EDMUND RICHARDSON | Alexander the Great: God, King, Man (Ep. 978)

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This is Undaunted Life A Man's Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it. All right, guys, we got a special guest on the podcast today. His name is Edmund Richardson. He is a historian of ancient Greece. He is also a professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University and the author of the new book, Alexander God King Man. Now, I got to tell you, I was super excited for this one because when I was pitched this book by his publisher, I said yes almost immediately and I get a ton of pitches nowadays. But just the gravitational pull of Alexander the Great as a historical figure is so substantial. But if you're trying to learn things about him, you can't go watch the terrible Colin Farrell movie. You got to try to dig into these different histories. But as we talk about in this interview, there's some mistakes and some things that the people that have written previous histories of Alexander didn't do quite well enough. There were certain sources that they wouldn't go to that are actually reliable sources. So we do talk about that. And then we get into the person of Alexander, like what his relationship was like with his father, Philip II, how Philip II obviously, as you've heard me say before, thought he was the point, but apparently, as some was the point, how Aristotle, the famous philosopher, the world-renowned philosopher even to this day, how he was actually a mentor to Alexander, how that even came about. And then we get into him becoming king, some of his early conquests.

We talk at length about the phalanx, right, the Macedonian phalanx. And if you listen to my show for any length of time, you've heard me talk about the phalanx a lot. Edmund gives us a lot of really nice details about the phalanx and why it was so effective, because that's basically the reason he was able to conquer from, you know, gosh, ancient Greek all the way to India. Then we get into kind of his foil, Alexander's foil, which would have been Darius, the king of Persia. We get into Alexander eventually becoming pharaoh of Egypt. We talk about the library of Alexander. We talk about his battle strategies. Then we talk about this big shift in his life.

When he went from having these battle hardened soldiers, these generals around him, that were okay with interrupting him, that were okay with telling him, hey, this isn't a good idea. And then he eventually got to where it was just a bunch of yes men around him, and how that really put him in a bad place. We talk about when Alexander finally was done conquering whenever he turned back, and how it was a desert that consumed most of his men way more than he had ever lost in battle. We get into his overall legacy. I even ask Edmund towards the end about how he thinks about Jesus, because Alexander the Great thought of himself as a God-King. So did Xerxes and Artaxerxes and King Tut and all these other people. They thought of themselves as God-Kings, but all those guys are dead, right? They're in tombs. Their bones are somewhere on this planet. They are not alive right now on this planet. But how Jesus of Nazareth is alive, and what it could be as a reminder for us in terms of how we approach life. But really enjoyed my time with Edmund, and I really, really enjoyed the book. Guys, you'll have to check it out. It's in the show notes. But without further ado, let's get into it.