EP9 Glimpses of Olympias

What this episode is about

The discussion highlights the entertainment industry's ongoing struggle for original ideas, emphasizing the untapped potential of historical narratives that could inspire compelling stories. It particularly focuses on the overlooked, rich history of Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, advocating for her story to be transformed into a cinematic portrayal, underscoring the abundance of intriguing historical figures waiting to be explored.

Key takeaways

• Hollywood's idea well is drying up—who needs creativity when nostalgia is a cash cow?
• Desperate for content, studios skip stories brimming with potential, instead repackaging our childhood.
• Strong female leads sell, yet Alexander the Great's mom remains a hidden gem—where's the love?
• History narrates the wildest tales, yet filmmakers choose dragons over real-life drama. Curious choice!
• Alexander's 'mama's boy' label begs the question: can you conquer the world while hugging your mom?

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dan Carlin (Host) · 3 h 21 min speaking
• Elizabeth Carney (Guest) · 11 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 15:00: Alexander the Great, Elizabeth Carney, Macedonia, Philip II of Macedon
2. 15:00 – 30:00: Alexander the Great, Dionysus, Heracles, Richard A. Gabriel
3. 30:00 – 45:00: Dionysus, Heracles, Alexander the Great
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00: Persia, Elizabeth Carney, Thebes, Philip II of Macedon
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00: Persia
6. 1:15:00 – 1:30:00: Dionysus, Elizabeth Carney, Alexander the Great, Richard A. Gabriel
7. 1:30:00 – 1:45:00: Elizabeth Carney, Macedonia, Persia
8. 1:45:00 – 2:00:00: Heracles, Alexander the Great, Persia, Elizabeth Carney
9. 2:00:00 – 2:15:00: Persia, Elizabeth Carney, Alexander the Great, Heracles
10. 2:15:00 – 2:30:00: Alexander the Great
11. 2:30:00 – 2:45:00: Alexander the Great
12. 2:45:00 – 3:00:00: Alexander the Great
13. 3:00:00 – 3:15:00: Dionysus, Alexander the Great, Elizabeth Carney
14. 3:15:00 – 3:30:00: Alexander the Great, Macedonia
15. 3:30:00 – 3:32:00: Alexander the Great

Notable quotes from "EP9 Glimpses of Olympias"

• What's great about him of course is you can see him a thousand different ways so take your pick but Elizabeth Carney was addressing this question that has arisen from you know…

  about Elizabeth Carney · at 5:11

• Set up the invasion of Persia he actually had a beachhead established in Persian territory when he died Alexander grabbed the keys to the car and conquered you know half the known world with it he was using basically the German Vermont 1940.

  about Alexander the Great · at 13:00

• Kind of barbarians and the funny part about it is it's a sliding scale because the makedonia pnes were always trying to import all these Greek scholars and teachers and art…

  about Macedonia · at 14:26

• The mountains though and it Pyrus is a place and it's funny how you could have this right where the makedonia pnes are a little leery of elizabeth carney quotes some of the…

  about Pyrus · at 15:38

• In a nutshell though you know my college buddies he's the god of partying but it's so much deeper than that yes wine okay so that they're drinking but there's ritual ecstasy…

  about Dionysus · at 19:51

• Bananas there are Jed's they are the descendants of Hercules or Heracles is the better word for it and she shows up and she's descended from her own royal line which goes back to a different demigod Achilles and she's proud of it and aware.

  about Heracles · at 22:55

• A whole different way to look at it isn't it when he destroyed both those armies at the Battle of Chaeronea the combined arms of Thebes and Athens and it wasn't all that close…

  about Thebes · at 46:31

• This is the way the propaganda sells it and hey the Persians back for that whole invasion thing that happened you know with the we are Spartans thing more than a century before you like getting mad at somebody for something that happened in.

  about Persia · at 48:39

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Alexander the Great — Person · Primary historical subject (referenced figure) · 28 mentions · first at 1:47
  The episode frames Olympias through her relationship to Alexander and repeatedly uses Alexander’s life, propaganda, and later succession crisis as context for her power and reputation.
• Philip II of Macedon — Person · Key historical figure (referenced figure) · 2 mentions · first at 12:58
  Presented as the builder of Macedonian power and Alexander’s father/husband of Olympias; his marriage politics and assassination are used to illustrate the lethal court environment Olympias navigated.
  Gassed up and ready to go to his son who then gets you know does it and gets credit for it philip ii is the guy that set up the invasion of Persia he actually had a beachhead…
• Elizabeth Carney — Person · Referenced expert (modern historian) · 16 mentions · first at 4:43
  Cited as a key scholarly source for interpreting Olympias, especially around gendered bias in ancient sources and the difficulty of separating stereotype from evidence.
• Richard A. Gabriel — Person · Referenced expert (modern author/historian) · 3 mentions · first at 25:41
  Quoted for a condensed, laudatory summary of Philip II’s achievements, reinforcing Philip’s stature and making Olympias’ ability to intimidate him more striking in the narrative.
  Kill you and he's not having any trouble handling her so what's so special about Olympius historian Richard a Gabriel wrote a whole book on philip ii and he tries to cut down…

Concepts & topics

• Dionysus — Concept · Core topic · 10 mentions · first at 19:44
  Central to understanding Olympias' religious practices and influence in Macedonian court
• Heracles — Concept · Key argument · 7 mentions · first at 23:00
  Mythological ancestor of Philip II and Alexander the Great, influencing their self-image and propaganda

Places & events

• Macedonia — Place · Setting · 5 mentions · first at 14:31
  Primary location where the events involving Philip II, Alexander the Great, and Olympias took place
• Persia — Place · Setting · 11 mentions · first at 13:00
  Target of Philip II's and later Alexander the Great's military campaigns
• Pyrus — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at 15:41
  Origin of Olympias, providing cultural and familial context to her character
• Thebes — Place · Setting · 2 mentions · first at 45:23
  One of the major Greek city-states that clashed with Philip II of Macedonia

Full transcript with timestamps

0:01 it's hardcore history attendant I keep reading in all of them like the entertainment stories how desperate the entertainment industry is for new ideas and new concepts and subject matter and all this stuff and I read one the other day that says this is the reason why you keep seeing like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 47 and every cartoon you grew up with as a kid made into a live-action movie I mean they're just desperate for you know they need ideas and I can't believe that I refuse to believe it because the ideas are hiding in plain sight so I don't get it I don't get why the stories that are right there aren't just snapped up and used I mean they're sitting there like diamonds on the beach and because human history is so fast right not just in terms of geography but also you know eras that there are so many stories that whatever you're particularly trying to well let's just take a movie for example but it could be

1:01 anything whatever you're trying to make a movie out of I mean there's there's the right diamond on the beach for you and maybe multiples I was thinking the other day everybody wants to make you know a strong female you know protagonist sort of film right now from a female I mean it's it would be the perfect idea right the perfect time period right now to do the definitive movie how about the only movie on what I think and remember my knowledge is the opposite of vast and deep but but from my limited perspective this is the most interesting I don't even know that the adjectives elude me woman in the entire ancient period of you know Greek Mediterranean West Asian history you know that world it's Alexander the Great's mother how the hell has that movie not been made and let me stop and point out that Alexander the Great story maybe the you know when people say to me because I said once that history has

2:02 ruined me for fiction and people will come up to me sometimes and one an example you know give me an example from history and I always use the same one because it's right on the tip of my tongue and it's also the best example I can think of I don't think it's you know argue boy we say the youngest Alexander the great story now obviously it doesn't have dragons and stuff and you can get that in fiction but to balance that out the story is basically true and that will compensate you in my book anyway for a lot of dragons and the reason the Alexander the Great story is so amazing is because he's just one of many over-the-top larger-than-life figures in it he may be like Seinfeld in the TV series Seinfeld where everything everyone orbiting around him is a more interesting figure although he's pretty damn interesting to you but the story is so interesting you can break pieces off of the main story and just examine them

2:56 and get a kick out of it I mean we've done that before we've mined the alexander vein on this hardcore history podcast already I mean the first show we did was called Alexander vs. Hitler then we did one on what we called the makedonia in soap opera but the name you usually hear is the funeral game's the period after Alexander's death where there was this scramble for the Empire and Alexander's mother was one of the key figures the Queen you might say on the chess board during that entire struggle so we've dealt with her before but I was thinking you know just reading these stories about how you don't have any content and everybody wants to make a good strong female movie well how about the greatest story you've ever heard and I should point out that I was trying to use as my model for this conversation today some of the earlier hardcore history shows we did because we used to think if we would just name them

3:49 in a very limited way so that we set the parameters with the title of the show it would keep us from going too deep and getting out of hand that was when we were young and we didn't know what we were doing and we didn't realize that's impossible so what are we gonna do we're gonna try it again we don't learn from history but those shows where shows like Nazi tidbits and thoughts on Churchill and meandering through the Cold War you know sort of denotes that it's it's not gonna be a deep an intensive look we're just going to hit some other more interesting points worth discussing some people miss those shows some people don't miss those shows so we're gonna please about half of you now maybe you will call this today's show glimpses of Olympius as we look at the most interesting female figure that I know of in the ancient world Alexander the Great's mom and I should tell you and this is proof

4:39 positive that I am a history geek because I have been giggling to myself for like the last 24 hours I've been reading the historian Elizabeth Carney's book she's the only one who I think actually put a book out specifically about Olympius Alexander's mom it's called Olympius and in it she addresses one of the let's call them psychological profiles that people have attempted to make concerning Alexander for 2,500 years he's got to be the most psychoanalyzed historical figure from a long time ago that I can think of and what's great about him of course is you can see him a thousand different ways so take your pick but Elizabeth Carney was addressing this question that has arisen from you know way back in the time when this phrase was actually in use but the question was was Alexander the Great a mama's boy in air quotes mama's boy I don't even know what that means anymore I think like Howard Wolowitz from the

5:35 Big Bang Theory which makes that question that's why I'm snickering because was Alexander the Great a mama's boys funny on a couple of different levels but they're history geek levels the first one is think about Alexander the Great for a minute right I'm thinking Howard Wolowitz instead we have a guy that is responsible one way or another for the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands and maybe millions of people conquered a ton of the known world during the time period far beyond anything anybody thought possible remember this guy conquered from Greece to India into India he fought elephants in the rainforest with makedonia and greases he did not do this from some command sent her way behind the lines instead he would lead the decisive cavalry charge himself probably from the front of a wedge formation which is like a pyramid and he'd be the guy you know the the star on the top of the Christmas

6:34 tree positioned the tip of the spear in the wedge so hardly a shrinking violet he was known to drink other people under the table in drinking contests at parties and occasionally at least on one occasion spear one of his best friends at one of these parties he doesn't strike me as the Howard Wolowitz stereotypically you know the mama's boy in the air quotes but it's funny for another reason because Alexander was all those things I just mentioned a person that has been seen as everything from a philosopher King to a genocide athough and everything in between he could have been all those things in his case and still been a mama's boy because look at his mama this is them listen again limited knowledge this is the most formidable woman in history as far as from a geopolitical sense anyway you can see women get involved in stories in the past with these male writers from Greece and Rome and these people who had to

7:35 catalog them and they're often story props bits and pieces and furniture and great the stories of great men or events sometimes they're they're sort of the wicked Eve type of character where they're the root of problems other times they they represent a religious and divine side of things which is interesting and plays into this story too but as a elisabeth carney points out in her book Olympius it's really tough to tease out all of the stereotypes in that and the cultural influences of all these ancient writers who would oftentimes excuse a male figure like an alexander for doing something you know horrible maybe they had to wipe out a village and a person like Plutarch an ancient writer would say well it's a they have to do that it's sometimes you know real politique or Machiavellian is the way we look at it now sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do to move history forward or whatever the

8:24 tough decisions but when a woman does the same thing it gets attributed not to logical real world questions but emotion you know it's envy it spite it's the jealousy of a woman she was angry you know it's irrational right so just seeing it through a lens where in a guy like Plutarch's time a person like Olympius looks pretty uppity in fact though let's be honest Olimpia looks uppity from the start it's part of what makes her fun because if you look at the stew that she walked into you when she joined the makedonia and royal family how do you how do you not get killed in that environment first or how do you avoid trouble to begin with most people would walk in there and go how do I stay out of trouble in this environment she walk in and and well far from shrinking in a sense she took it over and she scared the crap out of some of the most August over-the-top larger-than-life figures of their time one of them was Philip the

9:23 second the guy she showed up to marry in 357 BCE so let's tell a little of this story but like I said glimpses of Olympius because I don't want to get too deeply into it for a lot of reasons including we've talked about some of this stuff before I am saving most of this stuff for the big Alexander show I have in my back pocket for some later date blueprint for Armageddon was one of those shows we were saving for awhile and when the Centennial happened of world war 1 boom we did that one I got the Alexander one in the future and I'm hoping that my super intense interest in this means a slightly better chance of a good show or shows so I'm not gonna get too deeply into a bunch of stuff I'm saving for that someday I will say and this is a little bit of a tangent in this story that I usually point out is the most unbelievable interesting historical tale of all time as you know whatever is true whatever

10:13 isn't that there's only been two movies attempted by Hollywood or at least released by Hollywood on this story it's incredible just incredible to me and one was in 1956 and Richard Burton was Alexander the Great there was another one that was supposed to be a movie ended up being downgraded and cut up to like a TV movie like a sword and sandals western thriller with William Shatner as Alexander the Great sort of like Captain Kirk with blond hair and a more falsetto a voice I like William Shatner I don't think he's probably too happy with it either though and then the one done by Oliver Stone not that long ago and I support an artist right to look at a person like Alexander in his era from a thousand different viewpoints cuz I think it lends itself to it it's part of the fun but it wasn't my cup of tea I want to give him credit for something though because one he did has stayed with me ever since I

11:05 actually can't get it out of my mind I have to confess to it right now I didn't like his casting I found out he made the most maybe the most interesting character in the story Val Kilmer is Philip the second come on but Alexander's mother as played by Angelina Jolie and I didn't like the casting and then I saw her and now I can't unsee it I think she's perfect at least you know everybody's got their image my image of this person first of all I don't know if it's the makeup or just how Jolie looks or some combination of the two boy she looks like my image of what a person in the northern Greek southern albania area of it Pyrus would look like she looks the part to me and at the time she did the movie she really seems to be of that age that most of Olympius story seems to happen in where she's not a young lady anymore and she's not an older lady anymore it's that middle range but she still commands

12:00 attention in a physical sense and there's a lot of reasons for it it might not have just been conventional Beauty I mean the woman is supposed to have carried snakes around with her whether or not that's true that'll make an impression right the stories are wonderful and watching Elizabeth Kearney try to make sense of what's real and what's not in the stories is fascinating the one thing she does say though is the snakes were probably probably real so we should back up and talk about the snakes and make sense of all this story for a minute Olympius ends up marrying this is why she's famous right she marries the up-and-coming soon-to-be greatest man of her age in her world the guy who would have been Alexander the Great had he not died he's one of these kings that actually is maybe like the best example you will ever see who builds up everything necessary for some great endeavor dies before he can carry it out

12:51 hands over the you know the the car all gassed up and ready to go to his son who then gets you know does it and gets credit for it philip ii is the guy that set up the invasion of Persia he actually had a beachhead established in Persian territory when he died Alexander grabbed the keys to the car and conquered you know half the known world with it he was using basically the German Vermont 1940 right before the whole Russian problem it was the greatest army of its time with a host of generals and marshals to help him out right he had tutors right away and this group was in my top five of greatest assembly of generals and marshals and and over the top military figures under a single great visionary leader you will ever see jenga's Colin had a great group of generals Napoleon had I mean you know as ever has there ever been a better assembly of larger-than-life marshals and generals at Napoleon's General Staff people and

13:53 then you have Alexander and Alexander's father and all these figures who are not only going to play huge roles after his death and start whole kingdoms and dynasties of their own but they're all these I'm right out of central casting I mean take and taking this monolith on homeless and taking this one I he's got one eye he's looks like I mean they always portray him like this giant sort of bearded I mean they just the Greeks in Athens and Sparta looked at the people up in makedonia like they were kind of barbarians and the funny part about it is it's a sliding scale because the makedonia pnes were always trying to import all these Greek scholars and and teachers and art working and all the stuff to try to gussy themselves up a little and buff up their image with those cultured southern Greeks who might be a little sniffy and effeminate but whatever the makedonia is were moving up in the world during this time period

14:46 trying to point out to the other Greeks hey we're one of you we should be in the Olympics too and Philip was allowed that early on that's why Olympius might have been named Olympius but if the makedonia pnes were trying to not look so barbaric they looked at the people where Olympius is families from as as the weirdoes a hundred and fifty miles away that's part of the fun by the way of the ancient period is it's also localized sometimes I mean one of my favorite periods in Roman history is really early on when Rome was a small city-state and it's having a war with another city state and that city-states 11 miles away I mean in your big cities now that's like fighting with your suburbs but I love the low ality of it makedonia ana Pyrus which is where Olympius is from only about a hundred and fifty miles away and over the mountains though and it Pyrus is a place and it's funny how you could have

15:41 this right where the makedonia pnes are a little leery of elizabeth carney quotes some of the ancient stereotypes and says you know they thought of the appearance as poisoners and casters of spells now part of what makes this Olympius story interesting and this is see this is my own take on it I try I've never forgotten an experiment that a teacher did with us back when I was first starting as a history major and it was just the first step in what would if you carried it all the way to a PhD someday be a long line of trying to get you to purge your period now from how you see other periods because it's this huge challenge right how do you objectively look at the past when you've got all these cultural influences influencing you and to make it more complicated many of the historians you're reading had their cultural influences working on them and so this teacher said let's imagine something for

16:32 a second let's imagine that instead of like Newtonian laws of physics that we all take for granted and we know are true right you substitute magic and you believe it as as rock solid with as much certitude as we believe in the Newtonian laws of physics how does that change everything around you and when you start thinking about it for a while you go wait wait a minute I mean for example in this world we live in now you have many different competing views on reality and you can almost treat it like a buffet you can say I accept the hard sciences here but I'm still into astrology over there and I'm a Catholic so I believe in that but I also just subscribe to this I mean you can be able you have lots to choose from and there are arguments on all sides it's it's a buffet of intellectual reality orientation for yourself most periods in human history don't have this and in most periods of human history even where you could

17:33 identify you could go to Athens in the classical Greek period and say well there were some thinkers they literally disagreed with the idea that magic existed or anything they're like the top point O three percent of the population right if the rest of the people believe in matching magic what does that mean and the reason I bring it up is because the people that Olympia shows up to believe the people where she's from are casters of spells and you know if you read the sources and you want to believe a Olympius didn't do a whole lot to dissuade them of that notion this was another thing that a teacher explained once a female teacher was trying to explain again not taking your modern template and putting it over a past era and trying to draw conclusions and she was talking about like an equal rights thing between women and men because we as students and this was the 1980s we were trying to figure out how you didn't

18:22 have more examples of societies where the 50% of the population that was female overthrew the existing order right just said enough of being treated like you know slaves or servants or chattel or property or whatever we've had it and she said because in a lot of these cultures they were culturally fit into their own places in society and these were not necessarily as powerless as we assume they are because we're judging them the way we would judge power does everybody have the same chance for example to lead the country or to be a general or to be in these positions of authority right are women giving the same opportunities as men but in some of these cultures they might not want that but they did have areas of their own power for example in the Greek world and places like makedonia and places like a Pyrus heck in places like ancient Germany and and the Kelton well a lot of other societies you can name

