort of pikes sticking out, right, of spear tips, five layers of them. Because it's the 18 feet, right, it's so long that even soldiers five men back could still stick theirs out. And everyone is standing the same way, right? So everyone's kind of standing with their chest puffed out because the shield is worn around the neck, like a necklace, because you need both hands to hold the Sarissa.
So you can't have one hand. Remember, a Hoplite has one hand holding a spear and one hand holding a shield, right? The Phalangites can't fight like that.
They need both hands for the Sarissa, and so the shield just hangs from their neck. Kind of like, I don't know if you ever played baseball, right? Like a...
baseball catcher's chest protector. That's basically what these shields look like. So they would stand with their chest out so that the shields could lock and make a shield wall. And then they would stick the Sarissa out. And even the guys, again, there's 16 layers of soldiers, so even the 16th layer, they're standing the same way.
So if someone in front of them dies, they can step up and take a spot. And so they basically fight as a moving shield wall with five layers of Sarissa tips. sticking out and they would move in perfect square formations and they fought Sort of less aggressively than hoplites remember hoplites would lock their shields Stick their spears out and then sprint across battlefields and smash into the other side That's not really the way the phalanx worked right the Macedonian phalanx.
They didn't the they didn't often sprint across battlefields and smash into other armies because the shield was too unwieldy, right? Because they're wearing a shield around their neck. It sort of wasn't as good for smashing into other sides. So basically the way the phalanx worked was the Macedonians wanted the other side to smash into them, right?
And then because the squares are so deep, these perfect square formations are so deep, that when the other side would smash in, they wouldn't. they wouldn't knock the phalanx back, right? So again, the hoplites, so imagine they're fighting hoplites, because they often did. When the hoplites would smash into the Macedonian phalanx, the Macedonian phalanx doesn't move, because again, it's 16 soldiers deep. And then the hoplites just smashed into five layers of sarissa tips sticking out.
And then basically the phalangites, their job after that was to hold the enemy in place. All right, so the phalangites are designed first to absorb. an enemy charge and then to hold the enemy lines in place right and then what came next was uh we'll talk about that in a moment what comes next is the macedonian cavalry would come charging in right and smash into the enemy held in place right and what's called a hammer and anvil tactic i don't know if you've ever seen an anvil right but that's like the big iron or steel uh thing that blacksmiths would smash tools against, right, with a hammer to shape a sword or to shape a horseshoe even, right? So I know my grandfather growing up, he always had an anvil. I don't know if your grandfather did or not, but an anvil, right, again, just a big iron block and you would smash sword blades or horseshoes or whatever and you'd shape hot iron against an anvil with a hammer, right?
So a hammer and anvil tactic is exactly that, where... Basically, the phalanx acts as the anvil, and again, the enemy is held there. And then the cavalry acts as a hammer and runs up behind the enemy and smashes them.
into the sericotyps of the phalangites, and the enemy can't move, and they're kind of stuck there. As the slide says, the only vulnerability of a Macedonian phalanx was on its sides, because everyone has to be facing forward, and you can't move a shield. So you can't hold a shield to the side because you're not holding the shield. The shield's worn around your neck, and so phalanxes could only move forward.
And so the Macedonian phalanx on the sides was protected by Hippasus. That's the name of the troops. And they were basically armed exactly like traditional Greek hoplites. And again, their job was to guard the flanks so that an enemy charge couldn't get around and hit the phalanx in the side where it was really vulnerable. And that's the way it worked.
That was the Macedonian military. And so again, what they do is they invite an enemy charge. The phalanx would absorb the charge, hold the enemy army in place.
And then the... the cavalry would sweep in behind and smash the enemy army into the phalanx and kill everybody. This worked extraordinarily well. As I already alluded to, the Macedonians and the phalanx were often fighting Greeks. This is because Philip II was always concerned with Greek affairs.
And so he made him, you know, again, he inserts himself into Greek affairs a lot. Unsurprisingly, he admired the Greeks. Most people who knew the Greeks admired the Greeks. They really liked Greek culture.
and Hellenism in general. And Philip II, of course, had spent his entire youth in Greece, and so he had a special sort of childhood affinity for Greece. This helps explain why he hired the very famous Greek philosopher Aristotle to come and tutor his son Alexander.
In a series of sort of diplomatic and military affairs, Philip II was able to outmaneuver Athens to seize northern gold mines sort of in the north of Greece, which made Macedonia very wealthy. And then he used that gold to buy ever greater degrees of political influence throughout Greece. So in other words, he's influencing the politics of various Greek polices for the benefit of the Macedonians. And the Greeks don't take kindly to this, right? So a lot of Greeks don't like these Macedonian upstarts who are meddling in their affairs.
And we get a lot of wars in Greece between the Greeks and the Macedonians. They're typically small wars. The Macedonians, in this case, the first real battle that the Macedonians will fight against the Greeks comes in either 353 or 352, historians can't agree, as part of the Third Sacred War.
So there were four sacred wars in Greece. in the 4th century BCE that we're not going to worry about. But in the 3rd, the Macedonians get involved because they wanted a certain polis to win, right? And then this angers other Greeks, and so the Greeks and the Macedonians fight at the Battle of Crocus Field, and the Macedonians with their awesome phalanx win this battle.
And this, combined with Philip II seizing those gold mines, really begins to... indicate a shift in the geopolitics of Greece. In other words, who's the most powerful political entity in Greece? It begins to shift away from the Greeks and towards the Macedonians. And this would continue for the rest of Philip's lifetime because basically for the next 20 years, particularly in the 340s, Greece is torn by a rivalry between Macedonia and Athens.
