Episode 4: Alexander the Great: Son of Zeus

Alexander III of Macedon posed as the ‘Son of Zeus’, but followed the advice of his biological father, King Philip II, to get out of Macedon and “seek a kingdom equal to yourself”. Between 336 and 323 BC, Alexander the Great created the largest empire the Middle East had known.

Macedonian expansionism had begun under Philip II, with his son Alexander II picking up and honing the armed forces created by his father. But where Philip’s strategic aims were to dominate all of Greece and Western Asia Minor, Alexander’s sight was set on bringing the Persian Empire to heel. And as he moved from sieges and massacres to battle after victorious battle, his ambitions grew further – the conquest of Afghanistan and India. How did he keep his Macedonian and Greek companions motivated? Without him to lead, they did not know how to get back?

Dr Andrew Fear, Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Manchester, joins Paul and Beatrice to tell us about the strategies of Alexander. An Oxonian, he has a spate of publications on Alexander and on warfare in Antiquity, with contributions to the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (CUP 2007) and to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Strategy (2024). He is co-editor with Dr Jamie Wood of A Companion to Isidore of Seville (Brill, 2015).

Fear, Andrew: “Philip II and Alexander III of Macedon”, in Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Beatrice Heuser (eds): The Cambridge History of Strategy (Cambridge: CUP, forthcoming 2024), vol. 1

Romm, James (ed.): with Pamela Mensch trans., Alexander the Great: Sections from Arrian, Diodorus, Plutarch and Quintus Curtius (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005).

Brunt, P.A.: ‘The aims of Alexander’ Greece & Rome Vol.12 (1965), pp. 205-215.

Worthington, Ian: “Alexander the Great, Nation Building, and the Maintenance of Empire”, in Victor Davis in Hanson (ed): Makers of ancient strategy: from the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp.118-138

Sabin, Philip, Hans van Wees and Michael Whitby (eds.): The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare II. Rome from the Late Republic to the Late Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Worthington, Ian: “Alexander the Great, Nation-Building, and the Maintenance of Empire”, in Victor Davis Hanson (ed.), Makers of Ancient Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 118-137.

Lonsdale, David: “The Campaigns of Alexander the Great”, in John Andreas Olsen and Colin S. Gray (eds.): The Practice of Strategy from Alexander the Great to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 15-35.

Allen, Brooke: “Alexander the Great or Alexander the Terrible?”, The Hudson Review Vol. 58 No. 2 (Summer 2005), pp. 220-230.

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