19:15 the women were often dominant in a religious area and not always as like the high priest but always in these positions where they would have these relationships with the deity priestesses if you look at Alexander the Great's mother and you look at her life and we'll look at some highlights she comes out like a Dungeons & Dragons character sometime I said there were no dragons in this story but there are snakes she is a follower of Dionysus one of the most interesting gods if you go back and you study you know ancient Greek mythology in a nutshell though you know my college buddies he's the god of partying but it's so much deeper than that yes wine okay so that they're drinking but there's ritual ecstasy there may be sexual orgies there it's let's put it this way it's one of those things where I mean I imagine one guy would wink at another guy and go you know she's a follower of Dionysus um but

20:14 in the case of somebody like Olympius it made her intimidating and the sources make it sound like she intimidates philip ii philip ii how do you intimidate the greatest man of his day and age let me read you Peter Green's description and I love Peter Green this was written in 1970 but he's one of those people who raised me on this era in this region and I still feel like he sets up the legend let's call it the legend of Olympius and how is there no movie about this this womanless he sets it up perfectly now remember she walks into a scene let me set it up for you that's like a mafia crime family when Oliver Stone made his alexander film there were rumors that martin scorsese had been thinking about making one of his own and i thought oh that would be perfect cuz that would fit my image of the scene you know Scorsese's The Godfather if you'll pardon the pun of the mafia genre of movies you could take

21:06 that template throw it over the makedonia in royal house the dynamics of it add a lot more alcohol and a lot of homosexuality and end up with something like The Sopranos on a week-by-week basis where somebody's getting whacked somebody's getting poisoned you don't have love triangles you have love hexagons heck it's all violence you have love octagons imagine the complexity when you're not just dealing with the other woman because he's makedonia and kings often had multiple wives you're dealing with all the male lovers of the makedonia King and you all may be jealous and gossiping and talking with each other it is an explosive situation that leads to people getting killed pretty often in makedonia in history to show you how weird it can get by modern standards at one point in this story Olympius and philip will be marrying off their daughter cleopatra who is Alexander the Great's full sister to

22:08 Olympia sees bra also named Alexander of Molossia so that's Cleopatra's uncle their wedding her too now Alexander Molossia Cleopatra's uncle who is marrying Cleopatra now is also rumoured to have been the lover of Philip as well and Philip kind of put Alexander on the throne of a Pyrus so um it's a complicated dynamic isn't it and if you're a fan of the ancient world this doesn't put you off this is part of the attraction like going and being part of a landing party at a very strange planet where the customs are very different here's what Peter Greene wrote in 1970 about this young girl from this out-of-the-way place known for poisoners and spellcasters when she shows up in this mafia cry they're not Gambino's and bananas there are Jed's they are the descendants of Hercules or Heracles is the better word for it and she shows up and she's descended from her own royal line which goes back to a different demigod

23:12 Achilles and she's proud of it and aware of it and just like the fact that philip ii is proud and aware that he's supposed to be descendant from Heracles is the son of Zeus of course it influences the way her self-image is and the way she expects to be treated and the way she'll conduct herself Peter Green writes quote at all events in the autumn of 357 Philip married as a pirate princess and for the first time in his life found he'd taken on rather more than he could handle Olympius though not yet 18 had already emerged as a forceful not to say eccentric personality she was among other things passionately devoted to the orgy astok writes of Dionysus and her mean attic frenzies can scarcely have been conducive to a peaceful domestic life one of her more outre habits unless as has been suggested it had a ritual origin was keeping an assortment of large tame snakes as pets to employ these creatures on religious occasions

24:18 could raise no objections but their intermittent appearance in Olympia's bad must have been a hazard calculated to put even the toughest bridegroom off his stroke our sources furthermore while admitting Olympius is beauty described her variously as sullen jealous bloody-minded arrogant headstrong and meddlesome to these attributes we may add towering political ambition and a literally murderous temper she was determined to be Queen in something more than name this did not endear her to the makedonia and barons end quote I love that line from Peter green where he says that Olympius gave philip ii maybe something he couldn't handle because if you look at the history books this guy's mo is kind of that he's a guy no one else can handle and yet this 17-year eighteen year old a pirate princess has given him trouble I should point out that when they get married he's got some life experience on her too he's 25 I think

25:23 he's already got a couple of wives and they're not shrinking violets either he's married to an illyrian princess that if the sources are to be believed is trained in hand-to-hand combat sword shield helmet the whole thing so she'll kill you and he's not having any trouble handling her so what's so special about Olympius historian Richard a Gabriel wrote a whole book on philip ii and he tries to cut down the list of the man's achievements his formidable nature and all that stuff to a single paragraph and this is the way he describes the guy and as i said you think to yourself this is not the kind of person you would imagine having any trouble with anyone or putting up with any flack from anyone gabriel writes quote philip ii of makedonia lived 382 BCE to 336 BCE father of alexander the great dynastic heir to the our jade kings who trace their lineage to Heracles son of the Temin ed family from argos that had

26:28 ruled makedonia since the 8th century BCE unifier of greece author of Greece's first federal constant tution creator of the first national state in europe the first general of the greek imperial age founder of europe's first great land Empire and Greece's greatest general was one of the preeminent statesmen of the ancient world it was Philip who saved makedonia from disintegration military occupation and eventual destruction by securing it against external enemies and by bringing into existence Europe's first national territorial state an entirely new form of political organization in the West he continues having made makedonia safe Philip developed mining agriculture urbanization trade Commerce and Greek culture and transformed a semi-feudal tribal pastoral society into a centralized national state governed by a powerful monarchy and protected by a modern army end quote and couldn't easily handle a 17 or 18

27:40 year old pirate princess that's fascinating and listen timing is everything right I mean if this app I wrote princess shows up and marries some obscure Balkan king who never does anything we never hear about her forceful personality but because she joins the makedonia new oil family when the makedonia historical stock is about to go from nothing to spectacular she's there you know for the ride and she has a huge influence on it and this forceful personality is going to get amplified by the growing power of the makedonia --nz on world affairs and this guy she marries is gonna play a huge role in that and then the Sun she sires is going to do the rest of it in 356 the year after the wedding basically she and Philip welcome young Alexander into the world and now Olympia says status change is part of the reason maybe Philip couldn't handle her the way he could some other wife is all of a sudden she seems to be the mother of the

28:41 prospective heir and that changes things and and her power base forever afterwards is going to be this connection she has - Alexander normally in history the mother of a king gets left out of the question about the Kings qualities I mean this is even true up until recent times huh how often do you read about some historical figure some great historical Conqueror or unifier of states or however you want to frame it and then someone speak about his mother you'll hear sometimes the whole you know the king has a son who's a chip off the old block right looks just like his dad carries on the family mission you can find that example all throughout history but you rarely hear someone say yes you know has his mother's qualities but you do with Alexander and you're tempted to suggest I mean this is just my theory but it seems obvious to me you can send me an email and tell me how wrong I am because no no worries there but I mean

29:41 it almost seems like they'd ignore it if they could but it's so obvious they can't does that make sense he's so obviously a product heavily influenced by his mother you'd be a fool to deny it I hate to think that that might just be a story I don't think so when Alexander's young supposedly the precocious nature of the child is noticed this can all be stuff written after the fact Alexander put on a ton of propaganda in his life and it's colored the narrative and polluted it ever since none of the two things that Olympius traditionally brings to this Alexander influenced question are you know her influences as a mother a close personal confidant and parent of Alexander right so you'd say her social influences and her DNA so the things Olympius brings to the table here the DNA side is easy to understand I mean it sounds to me like if we were at a cocktail party in modern times and Philip and Olympius were there

30:44 and they didn't even know each other and they were just sort of talking for the first time and you overheard their conversation and watched them they would be the kind of people you would go I wonder what kind of kids those two people would have right so they sound like formidable people to begin with and the Greeks wouldn't have thought about DNA the way we do but they sure did think about things like lineage and that's why it here all this talk about Alexander Heracles is descended on this side and Achilles on that side because it has a lot of power if everybody buys into that Alexander bought into it and his mother and part of her role in all this is she's telling him this stuff and telling him not to forget it one of her reputations historically speaking is that she's constantly whispering into Alexander's ear you know don't forget who you are don't forget your lineage so besides the

31:36 DNA the personality question that comes into play here and what she did the influence that well this is where things get more interesting because this is where the magic gets involved right if she's telling her son that he's not necessarily just a descendent from Achilles you know many generations up the family tree but perhaps that he's related to a God in a much more close way than that that Philip the seconds not his dad Zeus the king of the gods is his dad oh let's turn to Plutarch shall we because he's so fun on stories like this but but if they believed it this is where the power of mass collective belief right these people don't believe in the Newtonian laws of physics like we do they believe I mean poot arcs writing hundreds of years later and says this note that there is no question is the way he phrases it quote as for the lineage of Alexander on his father's side he was a descendant of Heracles

32:38 through Karen s and on his mother's side a descendant of I believe it's yeah cos through Neoptolemus this is accepted without any question he writes then Plutarch writing hundreds of years later by the way talks about Philip meaning Olympius at a religious festival once again Olympius always sort of associated with the mysteries of Dionysus and I should apologize to Dionysus I didn't mean to simply write him off as just the god of partying earlier Dionysus has a fertility connection very powerful old God in this in this pantheon and you wouldn't want to have him angry with you and no one would during the time period so if you actually believe that Olympius has some sort of priests dislike connection to the God you might steer clear of her too but as we said maybe more than Dionysus we might be talking about someone who at least people believed might be a little closer to the gods as we said Plutarch

33:46 wrote later quote and he's talking about the night before Philip marries Olympius quote the night before that on which the marriage was consummated the bride dreamed that there was a peal of thunder and that a thunderbolt fell upon her womb and that there by much fire was kindled which broke into flames that traveled all about and then was extinguished at a later time - after the marriage Philip dreamed that he was putting a seal upon his wife's womb and the device of the seal as he thought was the figure of a lion end quote gotta love the ancient history for the good weird stuff apparently according to Plutarch Philip goes to a bunch of seers and asked them what does all this mean and most of them say you got to keep a closer eye on your wife right make sure no one's coming into the marriage bed that you don't know about but Philip apparently if you believe Plutarch he seems less worried about death and then

34:43 what he does know about here's what Plutarch says he's quoting by the way another one of these seers that says quote a serpent was once seen lying stretched out by the side of Olympius as she slept and we are told that this more than anything else dulled the ardor of Philips attentions to his wife so that he no longer came often to sleep by her side either because he feared that some spells and enchantments might be practiced upon him by her or because he shrank from her embraces in the conviction that she was the partner of a superior being end quote understand this is the sort of stuff that Alexander's propaganda might wanted to play up but it's part of this character of this woman is it true it could be is magic true no does it have an influence if people believe it yeah if Alexander was trying to make people think he was the son of a God might a story like that you know help his case

35:50 fake news goes way back I mean it's worth asking an obvious question and you can ask this about a lot of historical events and the farther back in history you go the more easily you can ask it how much of this is true how much of this is a story or a fable it's hard to know it's part of what makes the job of historians and you know I'm not one I'm a fan I'm an admirer from afar their jobs are fascinating they're detectives they're doing investigative research they start with these sources that have come down to us right somehow through all the fire and earthquakes war and everything that's happened since since early times information makes it through the pipeline but it's a tiny tiny fraction of what was originally there and oftentimes you don't get it directly you don't get a scroll from the Alexandrian library so you can read ptolemies memoirs you know in the original right there you get copies of

36:43 copies of copies and the people who write and do the copying this was a by hand thing right are from much later errors with very different values and they copy what they want and maybe the way they want part of the job of the historical investigator is to sit there and sift through all that and it would be easy if all you had to deal with is a scroll from Alexander's time and try to weed out Alexander's personal propaganda that he embedded into it but then what happens when a Roman gets their hands on it to write the history of Alexander hundreds of years after Alexander farther away from Alexander than we are from George Washington's time now what sources are they using well theoretically they're going to libraries too and they're you know digging out scrolls and something like Ptolemies in one of Alexander's generals and his memoirs are gonna be there theoretically and and the historians can actually this

37:30 is they're so fast they can sit there and and connect points to say well he was probably using Ptolemies memoirs because this other guy says the same thing so I mean it's fascinating detective work but its ever-changing and every time you find something new you have to alter the paradigm a little and Olympius is even harder for two reasons one because she's being written about as an addendum to other stories where she's Alexander's mother so when someone writes a piece about Alexander she's one of the characters in that story the other reason as we said is because she's a woman and when you think about the different copies and errors and filters that this original story has to go through before it gets to us now you think about the different attitudes towards women that the original makedonia pnes had that Alexander's propaganda might have might have seen things by then you think about their

38:18 changing status in Roman times then think about the post Roman world and and the Middle Ages when you've got monks and scribes copying this stuff in a religious context I mean this is hard stuff to try to figure out the stuff we have from Olympius or about Olympius rather is is has made it through that same pipeline and so trying to dissect the fables from the stories from the truth really difficult the one thing you try to work on and hang everything on are these data points right data point number one Olympius mary's philip seems to be a concrete moment this is a connect-the-dots game there's a dot Olympius gives birth to Alexander the Great boom another data point connect that dot there are going to be periods in her life where we are missing data points right she's not bowing to the Alexander story nothing is going on with olympia snowe so fast for and we're gonna fast for yada yada yada cuz we

39:11 don't know what's going on there are things we can infer cuz we can see what's going on at the same time her husband Phillip is off doing his you know making his obituary essentially he's piling up the achievements this is the period in his life he's laid that foundation that we said earlier now he's capitalizing on it my mythical producer Ben had suggested casting some of these people and I thought you know like trying to figure out if you like Angelina Jolie but you didn't like Val Kilmer is full of who would you like us Phillip and I spent a stupid amount of time and a stupid amount of time to not have a better answer researching actors and going back and watching clips on the I'm a Vassili and the best I came up with although he's a lot better than a lot of the other ones I came up with I thought a 38 40 42 year old Charles Bronson would have met my view of it kind of he's got that look where you

40:02 could see him coming from that region he's not makedonia he's not even from the Balkans he's Lithuanian or Latvian but I think his family you know go back to like Tatar is from the steppe I think like Angelina Jolie if you put you know his physical features in the hands of a good makeup person you're gonna get somebody that looks like they could play the role in terms of the physicality of it and whatnot I messed around for again far too long with one of those online beard creators where you upload a photo of Charles Bronson in this case and then try to find a beard that fits him I couldn't find anything that even looked like it wasn't a joke I know one of you out there will though I know how these things go so if you do it don't get some barbarian looking beard don't fall for that demosthenes portrayal of the guy this is a wealthy up-and-coming dude who wants to tell and show the Greeks down

40:53 south I mean part of this as a PR campaign that he's a full-fledged member of the Greek cultural Club I mean this is a guy you don't have to worry about letting him into the Country Club he won't embarrass you look at these flashy suits he wears he's gonna be as turned out as he can be while still appearing to be you know Charles Bronson I also think this would be a fun role for Charles Bronson because you know there's all as we said that the and and I think this is a wonderful way of showing how weird this is because the cultural mores are so different imagine Charles Bronson in one of those scenes where he has to be with one of them the male lovers right even interacting with them in a way that implies it you don't have to see anything just the implication can you think of a more awkward pairing I think that's perfect because every time you read about these things the historians always caution you about applying our

41:46 modern views cuz they they say the Greeks didn't think about it the way we do it's you know there's so much cultural baggage concerned with it so you have to think about it in a way that's totally alien watching Charles Bronson in some sort of gay Brokeback Mountain brokeback makedonia in mountain scene is about as strange and sriracha sauce on vanilla ice cream that I can imagine which is how the ancient world looks and feels like I said if you revel in that sort of stuff you know there you go it does depend on when you also create this Charles Bronson character because he goes from what appears to be a pretty dashing character maybe a very rough and tumble as my old history books used to say makedonia enroller to somebody who degrades like an NFL football player does over a 20-year career he's like jim otto a couple years after he marries Olympia's he famously loses his eye and they're pretty sure it's been long

42:45 debated but they're pretty sure now that they found his skull and some of the bones in a famous tomb and the skull has the little notch that the arrow left when it took out his eye and I think he suffers like five or six life-threatening bad awful wounds over his lifetime and by the end of it he's just you can see the physical toll the cost of this you know starting Phillip and Sons right this family business what it's done to him when Alexander is growing up Philips gone a lot he's gone when Alexander's born this is maybe part of the reason that you see the influence that Olympia's had on him she's the primary family member there Phillip by the way this remarkable combination and you see it from time to time in great figures of energy and genius it's a force multiplier either one of those things without the other it's great to have but but you put him together and you get guys like Philip

43:47 you look at Philips schedule and his data points are pretty well attested it'll wear you out most of us anyway now Philips besieging this city and this year he's besieging that city in that year holy cow but he's never at home he does want a son that none of the cultured Greeks in the South can sneer at the way they sneer at dad so he's bringing in the best educators he's giving him the best sort of cultural exposure you can he brings in Aristotle to be as to how's that for nouveau riche yet get me the best what's his name aristotle bring him in here and aristotle is not teaching alexander you know with a hundred other students in the symposium he's teaching alexander with a couple of Alexander's youthful friends that's the class all day long hang with Aristotle absorb everything Alexander could of course famously recite passages from the great Greek plays and dramas and all these things you have a cultured guy

44:42 here it's part of how you get that whole view of him as a philosopher King a cultured man as a buddy of mine always likes to say a culture Jenna sidle butcher is thug butcher miss a word I'll have to call him on that the whole period when Alexander's growing up is one of those yada yada yada times you don't really hear a lot of details except how precocious this guy is and all the portents are showing these signs that he's going to be this amazing guy meanwhile Phillip is by hook or by crook taking conquering somehow acquiring great wealth as he takes over Minds he's becoming this huge player in Greek politics and at a certain point he clashes with the other major players you know there are certain city-states that are well-known Athens Sparta Thebes those are your big three usually and Phillip Phillip has a problem eventually with all of them his encounters with Sparta are famous because it's one of

45:38 the great lines from Sparta one of the great diplomatic notes from them back to Adam and involves Phillip because he was coming down near Sparta and he gives him one of those ultimatums that says if I have to come down there and I'm paraphrasing and and destroy you I will you know make you all enslave that will take all your stuff you know all that kind of thing if I have to do that and the famous Spartan answer and they were known for very short as few words as possible it's called the laconic style and the Spartan answer was just one word if that sounds really badass except the Spartans did not come out of their little Enclave to play with Phillip at all right what does that say right we're badass come and get us they stayed away and Phillip famously in 338 BCE destroys Greek freedom is the way I always learned about it you know you'll get different approaches hold different lenses unified Greece is