And again, Macedonia will prevail, particularly when they win the Battle of Cheronia in 338 BCE that destroys the armies of southern Greece. Again, the Macedonian phalanx was sort of perfectly designed to just destroy Greek hoplite armies. After this Battle of Cheronia, Philip II decides that he wants to invade the Achenid Persian Empire, and he wants to do so with Greek help.
Macedonia itself is not big or powerful enough to be able to take on the entire Persian Empire by itself. And so he basically forces the Greeks, because the Greeks more or less have to do what Macedonia says, because after the Battle of Charonia, they don't really even have armies anymore. And so Philip II more or less... forces the Greeks to join what's called the Hellenic League, with Philip II as Strategos. So Strategos is just the temporary leader of a temporary league, right?
So the Hellenic League is seen as a temporary alliance between the Greeks and the Macedonians, and Philip II is in charge. And again, the whole point of the Hellenic League was to invade the Achaian Persian Empire. Philip does not get to do this.
He does not get the opportunity to invade Persia because he is assassinated by his bodyguard, Pausanias of Orestes, at the marriage feast of one of his daughters in 336 BCE. Philip II had lots and lots of daughters, like dozens of daughters, but he only had two sons. Anyway, he's assassinated entering the marriage feast of one of his daughters by his own bodyguard. The bodyguard was then immediately killed by another bodyguard, and so no one ever got to interrogate Pausanias of Orestes.
And so the reasons why he carried out the assassination were never made clear, and they have been debated ever since. Because basically when Philip dies, Alexander the Great will become the king of Macedonia. And because Alexander the Great is such an important and impactful...
sort of world military and political leader, historians then want to debate how he got to take the throne. And so no one really knows who's responsible for this assassination. A lot of people don't like Philip II, right? Most of the Greeks, right?
Most Greek elites don't like this Macedonian who comes and gives them orders, right? The Greeks look down on the Macedonians, right? Those are like, you know...
Basically, the way the Greeks look at it, the Macedonians are kind of like country rednecks with very little civilization or very little culture. And here they are running amok in Greece. So basically, any Greek elite would have probably signed on to happily assassinate Philip II.
As we know, the Persians were constantly meddling in Greek affairs. The Persians probably know that Philip II is planning this invasion of Persia, so maybe it was the Persians. Neither of those are the leading candidates, however. The prevailing theory is that the person who ordered the assassination was Olympias.
Olympias is one of Philip's four wives. She was the mother of Alexander, and she does not like Philip. In fact, she hadn't lived with Philip II for some years.
She had been living in voluntary exile. She was an Illyrian princess who was basically married off to Philip. as part of a war alliance, right?
So she didn't, you know, it was a forced marriage to Philip. And again, she never really cared for the man. And by the time that Philip is killed, she is living in voluntary exile back at her old home in Illyria. And she was always quite politically ambitious, not just for herself, but also for all Illyrians and for her son, Alexander. And again, Philip only had one other son.
And... Again, we don't know who hired Pausanias to murder Philip, but we do know that Olympias had ordered the death of Philip's only other son and that boy's mother, one of Philip's other wives, to make sure that Alexander was the only son who would inherit Philip II's throne. So again, it was probably Olympias who ordered the assassination of Philip II, though again, there's lots of other Greek and Persian candidates.
Philip II, again, was a man with a lot of enemies and not so many friends. When he's killed, what this does mean is that Olympias gets her wish, and her son, Alexander, only 20 years old, rises to the throne of Macedonia and to the position of strategos of the Hellenic League. Now, a lot of people don't like taking orders from 20-year-olds.
And so Alexander spends the first several years of his reign suppressing revolts. The Illyrians rise up and revolt. We're not taking orders from a child.
We were defeated by Philip II. Philip II is gone. We therefore declare our independence. So Alexander goes in and smacks the Illyrians around.
Thracians, the same thing. We don't take orders from a child either. We answered only to Philip II. He's gone.
We are now independent. And so Alexander goes and smacks them around. Some of the Greek polices say, hey, we are withdrawing from the Hellenic League. Our promise was to Philip II.
He's gone. We're no longer beholden to this agreement. And Alexander would go and smack them around and say, no, actually, you are. So he spends his first two years suppressing these various revolts and just establishing his authority.
Look, I really am the king of Macedonia. I know my father, Philip II, was this great military and political leader. And you don't think that I can follow in his footsteps, but I'm going to clearly demonstrate to you that I am, you know, every bit the man my father was. And again, Alexander is a really impressive man, right?
As we'll come to see, he's an absolutely brilliant military strategist and tactician. He's a very good fighter. He's an absolute. sort of gambler and risk taker, right?
He's very reckless in battle. He's also extraordinarily well educated, right? He's probably the most educated person in the world in 336 BCE, right?
Having been tutored by Aristotle for several years. And so Alexander then carries out his father's planned invasion of Persia. And this worked out great for Olympias because Alexander is leaving his kingdom behind to go fight a war in Asia, and no one knows how long he's going to be gone, and he leaves his mother Olympias in charge.
So Olympias basically becomes the ruler of Macedonia while Alexander's off fighting wars. I've pointed out the Hellespont to you in a couple of different lectures. The Hellespont, again, is the easiest place to… across from Europe to Asia, right across the Turkish Straits, on the edge of the Mediterranean.