46:31 a whole different way to look at it isn't it when he destroyed both those armies at the Battle of Chaeronea the combined arms of Thebes and Athens and it wasn't all that close famously leading the cavalry charge his young I think he was 17 or 18 years old his young son Alexander all right you get your 17 or 18 year old kid at the tip of the spear their dad welcome to the Homeric ethos in action right so Olympia says datapoints re-enter the picture here as Phillip is beginning to get to the height of his power he's doing so many amazing things and is being recognized as this huge historical figure that Alexander supposedly says I think it's Plutarch that says it he's not gonna leave anything for me or the functional equivalent you gonna do everything you can do Alexander was chomping at the bit I like Elizabeth Carney the historian who points out that there's this usual relationship between kings and their

47:32 sons that's a little strange right because sometimes the son is the king in Waiting just sort of waiting for the dad to die even if you like the guy the dad however may have several different sons that could get the kingship in a system like the makedonia --nz so that explains a Carney thought one explanation anyway why Alexander might be close to his mother she and he had the same interest in him Philip ends up you know he's got a son about Alexander's age right around named Philip aridaias as the way history describes him he's he's interesting he's described all kinds of different way he sounds like he's got some sort of mental disability it's obscure I think it's Plutarch I can't remember which of the ancient historians starts the rumor that it was Olympius who poisoned him and gave him that malady don't you love that I mean if you're gonna have a bad guy in the story anybody who's in Alexander's way

48:23 who has anything wrong with them it might be the witch I mean the priestess but Alexander runs into some trouble as Philip is is reaching his ascent and who he's planning this crusade against Persia right this is going to be Philips crowning glory he's going to go back and this is the way the propaganda sells it and hey the Persians back for that whole invasion thing that happened you know with the we are Spartans thing more than a century before you like getting mad at somebody for something that happened in the late 1800s and saying we're finally back you know you thought we forgot about that no Philip gets a bridgehead going in Asia he creates a League of Greek States the makedonia didn't rule like God Kings this was a way to do it in a very modern fashion where everybody just is in the Greek version of NATO or the Warsaw Pact or whatever and we're all in this together right and by the way who is the

49:17 leader of the group you guessed it the boss of bosses Philip the moment where Olympia comes back into the story is when Philip takes another wife the same year that this crusade against Persia is announced Philip marries Cleopatra now the makedonia in history is really hard to follow because they seem to have only had like nine names or ten names for people and they just reoccur all the time so you get easily confused Cleopatra one of those names you see all the time it's not Egyptian it's Greek and makedonia and it's one of the names I mean I'll examine their sisters names Cleopatra this Cleopatra is the niece of a guy named Atlas Atlas is one of these important makedonia and barons one of these people that you know are part of the family right we're marrying ourselves together even more we need each other Phillip means these people to the best cavalry in Greece he needs them to be on his side and everybody happy so they're

50:21 gonna marry into each other's families and then there's an incident recounted this is part of the makedonia and soap opera thing where stuff just goes down at a drinking party now if you're a substance abuse counselor you're gonna notice right away that it is probably not smart certainly not by modern standards to get a whole bunch of these powerful and important people together and they're an emotional lot by the way but they're all killers in their time period lot of people were killers right I don't want to make that sound so extra bad they're not charles manse but these are all very experienced men kind of hard men and they like to drink and they don't like to drink in moderation one of the critiques that the Greeks always had about these people is that they do not drink wine mixed with water like cultured people do they drink the wine straight and they have drinking contests this is something that's hard

51:15 to understand but you have to imagine very big containers full of wine and then men drinking at the same time and you know the guy who drinks longer wins but when you read the accounts of this it's crazy and by the way these guys are all there's weapons everywhere I mean it's a it's a dangerous environment for people to be dead drunk in I mean what if you said something in this mafia like crime family that wasn't politically correct about somebody who was really powerful so here's the story take it or leave it but it's famous a lot of you know it already there's a drinking party where this marriage is being celebrated and Axl is this important makedonia in general and Baron and everything else is supposed to give a toast something about its phrase different ways you know hoping that this provides an air but the suggestions in many of the pieces of literature's hopefully provides a legitimate heir or a true heir or a true

52:17 full-blood makedonia heir remember Alexander who is the heir as a mother who's not makedonia at all so what is Attalus saying here well in the story that's exactly what Alexander says loud and in front of the whole group of people I remember the Richard Burton portrayal you know a cup is thrown and he says are you calling me a bastard or I hope I'm remembering the Richard Burton portrayal then you have the moment where Philip supposedly drunk as a skunk and now even more broken down you know with a spear wound and he's lame and and he gets up from the table and supposedly pulls a sword almost against Alexander which leads Alexander to believe wait why didn't dad get up and defend me in front of that that scurrilous charge right there which leads to a break in the family in Alexander and his mom leave makedonia back to a virus and things are chilly Philip does not need this kind of problem right away I mean this is his

53:14 really dramatic wife and once again there's problems she's got the air I got problems with a Dallas now I should point out that there's been lots of speculation and opinions and views of what's going on here this would have been something that would have been hard to figure out at the time with the sources that we have that we're working with you know it's open for argument I'm not going to try to parse it except to point out that some of the obvious points that have been made about this when you marry a queen to solidify a diplomatic agreement and that Queen goes back home to her family maybe with you know tales of insults to their lineage I mean this is again the same sort of thing that will get you whacked in the Mafia crime family if you're disrespected and she goes back to her brother maybe the former lover of Phillip at one time and basically you know she looks like a queen that's been

54:08 maltreated what does that do to the diplomatic agreement Phillip is in a position now where he's kind of uniting all the different families that he's put together so that they can go off and get this big score that this easy pickins that persia looks like at this point it looks like it's just there who's gonna be the first guy to walk in they've left the door open the alarm doesn't work the security guards old and senile it's just they're come on all we gotta do is unite and go take that right we'll all be you know kings of the world basically he's just got to keep this fractious coalition of Greek states that were only you know cooperating because he beat them makedonia and barons that are always kind of unreliable and and jockeying for you know closer family ties guys like a delish you could easily see us as an underboss or a boss from a different family that's working with Phillip now but he's got to be kept

55:02 happy one of the ways he's kept happy as you marry my niece right but marrying my niece causes problems with one of your wives the mother of the heir see it's a soap opera but it's murderous because a lot of people are going to die because of this dynamic at this time Olympius and alexander for a short I'm worried it might be them but Philip is far too smart for this you don't get to where he is without realizing that this can't work so in what Elizabeth Kearney historian Elizabeth Kearney says is almost certainly a sort of a mending fences sort of affair he arranges another wedding I mean what do you do right this is the standard approach this wedding is going to strike us all as very incestuous what he's gonna do is he's gonna marry his daughter who is also Olympia's his daughter so he's got a lot of wives but this one is Alexander's full sister Cleopatra he's gonna marry Cleopatra to Olympia PSA's

55:58 brother her uncle former lover probably of her father and going to just double down on the family relationship there if this is for diplomatic purposes you could almost see Philip not wanting to do any of this but he's got to keep that important area pacified and with him so he can conduct this long-awaited thing in Persia he's already got an advance party of his generals who've conquered a little bridgehead over there so I mean they're ready to go so as part of the ceremonies for this wedding where Cleopatra's gonna marry her uncle Philip throws a big bash this is his coming out party this is 25 years or something of work on his part to create this moment he's going to bask in it he invites all the big dignitaries all the top people the ambassador's the performers everything today we would call it a star-studded affair right the media would all be there he has a bunch of gold statues made for all the gods

57:01 and then one other one that just happens to be him think of the significance of that so this is this multi-day affair supposedly for a wedding ceremony but in reality a hugely political event and of course this is going to be a highly choreographed affair isn't it it's going to be staged and everything is going to be done for a reason it's supposed to convey something maybe the same thing that having 12 statues of gods and a 13th the you know main guy actually the father of the bride that maybe symbolizes something to maybe 13 is an unlucky number too the way this thing is staged is Phillip is going to come out in front of a crowd in the amphitheater and he's going to have Alexander his son you know someday to be the great with him that's a symbol right and basically embracing my son here in front of the crowd he must have gone to him and said something like hey we were chugalug in wine until one

58:03 person in the contest passed out you can't hold me to account for something I didn't notice it you know uh bygones are bygones who knows but Alexander's there with him the other Alexander right Philips brother-in-law the one that he may have had an affair with the one that's marrying his daughter he's there too and then Philips got bodyguards right because this is the boss of bosses there's always somebody who wants to get him demosthenes in athens years before basically said this is a hunted man but he's got seven famous bodyguards and maybe another guy but he tells them to stand off famously because he's trying to show these people in the audience these dignitaries I'm not some guy that needs to be afraid of enemies I don't have enemies right I'm people love me I'm a uniter not a divider I mean it's an important piece of symbolism to show that I don't need to have bodyguards I'm not in danger he

58:59 is however falling apart physically it means took taking a spear through the knees so he's limping out there he's missing the eye he's gotta but he's showing all of his 46 years and according to the ancient sources he gets to the center of this theater and once again you have to think that this is the man's the highlight of this guy's life so far with great things on the horizon Olympius is thought to be in the audience by the way there is some disagreement in there sometimes but I mean Peter Green I think Elizabeth Carney - I think they think she was there but you know this is her brother marrying her daughter you'd think it's a family affair I would think she'd be there and that's part of the reconciliation right there all's good with the royal family don't worry and if she is she gets to watch a man run out to the center of the theater and plunge a dagger into the ribs of philip ii in front of everybody

59:58 all these people he invited to his assassination unwittingly and history turns on a dime here because most of history's we know it's an accumulation of a ton of trends and chaotic thing is all pinging off each other you know and and even when things seem to go quickly sometimes if you examine it you go well you can see that the roots of this go very deep and the seeds were planted a long time ago for this event but sometimes earthquakes happen in history and stuff that Lee Harvey Oswald shoots John F Kennedy if that's what happened boom what is that that's a historical earthquake and everything's different afterwards and how scary that one guy may be all by his little lonesome self changes the world so dramatically and what if he wasn't acting alone all those things apply to what happens to fill up it is the great John F Kennedy assassination of this time period in this in this area the greatest

1:00:57 man in the world was just killed by somebody in front of everybody right before he's about to embark on this historic mission he's basically declared war almost against the Persian Empire and then this happens well if you think about it that doesn't sound too coincidental though does it first of all let's go to the sources because the reason that Philip ends up in this situation is part of the makedonia and soap opera member we talked about love octagons what does it love octagon look like shall we go to diadora siculus the ancient writer all these people writing a long time after these events we presume using some sources that have now you know been lost to us but who the hell knows so we'll pick up the odorous his account when he talks about philip coming into the theater right he's he's got this this this conquering moment in his life with greater things even to come quote once the theater had been filled Philip

1:01:58 himself entered wearing a white cloak he ordered his bodyguards to follow removed at some distance from him as an indication to everyone that he had no need of the protection of guards such was the degree of preeminence that he had attained but amid the in come--as of everyone as they were congratulating him an unbelievable and totally unexpected plot against the king came to light that was to bring about his death and quote congratulating maybe I mean we may be talking about applause there like a theater of people applauding him and lauding him you know as he garlands being thrown his way I mean I guess if this has to happen to you maybe this is the time I don't know what you would choose if you could choose but then the odorous diverts from what's about to happen to go into the roots of what's about to happen and it involves two people named Paul say Gnaeus again we get confused here right

1:02:52 not only do these makedonia pnes have a limited number of names they keep changing them sometimes in their lifetime both of these figures are named pulse Aeneas this is what Diadora says and now think soap opera and now think murderous soap opera quote in order that our account of this matter may be clear we shall first explain the causes of the plot he says quote there was a makedonia named Paz Aeneas who were originated in the canton known as arrest Asst he was a bodyguard of the king and loved by philip for his good looks on observing that another man of the same name as himself was becoming the object of the Kings affections he abused the second pass Aeneas by calling him an effeminate who was willing to submit to the erotic advances of anyone who desired to initiate them end quote a Richard Gabriel says it's the equivalent of calling someone a male prostitute sounds like he's saying use a

1:03:52 male [ __ ] what would the reaction be to that especially from another guy who was probably sleeping with Philip well according to the odorous this second post Aeneas unable to tolerate the insult he said for a time kept his mouth shut and then the odorous goes to describe how he throws himself heroically and recklessly in front of the King to tectum you know as a bodyguard but essentially committing suicide by heroic act and it made appleís mad a delicious may remember the bride's uncle in this whole wedding ceremony apparently Attalus got mad that this palace aeneas guy the good one who threw his life away had to throw his life away so he decided to punish the initial post aeneas guy and the story of how he does that is positively triggering for some people so I apologize if this is hardcore because it is welcome to the ancient world dia Doris writes quote when this incident became widely known

1:04:54 Attalus who was a courtier and exercised a good deal of influence with the king invited puss Aeneas to dinner and filling with vast quantities of unmixed wine handed his body over to his stableman to abuse sexually in a drunken rape on sobering up from his intoxication he passe Gnaeus was extremely bitter about the physical abuse he had suffered an accused Attalus before the king philip though incensed at the enormity of a delicious transgression was nevertheless unwilling to show his abhorrence because of his kinship with him and his present need of his services end quote so in order to punish this guy for for his actions against the other Posse Gnaeus a Dallas has the guy basically date rapes him right he gets him drunk on wine throws into the stablemates and it's a male gang rape and puss Aeneas is upset about that as you might imagine someone would be he goes to perhaps his former lover

1:05:55 Philip the King and says adalah stood this to me do something about it and he can't he's just married himself to at Alyssa's nice to try to you know make the relationship more stable a duelist is one of the generals whose commanding the bridgehead in Asia he can't upset atlas so he gives this post Aeneas guy a lot of other things to compensate him right here's some stuff here I'll promote you into the bodyguard all these things just don't be mad but he's mad if you believe the sources anyway instead of just wanting to get even against the person who set up his gang why he wants to get even with the guy who didn't do anything about it when he complained he went to the Godfather and the Godfather didn't help so he whacks Phillip a knife to the ribs after stabbing Phillip passe Gnaeus runs out of the theater he is pursued by several of Philips bodyguards some run to Phillip he's almost certainly already dead by the time they

1:06:54 get there this seems to have been I mean these these guys were warriors I mean this is a professional hit he would have known just where to stab somebody Philips probably dead by the time the bodyguards get to him the other body got to take off after pasta Gnaeus and he would have gotten away dia Doris says he has horses waiting for him right right the ready the getaway car so to speak in ancient terms but he trips on a vine with his sandals and go sprawling in the dust and the bodyguards catch up to him and spear him right there and kill him it's a little Jack Ruby ish though isn't it and people have been wondering ever since that moment was passe Gnaeus acting alone and I was going through a bunch of the different theories and the number one theory just like the JFK assassination is passe Gnaeus might have been acting exactly the way these ancient writers said jilted male lover The Godfather didn't I mean the whole

1:07:46 thing we just described that can be absolutely true there's a lot of other things involved that too a lot of people wanted Phillip dead demosthenes said that a long time earlier he was giving his speeches warning about Philip II basically said he has a lot of enemies he won't be around forever lasted longer than some might have thought actually the ancient writers of course having a woman to potentially link to it often do and the rumor was that Olympius was seen at the grave of the assassin putting garlands on it or something like that decorating or honoring the grave of Paul simius later she's tied to it the idea being that you know her status in the court had been very precarious this was supposed to be a sort of a makeup affair but Philip also might have insulted her family this family descended from Achilles that was very proud in this ethical world where that was a very big deal you can get whacked for that right

1:08:44 I mean we talked about how precarious being a makedonia new ruler was anyway was one of the things that had kept the kingdom down for so long you couldn't keep a good King around the second they became too powerful somebody wanted to take him down a peg right the last thing you want is a perpetual boss of bosses if you think some day you might be the boss of bosses and that's not a pipe dream if you're the mother of the heir because very quickly after Phillip is stabbed Alexander is acclaimed the king and the makedonia --nz do a thing where they kind of have the the people acclaim the king and there's a lot of argument whether that's real or whether it's a bunch of nobles who get out and say get out there and raise your hands and say you know hail the new king who the hell knows but it goes back to that Homeric ethos - it's not a god King it's it's sort of an acclaimed King and so if you had

1:09:35 something to do with the assassination and your Olympius you just solved all your problems she made out like a bandit a lot of the people I've read lately are in and this change is a her of the opinion that Olympia's probably didn't have anything to do with what happened to Phillip and that neither did Alexander if only because they had no need to kill him in public in front of a lot of people they had access to him in private all right this could have been done nicely quietly a little poison in the right place and who would have known this guy is murdered in front of a giant crowd of admirers in public I mean today would be the equivalent of having it happen on live television and the star of the show is the one who's killed the greatest man in the history of this region right just when they're celebrating it some of the other people who are implicated though make a lot of sense the Athenians could have hired an

1:10:25 assassin they would have loved to have seen Phillip out of the way but maybe most likely on this assassination you know hit list who paid for the the killing you know who hired murder incorporated the Persians I'm a fan of the Persians as many of you know and one of the wonderful things about them is they had a government that just did not function well and they figured out ways around it I'm the number one around it was money they had a lot of money and they figured out ways to have money do things for them so they couldn't beat the Greeks on the battlefield because of tactical dissimilarities between their armies okay well spent a lot of money have the Greeks fight each other that was wonderful they called it the Peloponnesian War it kept the Greeks busy for a long time kept them out of Persia's hair Persia has no doubt that Philips coming to invade them he's already basically publicly proclaimed it

1:11:16 he's conquered a little territory already to establish a beachhead as we said he's making inroads diplomatically with some of the satraps you know closest to him it's going to happen so if you kill him maybe it won't but as several of these historians point out the Persians probably did not have somebody so inside the royal family that they could do it quietly and that so they had to kind of do it in public or you never know this might be a statement right especially if your policy Gnaeus and you really are acting because you were gang raped and you know you're not gonna be disrespected like that it all boils down to how much you're willing to trust these ancient writers who preserve the details of these incidents or what they say are the details or what they heard were the details or what the source they were using said were the details you can see why so many historians would love if they could just throw all this stuff out

1:12:15 is unreliable and biased and all these kinds of things but if you do you're not left with a whole lot right I mean for example coinage and inscriptions and stuff like that will tell you that during this time period there was a change in leadership from Philip king of makedonia to alexander king of makedonia but it probably won't tell you why and it certainly won't give you any details but that leaves the experts trying to pick out the fact from the fiction and well as you might imagine it's it's tough and views change and experts differ reminds me again a little of the Kennedy assassination we have a lot of different theories here and when you hear the rationales for them you kind of go I kind of go with a bunch of him going yeah that makes sense and then I read the next but yeah that makes sense in the 1970s when I read alexander of macedon peter green was firmly in the camp of those who thought

1:13:04 Olympius and alexander did it a dynastic hit now his views may have updated since then I should point out an updated doesn't mean better because there's a whole lot of people still think Olympius and alexander did it but the story you know you want to compare it to the JFK assassination which is a fascinating story of course at the same time it makes it look so vanilla and boring by comparison I mean for example if you want the analogy here that starts the the mind reeling you'd have to have Jackie Kennedy basically at the root of the plot to kill her husband right when he gets killed in the limo next to her she set that up if she's Olympius and you believe that particular conspiracy theory what's more the person if you believe Oswald took a shot at JFK that person is encouraged by Jackie Kennedy to do the deed and Oswald of course would have had to have a sexual relationship previously with JFK see how

1:14:02 weird it gets them how quickly remember how wild some of the accusations from the ancient writers can get here saying that Olympius placed a gold crown on the assassins head the assassin was nailed to it like a cross or a gibbet and that she placed a gold crown on his head and then had it this the the ashes spread over Phillips grave that every year on the anniversary of the murder she poured libations and offerings over them but she obtained the murder weapon and dedicated it to Apollo and used her maiden name when she did a lot of accusations right well Peter Green suggests back in the 1970s anyway a possible way it all goes down and it starts with Olympius working her sorceress like magic psychologically speaking on the Lee Harvey Oswald in this story I mean Plutarch has Olympius doing the initial inciting of pasta he's going up and playing on his grievances and exhorting him to do this we should

1:15:11 recall by the way the version I gave of the palace Aeneas date-rape thing that the mild one the more severe one is that this all happened at a party in that Attalus the guy who organized the whole thing was one of the people who date-raped him before turning him over to the groom's who continued the process and then beat him up afterwards the point of the story is that this guy's humiliation would have been known to basically everybody imagine how quickly that gossip got around with all the people that mattered in his life in a culture of heroic ethos clan loyalties grievances generational feuds um how do you think this person is gonna gonna be thinking of himself anyway he's humiliated and if Olympius goes to him and and commiserate with him and tells him that this can all be remedied right we can just put somebody else in power and not connected to your whole deed and all these bad people including Attalus

1:16:09 will go away and I can think of a whole lot of different appeals that might have been used on a guy like Puss inia starting with the most real-world bedrock one of all how about some money or how about you pull this off get rid of the old king the new king takes over the new Kings gonna forgive you make you a valued member of your honor based society again you will prosper your enemies will pay that's a pretty good incentive in any time in place for a lot of people isn't it then of course there's the other tradition about what was maybe going on here and that's that Olympius was in the assassins head psychologically manipulating him like Jackie Kennedy working on Oswald psychologically there were no doctorate degrees in psychology in the ancient world that I know of but let's not pretend that the ancients especially the ancient Greeks didn't understand human psychological makeup I mean go look at

1:17:11 their plays it's a key integral part of a lot of them they explore the issue intensely to me when I do my movie it's not going to be a movie it has to be more like a game of Thrones now that I think about it long-term sort of thing because there's too many characters that come in and out you can hardly learn the names and they die and much more suited to that but in in the movie I'm gonna have my moment when Olympius goes to poss aeneas and gets up in his head I'm gonna have her come to him and maybe she did dressed the way some of these ancient writers described the Dionysian priestesses they carry wands one of them said they carry wands like magic wands some of them wrapped with ivy which was a sacred plant I guess others dripping honey which is very symbolic if you think about the god of fertility and all that kind of stuff and and wine and all that and that there were snakes everywhere sometimes on the wands

1:18:03 wrapped around them I think it was Plutarch's had freaking the man out so she's gonna come in my long term HBO miniseries um she's going to come to Paul say Gnaeus and she's gonna get in his head and she's gonna promise a very Dionysian thing to promise because remember Dionysus is you know the Apollonian tradition according to Nietzsche anyway and others is that that's the rational side of the human mind the logic and all but it's all the other stuff that Dionysus controls the hidden stuff these the the subconscious the emotional the inspirational the madness I mean heck acting and most of the arts are Dionysian at their root it's a little mysterious right it's very mysterious to us now looking back in the ancient world but even in the ancient world was kind of mysterious it was part of the attraction and she represents this now another name say this I'm gonna do it is the producer of this thing the

1:18:56 other name for Dionysus that Dionysus was known as was the Liberator right frees you from care worry sorrow pain the good side of what wine might do to you especially in the ancient world versus the destructive nature which is the divine madness and all that kind of stuff although she wouldn't have seen that as destructive that's one of the good things right well she is promising as a priestess for The Liberator maybe to liberate pase Gnaeus from his cares and worries and this he'll that he lives in we should also point out that she's the one who supposedly has horses waiting for the conspirators right soon remember there's not one horse waiting the tradition has multiple horses there multiple getaway vehicles why do you multiple horses if he only have one assassin Peter Green has a 1970s rundown of how it might have happened when he writes quote from these facts we may perhaps form a hypothesis as to how

1:20:00 Phillips murder was planned and carried out policy Gnaeus still hot with resentment at the abominable way he had been treated was approached probably by Olympius and promised higher rewards and honors if he would join with his three kinsmen from arrest us in assassinating the king I should point out those three kinsmen or Philips bodyguards so the guys who Jack Ruby him in a minute are the guys who were supposed to work with him in the assassination this is going to be very Joker like from Batman Green continues quote Olympius undertook to have horses ready for all four of them afterwards but what posse Gnaeus clearly did not know was the real role assigned to his fellow conspirators those trusted intimates of Alexander their business was not the removal of Philip it was to silence him he knew too much once he had served his purpose he was expendable after his death the propaganda machine

1:20:59 could go smoothly into action the elimination of post aeneas was an essential stage in the plot circumstantial evidence he writes does not amount to proof positive but men have been hanged on weaker cumulative testimony than that assembled here the motive was overwhelming the opportunity ideal end quote whenever there are these giant earthquake moments in history it just seems wrong for us to not know more about them because there the import would seem to demand that there be more information about them but then I remember the Kennedy assassination which happened two years before I was born and look at how much you think you know but you don't know about that so imagine something more than 2,000 years ago I've always loved a V Bosworth an Alexander and historian I like his view that Alexander was you know let's not romanticize him too much but Bosworth points out about this period something

1:21:55 that we all need to take into account of that does Heil how difficult to historians job is trying to piece this stuff together and the need to use all sorts of things like coinage and archaeology and a bunch of other other disciplines to supplement the meager bits of information sometimes or the contradictory stuff and he writes about this period right after Philips death quote the first few days of Alexander's reign must have been among the most critical of his career unfortunately no connected account survives of them there are scraps of epitome and random flashbacks from later history but most of the crucial details are irretrievably lost there is infinite scope for speculation and imaginative reconstruction but the sources themselves allow very little to be said we must be prepared to admit our ignorance however galling that may be end quote these are the kind of unknowables by the way that make this a

1:22:52 hardcore history addendum show and not a full hardcore history program because a lot of the data points are missing forget about the stuff between the data points you don't know major things like whether or not Olympius can accurately be placed at Philips assassination was she there was she and I witness there are historians who say no that she was back in her homeland at this time and that she didn't come back to makedonia until Philip was good and safely out of the way good and dead maybe for reasons of their own personal security others though generally following different ancient sources say that she hardly would have missed a wedding between her daughter and her brother with her son there at an event that was in part staged to show that everything's just hunky-dory with the royal house you know before the big Persian expedition she's a prop in that propaganda show isn't she she's got to be there but you

1:23:47 don't know another thing you don't know about it and it's key to what's going on behind the scenes now is how many children philip ii actually had Richard a Gabriel says they only record the official kids of the official wives in the makedonia tradition but then says Philip was a rampant I believe the word he used was rampant womanizer he quotes Justin I think it was not the greatest of all sources but who says that Philip had sons all over the place and just because they're not official in the makedonia system that didn't matter the amount of royal blood mattered whether it was official or not less important especially if you were a tool of a powerful makedonia clan that wants to push you know for their chance to have the boss of bosses job and will overlook any problems with this contender hack he's one of phillips kids who cares if he's a bastard so Alexander's first several weeks or a

1:24:48 month month and a half hard to know what happened but eventually he merges as the king he's 20 years old by the way some of the powerful bearings that might have pushed back on him so quickly being acclaimed King are just conveniently out of the way including AXA list the guy who said I hope we have a full-blooded True Blood Macedonian heir and you know precipitated that drunken fight which led to the need to have the wedding that Philip was just killed at a Dallas is conveniently back at the bridgehead preparing things for the big Asian expedition and Alexander starts his purges these are not abnormal when the kingship changes hands in makedonia in history it's often bloody it's almost like there's a godfather list people to be hit when the Godfather died and when my father does carry out your orders and when Philip is killed people start getting killed because of it Alexander's official line once he becomes king by

1:25:48 the way is that Passini astac ttle own this was a conspiracy at his father's funeral at the gravesite he executes people a couple of people he's related to and on his father's side anyway people who potentially could have been put forward I mean people who might have had a claim to the kingship but Alexander says they were involved in the plot to kill his dad boom they're gone and here's the weird part they might have been but this becomes very stalin asked this becomes you know stalin had the Kirov excuse Kirov nation is the thing that makes all these purges and and and killings justified Alexander had his dad's and it allows him to cover up the traditional makedonia purges where lots of people are gonna get whacked including Atlas he'll get it he gets it by like slow messenger they they have their own version of like heat-seeking drone missiles or something but they just take forever to get to

1:26:48 their targets like the speed of a horse alexander sends an assassin it's a couple probably weeks to get the asia minor and we are left wondering how the assassination happened this often happens in the ancient writings they'll tell you that something happened but they won't tell you how in the case of a mode of death they did use poison they did stuff like that but this sounds like one of those traditional sort of man-to-man hits back before guns were around knives were very popular and if you think about the ways the gangsters would do it in like the 1920s they grab your hands sometimes in a handshake hold you really tight and then use a pistol on you from close range they would do the knife equivalent sometimes in the ancient world so it'd be easy to imagine a Dallas who was probably in his 60s at this time goes out to greet the makedonia messenger they probably vaguely know each other maybe some kind

1:27:40 of an embrace and then a knife just in the right place now remember it was at Alyssa's niece Cleopatra such a common name that is confusing who will then change it to you Riddick II another super common name and confusing she married Philip right that was again the thing that caused the most recent rift in the family and she has born one maybe two children another one of those things that's calling because we don't know for sure how many children did Cleopatra have in a short time and were they male or female I'm not going to take a position experts differ there was supposed to be a female her name Europa there was in other sources supposed to be a male his name crater Asst well you could have either one or the other or both I don't know neither one of them are gonna make it very long in this world though because they are both under the age of two and they and their mother are about to get whacked now

1:28:36 you may say why are you spending so much time on Alexander the Great's purges as he initially comes to power it's a logical question Elizabeth Carney answers it when she says because Olympius participated in them one of her claims to infamy historically speaking is that she's the one who eliminates Philips new wife newest wife remember Philips newest wife is his seventh I should point out she eliminates Philips newest wife and his one or two children that are either male or female or both this is one of the events that Olympius is most known for and it colors her entire historical reputation so as you might imagine Elizabeth Carney writing an entire book on Olympius has the luxury of spending some time on the question and devotes several pages to the possibilities and the first possibility is that it never happened at all when we need to bear this in mind right we've talked about this historical

1:29:39 equivalent to fake news or whatever thousands Viers limited sources unreliable sometimes I mean may never have happened if it did happen what was going on there was it some outbreak of you know like raging hormones and jealousy and all this sort of stuff from one wife to another the real soap opera stuff right you stole my husband and I'm gonna get you know Elizabeth Carney points out that these are highfalutin diplomatic marriages with Kings who go out and sleep with anyone they want I mean this is not a question of sexuality and all that especially probably not by her age in the ancient world this is about power and in some cases about personal security and those two things are related and the way you know this is that had Cleopatra you know Philips last wife got into Olympius an Alexander first the shoe very well could have been on the other foot Elizabeth Carney says that this very likely was a do unto

1:30:42 others before they did unto you sort of thing you hit their family at Alyssa's family before they get you Attalus of course the uncle of cleopatra and he dies too one of the things that Carney points out though is that people die a lot in these makedonia and power transitions as we said and by the standards of the time and place this may have been a relatively lightweight purge right merciful purge this side of the family Cleopatra was always gonna get cut off and any of her offspring were too it is unusual it won't be as unusual after this time period for one woman to be eliminating another woman and a female child likely female child Europa that that's unusual but if these were makedonia and males it would have been realpolitik and typical makedonia and stuff because it's a female it's blamed on jealousy and whatnot but Elizabeth Carney says and she seems to come down if I'm reading her right on the on the

1:31:43 idea that it did happen but it happened for the same kind of calculating she says Olympia's was always a very calculating person that it comes down to the same sort of calculation that Philip himself her husband now in the ground would have made she's a hardcore realist and she got Cleopatra and the Attalus side of the family before they got her and her son and how it actually happened is once again the debatable stuff I mean did she carry out the killings herself did she order them how was it done a much later unreliable source famously says that she had the the other wife of Philip and the infant or infants dragged over a heap of burning coals like a giant barbecue which again colors her historical reputation whether or not she did that the killing of the infant too is very hard for everyone and Elizabeth Carney goes into that quite a bit and how that would have been perceived during the time period and all this kind

1:32:45 of stuff Connie writes that other than the novelty of the woman-on-woman violence it might not have rattled people that much and she writes quote several factors indicate that contemporaries were not particularly surprised or bothered by Olympia's actions the mere ABB's to the incident for most accounts is suggestive it was not an attention grabber unlike other acts of violence committed by Alexander or Olympius the sources do not mention them again at least in terms of Olympius dynastic murders were a dime a dozen before and after these particular deaths and some of those murdered were children Philips mother had been accused albeit almost certainly unjustly of dynastic murders one suspects she writes that many thought that Attalus and cleopatra could hardly have expected anything else once Philip was dead they had committed themselves to what proved to be the losing side in a dynastic struggle and past rains

1:33:47 demonstrated what happened to those who made such a poor choice and quote she goes on to theorize that it's possible that the death was by hanging reasons for which we will describe later but like a self hanging like a suicide where you know they put up a rope or they hand the former bride of Philip a rope and sort of suggest the same way ernst röhm in the night of the Long Knives in Nazi Germany was supposed to have been given such a choice you know here you go do what you know you have to do kind of thing and no real word on what happened to the infant another one of the unreliable ancient sources says that Olympia's killed the infants in front of and there were two in that story I think I killed the infants in front of the mother and then she either died when she saw that out of grief or whatever or killed herself after that you can see why Olympius gets such a fearsome rep the next year and a half or so of what's

1:34:58 going on in their lives is going to be Alexander putting together Humpty Dumpty again his father's creation which was held together in a rickety sort of sense with a bunch of people who didn't want to be involved in this Asian expedition under makedonia leadership but what were they going to do right combination of Philips energy his genius and later in life his gravitas and let's be honest backed by the best army around kept everybody in line and when he died all those people who would have liked to have seen him dead whether or not they paid the bill for the murder incorporation tab you know took the opportunity to throw off the makedonia yoke and the next year and a half or so is Alexander trying to put the yoke back in Humpty know I'm a fan of Alexander and many of these details I'm going to leave out here will be in that eventual show whenever the hell I do it but let's not ignore the fact that Alexander

1:35:53 doesn't just inherit the great army of its day which you know anybody could probably do pretty well with he also inherits the leadership of that army we'd said earlier that he was like ginga scone and a poli and that he had the great set of marshals and generals around him they really fall into two major groups let's call them because other people have the old guard and the new guard the old guard our dads generals Attalus was one of those guys there's a bunch of them and they're all famous and they're good and they are hard-bitten and they're old by this time remember this is not young by today's age standards this is a world where these ages are quite a bit older than they are today these guys are in their 50s and 60s think of how much fighting they've already done and think about how they they came from a time before all this glitz when makedonia was ruling this whole part of the world Alexander was

1:36:44 born into that world right I wonder how they felt about the 20 year old wunderkind right especially before he was proven as anything like of wunderkind not just that these guys are not like the modern generals in the military his job it is to salute and like robots do what they're told by their superior you know we we said these are like bosses of other crime families now they may listen to the boss of bosses right now but at the situation were to turn against their interest that could change these are barons that's a better way to look at them guys like Attalus are barons and the king has their Allegiance for now Alexander has the help of one of these really formidable guys who's probably in his 60s by this time a guy named Ann Thibodeau Antipodes opposed to have sided with Alexander during the transition of power when things might have been kind of hairy and then all of a sudden he has one of these great

1:37:36 Barons backing him and the other great Baron's are away and you know this Antipodes kind of friends of the family he's loyal to Philip and he shows that loyalty by helping Philip son and Olympius they were supposed to be on good terms initially the reason for bringing Antipodes name into all this though is that they're not going to be on good terms for long this is going to turn out to be probably the most negative personal relationship in Olympia's life in terms of consequences the reason things go south between XI and antipodal are often tied to Alexander leaving along with a giant chunk of the army most of the mercenaries and a lot of Greek allies when he launches his dad's mission his dad's plan for an invasion of Asia himself with his dad's army throws a spear when he's disembarking from the boat onto the Asian side into the sand calls the entire area spear one territory and were off to be dealt with

1:38:43 later in the inevitable Alexander's show this will continue by the way for 10 to 11 years as Alexander continues until his army makes him stop an army who adored him and saw him as almost a God King and finally he said we can't go any farther we have snakes and elephants and monsoons and we don't even remember what home looks like in our armors falling office can we stop now and Alexander basically called him a bunch of ingrates what do you want meanwhile antipodal and his mother are both in Macedonia Antipodes the guy who Alexander picked to run the show when I'm gone somebody has to hold down the fort interpreter gets the job friend of the family if you got to pick one of these unreliable makedonia barons this guy looks like the most reliable right this this family's been the most reliable to me the boss of bosses I'll put you in charge antipodal he doesn't really have it seems like an official

1:39:37 position for his mother but do you think Olympius is just gonna sit there and say nothing a lot of wise probably would but this is she makes the history books Kashyyyk she doesn't say nothing she says a lot of stuff and interpreters got a deal with Alexander's mom probably not used to dealing with women like this at all who get up in your grill and questions some of the things you do the funny part about it is you can't really believe any of the letters that the Alexander romance that some of these sources have that supposedly show correspondence but you can see that there was correspondence to Alexander from both of those people complaining about each other so his mom would write letters to Alexander when he's off in Asia saying you know Antipodes a exceeding his authority he's acting like a king he's in danger of you know becoming a monarch himself and all each a complaining complaining complaining and Antipodes

1:40:27 ready the Alexander complaining about his mom and the interference and she's you know she's uh exceeding her Authority and getting involved in things she shouldn't speaking of getting involved in things she probably shouldn't one of the stories about mother and son Olympius and Alexander that always makes the rounds as evidence someone points out of the mama's boy oedipal complex version or view of Alexander has to do with worries over Alexander's sexuality as he gets older now the reason this comes into play at this point in the story is because before this great invasion of Asia this King who's been a king you know a year and a half something like that almost two years um he has no wife and he has no heir and his generals are telling him listen it would be really smart you're gonna be at the tip of the spear here fighting lots of battles in this big country you should have an heir and

1:41:18 Alexander shows no real enthusiasm for this and the story is famous of Alexander's mother hiring him a Thessalian courtesan that facilities in northern Greece in a courtesan of course is a prostitute although in this day and age these might have been people of some status and wealth and standing - especially if you're getting one for a prince Peter Green writes quote both he meaning Philip Alexander's dead both he and Olympius according to Thea Frosty's were worried by among other things the boys lack of heterosexual interests they feared he might be turning out a girlish invert and even went so far as to procure a beautiful facility artisan named calyx zinnia I believe it is to help develop his manly nature Olympia's herself we are told frequently begged him to have intercourse with this woman which does not suggest any great enthusiasm on his part but then what son would take kindly to a maternally selected mistress and