And just to give you a sense of what Alexander is like as a personality, because he's a complete megalomaniac, meaning he was completely obsessed with himself and his own greatness. And he really thought that he was sort of destined for greatness. As he's crossing the Hellespont, he's in the first boat across, right, because his whole army are on boats crossing the Hellespont. Alexander's in the very front of the very first boat.
He pulls a spear from his, you know, there's a spear sort of laying there in the boat next to him. He picks it up, and as the boat is approaching Asia, he throws the spear from the boat, right, it lands point down in Asia. And he says, I hereby claim this continent for myself. And so he claims the entire continent of Asia as he's crossing into it. In 334 BCE.
The funniest thing about this anecdote is he has no idea how big Asia is. No one in Greece knows how big Asia is. No one in Greece in 334 BCE knows that China exists. They don't really know that India exists. They know that Persia stretches across to something like India, stretches across Asia to someplace where elephants live.
Because again, the Persians have battle elephants. But the Greeks don't actually know what India is. They don't know where India is. They don't know how big India is. So when Alexander says he's going to conquer all of Asia, he thinks Persia is the very edge of Asia.
So what he really means is he's going to conquer Persia, but that's not what he thinks in his head. In his head, he thinks he's going to conquer Asia, and he basically declares he wants to be the king of Asia, and not just the king of Asia, the only king in Asia. And so again, he's a guy with delusions of self-grandeur.
Again, he thinks a lot of himself. He's easily one of the three or four most arrogant humans to ever live, right? Again, extraordinarily ambitious, but also just very intelligent.
Again, he doesn't know that China or India are there, but neither does anyone else in Greece, right? And no one really knows that China's there, right? China's still sort of separate from basically the rest of the world.
When he crossed, he had 32,000 infantry in the form of the Macedonian phalanx, mostly phalangites, but also some hepatists. And then he has more than 5,000 cavalry. And his very first battle comes quite quickly. He'll fight three battles against the Persians.
The first battle is called the Battle of the Gronicus. And these are basically the Persian troops stationed in Anatolia, who just happen to be there. That's where they were, right?
The troops were just in Anatolia all the time. So it's not like a special army raised because Alexander has invaded, right? They're just the troops that were already in Anatolia. And they meet Alexander.
And again, I told you the way these ancient battles usually go is both sides will wake up and they'll have some sort of magical figure who's a major advisor to the general. And he will divine the wishes of the gods on that particular day, again, by... reading the intros of a goat or watching the way the you know an eagle soars through the sky and you know oh the gods are angry today sir i wouldn't fight the battle today right so most of these ancient battles take three or four days to really get going when alexander sees the persian army across the field from him he just rushes straight into battle right for the persians this was unheard of again no one rushes into battle with the persians they have this incredible terrifying military machine number one And number two, no one rushes into battle in the ancient periods with anyone. But that's not Alexander. Alexander does whatever Alexander wants to do, right?
And so he just plunges straight into battle. And the battle's not going so well, right? It's kind of like a 50-50 affair. And Alexander, he's the cavalry commander, and he's usually surrounded by some bodyguards, like 100 bodyguards.
And he and the cavalry and all of his bodyguards are watching the battle, and you can see the kind of grimacing, like, ooh, it's not going so well. And Alexander says, screw this. I'm going to change the fate of this battle myself. And so he just charges right into the fighting, right in the middle of the fighting.
He's nearly killed because someone hits him in the back of the head with an axe. A helmet basically deflects the blow, but it stunned him. You can imagine, it doesn't matter how big a helmet you have, if someone hits you in the head, if a grown man hits you in the back of the head with an axe, it's going to stun you. But before he could be killed, one of his bodyguards jumped in and saved his life.
That bodyguard would then be obviously promoted. and his sort of reckless just smashing into the battle on his own turned the tide, and Alexander and the Macedonians win the battle. So they win the battle of Granicus, again, mostly through the personal recklessness of Alexander, and again, this would become a pattern for him.
He was a very reckless person, and after they win the battle, they begin liberating. writing here in scare quotes the various Ionian cities. Remember the Ionian cities were Greek cultured cities in Anatolia.
And so Alexander rides into each one. He says, I hereby declare in the name of the Hellenic League and the kingdom of Macedonia, you are freed from the yoke of Persian oppression, right? Or some such variation of that pattern. Most of the Ionian cities are like, who's Macedonia? The Persians are oppressing us.
You know, this would be news to all of them. They don't need to be liberated. Persian rule was actually pretty good, right?
But Alexander liberates them in the name of Alexander, right? And so Anatolia then is sort of taken away from the Persians. And Alexander, again, he's the king in Asia, so he's going to continue marching into Asia to find more Persians to kill. And so he marches through Anatolia and he begins descending south into the Levant. Again, they're sort of in the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea.
And then behind him marches an enormous Persian army led by the Persian emperor himself, the king of kings, Darius III. Darius III was placed into power by his uncle, who was a eunuch and the chief advisor to Artaxerxes III. Remember that eunuch had murdered Artaxerxes III and Artaxerxes III's. son and then put his nephew, Darius III, into power.
So Darius III is a sort of pretender king, but he does run the Persian Empire. As we'll see, he turns out not to be a very good king, but he's leading this enormous army that was specifically raised to deal with this Macedonian invasion. Remember, the first army that Alexander fought was just an army that happened to be in Anatolia, and it wasn't raised to deal with the threat of Alexander himself.