1:42:23 quote good point they're a little weird least nowadays nevertheless without heir or wife in 334 BCE Alexander takes off on his adventure in Asia never to return home again leaving his mother and interpreter back at home and this is where the data points get sparse right they sort of go away with Alexander she's doing a couple of things it's thought back at home the first thing is she is obviously the equivalent of the Kings eye in Persia that's the famous position where the Persian King would have an official who stayed in the governor's palaces and watched the governors for the king watched to make sure that they do what the King wanted watch to make sure you know go to the marketplace listen to the scuttlebutt listen to any rumors of a fine and constantly report back to the king she was certainly doing this for Alexander as we said earlier she's the person the one person probably in this world whose

1:43:28 interest completely line up with Alexander's and the one person he can almost totally trust her her power rests on him right his life and success is what makes her power manifest and so she has the same interest he does let's protect Alexander in his interest so she's watching and tippet er for Alexander no doubt about that but she's also doing things in a Liz abbath Kearney it's a great book by the way it's not a child's book but if you like Olympius it's the only one I found just on Olympius pick that up but she points out that women in the ancient world did things that are sometimes under the radar but that are these really parts of the story like diplomacy it's such a personal relationship thing in this time period although I've known diplomats who will say it's still about personal relationships even today go look if you just want to see how recently it was how it could even manifest look at the correspondence

1:44:26 between the the various royal families of Europe before the first world war broke out and how much they were writing these intimate letters to their cousins and whatnot but bringing up major things like treaties and agreements and diplomacy and everything else right unofficial diplomatic stuff from the back channels if you will well in most periods in human history most places had it on a like a personal level right who's in your rolodex I know that guy I'll go talk to him whatever it might be right a lot of these people would send their children to foreign courts and then they would come back home later and then if you needed to do diplomacy with those courts you'd send the child that grew up there right if Alexander or Philip had a problem with anyone in the Pyrus you send Olympius right she's from there she knows everybody I grew up with all those people I'll go talk to them that's personal diplomacy it sounds like

1:45:13 she was doing a lot of that and that's the kind of stuff that maybe antipodal would be like she's you know exceeding her Authority they also found her signature or her daughter's signature on some official shipments of food and stuff so it's theorized that maybe during a time of food shortage she either signed the invoice or maybe even out of her own funds paid for food to be brought in that's another thing that might look like it undercut Antipodes you know competence or whatever I'm complaining about that to Alexander at my next letter but even as Alexander continues and goes from victory to victory in the East there's almost like something from his mother that follows him and once again who the heck I can I can't stress that enough this is part of a story a story that may be based I'd love to be able to compare the original to what it's become and how much of this stuff is true when when multiple sources talk about it you

1:46:10 start to put a little bit more hmm maybe there's something to this something goes wrong with Alexander over the the the slightly more than a decade that he has left in this life while he's becoming the great something's going on in his head and there's been debate ever since about what this is the easiest thing to probably point to is he looks like some of the other great conquerors in history who would engage and embark on a lucky Lucky's the wrong word but but a string of unbroken successes improbable amounts of success to where they start to think of themselves as something more than human a man of destiny somebody smiled on by the gods or whatever right the story about Alexander always contains this question of whether or not Philip was his real father and if Philip wasn't his real father the implication was that it was Zeus we told you about the lightning striking the womb thing all that's part

1:47:10 of later writings but it's all part of this idea that Alexander began to wonder and and there was a wonderful historian I read who tried to point out that this isn't that unusual in the greek-macedonian way of seeing things because that's after all what the Achilles is and the Heracles azar these are people whose deeds proved to be so superhuman that you can then sort of go well obviously they're they're part God right that's how you know that you're a demigod or something and if you're an Alexander and you're doing these amazing things well gosh we've seen it in more modern times where it seems to be a known hazard of the great Conqueror business that you might become megalomaniacal and you might start to think there's something divine going on here and Olympia is his impact on this story is that you know it's unlikely that Hitler's mom was whispering in his ear that there was something super

1:48:04 special about him Napoleon's mom either the tradition hold that that's not the case with Alexander his mother was whispering in his ear at the very least remember that you are a descendent of Achilles but it might be a little bit bigger even than that one of the things another historian that I read pointed out I hadn't even thought about this but it's right that in a patch early society like makedonia where everybody always calls attention to their their father's family line Alexander constantly called attention to his mother's and constantly sort of associated himself with the kilise rather than his dad's line that Heracles Zeus however which is sort of you know it all devolves to Zeus in the end Zeus however began to fascinate him as his conquest went on and the Alexander's story famously he's going to go to all these Oracle's when he conquers Egypt he finds the the famous Oracle there and

1:49:00 he's going into these Oracle's and the stories are that he's asking these Oracle's you know let's fill up my dad and the implication is that Phillip isn't his dad Zeus is now all by itself I'm not even sure the thinking that you are the son of a god or something is all that terrible depends on how it works out right maybe you're a wonderful person who thinks they're the son of a god but in Alexander's case it's wrapped up with all the other traditional stuff that's going on the megalomania the mental instability historians and writers ever since had been trying to put a label on it and figure it out there's so much unknown space in which to theorize you get pretty wide variation of ideas I have a whole book devoted to the idea that if you plug in rampant alcoholism for X the unknown quantity in the story boom everything else makes sense well that's just an argument but there's no doubt about it

1:49:51 that if you could bring Olympius from her home or the or the or the ruling area of makedonia in a giant Concorde jet land here in Babylon where Alexander is ten years after she last saw him if she could have a conversation with her son I wonder if she would recognize him the alcohol situation is a factor there's no doubt about it I mean his best friend and probable lover of fustian will die from drinking and not only does he almost died from drinking initially he's told to lay off the drinking for like a few days and he can't even do that and when he drinks the more he dies if Alexander's response to this was to drink more I mean these are people who are dying sometimes I mean imagine having chugalug contests where sometimes one of the participants dies I just imagine the other participant turning around lowering his giant cauldron of wine and going I win it's pretty hardcore right the only

1:50:44 thing I could say that sort of mollify is it a little bit is that the Persians that Alexander took over their ruler kind of is a big drinker and is supposed to be a big drinker like that to a heroic drinker you want to be the king of the Persians you better be able to drink sir just saying even now I think okay rampant alcoholic who thinks he's the son of a god you could still work with that couldn't you it's when you get to another of the known pitfalls of this great Conqueror sort of lifestyle that it all falls apart for him maybe the the paranoia and the suspicion and he begins to start killing the people around him he begins to think everyone's a threat and maybe those letters from his mom years ago that we're saying Antipodes trying to take over temperature doing too much antipathy this and maybe he could rebuke her back then just say lay off I know I know he's trying to conquer the world I'll get back to you maybe now

1:51:43 when you become more suspicious and as the mental instability takes hold and all these other problems he's got some war wounds that are maybe taking a toll on him sort of - he's not the man he was probably maybe you start listening to your mom's letters a little bit more you you already were thinking everyone around you is plotting and now she's saying this stuff about antipodean she's been saying it for like ten years certainly there where there's smoke there's fire in 3:23 Alexander decides to sack antipodal sends him a note from Babylon saying bring me some more replacement troops and come on over here I want to see you with everybody getting whacked around Alexander all of a sudden an tippet or who was in his 60s 70s maybe even now he thinks this is a trap traditionally he's he and anybody would think mafia crime family again Alexander wants you to come on over to this clam house and have a

1:52:35 little something to eat just want to talk to you so my interpreter doesn't go anywhere he doesn't drop his command and leave makedonia and go to see Alexander he doesn't respond to the summons so eventually he does send his son Cassander though cassandra is about Alexander's a by the way and he's important to the story very important Elizabeth Carney pointed out something that you kind of remember knowing but I didn't sink in until she said it was how many of these people had known each other their whole lives what's more in the makedonia in court many of these people's parents knew each other as toddlers and in a lot of cases even their grandparents played together on the schoolyard Alexander and Cassander were two of the people in that very tiny class taught by Aristotle and when you look at that class when the students in that class are named they all become like Alexander's generals and his

1:53:29 advisors and his bodyguards earlier we had mentioned the old guard of the generals Phillips you know people his dad's generals he has his own contemporaries who become generals and become great leaders of armies after his time - and these are all guys that went to school with him Kassandra is one of those guys but they don't really like each other that much apparently and Cassander shows up in Alexander's court ostensibly I guess to beg for his dad's job but in this case that's almost the same thing as begging for his life and in a famous story once again take it or leave it Cassandra walks in and sees something that the makedonia pnes around alexander have become accustomed to but Cassander hasn't seen it yet he sees the persians bowing on the ground - Alexander it's how they treat their kings you know you see the same thing in Egypt that's how they treated the Pharaohs right get right down on the ground like a god but

1:54:26 the makedonia 'ns didn't do that stuff right they thought it wasn't democracy what they had in makedonia but it was this sort of a gala day or we claimed the leader it was a much more down-to-earth sort of leadership by comparison a Cassander is supposed to have seen the persians doing this in front of Alexander - Alexander and laughing at it or making fun of it and in the story Alexander and this is a sign probably of the megalomania but maybe he would have done this back in the old days Alexander grabs him by the hair and starts smashing his head against the wall scaring Cassander so badly that we're told I think it was blue Turk who said that you know decades later long after Alexander is dead and gone a Cassander couldn't even pass a statue of the man without going weakened and I think futhark said taking quite a while to recover Cassandra was hardly the only person though scared at this

1:55:17 time Alexander had everybody on edge it's like the Third Reich at the end or I mean all these rulers get a little unstable at the end and they see plots everywhere there are a lot of people who may at this time have thought that it was worth taking a chance on trying to get rid of Alexander because if you didn't get rid of him he was likely to get rid of you and Cassander is one of the people implicated as a potential participant in Alexander's death by the way not only is Antipodes oldest son Cassander here Cassandra's brother another son of an tippet or is Alexander's cupbearer the one who you know just to make sure that this cup does not get out of my hands and nobody spikes it with anything that guy is Antipodes other son now the only time you care about the ancestry of a king's cup Bearer it's a little like an offensive lineman in football you only care about their name apparently when

1:56:17 something goes wrong well the only time the poor cup bearer gets mentioned is when something goes wrong or depending on you know what the cup bearer is involved with and who they're involved with when something goes right on June 10th June 11th 323 BCE a 32 year old Alexander the Great dies and no one to this day can say definitively why theories abound in all directions from the natural to the unnatural from the common sense and obvious to the wild guy had a lot of reasons he might have died though and disease is an obvious one and medical professionals have been looking and examining the the evidence from hundreds of years later that writers have kept about this kind of stuff and they will proclaim definitively it was just disease or not disease and I've heard everything typhus cholera malaria West Nile virus all of it then there's the sort of common sense ones I mean you can oh this is a guy with some major war

1:57:24 wounds that have probably began to take its toll the the drinking is long-term and chronic and and still at very high levels I mean that will take a toll it mixing it all together it could be an accumulation of things weakened his immune system and the West Nile virus gets him revenge of the Persian Empire through the mosquito but there has always been a tradition modern and ancient included by most of the sources that Alexander was assassinated poisoned that Cassander brought the poison that the cupbearer son of antipodean at Alexander that the poison might have been mixed by Aristotle himself appalled by Alexander's descent into tyrannical madness and that maybe Cassandra's job wasn't to go there and plead for his dad's job in life but to assess Alexander's sanity and willingness to be reasonable because remember antipodean those people are all back in Greece they're getting letters and hearing

1:58:31 stories but maybe you send your son say get a look for yourself and if he's not reasonable take him out Olympius certainly thinks antipodal and company did it and she will eventually proclaim this publicly and you have to be careful because the propaganda from this period following Alexander's death is heavy duty and it comes from all sides so saying he killed Alexander would be a huge propaganda tool but you can tell by the way it helps take something you know there was always a lot of gasoline soaked wood in the Olympia Santa Peter relationship this is when it turns into a vendetta a real clan blood feud between the official name for there are the and tippet Reds which are the family of antipodal but think about it like a you know the Gambino's the bonanno's the and tippet reds and Olympius is clan which includes two distinct ones really her clan back home remember she's maybe become the regent of her

1:59:38 homeland during this time period because her poor brother who married Cleopatra Alexander's sister gets himself killed in a war in Italy and apparently the kids are too young so Cleopatra or Olympius or both or maybe running the show back in the old Pyrus malossi in homeland and now with pretty much no male family members around to succeed she's kind of the front and center face of the royal family back in makedonia or what was the royal family and this is where you just get the feeling that all the people around Alexander are feeling really bad that he didn't take that good advice marry one woman or what the heck you know take a page out of his dad's playbook and marry to make sure one of them's a full-blooded makedonia n-- get a few kids going before you leave for your expedition in asia by the time you die here in 323 BCE at 32 it's 32 right um you'd have a couple of kids back in makedonia if you get lucky and err maybe

2:00:43 12 years old maybe 13 years old by this time I didn't do the math now we all know how the makedonia history goes the likelihood of a child you know having the throne kept long enough for them to succeed it is a long shot in makedonia but the older you are the better the chance you'll make it and let's be honest any king of Alexander is gonna have a bloodline that's incomparable right so maybe that's a get out of jail free card from typical makedonia history you're the son of Alexander you're the grandson of Philip the second and let's be honest you know who will be there guarding you until she dies of old age or something else Olympius because the interest with Alexander's heir will line up with his mother the same way that Alexander's interested when this will be the role she'll play for the rest of her life the guardian of the heir but if Alexander didn't have any heirs back in makedonia before he left for Asia

2:01:37 whatever am I talking about well there's not much there is a non-official wife so mistress she's often called in the child's often called the illegitimate son of Alexander his name is Heracles he's three four years old by this time and he's off somewhere in like Bactria which is a month with modern Afghanistan or a real real real upper part of Persia he's a long way away and his mother's a barbarian for goodness sake or at least the makedonia pnes would think so or at least half barbarian in anyway this kid does not get anywhere near the attention you would think he would get until power brokers feel like they can use him and then he all of a sudden I guess and some sources appears on the scene I've read some historians who questioned whether he really existed at all but there is something real that everyone can point to Alexander's got an official wife in Persia and she's pregnant when Alexander dies she

2:02:26 apparently quickly kills Alexander's other wives keeping the bloodline pure the makedonia pnes and persians both are into that some times but if you're worried about a 13 or 14 or 12 year old air back in makedonia the one he didn't have surviving long enough to get to the throne what chance does a kid who isn't even born yet have what's more it could be a female might not make it to term this is the ancient world after all the bottom line though is that there's no logical easy answer to what do we do now once Alexander dies and if you think about it it's it's really kind of a crazy moment in history these are always my favorite things and naturally there's never enough information did it really go down the way most of the sources kind of say it went down which is that when Alexander dies there is no plan as we said he's supposed to the story says that when he's asked on his deathbed to whom he leaves the Empire you know if

2:03:24 you're basically an emperor Alexander who's the next Emperor and he says to the strong guests very macho makedonia and Homeric answer may be something you could justify in a darwinian may the best man win kind of competition for the throne but disastrous for his people when you're talking about this as a successor to the entire policy right why don't you fight it out and we'll see that's gonna lead to more deaths from academia and soldiers than Philip and Alexander's Wars put together the makedonia infantry didn't suffer as terribly as you might think because they were so victorious and so dominant I had a professor once that said if you want to know the way to defeat the best army in any age in history split it up and make it fight itself you saw that in Roman history by the way the nastiest most dangerous opponents the Legionaries ever faced or other legionaries in civil wars that's what's gonna happen in the

2:04:20 next well this is crazy to even say over the next 44 or 45 years that's how long it will take for the two the strongest thing to be settled they're known as the Wars of the Alexandrian successors are the Wars of the successors of the Wars of the dyadic I've that's the Greek word for successors the rest of Olympia says life by the way will be spent as a player in this geopolitical struggle that will happen in phases it's not like 44 or 45 years of continual War II there'll be multiple phases that happen and there are so many players it is to me anyway easily the most complicated struggle in the ancient world it is very tough to keep track of as they say in sports the players without a scorecard a dizzying array of personalities a very weird crabs in a bucket type dynamic where the most august's scary and impressive people are eliminated early because everyone who's less competent and less impressive bands together to

2:05:28 take him down Olympius will be one of those people by the way she is a very scary player in the early phases of this so she's gotten rid of as quickly as anybody can do it but she's very hard to deal with because she represents ghosts impressive ghosts the power of Olympius which stemmed from her relationship to Philip for a while and then from her relationship to Alexander after that will now stem from the power that those former figures still possess it will it will flow through her I mean I think about her like this priestess but now the authority and gravitas and reputation of Philip and Alexander come mind are emanating through her and it affects the infantry of Alexander's army let me explain when Alexander dies the story is that you know everybody kind of looks at each other this is a cult of personality empire right it's really concentrated into one person he makes all the decisions he's I mean every he's the

2:06:36 heart the soul on the brain of this place and when he goes away a bunch of the makedonia n-- nobility go into a room and start debating what we know here's what we're gonna do now the best way to think about this maybe is that this is as close as you can come there in Babylon where Alexander dies by the way this is as close as you can come to the old makedonia smoke-filled room where the aristocrats and the heads of the families decide who it's going to be have to be an origin for the last long period of time but you know we'll figure this out it's Elizabeth Carney points out though they've had two kings and haven't had to do this for a long time in the last time they did something like this makedonia was a not important at all kingdom north of Greece a bunch of barbarians according to the Greeks and the Greeks could actually from the southern states could actually interfere and who got to be the makedonia King and

2:07:25 now she points out they're having one of these meetings to determine half the known world's fate it's a little bit different isn't it what's more they're operating in a really weird one historian called it a potentially terrifying period of time here after Alexander's death there's a problem sometimes when you read history and in the black words on the white page failed to convey the parts of history sometimes that are the most human right the reason it can't be a science the emotional stuff and there's two kinds of emotional stuff there's there's you're having an emotional moment yourself and that's very different than Society is having an emotional moment all at the same time and I try to think of emotional analogies which is both a a very cool and stupid concept at the same time because you know there's really no analogies when you think about what might happen but you try to say okay if

2:08:16 people in this time period are operating in a stunned sort of state of mind I try to think of like after 9/11 when you walked around and and everybody had this there's no good English word for I was like 20 adjectives to try to explain it where I'm sure one really good long German word would hit it right on the head like they always do stunned surprised disbelief a real sense of disbelief then there's like a brain fog if it's anything like the 9/11 thing there's a real sense of trepidation about what happens now and it's not hysteria it's not mania but it's not stable it's a time where you could see the emotional state of mind if everybody is on edge and as every major historian points out from the sources we have which are not great you get this feeling like civil war could happen at any moment like you have gasoline soaked wood here and it wouldn't take much and the reason why is because the elites in

2:09:12 the makedonia army the cavalry are the ones in the back smokey filled room thinking they're going to figure this out the infantry of the makedonia naar me are the salt of the earth types they're not going to be so much salt of the earth types later when they get rich and they turn mercenary but during this time period they're still like the farmer people of makedonia you know the people who have a real loyalty to the royal house who who have a if there's a more mythical sort of feel to what patriotism is the wrong word in the era before nationalism arose but it's a little like patriotism their their allegiance is to the family of Alexander I mean think about it if you have had two virtual demigod kings in a row from that line I mean why would you want to change horses in midstream Alexander and Philip and now you want to do something else and by the way I didn't mention the something else the agreement eventually

2:10:02 worked out with all these crabs in a bucket in this back room trying to broker some deal is that they're gonna wait to see about the child that Roxane Alexander's wife is pregnant with because if it's a boy we will hold the kingship for that they'll have a Regency right and we told you already 18 years these guys are gonna hold this for this keep the throne warm for eighteen years okay well that's a certain kind of decision right there isn't it and the infantry who are made up like we said of these people who are loyal to the royal house and they pretty much have their own idea who the throne should go to and they present him to the cavalry apparently in one of these making them an offer they can't refuse kind of deals and he's dressed this this person is dressed in Alexander's clothes supposedly one source you know hasn't been the armor his name just added by this group of infantry by the way is Philip so if you

2:11:00 dressed at Alexander's clothes your name is Philip well they're trying to tell you something it's Philip era dais though it's Alexander's brother who has that sort of indeterminable mental condition as one historian said the only reason that this is the only person you have to turn to is cuz anybody that Alexander was afraid of his gone by now so he wasn't afraid of this guy why cuz he's no threat although I read someone else that said the fact that the infantry knew him and he was in Babylon with them he was sort of a mascot apparently as the way it's portrayed you know the team mascot but the fact that the infantry knew him and wanted him for this role may have been an indication that that's not really true in history so who knows the two sides the infantry the salt of the earth types start clashing with the cavalry violence almost breaks out or does and the cavalry leaves Babylon the infantry

2:11:54 stays in Babylon and then the cavalry puts Babylon under siege you have an explosive moment here and then a deal is brokered the deal is that there will be no compromises on either side that both sides get what they want so there's going to be two kings the unborn child of Roxanne who does turn out to be a boy and Alexander the Great is Alexander the third so they'll name this one Alexander the fourth and Alexander's half-brother son of Philip and APHIS alien dancing girl I believe is going to be the other king and neither one of them can rule without a region so a regent is appointed and away we go Elizabeth Carney tries to get into the head a little bit of Olympius on an emotional level when she finds out her son is dead she has no body she has nothing and you know at most mothers would be very bereaved in the situation her situations worse because Alexander was her guarantee of safety not just for her but for her

2:13:00 immediate loved ones all together the reason her enemy antipodal couldn't touch her when Alexander was alive he's still in makedonia she's nearby if she's not in makedonia i think it that she keeps going back and forth between makedonia and her homeland in malaysia but all of a sudden I mean antipodal can do whatever he wants to her except for one thing he's got to be careful because all throughout the rest of her life the salt of the earth makedonia n-- soldiers not so much the cavalry but but the people on the ground the everyday joes in the ranks they're gonna show an immense amount of loyalty to her and the loyalty of the troops during this time period in this next successor war is key because at times they will turn on their commanders in this in the upcoming wars there'll be incidents of them deciding to I mean in one famous case the baggage of the infantry you know you know in a conflict is captured and so to get their

2:14:04 baggage back to hand the general over it's going to be a very interesting time period for all of these different generals who essentially have pieces of the vert MOC that they're that they're fighting with against other pieces of the vert MOC but sometimes the pieces in the vert macht have a mind of their own and Olympius is one of those people that will prove to be a dangerous person to do anything against because your own vert MOC troops might turn against you this is an interesting thing for the generals to try to have to deal with it's a dynamic in this crisis and interestingly enough it's not just Olympius the commands this sort of loyalty from the backbone of the makedonia gnar me and probably the farmers and the folks back home in makedonia it's not just her it's all the close family of philip ii and of course she's not the only close family of philip ii she's also not the only one

2:15:03 able to channel power in the here-and-now through ghosts philip ii Olympia's his long dead husband now the great philip ii Alexander's dad you know he had seven wives right he didn't just have Olympius and those wives produced offspring didn't they obviously they didn't have any of the male offspring survived to become competitors of Alexander because well that's what purges are for right out of the Alexander would have gotten those guys but the women are no threat to him so they usually didn't get touched which means when it comes to what those salt-of-the-earth backbone of the makedonia army and probably the makedonia invokes back home if they have a loyalty to the royal family at this point that mainly means women which provides a level of power boost that is unusual what's unusual about the next part of this story it to me it is the best part of this story because it's so rare it's rare to see women exerting

2:16:07 themselves on the on the global geopolitical stage especially before modern times but they're out there there's incidents there's even incidents of multiple women doing it at the same time but they're rare I've never and you know I'm ignorant on so many subjects and I'm sure it happened in Chinese history because everything happened in Chinese history once upon a time but I've not encountered another era where you have so many powerful August women in the story operating on both sides by the way and often at odds with each other in it in a full-on geopolitical diplomatic power sense as now and you might be able to make a case that it's because of the way the conditions developed and one of the conditions is all these men that might have otherwise assumed this role are gone and if Philip the second and Alexander the Great's memory confers power on the people left over in the family and those people are

2:16:54 women well you see a unique opportunity for these women to figure out a tool to use that power after Alexander dies you have a mass rush of all these various makedonia royal clans marrying into each other for diplomatic purposes right covering their ass hedging their bets this is a it's a dangerous time right which of these successors might win what what might happen to us who are we said well what if you support the wrong guy for the boss the bosses and then afterwards the other guy they're going to remember that right Elizabeth Kearney called this period the brisk post Alexander elite makedonia in marriage market which I thought was interesting now the reason it concerns us though is there's a couple of these potential marriage partners from the royal clan who are game changers right they could end this story of who gets to succeed Alexander right now right there doesn't have to be the equivalent of an ancient world war

2:17:49 for 44 or 45 years to settle it we could settle it right now you know in 322 or something year after Alexander dies we'll settle it right now all you got to do is have one of these crabs in a bucket one of these successor warlords has to just get the edge and it's all over and it's got to be a pretty good edge because the other crabs in the bucket will pull you down if you just get a slight bit more power than they have you've got to win the game you got to hit the jackpot if this is like a murderous version of The Bachelorette you've got to get the hand of the bride that can confer legitimacy on you who's out there that could do that and think about how much power that gives the person who can do that well there are multiple potential people who could marry into one of these successors clans and get them closer to the royal house but there is almost a hierarchy right this person will get you this close to

2:18:49 the royal house but this person will get you two steps close to the royal house you want to get the jackpot you gotta marry Alexander the Great's sister don't you he's only got one full blooded sibling Cleopatra the one who married her uncle who's gone off and died in Italy now leaving her a widow boom here she is available the Bachelorette and of course Olympius and her daughter Cleopatra work as a team here sort of so much the Olympius Cleopatra limited partnership here and they desperately need to utilize this power of of having the ability to confer upon you a spouse and then of course subsequent children whose father was Philip the second whose brother was Alexander the Great whose mother is Olympius I mean come on that is your game-changer right there you want to be the crab that crawls out of the bucket you marry Cleopatra and she knows it but this power also makes her dangerous to others I mean if you happen to be the

2:19:55 successor warlord who gets her hand in marriage well fantastic for you but what does that mean for all your competitors all the Warlord's who didn't get her hand in marriage so over her over her lifetime she's going to either court or be courted by many of the major players in this story all the bigwigs are gonna try to get her hand in marriage she's the obvious prize here but if you can't have her hand in marriage she's the obvious target to at least you have to block her because she's another one of those people that you can't just kill all right sometimes you just want to kill these people if you're one of these successors but there are certain people that have sort of a cloak of invincibility around them and it's the ghosts protecting them philip ii and alexander you go off and kill them your troops might kill you now that's not just speculation because some of the other women in this story have an

2:20:53 incident very similar to that happen to them this is where the other women come into the piece philip ii had multiple wives remember we talked about one of these wives as an example of how tough you know philip shouldn't have a problem with Olympius right he has that warrior that a leery and warrior princess as a wife and one of his other ones the Wonder Woman lady fights with sword shield helmet remember we talked about her well you know she had children with Philip imagine how August a child of that woman trained in combat and maybe even leading troops melded with Philips DNA think of how Olga's those kids would be well here they come into the story and they're female as we said earlier it's hard to keep track of the names and the players in this story without a scorecard this is the case by the way for any long Wars the 30 Years War is the same way where there's so much time for so much stuff to occur that it's

2:21:47 impossible to keep track of it all it's a multi-generational soap opera kind of as we said I was trying to think of the way to simplify this the best and the best way to say it is that Alexander's half-sister the woman who we just talked about who is the daughter of Wonder Woman and Philip the second her name is Kanani it looks like cyan if you ever see it written also trained in the ways of the warrior illyrian princesses right so she's a killer a hand-to-hand killer apparently too very culture though I mean she's Philip the second daughter she's the King's daughter so she'll just kill you in a cultured sort of manner um she's involved in what some historians call a scheme it looks much more like a a grab for power in this post Alexandrian world and let's remember power this might not be because they're power-hungry power is synonymous with safety here and the best way to get eliminated is to be shut out of power by

2:22:42 your enemies what happens though is that this cannon a daughter of Wonder Woman and philip ii makes a bold play to seize one of the sources of power and authority in this very unstable post Alexandrian world and this is all happening in the wake of Alexander's death so a year two three this is the initial you know initial power moves of this whole thing there's two places that power emanates from officially in this world right now and it's the two kings Alexander's infant son Alexander the fourth with the Persian or Bactrian mom I think he's still in Asia at this point but he's an infant right he's a prop in the power struggles for now but then you have philip aridaias the mascot king the woman with the disability of some sort he's almost certainly being used as a puppet by the Warlord's you know who are the Regents right we're ruling for the king who's right here and he's indisposed at the

2:23:38 moment but what happens if somebody steals the puppet from the Warlord's right that the person who's making it possible for you to keep the army loyal and happy and thinking that he's running the show and really you're running the show through him if you're one of the Warlord's how do you how do you prevent somebody from stealing the puppet well that's what this scheme is this daughter of philip ii and wonder woman is bringing her daughter a day 'you Riddick he's gonna be what she's known as eventually bringing her daughter and she's gonna try to marry her daughter to one of the Kings right she can't have the infant king he's not marriage Abul anyway but Phillip paradise doesn't have a wife now if you're trying to pull this scheme off though you can't go to the Warlord's you can't go to the people who have the puppet now that you're gonna steal the puppet from and say hey let me steal the

2:24:28 puppet do I'll have your blessing you got to bypass them well how do you bypass them you go right to the source of power the makedonia naar me and the infantry the salt of the earth types so the warlord general types the successors they get word that this is under way that the scheme is ongoing and that this woman cannon a is on the way and I've read sources that say she has a small bodyguard with her others that she's got a decent sized entourage others that she's got a whole army behind her so I don't know which of those is true but she's she's protected the general send out someone to intercept her before she could get to the infantry cuz lord knows the infantry will probably say yes to this deal and the intercepting force somehow blocks her for a little bit of time and in that little bit of time she's killed sources differ on what happened here everything from assassinated to violence breaking out

2:25:24 between the various bodyguards that leads to her being killed in the fray to a full blown story again from one of the less reputable sources that she's giving a speech she sounds fully like Phillips daughter in this warrior princess like she's getting up in the face of her assassins and pleading her case and yelling at them and she's in the middle of a speech in one of these stories to the Troops that are there there are makedonia and troops there witnessing all this and while she's in the middle of the speech she she's stabbed or killed and and cut down in the middle of the conversation no matter which of those stories is true it apparently happens in a way that either the makedonia n-- troops see it at the time watch it live or hear about it soon after and they're outraged you can't kill Philip the second daughter who the hell are you and these warlords who are counting on these military forces to stay loyal to

2:26:14 them are about to be thrown to the crocodiles by these same troops because they killed what a philip ii daughters in front of them the only way they managed to avoid disaster is to give in to what that now dead daughter of Philip wanted they have to go ahead and let this granddaughter of Philip this a day a Eurydice Lady Mary the mascot King Mary the puppet and as I think he was a V Bosworth who coined the phrase and it's not very nice the marriage of the Amazon to the idiot but it gives you a sense of what's going on here an easily controllable not very August personality who was being controlled by these powerful marshals is now going to be controlled by this powerful personality called a de aridity and if you took an ancient Greek playwright brought them in the time machine and let them write for one of today's TV daytime soap operas that's how I see this whole whole situation unfolding because it looks

2:27:15 like this is revenge from another one of Philips wives against Olympius from the grave through her descendants something wonderfully Greek about that this a daya Riddick he's gonna be an instant thorn in the side of Olympius though remember she's she's the granddaughter of her husband she's going to be an instant thorn in the side because what if she's able to make you know Philip aridaias the the mascot king what if she can make him legitimate enough so no one's gonna wait around 17 years for Olympius as grandson to come of age in other words could she turn the puppet king into a real king the only king that she dominates it's wonderful but I said earlier that this period is one of the ones I use as evidence for why history ruins fiction for me because we already have a wonderful story here kind of unbelievable wild you know and then in typical Alexandrian fashion the story gets kicked up two notches

2:28:17 knotch number one apparently Alexander the Great had a day.you Riddick his father killed when she was a kid one of his perch is you know potential competitor so if she didn't like the other side of the family to begin with she really doesn't like him now the other thing and I find this to be the one where I would send this script back to the screenwriter and said sorry you went too far here nobody's gonna buy that she's apparently something like 16 years old her age is tough to determining and dividing the spoils the Robin water-filled said 16 Wow and 16 really doesn't mean anything in a neutral playing field historically speaking right as we all know people got married younger Romeo and Juliet there and she's like 1314 something like that but we're not talking about somebody who just gets married and then ends up in somebody's you know royal family or whatnot we're talking about somebody who

2:29:13 almost immediately asserts her prerogatives and tries to rest as much control as she can grab over the situation here and she's not playing with a bunch of little court functionaries she's doing this in a room full of these generals and marshals that are so great I said that only like Napoleon's group of generals and marshals and jenga's cons I mean it's rarefied air and some of these guys are like multiple times her age there's a bunch of these dudes in their late 60s all the way up to their mid 70s still in the field fighting by the way they don't make people like this anymore we should point out guys who were fighting with Alexander's dad the day Alexander was born and some sixteen-year-old is gonna come in there who wasn't even a part of the story five minutes ago and start telling them how it's gonna be this is insane and I wouldn't believe it when I do my multi-part you know what forty-five

2:30:14 fifty seven episodes whatever it's gonna be on my cable channel I'm going to find some actors from that region cuz I feel like there's in my head anyway I have a very specific kind of fire in mind that that that's native to the region I guess you could say you know Greece northern Greece Albania Bulgaria maybe maybe Sicily and then go find yourself like a 16 year old from there who it sounds like something out of The Hunger doesn't it too much to be believed because this 16 year old is not going to stay in the shadows at all now the year she marries Philip Barry Deus though is 321 BCE this is two years after Alexander the Great dies and it is the year that the whole post Alexander deal on how we're going to run things goes murderously sideways the deal made in the wake of Alexander's death you know under pressure in haste it never seems like that had much of a chance of lasting especially with all these

2:31:12 ambitious powerful people involved it would have required a lot of good behavior on a lot of people's parts to understand the set up because it's kind of important essentially what all these people did in deciding how they were gonna run Alexander's Empire after he died was to run it like the Persians ran theirs and really if you want to look at it similar to the way the makedonia pnes ran makedonia before they got all big and powerful all these great successors these generals these marshals these high administrators these bodyguards of Alexander would all be given territories you know think Al Capone South Side's his territory Ptolemy Ptolemy gets Egypt so all these people rule these areas and they rule them kind of like kings and I keep calling them warlords because they fit the definition of the term at the same time one historian reminds us that these are at this time period people who

2:32:02 are practically kings themselves fabulously wealthy immensely famous lots of troops swear allegiance to them I mean these are these are kings in their own right you start if you're a king after a while wanting to be treated like a king and not really wanting to bow the knee to any boss of bosses but this system has won that's the deal it is like a Persian system where all of the sat traps are Kings in their own territory but there is someone called the King of Kings and that was the high commander well that person is a title in this system is Regent and they they rule with the royal power in the name of the two kings who are not capable of ruling at the moment this person just happens to get this job because he was at Alexander's been seen as Alexander Lay Dying and Alexander gives the signet ring to this guy his name is perd a kiss by the way and he's one of the successors and he's an impressive figure and as we had

2:33:04 mentioned earlier in this dynamic some of the impressive figures are the ones most of the other people agree we don't want them around now this signet ring that Alexander gives to perta kiss is not the equivalent of giving him the crown it's not saying I leave the Empire to you it's more like if we go back to our analogy of you know Philip and Sons Asian conquest expedition LLC or whatever the family business it's like given in the keys to the office so he can open up in the morning for everyone else so Perdiccas will basically use that though against the other successors and say hey you know he didn't give you the office keys did he so Perdiccas becomes the first regent and then he starts acting if you're looking at this from the point of view of his successor opponents he starts acting like a king or wanting to look like a king or starting to want to act like he could be the next Alexander and so you know they

2:33:55 had to take him down Olympius plays a role in this which is why some historians have always blamed her for being at the root cause of this entire world war you don't get very many women in geopolitical history in the ancient world and then they finally write about her and the accuser of starting a multi-generational World War come on and probably for reasons of jealousy and revenge and you know spiked all those typical female qualities even good historians use words like scheming and meddling and things like that where you're going was she really meddling or were there geopolitical concerns going on here that explained it in a better way than meddling do we accuse Alexander of meddling in other kingdoms affairs being the regent though gives this / - kiss guy the inside track to being the next Alexander and Olympia starts positioning herself back in makedonia to be on his side because she needs anybody

2:34:53 who's going to be someone who can protect her and and protect her interest from antipodal right now that Alexander is dead this nice feud she has with antipodal you know you can you can light the torch to that gasoline-soaked wood that you've been soaking down for more than a decade now who's gonna protect you from an tippet or well she's working on that she actually you know schemes or metals in affairs in greece right after alexander dies to stir up trouble just to keep an tip ador busy which is of course just going to make him a little bit more angry right and then / takus this first guy who gets the Regency he becomes the first crab dynamic victim in the bucket one of the crazy things about the war of the successors and it will be hard to find anything quite like it is that it combines this element of geopolitical cutthroat Machiavellian type world affairs at the highest level you know in

2:35:50 that geopolitical world right that that mediterranean western asia northern africa world with very close personal relationship dynamics that's why the soap opera thing works so well americans love to point out and talk about the element of the american civil war that that's fascinating about how the generals on both sides knew each other and often serve together in wars and had close relationships it is it's a dynamic element that adds a humaneness and a relationship between enemies that you normally don't have when the enemies are foreign right I know those guys you know well you get this to a degree you'll never see anywhere else in this in this upcoming series of wars because all of the leaders of these countries know each other intimately families were probably closed may have been toddlers together may have been in the Aristotle school together certainly served together many in the greatest event that they can find

2:36:44 anywhere in their history book still they go back to mythical times with gods right they conquered the east together as comrades maybe saved each other's lives and now they're ordering hits on each other what's more these officer cores in all these versions of the Vermont the Macedonian army that's now spread out from Albania to Afghanistan from Egypt to India all these upper officer cores know each other which causes huge issue you'll get people making statements and saying things like well I'm not gonna fight against craters I won't fight against him or troops that end up liking the general that they're about to fight against that they know personally and who's very popular more than the person they're fighting for and switching sides what this really is is it's a world war that's going to encompass the entire former Empire of Alexander but that is really at its core a Mack Adomian Civil