It just happened to This armor that Darius III is leading, again, was specifically raised to go put down this Macedonian invasion. And Darius III cuts the line of march from Alexander. So Alexander has a decision to make. He can press forward on the offensive through the Levant, or he can turn around and try to secure his lines of supply and his lines of retreat. Because if he presses on, then there's no chance he'll ever be able to retreat back.
to Macedonia, and maybe that's where Darius III is headed, right? Maybe Darius III is going to march on Macedonia and Greece and sort of, you know, burn down Macedonia and Greece while all the Macedonian and Greek soldiers are off with Alexander, right, in the Levant. And so it would be very risky for Alexander to press on, and also quite stupid.
Alexander has no trouble taking a risk, but he's not going to do something stupid. So Alexander decides to turn around and meet the Persians for battle. Darius III is only too happy to make battle because he thinks that he will easily win the battle.
So Darius III thinks this is a guaranteed Persian victory at the battle. This is a very famous battle. It happens on the 5th of November, 333 BCE in a very tight mountain pass.
And Alexander gets to choose the battlefield. And again, being a great military tactician, he realizes the advantages he would have in a tight pass. It's not quite Thermopylae, but it's similar.
And remember what the Greeks were able to do to the Persians in a tight pass at Thermopylae. So the Greek sources say that Darius III commands 600,000 men. As we've already said many times, the Greek sources, all of the ancient sources, but the Greeks most of all are sort of famous for exaggerating.
So Darius III almost certainly doesn't have 600,000 men. It's more likely around 100,000. And Alexander has fewer than 40,000. So you can see why Darius III is confident.
He has two and a half men for everyone that Alexander has. But again, Alexander has picked... tight pass and so the tight terrain sort of evens the odds because only so many Persians can fit on the battle line at one time again because the geography is squeezing the battle lines.
So the Persians are squeezed by the terrain and this really again helps the Macedonian forces. Much like we saw in the first battle, the Battle of Gronicus, the battle is more or less a stalemate. And then the Persians look to be turning the tide.
So it looks like Persia is going to win this battle and sort of dash Alexander's dreams of being the king of Asia. And then once again, Alexander decides that he will personally turn the tide of battle. And he grabs a sword and a lance, and he goes charging into the battle himself. He smashes right into the Persian lines, punches a hole through the...
the Persian lines, and then dashes through it, right? So he basically runs all the way through the battle, right? He just punches a hole straight through the Persian lines and keeps going.
Who's behind the Persian lines? Darius III, right, in a chariot watching the battle, right? And so Alexander rides straight for Darius. He's going to take on Darius III and his bodyguards, you know, directly and personally, right? Rather than fighting out this battle in the field, how about it just be me, Alexander, versus you, Darius III?
Darius III orders his chariot to flee the field. So Darius III just runs away, leaves his troops there with no concern for the safety of his troops. The Persian forces then are extraordinarily demoralized. They're not motivated to continue fighting, and so they sort of crumble and retreat. We're not fighting for a king who won't even stay on the battlefield.
And so, again, Alexander turns the tide of a battle that he seemed like he was going to lose through personal courage and, again, just absurd recklessness. And the Battle of Issus becomes the second major victory against the Persians. And at this point, it's going to take a while before the Persians are going to be able to fight Alexander again.
Because Darius III needs to raise a new army. And that takes a while, right? Even with the great sort of administrative machine that the Persians have, where they can raise troops faster than, you know, your average ancient kingdom, it takes a while for an ancient kingdom to raise an army.
I mean, it takes a while for a modern country to raise an army, right? When the U.S. gets involved in World War I, for instance, in 1917, it takes the U.S. about 12 months to really get troops in the field in France, right? And that's with, you know... modern ship technology and airplanes and railroads and that sort of thing. It's an ancient period.
It takes a while to raise an army. So Alexander knows that it's going to be a while before the Persians can really fight him. And so he begins now to show why he's also not just a master tactician, a tactician on the battlefield.
He's also a master strategist. And so he understands that the next thing he needs to do is to deny coastal ports to the Persian Empire. So that way the Persian Empire can't sail in.
behind them with a lot of supplies for troops or to bring in troops. So he wants to make sure that the Persians can't get behind him anymore. So he begins capturing all of the coastal ports along the Levantine coast. Most of the ports sort of surrender straight away.
The city of Tyre does not. The city of Tyre is a Phoenician city in modern-day Lebanon. And Alexander had to put them under siege for six months in the year...
332 BCE, and this infuriated him. He could not believe that the Tyrian people were resisting him. I'm Alexander. I'm undeniable. I'm the king of Asia.
How dare you resist me? That was sort of his attitude. I have defeated all of the Persian armies.
I am clearly God-touched. I'm clearly the person who's supposed to be in charge here. How dare you, people of Tyre?
resist me and slow me down and make me waste six months to take your minor little city. So upon taking the city, Alexander enters Tyre in a rage. He orders all the men of the city killed, and orders all the women and children of Tyre sold into slavery, and then he's set the city on fire with an intention of burning it down, but only about half of it burned down. After seeing this, most of the other cities surrender.
All of Egypt surrenders. Remember, Egypt doesn't like being in the Persian Empire. They had rebelled and were nearly independent. 350 BCE to Artaxerxes III sort of brought them back by putting down the rebellion. And so they really don't like the Persians.
And so they're not going to fight Alexander on behalf of Persia, particularly because they know that Alexander is going to win anyway. And when he does, they'll get the treatment that Tyr got. So no one wants to be treated like Tyr.