2:37:38 War and all these millions of people in these territories most of whom have already suffered by being conquered by the makedonia --nz are gonna get swept up into it the reason Olympia sometimes gets accused of starting the war is that this particular Regent the guy who has the inside track to succeeding Alexander is already kind of riding high and scaring everybody he's scaring everybody to the point where he has to make a marriage arrangement with his you know competitors to try to make them feel better so he's gonna marry Antipodes daughter right Olympia's his enemy antipodal that's not good for Olympius by the way he's gonna marry Antipodes daughter and that will help you know patch over their differences so he's betrothed to this woman whose name is nasiha and olympia sends cleopatra the Bachelorette to go in and block her and offer marriage to her instead this would completely discombobulated everything in his book

2:38:40 dividing the spoils author Robin water-filled describes Olympia's scheme or meddling this way quote Olympius was still nervous about antipodal once he had finished settling affairs in southern Greece he was bound to punish her for her support of the Greek rebellion she came up with a bold ploy knowing that nasiha this is Antipodes daughter was betrothed to Perdiccas and was even now on her way to Presidio for the wedding she simultaneously sent Cleopatra to Sardis which is nearby and wrote to human ease suggesting that Perdiccas might like to marry her daughter instead she needed Perdiccas to be Antipodes enemy not his son-in-law she needed an tip in her to be just did by war in Asia and unable to turn his attention to a Pyrus her homeland the plan worked perfectly he writes he continues quote Olympius is overall intention now and in the following years was to see her grandson Alexander the

2:39:44 fourth gain the makedonia enthroned even though the chances of his attaining his majority must have appeared very bleak offering Cleopatra Alexander's sister to purchase was a major plank in the scheme she wanted to see Perdiccas arrive in makka Don Mary to Alexander's sister welcomed by Alexander's mother with two kings and Alexander's corpse in his train and at the head of the army with which Alexander had conquered the East under such circumstances antipathy would have had no future barring unforeseen ball accidents perdicas would have been the sole ruler of the empire until Alexander the fourth came of age with Olympius by his side end quote apparently Perdiccas is tempted by this whole thing but he goes ahead with the wedding Mary's interpreters daughter anyway but then starts sending messages to Cleopatra basically insinuating that he's still interested and maybe they could work this deal and that kind of

2:40:42 thing and that becomes known to the other big powerful generals and marshals to them many histories portray this is like the moment of reveal when Perdiccas as true intentions are are made known to everyone I don't know if it's quite that big of the the reveal moment but essentially it shows hey I'm going for it all he's the first to trigger the famous crabs in a bucket dynamic I've overused and talked about this whole program he will have several powerful marshals band together to take him down he will also fight with Ptolemy another one of the successors who's whose territories Egypt Ptolemy is one of my favorite ones he was a bodyguard of Alexander's he was a member of the the small class of boys who learned from Aristotle he is the one who gets Egypt for his territory he's also the one who in 321 BCE steals alexander the great's preserved corpse while it's on its way in a in a big display a convoy showing off the

2:41:46 god-king to all the people along the Royal Road all the way back to makedonia where it can be buried in its native soil and instead Ptolemy and the greatest heist in all human history steals it brings it back to Egypt it will become a tourist attraction for generations and Peter Green calls it a quasi magical good-luck charm and legitimize er of power he says in the makedonia system in order to be considered a legitimate successor to the previous king you have to bury the previous king and only ptolemy has the body at this point what a great heist it's like Al Capone seizing all that bootleg liquor from a competitor now the problem with Olympius hitching her wagon to this / - kiss guy and essentially offering him the kingdom right I give you Cleopatra it's jackpot you win is that with all these other powerful generals against Perdiccas he gets whacked it happens to him in Egypt when he's fighting Ptolemy the guy who

2:42:45 stole Alexander's body apparently officers come in - purr - kisses tent and knife him or sword get him with a sword he'd already had all kinds of debacles he had an army desert to the other side he had a river crossing that went disastrously awry and maybe 2,000 men drowned or were eaten by crocodiles and so the army probably had a lot of reason to not be happy with him so when these officers knifed him sometimes you'll read in the history books it'll say that he was killed by his own troops and if your officers knife you that's still technically true but it has a different connotation and in this case some of the history's record that Ptolemy is sitting across the river with his army waiting for word that this deed has been carried out that sure sounds like a mafia hit though doesn't it it's ruthless but I keep reminding myself ruthlessness is pretty much par for the course in the power politics game from the beginning

2:43:45 of history till like yesterday right there's nothing different about the ruthlessness so he's a little shocking a ruthless we human beings can be sometimes but nothing new there what makes this successors period so fascinating and interesting and twisty and weird and different and maybe potentially upsetting is that all this ruthlessness is happening between people who know each other so well as we said earlier there's a web of connection between these people some of their families go back generations some of them were toddlers together some of them were in class together with Aristotle almost all of them with the exception of a few were on the the big eastern campaign to conquer the world with Alexander I mean these are people who are closely connected on a personal level so it's not like you're being ruthless against a bunch of people you don't know that personal angles very strange and you

2:44:37 wonder this is the way I always think I wonder if Ptolemy felt any sort of emotional weirdness about if he was I should say disclaimer Ptolemy you might not have done it but the theory is telling me probably did do it he certainly may have had other successors saying yeah could do it um but I mean we felt any emotional pangs of sentiment at all and if he did you go okay that's interesting if he didn't that would be interesting too I can hear one of my history teachers saying you're putting your own cultural relevance into this they were raised in a different environment they wouldn't have thought about it the way you thought about it well if that's true and they were able to be that kind of ruthless to people they knew and sometimes cared about deeply well that's interesting too isn't it nonetheless purchases death is part of the first round of culling of these successor bigwigs and he's hardly the

2:45:30 only one there will be a number of major figures taken out in this conflict so in 320 BCE they have to have a conference where they all get together again because they got a lot of vacancies and some of the key jobs all right because the people are dead now and so they have this conference in 320 in Syria I believe where they're gonna reapportioned the jobs fill these positions confirm other people in their positions whatever now it's at this point that we see another entrance onto the history books and you get the sense that she forced her way on this this is not something that historians were dying to find out again it's unavoidable and it may explain things a day are you ready key is here again she's apparently at this conference she comes with her husband if they're gonna be deciding you know the power situation apparently you know she's either going to be there or they're the you know figment of

2:46:21 legitimacy that everyone's hiding behind but she goes out and with these bigwigs she's what 17 now she asserts the authority of the the throne demands more rights over the Regency that kind of thing and once again you're sitting here going Wow then something happens with her you want to talk about powerful women and remember with things like this this long ago you have to read between the lines so you're gonna get separated data points and you have to say to yourself like an algebra problem if she could do this what might we deduce about her right she apparently does something and it's unclear again that the prompts all kinds of troubles and and reactions she somehow gets in front of a large crowd of soldiers and starts inciting them at this conference there is apparently some sort of cash flow issue the soldiers haven't been paid or do some money they're angry about it we've already pointed out occasions where the

2:47:19 makedonia infantry the rank-and-file can get kind of fiery it's not just the ladies in this story from the region that can get that way the makedonia infantry can get a little fiery and she's playing that up she's inciting them one historian I read said it got to the point where there the the troops were almost ready to start lynching their officers or the marshals or whatnot there were two temporary people who took purchases job just until they decided something at the conference and both of them were unable to handle a day oh you Riddick II if you believe the sources sort of threw up their hands and didn't know what to do so when I say connect the data points and realize what's going on in between who the hell can't handle the 17 I mean you say to yourself how is she already such an issue enter onto the scene and tippet er Olympius is old enemy the vendor the head of the vendetta clan the whole

2:48:12 thing right he shows up once again we imagine in his late 70s here probably and he sort of quells the situation and it's not easy historian said it was a um a blend of firmness and conciliation that helped get the troops in line again and an tippet are sort of put some muzzle or a straitjacket on a day or you really key for the moment you know throws are off a Twitter or whatever it is whatever the ancient equivalent is but it doesn't sound like it was easy and the fact that he's got to do this once again shows you that she's a very interesting character right I so to get the feeling like you know he'd love to have her killed in a different world it would just solve everything but his hands are tied right she's got the cloak of invulnerability right now and she apparently knows it and she's gonna use it antipodal is going to be given the top job basically at this conference he's gonna be the guy

2:49:07 that succeeds Perdiccas which is exactly the opposite of what Olympius was hoping for right her so much of the machinations that she's been involved with since her son's death have been designed to prevent this guy from becoming powerful and here he is basically now at the top of his of his game in his late 70s approaching his early 80s he will come back to makedonia in 320 BCE 319 BCE bringing both Kings with him Phillip every day as the mascot King and Alexander's probably would you say toddler now Alexander the fourth with his mother Alexander's Persian battery and wife essentially and tippet are also now will hold this office of Regent he basically has all of the trappings of legitimacy that you could possibly have to be the one who you know gives orders in Alexander's stead except for Alexander's body Ptolemy is of course coveting that at home talking to it maybe when no one's looking

2:50:07 but within tipping are coming back to makedonia with this sort of power and authority it's hard not to see this as one of the lowest points in Olympia's life and maybe she's in great physical danger here to remember not only did she already have a lot of water under the bridge probably in the relationship with this guy but she can plausibly be accused of setting in motion the wave of destruction and Wars and everything that's been going on since Alexander died so I mean he's got a lot of reasons to want to see her gone it's a time when a person who had devoted their entire life to a particular deity might expect a little divine intervention and perhaps if you look at things from a magical point of view it's possible that that's exactly what she gets here in 319 BCE a relatively short time after he arrives back in makedonia after being given you know the trappings of kurta kisses position and legitimacy and Thibodeaux

2:51:18 dies now obviously there's no talk of conspiracy or worries about poison and whatnot here when you're 78 79 80 81 years old whatever he was people aren't surprised it's another reason if you're a person who wants to go tell Olympius dog think your God did this he was an old man he was bound to kick off eventually she might come back with a very plausible reply and say yeah but how do you explain the next part then the next part is that s antipodal a dying his son Cassander was supposed to be at his side when last we saw Cassander Alexander the Great was beating his head against the wall and he was forever traumatized and couldn't walk by a statue of the great figure without going weak in the knees even decades later we're told Cassander who might have been the guy that delivered the poison to the cupbearer that killed Alexander if poison did kill Alexander Cassandra's by his dad's bedside and

2:52:22 clearly expects to be the one who his dad gives his power and authority to and the reason you can deduce that is because when his dad doesn't do this Cassander gets pissed runs off and immediately starts the second round of the successor war is about 45 minutes after the last round ended you can see why people sometimes like to think of them as continuous conflicts now here's the thing had Cassander gotten the gig from his dad it would have been a disaster for Olympius and her people and that was sort of the one you would think was going to get the job so antipodal a have been old and that might have been expected but the idea that an tippity would hand the Regency over not to a son Cassander but to a person who would end up being close enough to Olympius to be on her side well what are the odds of that sometimes it pays to have friends in high places she might think I've read some really

2:53:21 good histories though that have really good rational explanations for why interpreter might not have given the job to Cassander the first one and the most plausible being he may not have seen it as his job to give it was the syndicate right the other bosses who gave me this job and and they're the ones who'll decide who will replace me I read one guy who had a great line about wisdom because when you look at the only successor who's really gonna come out ahead and all these crabs in a bucket dynamic kind of thing it's gonna be Ptolemy the guy with Alexander's body and sometimes there's almost a karmic sort of explanation given why he's the one that chose not to participate in alexandria's so-called funeral games right stayed out of the crabs in the bucket dynamic therefore he survived right what's the line from wargames the only way to win is not to play Ptolemy didn't play and maybe antipodean his

2:54:09 power and authority to his son was basically asserting that listen son stay out of this mess and you'll prosper but if I give this ring to you they're gonna see this as an attempt to create a dynasty you're gonna get all those powerful generals combining to take you down the way they took down Perdiccas let's just avoid this it will give the job to good old loyal [ __ ] pecan or Paulette perk on this is gonna be this guy this poor prolific on guys a moment on the world stage he seems like a trustworthy not very August general in a in a room full of really great generals one historian and not very nice way said he was a jackal amongst lions the Lions being the great marshals when the bad general though is just he's gonna end up fighting these other generals and they're really good so all of his shortcoming we'll be exposed and this is where you know if you're having that argument with Olympius trying to explain to her that

2:55:07 this is not your god favoring you you would come back with yeah well if your God was trying to help you out why would he saddle you with the pelipper come guy as your general because that's where Olympius is real downsides gonna happen in his fighting who's he gonna be fighting Cassander what's he gonna be fighting over which of the two kings gets to be the only king you know that deal when Alexander died we're gonna have two Kingdom they're both gonna be legitimate we're gonna raise them up blah blah blah yeah well that ends here there's gonna be one King and it's gonna be figured out who it is over the next couple of years it's either gonna be the mascot King Philip aridaias so it's gonna be the let's call him the toddler King Alexander the fourth maybe he's five years old now so maybe not toddler anymore the representatives of the mascot King are obviously a day ru Riddick II they will hook their wagon

2:55:56 both sides need military support they will hook their wagon to Cassandra's cause so he's kind of their champion and we don't know yet whether a day.you Riddick he figures that Cassandra is her puppet or whether Cassandra figures she's his on the other side you have the little kid Alexander the fourth you have his mother Alexander's Persian battery and wife you have Olympius and you have this pelipper con guy he's going to be the guy that goes and wrestles with Cassander all over this theater militarily and some of Cassandras allies and basically lose that's what happens they lose everywhere else but there's going to be a battle that actually physically involves both of our female champions here on opposite sides I can tell you with only a little bit of shame that the entire reason I've told you this entire story the entire reason I would justify the 57 part series on the cable network that I'd like to do is for

2:56:49 this battle on this scene and unfortunately the ancient sources tell you it happened give you like a sentence or two but they leave out all the juicy drama and color that could be in there so I'll try to fill it in with what little we know what little we know is already fascinating there's an ancient historian Duras of Samos he called this battle the first war between women certainly he is mistaken because with all of human history there's just too much out there where you can say reasonably with an odds the odds out there it probably happened before and I always safely say it probably happened in China before it's a safe bet but in 317 BCE at one point again there's a lot we don't know dating may be suspect but a day.you Riddick he might have come back to makedonia and attempted to sort of just dismiss the guy that antipodal left everything to sorry I pulled it back on we don't need you anymore your services

2:57:44 are no longer required we're giving it to Cassander and Phillip parodius is gonna be the new king or whatever she said that's so pissed off Olympius that Olympius gets an army together most of them the local levies from her homeland and she may have been ruling her homeland directly at this point by the way she'll get her levies together she has some makedonia n-- troops both sides I should point out have makedonia and staffs of command officers so they're not operating alone there's a group of people deciding on strategy and all that but there will be an encounter at the a pirate makedonia border between these two women at the heads of their armies basically sort of let's let's call them the faces of both sides on one side is a day a you Riddick II with an army with quite a few makedonia ng's on paper this should be the victorious force because they have the deciding factor right these what are we calling the ancient

2:58:39 Vermont units these people who conquered the world or at least a military system that produced them led by officers lots of veterans it's a fearsome force a day are you Riddick he is dressed like one of them in armor with weapons helmet the whole she's dressed like a soldier like a man and her illyrian heritage is always remarked upon her mother certainly fought and was trained to fight may have commanded troops as I said may have killed a rival queen in single combat and her mother the illyrian who marry married Philip the second well it goes without saying she was trained as well I find this sort of interesting because this is a what is she about twenty years old now I don't know when her birthday is but let's say twenty years old today are you ready ki she's essentially gonna go out there and and and say to the men that she is every bit is able to compete in their area of power as they are right

2:59:42 it's the same attitude that we have today I know job should be unavailable I'm just as good as you are I can do just as good of a job as you can right then Olympius is on the other side and she's gonna take it totally sort of a different standard this is all interpreted through me so I hope you'll give me a grain of salt here but but I'll explain my thinking she doesn't come out dressed as a warrior she's not going to compete and try to be an equal to the men in their area of power she has her own area of power which she already has an advantage in fact she's got a power that nobody can touch out there and I love it because it's something where you know I can talk about these people believe in magic or this or that all I want and make it sound like isn't that silly but Olympius is going to do something at this battle that is magical and it's not silly in fact the consequences of it are fearsome and the repercussions are huge

3:00:40 and if you don't think it's magic or you don't think that that's a word that that meets the definition of what we're about to see here maybe you have another but here's my thinking when these two armies meet there's going to be quite a bit of time where they face off against each other this is pretty common in a in a field battle a set piece battle from these eras now they're not all set peace battles you have encounter battles you have battles that happen between cavalry forces but when you have these kind of battles between sides that have troops that stand shoulder to shoulder in ranks it often takes a long time to set up think about a parade ground with tens of thousands or more people you're trying to get into the right positions and then maybe the last minutes you go I don't want these guys there move them a hundred yards down that way and then move the guys on it I mean there's finagling sometimes you have light

3:01:30 troops and skirmishers all around sort of conducting activities and securing views and whatnot but generally these two lines of people will have time's hours to stare at each other across a sort of a no-man's land farther than the distance an arrow can be shot that's sort of the point right you're just out of range but you can watch each other this is something modern soldiery really doesn't ever get to do in fact in combat you're lucky to ever see an enemy sometimes in modern you know any 20th century and afterwards sort of combat cuz the ranges are so far here you get to watch and have a look at and monitor your enemy for quite a long time it's why you see so many displays intended to intimidate the other side because you have time to do that commanders often dressed quite conspicuously it's a trade-off you become a target for the enemy when they can easily identify you but you want your own troops to be able

3:02:21 to easily identify you because one of the worst things that can happen is for a rumor to spread that you're dead or something and then everything collapses and so geez sorry almost happened to William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 famously so oftentimes both sides even from across the no-man's land can pick out and identify figures you know on the other side and this is key because the reason a day are you really key is so conspicuously dressed is so that they will know you know who they're up against right this is the queen i have fo phillip Irenaeus with me the king philip's son right we're the legitimate side on the other side is Olympius we are told dressed like a follower of Dionysus maybe like a priestess of Dionysus and she plays that side up she's not wearing armor we're not told exactly what a follower of Dionysus and dressed up like that means appears as a follower of Dionysus in my

3:03:16 movie I know what it means dye them around the hair flowing gown there will be snakes of course cuz I mean personally I think if you get one snake you probably get a package deal somebody's watching a bunch of snakes I want my wand with IV wrapped around it dripping honey whatever but she is showing up to these people as a channeler she's a she's an necromancer of sorts right she conjures the dead and she hasn't had an occasion where she's had to do that she's like one of those you know fast draw gunmen in the west where the because of their reputation you know how fast they have killed all these men or whatever you know who they are you don't ask you don't give them any trouble you just let their reputation get them what they want but every now and then some young kid comes into the town and demands that this guy show him that he's really as fast as everyone says this is the time where Olympius has to conjure

3:04:06 ghosts because she needs them now and she needs them in a physical sense in this battle if you don't believe in magic what do you think this is before the battle starts or just as the battle starts and the two sides are about to face off a day are you ready Keyes makedonia enforces lay down their weapons or they put up their spears or they send officers out who say we will not fight against the mother of Alexander the Great and the wife of philip ii and the son of alexander the great we don't know how they and I'm using air quotes my hands one of my one of my old ancient copies of an ancient translation says changed allegiances so exactly how it happened isn't known but what is known is Olympius was able to channel the ghosts in a way that magically forced the other side to not fight her folks we're talking about a set piece battle here almost certainly tens of thousands of troops on each side

3:05:12 a massive affair of humanity out there and when they notice Olympius on the other side dressed as a follower of Dionysus even though they have a queen in their ranks with a son of Philip the second they refuse to fight what is that is that not magic you want an analogy there's a famous story about Napoleon and you know Napoleon's the one who they said that he was apparently worth his presence on the battlefield was worth I'm going from memory here I think they said 40,000 men his presence on the battlefield was worth 40,000 men now they were not talking about his strategic brilliance or his tactical ability all that was already baked into the pie that was taken to account right the fact that as a commander making plans he would be wonderful when they said his presence is worth 40,000 men they meant because of the man the emotional and inspirational ability it had on his troops that the lift it

3:06:10 gave them the sense that their destiny was now latched to his destiny and his destiny was clear right now Alexander case he's a god right in Napoleon's case well as close as you can get to a God in that era there's a famous story about Napoleon that after he loses and is exiled for the first time he will famously come back to France unexpectedly with a small bodyguard and he will land and as he advances toward Paris he picks up more and more troops along the way and at one point the king desperate to stop him sends out forces you know to sort of end it kill him whatever it takes with an officer who I believe going from memory here was one of Napoleon's generals and they stopped him and there's this faceoff where they've got the guns pointed at him at least in the movie version of it anyway you know stand there stop you're under arrest whatever it is and Napoleon walks out in front of his own bodyguard troops

3:07:02 and says if you want to kill your Emperor you know here I am some wonderful dramatic move and his forces sort of dissolve into puddles of emotional tears drop their guns lift him up you know and the march to Paris is on Viva Emperor you know the magic that's magic folks what that is the ability to all of a sudden just morph a mass human emotional response into a way that completely changes the dynamics of a situation in a way that is inexplicable in any other sense how do you explain these makedonia enforces who by all rights should have destroyed Olympia's the pirate levies laying down their arms giving her the battle well you can have a number of logical explanations for that but I'm just thinking Olympius is going to go and say what my Irish Catholic great-aunt would always say to me when I thought I would win these logical arguments with her it's a question of faith Dionysus saves her ass

3:08:08 again and delivers into her hands her enemies Philip aridaias has captured almost immediately a day are you ready keys soon afterwards and they fall into Olympia's hands which as you already probably know is the worst place they can be in fairness to her if the shoe had been on the other foot she probably would have been doomed as well but the shoes not on the other foot and because of that Philip aridaias and and a day you really are doomed and she mistreats them for a couple of days or a certain period of time the ancient sources say before sending have different sources on this Thracians they're always poor Thracians are always implicated as like the executioner's are the ones who you get to do dirty work especially if it's involves killing a king that you might not think a makedonia n-- would handle too well you know you you might think they might balk at it so instead you send the Thracians in there to go do

3:09:03 that olympia supposedly sends Thracians in to stab philip every day as the mascot King to death death by a blade being the way that these kind of Kings were supposed to die and then famously sending three items to a day a you Riddick II diadora siculus says it was a a noose a sword and some hemlock hemlocks poison basically and this may have been what she did years ago to want two Philips wives two it's it's basically saying you know choose the way you want to do this but you know what you have to do and instead we're told that she after denouncing Olympius and supposedly Olympius was going to be nicer to her although you know if you believe it but she kept saying the kingdom is supposed to be mine not yours and so she got mad at her but instead of giving Olympius the satisfaction of killing her with one of the things Olympius gave her she hangs herself with her girdle were told Olympius and her

3:09:59 forces um then sweep into makedonia right the queen is back and she instantly kills like a hundred of Cassandra supporters boom that's some bad publicity as Peter Green points out and we'll kind of get her in trouble with a backlash that's going to come back to haunt her pretty much right away that's not all that Olympius did by the way she also gets her hands on one of Cassandras brothers kills him she may have she's accused certainly of going to another of Cassandras brothers the guy who was Alexander's cup bearer and desecrating his grave and maybe scattering the bones out in the open which would have been really sacral II just a real religious offence to Greek and makedonia n-- sensibilities if she did it it's kind of a public statement though about what she thinks of that family the vendetta continues right and your bones will not rest in peace Elizabeth Carney had a very interesting

3:10:59 line when she pointed out that this is exactly the sort of activity that you would think was designed to bring Cassander back to makedonia right drop everything in greece and come back and deal with this right before she kills more of your supporters but then she points out that when he does just that neither Olympius nor the guy who looks a little like her puppet general at this point pelipper khan neither one of them seems ready for it Cassandra's conducted all these campaigns relatively brilliantly does so here there's a point where there's a point where the forces of Olympius try to block him like pelipper khan's out there with troops they all try to block him and he blocks both of them and he goes right for Olympius forces almost as if he knows the you know Napoleon is worth 40,000 men sort of an equation and realizes to heck with these little forces of troops I can deal with it later

3:11:52 get Olympius she's the dangerous one right we said in this story that the most impressive most dangerous people are the ones who are gonna get eliminated from these 44 45 year-old conflict first Olympius is seen by Cassander for what she is she's the only woman you could think of it's in a position where she's running makedonia she's got to go he will drive her forces into a town on the coast that is not ready for any kind of siege the sources differ some saying she has almost no troops with her others saying she's got a substantial force so who the heck knows the chronology is disputed here amongst the experts some who think everything kind of collapses very quickly others who think there's like a year and a half long prolonged siege where people are starving you know you can see the bones through the ribcage I mean that kind of starvation and the chronology is messed up right including when all this goes down

3:12:52 that we're about to talk about now but between 317 and 315 how about we make it safe that way Olympius is walled up kind of an under siege in the city she has to surrender she either gets caught while trying to escape by sea and has to surrender or she has a deal where she turns over the city everybody agrees okay we surrender either one of those cases the deal seems to be the same her life is supposed to be spared Cassandra was supposed to spare her life and and some other prominent figures lives too he will renege on all of those agreements this is part of what makes Cassandra the kind of character he is you simply can't trust him at all and here's the thing before you judge him too harshly you have to go if the shoe were on the other foot you know what Olympius have done this she very well might have so all these people are rather ruthless Olympius gets treated a little unfairly for her ruthlessness

3:13:43 because it's viewed through the female lens where if she was just another guy like Cassandra which she kind of is sometimes might be a little bit different in this case the magic is protecting Olympius apparently even now though because Cassandra's got to figure out a way to kill her he can't really do it in the backroom the way she killed Philip ER or Deus and those people while she had them in custody he might lose his head if he did that so he does something that's another typical makedonia thinking tries to make it sort of public so that everybody's in on this decision he gets the makedonia gnar me under very interesting dubious sorts of perhaps tactics to put a death sentence on her he has people testify about what she did during these purges and all these kinds of things and then there's a bunch of stories and I'm sorry I don't know one from another in terms of what's better been talking about what happened

3:14:35 after the assembly condemns Olympius to death Elisabeth Kearney going over a bunch of the ancient writers versions of this says quote at this point the accounts diverge they differ about the context of her death its perpetrators and its method palce aeneas simply says the Cassander turned Olympius over to those makedonia pnes who were irritated with her so that she could be stoned to death Justin complaining that the makedonia pnes had forgotten the wealth power and security that her husband and son had brought them reports that when olympia saw armed men approaching her she went out to meet them dressed in royal attire and supported by two maids this action surprised her would-be assassins and reminded them of her former majesty and the names of all the kings she called to mind and they did not kill her instead Cassander had to send other men to stab her rather than trying to avoid the

3:15:35 sword and its wounds or crying out quote endquote like a woman justin claims that Olympius faced death in the manner of brave men in keeping with the glory of her ancient lineage so that quote you could see Alexander even in his dying mother end quote Elizabeth Kearney continues quote by going out to meet her killers justin's Olympius defined her death and rendered it as a kind of forced suicide since she in effect chose it and chose to make it a public death end quote she then goes under reports Theodorus is view though when his is a more confusing point of view she says but may be closer to the mark and it's interesting she points out that Cassander might have been trying to get Olympius condemned by you know this large group of sort of hand-picked people in a hand-picked situation so that he had the cloak of legitimacy around it but prevent her from being able to ever mount a defense

3:16:40 and Carney says it was possible that it was coming to a situation where she was going to have a chance now to give you know her to to sense into this whole thing at her side of the story and the Cassander panicked because if she could basically think about it Gandalf wise if she could utter the spell everybody might be transfixed right and so he has her done away with quietly by relatives of those she killed in the purge as a way to prevent any chance that she could work her magic again with the makedonia n-- troops or population connie then points out that if it seems a little storytelling like if it seems like it's already been written by this storyteller and it's just too it's too good to be true you'll send the script back to the screenwriter Kearney points out there may have been a reason for this in the same way that Christianity in Europe in the Middle Ages provides a framework giving people an idea of how to act

3:17:41 these Homeric stories and legends and traditions gave these people an idea how to act so if it seems like it's right out of the Iliad that may be because that's how they saw these circumstances in terms of how you should act Kearney points out that it's not just Olympius is death but also a day are you ready Keyes that follows this same sort of Homeric sort of feel this storytelling thing where they seem like heroes in the Iliad and she writes quote in effect homer and tragedy gave them a script one that was genuinely meaningful to them but also something they could manipulate to their own ends Olympius her daughter Cleopatra The Bachelorette and AD AAU Riddick II may have done much the same Olympius believed herself to be a linear descendent of both Achilles and Priam the heroic tradition gave her a model for how she ought to die and she may well have followed it surely she would have thought that her grandeur and

3:18:44 authority and honor demanded it the irony is that Olympius did not die the private appropriately gendered death that she had granted her female enemies men killed her with swords perhaps even in public she died the death of a male hero end quote when Olympius has taken out her grandson Alexander the fourth loses his greatest and most powerful defender and officially falls under the protection of Cassander so you can see how that's going to go he's just licking his lips trying to decide how long he has to wait before he can get away with you know maybe just being king himself and then doing away with this kid I never liked his dad and he bashed my head against the wall you know he who laughs last laughs the loudest Cassander will be responsible for killing Alexander the Great's son Alexander the Great's wife Alexander the Great's mother and of course if you believe that one branch of the

3:19:53 conspiracy theories he may have been involved in killing Alexander the Great himself the only close relative of Alexander the Great he didn't seem to want to kill all the time was Alexander the great sister Cleopatra the Bachelorette he may have gone after her hand in marriage at one point because she's so damn eligible right so much legitimacy she's just wouldn't she be a prize can you imagine that marriage talk about the bad blood at that wedding when those two sides those two families end up in the same place at the same time and then have one of their massive drinking contests why alarmed no trouble at all but Cleopatra will be the close relative of Alexander the Great that Cassandra doesn't kill she's almost too dangerous to kill but she's also too dangerous to leave out there running around she will find herself for at least the last decade of her life under a sort of I read one account that says

3:20:55 sort of a plush or an honorable house arrest where one of these successor generals just sort of locks her up like Rapunzel you can't let her out she's like the typhoid mary of matrimony she could get out marry some successor and all of a sudden you know you've destabilized the entire strategic world and hundreds of thousands of people could pay the price for that right there's a history and she may have been trying to do just that at some point near the end of her life right get out and marry somebody right everybody's worst figures confirmed she will be probably quietly assassinated around 308 BC ish and maybe everybody's attention had turned and the price for doing something like that had diminished somewhat it's worth noting that the potential value of all of Alexander the Great's close relatives was so high that none of them would be allowed to live there is no happily ever after in his direct line or

3:21:55 anybody really closely connected to him and listen just to be silly for a minute I don't doubt there's enough residual magic left then if Cassander and these other successors missed one that if some provable direct descendant of Alexander the Great's family were to show up today I think they could win the top job in Greek or modern Federation of makedonia politics it's Macedonia actually my point is is I still think there's enough residual power today that if somebody showed up with the right pedigree and could prove it they'll still be running the show in that region just goes to show that even after 2,300 years the Magic's not all gone yet

3:22:56 because the show you just heard wasn't long enough and the plane was for that should it be about an hour and 15 minutes so you see about what my failure rate is timewise but because that wasn't long enough let's add a little tag to it and forestall some emails directed at me because I can already hear you you know from inside my head right now and so rather than send me those emails let me answer a few of those questions or deal with a few of those comments right now first for the many of you who are sitting there going does this mean there's not going to be another supernova in the East episode no it means nothing like that part of the reason we have a hardcore history addendum feed is so that we can keep the other ones sort of pure with what you're waiting for while we can still take historical vacations or do different things interview shows whatever it might be something that doesn't fit on the

3:23:49 other feed this was a chance to take a little historical vacation to one of my favorite times and places a place I didn't have to read tons of books just to get enough foundational information to discuss things halfway rationally I can already hear the many of you who are saying that it is irresponsible if a person in my position to cast with actors and actresses fill up and Olympius and not cast alexander it is something i wrestled with while i debated how much time i was wasting trying to find the right person for philip and then you think okay you got to do well the examiner now - but oh my god if Philip was tough I mean Philips one of those guys I could throw somebody out there you could go yeah that's kind of interesting Alexander's a guy you throw your actor out there you get a punch in the nose people feel passionate about that and part of the reason it's so tough to avoid the punch in the nose is that

3:24:41 Alexander as we said you can view in so many different ways that the choice of who you want to play him is sort of implicitly saying which way you choose isn't it so I fooled around with it just like I did to cast Philips dad by the way I was also looking for someone that would have just a good dynamic also with Charles Bronson and Angelina Jolie I mean you think who fits who creates a wonderful weird stew there that just fits well the circumstance so don't punch me in the nose I have this terrible problem I don't know very many actors and actresses I have an even worse problem I don't know any good actors and actresses from that part of the world the Balkans cuz that's who probably should really play him so cut me some slack there and I'm old and a lot of the people I remember who are gonna be from age 20 to age 30 to 33 the Alexander lifespan there that that's the age that actor has to play so imagine him in that age she

3:25:37 got to go back to the time machine get the actor from them but had come getting 35 year old Charles Bronson or something so the time machine's working Nicolas Cage I know that's bizarre I kept coming back to him when I kept looking at the other people that I was looking at maybe for the role because nobody's right but I have this weird view of Alexander and I need somebody who can sort of go from the one guy before he becomes the guy everyone's bowing to in Asia before he converts to the megalomania and I just thought God you need a certain range and he has to look the right Nicholas Cage could be from that region blonde his hair up a little it'll look like he did when he was in those New Wave movies in the early 80s he and Charles Bronson together in the scenes with that tension between them I think would be wonderful and he and Angelina Jolie I mean I don't even have to make up and he script or it

3:26:31 already seems like it's kind of edible and weird doesn't it anyway you know sends your angry emails to Dan Carlin that punch in the nose dot face Eugene Oregon blah blah blah I should also point out that the emails that will come to us as they always do with the pronunciation of the word makedonia versus Macedonia I'm just gonna first all that because we've talked about it endlessly and a bazillion other people have too this is a long-running thing folks I remember thirty years ago I got my first history book that actually didn't even give you the option and used a K instead of a C and it was over those step people I like so much the tribe this the ski thien's we always call them Scythian because that's how it was spelled finally one of these historians just said screw that and put a k' there because that's the I mean they wouldn't know what the word Scythian meant probably even in Greece

3:27:26 today you know I mean it's it's not that's not how they pronounce it it's part of a change in in the Latin language that was done in the in the late 19th century mostly I mean it's this is not this is not some conspiracy think it's not hidden but it it created a divide between people that learned it one way and don't want to change that's fine and people who want to get back to a pronunciation more like the original or more like it is in most of the world today let's be honest most people say makedonia or makedonia Oh Mac Dona I mean most people don't say Macedonia and most people didn't say Macedonia back then either nobody did of course the problem is is that we're all hypocrites on this because while I want to be you know as close and faithful to the original as possible you're not gonna see me substituting for Julius Caesar Julius kazar although when you think about it that is a pretty badass name

3:28:18 for some space alien you know who's conquering things left and right right oh no you only ask as I was coming you know I guess my point is is that I won't say I'm not gonna say kicker Oh instead of Cicero and or not.but makedonia seems the right thing to do just like skit thean seems the right thing to do so it's a judgment call potato potato it's not a mistake it's intended you could find out stuff about this all over the internet though it's been gone on for at least thirty years finally I was listening to the playback and I did not think that I did a good enough job on this program I'm usually pretty good about it of telling you exactly which book you know we said which author it often was in which his story but we didn't tell you which books we were specifically using information from or whatnot we were pretty good about the Elizabeth carnie book Olympius which as I said you wanna go pick that up if you

3:29:07 like that stuff she did a great job she's become the go-to person on that issue at least in English and every book you see that talks about Olympius even in a tangent kind of way references her I used two different Peter Green books one was Alexander of Macedon 356 to 323 BC a historical biography this is the updated it's been updated and revised several times this one came out I think in the mid early to mid 1990s but the original work was in 1970 work and then of course for those of you who are the Hellenistic junkies the tome for people who are interested in the period Alexander to Actium the historical evolution of the Hellenistic age the word comprehensive does not do it justice and the whole politics and strategy and and all that kind of stuff is just one little chunk of what it deals with we also use robbing water fields dividing the spoils the war for alexander the great's empire a great

3:30:14 book I mean he does as good of a job as I think you can do simplifying this stuff and bringing out a bunch of the really interesting aspects because it can get dry if you don't dive in and and show the relationships between these people and the things that really makes it really interesting I think he does a great job of that we quoted a B Bosworth and that was from his book conquest and empire the reign of Alexander the Great Bosworth of course one of my he's no strand historian one of my favorite um in terms of he just is his view of Alexander the Great is fascinating and and perhaps perhaps the right one I mean I sometimes I read his stuff and I go wow you know that's that could really be the way the guy was finally we used Richard II Gabriel's book philip ii of makedonia greater than alexander for some of the stuff as well and you know we always put this stuff in the show notes which are on our website at Dan

3:31:08 Carlin com we link these books directly to a place like an you know major online bookseller where you can buy them you know right away one-click whatever it is we encourage you to do so we like books and we like these people or we wouldn't have use them so if you're thinking about buying them we'll go to the website and check them out and uh and maybe that would be just the Christmas gift for yourself for next year's Christmas why wait wrath of the cons Punic Nightmares Apache tears and of course ghosts of the osteon just a few of the classic hardcore history titles available from den Carlin com every true fan has heard these favorites hey they make great gifts too

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP9 Glimpses of Olympias"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Elizabeth Carney (Guest).

What is "EP9 Glimpses of Olympias" about?

The discussion highlights the entertainment industry's ongoing struggle for original ideas, emphasizing the untapped potential of historical narratives that could inspire compelling stories. It particularly focuses on the overlooked, rich history of Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great, advocating for her story to be transformed into a cinematic portrayal, underscoring the abundance of…

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

10 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Alexander the Great, Macedonia, Philip II of Macedon, Persia, Dionysus, Elizabeth Carney. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP9 Glimpses of Olympias"?

The episode runs 3 h 32 min; the transcript is about 37,875 words in 222 timestamped sections.

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