And again, everyone sort of assumes that if they resist, Alexander is going to win anyway. And so you just give in and then hopefully he doesn't. you know murder you and sell your children in slavery and burn your city down so all the other sort of coastal cities and coastal areas surrender except the city of gaza which alexander besieges and uh it takes him much less time than tear tears an island so he basically had to build um a bridge out to this a bridge that was the same height as the city walls so he basically had to build like okay a really big wall and then a bridge from the top of his wall to the top of the Tyr wall, and then run troops across his bridge into Tyr to take the city.
That's why it took Tyr so long. It only takes him about six weeks to take Gaza, and then Gaza gets treated like Tyr. All the men killed, the women and children sold into slavery, and the city burned down. As I've already said, the Egyptians don't like the Persians, and so they greet Alexander as a conquering hero.
They understand that this will be good for them because it will stoke his... enormous ego and he will give them you know sort of good treatment because they're flattering him and that's precisely what happens. Alexander also founds a new city in Egypt on the coast.
He names it after himself because again he's a very arrogant man so he calls the city Alexandria. It's still there. It's still called Alexandria.
It's the second biggest city in Egypt. Alexander would found more than 100 cities on his conquest across Asia, and he named them all Alexandria. Most of them have since changed their name or just sort of ceased to exist.
We'll talk about a couple more later in the slide, but he founds a lot of cities, and again, he calls them all Alexandria. But Alexandria, Egypt is the only one still called Alexandria. It's the biggest of all of his cities. He does all of this in 332 BCE. And then he kind of hangs out in Egypt for about six months, partying.
As we'll come to see, Alexander loves to party. He was extremely famous for just these huge, debaucherous, drunken orgies that would last sometimes two or three months. And that's basically what he does here in Egypt, Reg.
just a huge just drunken party of just mass random sex and you know contest and you know like a fighting contest and horse right you know horse racing and just anything that you could do that would be sort of debaucherous you know you could gamble on uh with anything that might lead to sex or drinking right alexander was all for those sorts of things and so he parties for a while in egypt and then continues his campaign in 331 BCE, and he's headed towards Persepolis. Remember, Persepolis is that great Persian capital that was built by Darius the Great. And this comes to the third major battle between Alexander and his Macedonian forces on one side and the Persian forces on the other, the Battle of Gagumela.
Throughout all of this time, I should note, Darius III is repeatedly attempting to negotiate with alexander to reach a peace settlement where he says look you can have all take the levant take anatolia take egypt and we'll just call it a day right i don't feel like fighting you if i fight you i'll come win just you know just take those cities and go back to macedonia alexander does not want to negotiate right alexander refuses all attempts to negotiate he wants to be the only king of asia right all of asia belongs to me i claimed it when i crossed the hell of spot Darius III goes, that's an insane thing to say. All of Asia belongs to me. Darius III, you know, is in his picture.
He's looking at his advisor like, this guy's crazy, right? And they're all like, yeah. So in other words, Alexander rebuffs every attempt to negotiate and stop the invasion. And Darius III still truly thinks that if they fight again, the persians will win right so he thinks that alexander is foolish to turn down these negotiations so darius iii will take off to meet alexander for one more fight um and they will meet in gagamella and darius iii again has an enormous army it's almost certainly bigger than the previous army So Alexander, we know, has 47,000 troops.
The Greek sources say that Darius has 100,000. Not 100,000, a million. So remember, the last battle, Darius supposedly had 600,000.
So for the Battle of Gagamella, he will supposedly have a million. Again, that's definitely false. He definitely does not have a million troops. But he probably has more than 100,000. He probably does have more troops than the last battle.
Let's just say he has at least 100,000. So he still has Alexander outnumbered two to one. So you can understand why Darius III thinks that he can win. There are two routes from Egypt to Persepolis, a northern route and a southern route.
The southern route was much easier and much faster, so the Persians assumed that Alexander would take the southern route. But again, Alexander is something of a military genius. He knows the Persians are going to expect that he's on the southern route. And so he marches on a northern route, surprising Persia.
Even though the Persians were surprised, they still got to pick the battlefield this time. Remember in the last battle, Alexander got to pick the battlefield, and he picked this tight mountain pass. This time, Darius III gets to pick the battle, and he picks this enormous flat field, which is perfect for all of the advantages the Persians have for their war chariots and their various other kinds of cavalry. And on the point of war chariots, the Persians bring a new terrifying weapon to this battle that Darius III is convinced that this weapon is going to win the battle for him.
This weapon is a scythe chariot. And scythe chariots are really awesome. And you've seen them in films. And when I describe them to you, you're going to be like, oh, my God, that's so cool. Or, oh, my God, that's so wicked or something, right?
They always get a reaction. A scythe chariot is a chariot. And so a chariot's already pretty deadly, right?
They'd usually be pulled by one, sometimes even two horses. They'd go very fast for the ancient period anyway, you know, like 10, 12, 14, sometimes 20 miles an hour. And then in the chariot, there'd be a driver and then usually two fighters, right? And at a distance, the fighters were fighting with bows, right?
And then as they get in close, they'd pull out a big lance, right? And so chariots were quite devastating. Scythe chariots were extra devastating because on the wheels, there were blades projecting out.
So basically, a scythe is a blade. They basically have knife blades sticking out of the wheels. So if you were to take the scythe chariot and drive it through an infantry formation, it's not only trampling the people in front of them, and it's not only killing the people that the two fighters are hitting with their lances.
but it's also killing people on the sides as the wheels turn and turn those knife blades. And so they were a terrifying weapon. They hadn't really been tried in battle, and they have very little effect in the Battle of Taganala. They didn't actually accomplish much, but they were scary. So you can imagine some of the Macedonian soldiers were probably quite frightened when they saw them.
But anyway, this huge flat field plays up all of the advantages the Persians have. And again, the advantages include their scythe chariots. And just in general, they're great cavalry and then their enormous numerical advantage.
Again, they have Alexander outnumbered two to one. And Alexander here shows the real, he really shows the full potential of the phalangist, right, and how the phalangist can sort of absorb an enemy attack and hold that attack in place for that hammer and anvil, you know, for the cavalry to come in and smash. And so basically what he does is he refuses to say what he sort of refuses to commit to the battle.
Remember, Alexander was always extraordinarily aggressive in committing the battle. He's not here. He's very sort of reticent to get involved and is sort of baiting the Persians into committing fully.
And so basically he wants the Persians to basically determine where their troops are going to be, and then he's going to attempt his reckless cavalry charges right at Darius. And Darius III is also sort of being cautious. So I don't know if you've ever watched boxing.
If you watch a really good boxing match, in the first five or six rounds, there's very few punches thrown. Both fighters are kind of sizing up the other fighter, trying to see where an opening might open up. So that's kind of what these two guys are doing. They're circling each other, waiting for the other side to commit.
Darius III finally decides, look, I got twice as many troops. I'm going for it. He commits. And then Alexander does what he'd done in the previous battle, and he just charges straight at Darius, right?
Just this reckless, headlong cavalry charge right at Darius III. And just like at the Battle of Isis, it works. Darius III flees the battle, and then all the Persians basically just throw their weapons down. We're not fighting for this asshole, right, who just retreats.
And so Alexander wins the Battle of Gagamella again with just... crazily audacious cavalry maneuver that he personally led himself. And again, Darius III flees, and there's no longer a Persian army. So the Persians are done. Alexander moves on to Babylon.
That's the next city along his path. And then from Babylon to Persepolis. In both cities, the cities were undefended.
Gates open. We're not resisting. Alexander, you're welcome.
There's no army to defend them. And so the cities just surrender without a fight. In Persepolis, he loots the city. Again, this is probably the richest city in the world.
So Alexander just made himself probably the wealthiest man who's ever lived upon looting the city of Persepolis. He's very fair in sharing the spoils with his troops. Alexander's troops universally love him because of his tactical and strategic genius.
Because he personally... takes so many risks on the battlefield for himself, right? And because he shares the spoils of Persepolis, right?
So his troops will be fiercely loyal to him. And he stays in Persepolis for five months doing his usual things, right? Orgies, drunken debauchery, partying, that sort of thing.
And as I alluded to when we talked about the Persians in the previous lecture, for unknown reasons, the city of Persepolis will catch fire and burn down, and the city is destroyed. Again, we don't know why the city burns. There are sort of three theories. So one is that it has nothing to do with Alexander, right?
These old cities burned, right? A cow in a stable kicked over a lantern, caught some hay on fire, right? The building next to the stable caught on fire. The building next to that one caught on fire. The fire is raging out of control, and there you have it, right?
Cities burned down. So it might have had nothing to do with Alexander. That's probably not true, right? So the two leading theories are that Alexander burned it down on accident because he was drunk and was doing something stupid with fire. He's still a child.
He was only 20 when he took over. He's still in his 20s. So people in their 20s, most of you are probably in your 20s.
People in their 20s make stupid decisions. People in their 20s lack sort of good, sound adult judgment. That's normal. That's not a criticism. That's everyone.
Alexander is more petulant and more immature than your average 20 year old because he's a spoiled royal. He's the richest man in the world. He's the most successful man in the world and again he already had a very inflated ego so he's probably doing something stupid with fire while being drunk.
Maybe he's trying to do some weird sexual act with fire or something and accidentally sets the city on fire. So that's leading theory number two. Leading theory number three is that being petulant and immature, and again, something of an egomaniac, he was personally insulted by someone, flies into an uncontrollable rage, and burns the city down on purpose.
It's one of those three things, right? It burns down, has nothing to do with Alexander, it's an accident. It burns down because Alexander's doing something stupid, or it burns down because Alexander set it on fire.
Again, we don't know which of the three it was, but Persepolis, again, almost certainly the greatest city in the world. at that particular moment burns down. So then Alexander is forced to leave the city. He goes back on his campaign. Darius III is still alive.
He's still technically the king of the Persians. And again, Alexander wants to be the only king in Asia. So he continues, right? He continues east. He's going east and east and east, away from Europe, again, to conquer all of Asia and become its king, whatever that might mean.
So he's chasing Darius III. Darius III was captured by one of his own satraps, right? So Bessus.
So Darius III goes to Bessus and says, oh, dear friend Bessus, please take me in off of your shelter. And Bessus goes, of course I will. Right?
And as soon as Darius III comes in, Bessus sort of handcuffs him and makes him prisoner and then would ultimately kill Darius III. III. So Alexander never catches Darius III.
Darius III is killed by one of his supposed allies, Bessus. And then Bessus says, I am now the king of the Persians. And he retreats into the mountains of Central Asia, right? The mountains of the Himalayas, the Hindu Kush, right? The mountains of Tibet and Afghanistan today, right?
That's where Bessus goes. He retreats into the mountains and he starts a guerrilla war against Alexander and the Macedonians. So now Alexander He's chasing Darius.
He's chasing Bessus. And he chases them all over modern-day Afghanistan, modern-day Tajikistan, into modern-day, say, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, all over Tibet. He's chasing all over Central Asia.
And again, Alexander and the Greeks, they didn't know any of this stuff existed. When Alexander left Macedonia, he had no idea how big Asia was. He didn't know that, you know, that... The Eurasian steppe extended that far. He didn't know that those mountains were there, that this place called Afghanistan is there.
He doesn't know about India. So Alexandria is chasing Vestas all over this territory, and he's amazed at, wow, look how much territory there is. Look at all this great land. And he's also founding cities.
Again, he founds dozens of cities in Central Asia. He calls them all Alexandria. One of them has thrived in the modern day. It's now the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, the second biggest city. in Afghanistan.
He does finally defeat Bessus in 326 BCE and sort of on the edge of India and he says, well, what the hell, I'll invade India. This is still Asia after all. And again, I'm the only king in Asia. I have claimed all of Asia for myself.
And so he plunges then into India and begins conquering it and conquers all of what would be modern day Pakistan and then begins working his way through northern and western India. The biggest battle he faces here is called the Battle of Hydaspis in 326. He nearly loses this battle, but as he always does, he sort of saves it with a last-minute dash of ridiculous bravery and wins that battle and continues fighting and fighting and fighting. Eventually, he reaches the Ganges River, and he tells his troops, all right, we camp here tonight. Tomorrow, we're going to cross the Ganges. He doesn't know it's called the Ganges.
Tomorrow, we're going to cross this river. and continue conquering east until we reach you know the edge of the world or whatever whatever's on the other side of asia right because i am the the only king of asia uh and remember his troops they love them but they say alexander we love you you're you're a great leader we would fight we would fight with you forever but we haven't been home in seven years we miss our wives we miss our children We miss our farms. We'd like to see Greece again. We'd like to see Macedonia again.
Haven't you conquered enough? Don't you feel like you are the king of Asia? Look at all you've conquered.
The entire Persian Empire, India, Central Asia, Egypt. We refuse. We love you, but we refuse. And they mutiny. And so Alexander is forced to turn home.
He sees the wisdom of his troops. Again, he's a fair man, fiercely loyal to his troops who are fiercely loyal to him in return. And he sort of sees those troops have a point.
And he decides he should probably return to Macedonia and begin consolidating this absolutely, again, just enormous empire. It's the biggest empire anyone had ever conquered before. So he turns for home.
Alexander will never make it home. He dies on either the 10th. or the 11th of June 323 BCE in Babylon.
He had stopped in Babylon. He had been ill for approximately 12 days. The cause and the nature of his death are unknown and hotly disputed.
There was a great conspiracy theory that he had been poisoned, but there wasn't any poison known to the ancients of that region of the world that would make you sick for 12 days before killing you. The poison's either worked instantaneously or it would make you sick for two or three days and then kill you. So if he was sick for 12 days, it almost certainly wasn't. poison because again the people who lived in the persian empire you know in that part of asia at that time and then anyone who lived in greece right so no one in alexander's retinue right no one in the in the immediate area would have had acts would have known about a poison that would take 12 days of sickness before killing you um but that that's definitely sort of the the most dramatic possible outcome right more likely It was one of two things. He either had something like appendicitis.
I don't know if you've had appendicitis. I have. But he complained of severe stomach pain, like just ungodly stomach pain. Again, this is a very tough, battle-hardened kind of soldier. So maybe he had appendicitis or pancreatitis or something like that in one of his small digestive organs.
And then it ruptured, and then he died of septic shock. Which, you know, that's... treats the timeline. Additionally, maybe he had some kind of cancer, maybe he had pancreatic cancer or liver cancer. So it was probably something medical like that.
And again, that's not unlikely because Alexander drank alcohol at a very high volume, right? He drank way more alcohol than any person should. I'm talking like literal gallons of wine every day for years.
And so maybe his liver just gave up, right? So he could have just given himself sclerosis at a very early age. You can imagine he probably had a lot of stress, so maybe he had ulcers.
There was probably some kind of medical issue in his digestive system, but he did die. So he never made it home. He was only 32 years old when he died. When he died, he presided over, by far, the largest empire ever assembled up to that point.
And it would be a thousand years before any empire would be larger than the one that Alexander the Great created for himself. Again, he never really governed it. He mostly just conquered it.
Once he died, no one knew what came next. And what came next ended up to be a 40-year civil war over the secession. Alexander, unmarried, childless.
He probably actually had a lot of children with all those orgies. No official legitimate child that could be an heir. So Alexander dies without an heir, and no one knows who should take over.
Should we keep the whole empire together? Do we divide the empire into smaller pieces? What comes next, basically?
What do we do with Olympias, who's still governing over Macedonia? Alexander doesn't have brothers. No one really knows what's going to come next.
So what comes next is 40 years of civil war. The war ended around sometime in the 280s, 290s with four fairly stable, much smaller empires. They basically take Alexander's empire and break it into four pieces, not equal pieces.
So the biggest piece by far is Seleucid Mesopotamia, and the Seleucids will return. When we talk about the Romans... In a couple lectures, we'll talk a lot about the Seleucids. So first of all, the whole eastern part of the empire breaks apart, right? So no one's controlling India.
So India breaks apart and becomes its own thing. And then what's left, right? Seleucid Mesopotamia, Ptolemaic Egypt, Adalid Anatolia, and Antigonid Macedonia. Macedonia controls Macedonia and Greece.
Adalid Anatolia controls Anatolia and a bit of Levant. Ptolemaic Egypt controls Egypt. And Seleucid Mesopotamia controls more of the Levant, all of Mesopotamia, and most of Persia, and then basically everything east. So again, the Seleucids are the biggest, and they will sort of be the ones that last the longest. Again, we will come back to the Seleucids in a couple of lectures.
They'll play a major part in the Roman Empire as well. So before we close on Alexander the Great, it's probably worth discussing his legacy. As I've already said, he's easily one of the, you know...
six or eight most famous people to ever live you know he's well known throughout the world um and he's also one of the six or eight most important or consequential people to ever live and so let's talk about why that is so basically the question here is what's the point of all of it right again he conquers the largest empire ever seen lots and lots and lots and lots of people die in the greatest city in the world persepolis is burned to the ground um you A lot of treasure was looted and moved about. But what's the point? Because he never governed. It's not like the Persians. Again, what was the point of the Persians?
an administrative revolution in the ancient world, a new way to govern, a new and more humane way to govern. They significantly diminished the cruelty in their realm. So that was a great point to the Persians. Alexander doesn't do any of that. He never governs.
So what was the point of it? What did he actually accomplish? And there are basically three big things that Alexander the Great accomplishes. The first and probably the most important is contact. He brings Europe.
and the Mediterranean world into direct contact with both South and Central Asia and establishes networks of exchange that would shape the next 2,000 plus years of history, right? Networks of exchange of trade goods, of ideas, of religions that will shape the next 2,000 years. And so when Christianity is developed, Christianity will quickly spread.
from the Mediterranean world into South and Central Asia, right, because of Alexander the Great. When Islam is established, Islam will move, right, quickly from the Mediterranean world into South and Central Asia. Ideas move up and down these routes as well, right?
Ideas about good technology, for instance, good navigational technology. and military innovations, trade goods. And in the next lecture, we'll see how China opens up this. So China basically does the same thing in reverse, right? China also gets in contact with Central Asia after Alexander, right?
But what that meant was, so if China is in contact with Central Asia and Central Asia is in contact with Europe, therefore Europe is in contact with China. And we begin to see trade between the Chinese and, say, Europeans, right? Even in the Roman period, we'll see this, right?
And so we get Chinese ideas and Chinese trade goods coming from China into Europe. And again, the Chinese have a lot of ideas, right? They are technologically sort of more advanced than the rest of the world.
They will invent paper. They will invent gunpowder, right? And those ideas travel into Europe via the contact. established by Alexander the Great.
So Alexander the Great really shapes the world for the next 2,000 years, right? Even disease will travel from China to Europe and from Europe to China, right? The bubonic plague that just destroys the population of Europe in the medieval period came from China, right? Via the trade routes opened up by Alexander the Great. So Alexander the Great would continue to have a very direct effect on...
on the world, on the Eurasian world, thousands of years after he died. He sort of created the idea of a Eurasian world. Again, putting Europe into contact with Central and South Asia, and then a generation or two later with East Asia as well. So contact, that's legacy point number one.
Legacy point number two is culture. Alexander the Great spread Hellenic culture across Asia. I told you the Greeks are...
enormously influential even today in the 21st century because their culture spread everywhere right the number one spreader of hellenic culture is alexander the great because again he carries hellenic culture with him as he conquers throughout asia and so he takes the ideas of plato the ideas of aristotle right the love of art and literature and theater and wine right because he's constantly drinking wine and he brings those with him to asia right to india Those Greek virtues of humility and discipline and cooperation, he carries those with him and spreads those various Hellenic cultural elements throughout the rest of Asia, throughout the rest of the world. This is why today, if you go to a Greek restaurant or a Syrian restaurant, they're serving very similar food. Why? Because in a lot of ways, they share a culture.
Why do they share a culture? spreads Hellenic culture from Greece into Asia. And the third major legacy of Alexander the Great is politics.
And we'll see the effects of this in great detail when we look at the Romans. And when I say politics, it's he brings Europe more formally, more firmly into the Mediterranean world, right? So everything on the other side of Greece from Asia. And so if you think of Greece, Greece is kind of the bridge between Asia and the rest of Europe. And that rest of Europe was sort of out of the picture.
We haven't talked about that. We haven't talked about the rest of Europe at all in this class. Think about the topics we've discussed.
Talk about Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia and, you know, points east from there. We haven't talked at all about people who live in modern day France, modern day Britain, modern day Italy, modern day Spain. We haven't mentioned them a single time in class yet. What Alexander the Great does is he sort of develops, again, a conduit. through which the people who live in Europe, again, modern-day France, modern-day Germany, can be in contact with Mesopotamian politics.
So he brings Europe into the Mediterranean world in a way. And we'll see this again. We'll see what this really accomplishes when we discuss the Romans, because the Romans are going to come from Europe, and they're going to blow right through Greece and into Asia.
and become the dominant force in the Mediterranean world. And sort of finish what Alexander started here with the incorporation of Europe more firmly into the geopolitics of the Mediterranean world, the geopolitics of Asia and Mesopotamia. So Alexander's legacy, it's difficult to overstate how important of a figure he is. Again, we can sum it up in three broad points, contact, culture, politics. Again, I would argue contact being the most important.
but the culture and politics also quite important. And that's all I have for you on Alexander the Great. I will see you next time.