Ashes and Empires: The Ancient World Behind the Bible

Season 1 · Part 9 of 9 · Prequel to the Maccabean Revolt

In 167 BC, a pagan altar rose on top of the altar of burnt offering in Jerusalem, and pig's blood was poured where the daily sacrifice had burned for generations. But thirty years earlier, the same dynasty had paid for those sacrifices and banned unclean animals from the city. This episode traces how that reversal happened, through a crushing war debt owed to Rome, a priesthood sold to the highest bidder, and a Roman envoy who drew a circle in the sand. It ends in a village square, where an old priest named Mattathias is offered silver and gold.

You'll hear about:

• Why Antiochus the Great died robbing a temple

• Heliodorus and the first raid on the Temple treasury

• Jason, Menelaus, and the auctioning of the high priesthood

• A Roman with a stick at the gates of Alexandria

• The Akra fortress and the outlawing of Judaism

• Modein, five sons, and the king's offer

Sources & further reading:

• 1 Maccabees 1 (Antiochus’s rise 1:10; the Hellenizers and the gymnasium 1:11–15; the plundering of the Temple in 169 BC 1:20–24; Apollonius’s Sabbath attack and the Akra 1:29–40; the decree outlawing the Law 1:41–53; the “abomination of desolation” on 15 Kislev and the first sacrifice on the 25th, 1:54–59; the executions 1:60–64)

• 1 Maccabees 2:1–18 (Mattathias of the line of Joarib, his five sons, the lament, and the king’s officer at Modein)

• 2 Maccabees 3 (Simon the Temple administrator, Heliodorus and the treasury, the horse and rider)

• 2 Maccabees 4 (Jason buys the high priesthood 4:7–10; the gymnasium, the petasos and the priests at the discus 4:11–17; the 300 drachmas for Heracles at Tyre 4:18–20; Menelaus outbids him 4:23–26; the stolen vessels, Onias at Daphne and his murder by Andronicus 4:27–38; Lysimachus and the riot 4:39–42; the three accusers executed 4:43–50)

• 2 Maccabees 5 (the rumor of the king’s death and Jason’s attack 5:5–10; Antiochus’s sack of Jerusalem 5:11–14; Menelaus leads him into the Temple, 1,800 talents 5:15–21; Apollonius 5:24–26)

• 2 Maccabees 6 (the Temple renamed for Olympian Zeus, the prostitutes in the courts 6:1–6; the mothers put to death 6:10; the scribe Eleazar 6:18–31)

• Daniel 9:27, 11:21–39 and 12:11 (the “abomination that makes desolate”; the ships of Kittim at 11:30 are Popillius’s embassy)

• Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 12.129–153 (Antiochus III’s decree for Jerusalem — the sacrifices, the tax relief, the ban on unclean animals) and 12.237–256 (Jason, Menelaus, the swine on the altar)

• The Heliodorus stele from Maresha, 178 BC — H. M. Cotton and M. Wörrle, “Seleukos IV to Heliodoros,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 159 (2007); D. Gera, ZPE 169 (2009) — Seleucus IV putting the sanctuaries of Coele-Syria under a royal official

• Polybius, Histories 21.42–43 (the Treaty of Apamea), 26.1 (Antiochus IV in the streets and baths of Antioch; “Epimanes”), 29.27 (Popillius Laenas and the circle at Eleusis)

• Livy, History of Rome 36.15–19 (Thermopylae, 191 BC), 37.37–44 (Magnesia), 38.38 (the treaty and the hostages), 45.12 (the line in the sand)

• Appian, Syrian Wars 39 (the young Antiochus sent to Rome), 45 (Heliodorus murders Seleucus IV; Antiochus takes the throne with Pergamene help); Diodorus Siculus 29.15 and Justin 32.2 (Antiochus III killed robbing the temple in Elymais); Diodorus 30.7 (the murder of the boy co-king)

• OGIS 248 (the Athenian decree honoring Eumenes II and Attalus for installing Antiochus IV)

• Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews (1959)

• Elias Bickerman, The God of the Maccabees (1937; English 1979) — the argument that the persecution came from the Hellenizing faction

• Otto Mørkholm, Antiochus IV of Syria (1966) — his years in Rome and Athens, the coinage and the title Epiphanes

• Jonathan A. Goldstein, I Maccabees (Anchor Bible, 1976) and II Maccabees (1983)

• Daniel R. Schwartz, 2 Maccabees (de Gruyter, 2008)

• John J. Collins, Daniel (Hermeneia, 1993) — on chapter 11

• Sylvie Honigman, Tales of High Priests and Taxes: The Books of the Maccabees and the Judean Rebellion against Antiochos IV (2014)

• Dov Gera, Judaea and Mediterranean Politics, 219 to 161 B.C.E. (1998)

Season 1 · Part 8 of 9 · Prequel to the Maccabean Revolt

A Seleucid official stands in the Temple court in Jerusalem with a royal letter, asking how much money is inside. To explain how he got there, this episode follows a single thread of silver across forty-five years: a teenaged Antiochus the Third murdering his own minister on a dawn walk, chasing the wrong army at Raphia, marching to the Hindu Kush, taking Judea at Panium, and then losing everything to Rome at Thermopylae and Magnesia. The bill Rome handed him, fifteen thousand talents, passes to his son, and a clerk's quarrel over the Jerusalem market turns the Temple treasury into a royal problem.

You'll hear about:

• Polybius's dawn-walk murder of the minister Hermeias

• Why Antiochus won his wing and lost Raphia

• Egypt arms its own peasants, and pays for it later

• Cato lost in the dark above Thermopylae

• Fifteen thousand talents: what the Treaty of Apamea weighed

• Simon, Onias, and the first royal audit of the Temple

Sources & further reading:

• Polybius, Histories, Book 5.50-56 (Hermeias and Epigenes), 5.79-87 (Raphia), 5.107 (arming of the Egyptians)

• Polybius, Histories, Book 11.34 (the eastern expedition), Book 16.18-19 (Panium and the criticism of Zeno)

• Polybius, Histories, Book 20.8 (winter at Chalcis and the marriage to Euboea), Book 21.42-43 (terms of the Treaty of Apamea)

• Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, Books 36.11, 36.15-19 (Thermopylae), 37.37-44 (Magnesia), 38.38 (Apamea)

• Plutarch, Life of Cato the Elder 13-14

• Appian, Syrian Wars 1-20, 30-39, 45

• Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 12.129-146

• Diodorus Siculus 28.3 and 29.15; Justin, Epitome 32.2; Strabo, Geography 16.1.18 (death of Antiochus III in Elymais)

• Second Maccabees, chapter 3

• Hannah M. Cotton and Michael Wörrle, Seleukos IV to Heliodoros: A New Dossier of Royal Correspondence from Israel, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 159 (2007)

• Elias Bickerman, La charte séleucide de Jérusalem, Revue des Études Juives 100 (1935)

• John Ma, Antiochos III and the Cities of Western Asia Minor (1999)

• John D. Grainger, The Roman War of Antiochos the Great (2002)

• John D. Grainger, The Syrian Wars (2010)

• Bezalel Bar-Kochva, The Seleucid Army (1976)

• Dov Gera, Judaea and Mediterranean Politics, 219 to 161 B.C.E. (1998)

• Daniel R. Schwartz, 2 Maccabees (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature, 2008)

Season 1 · Part 7 of 9 · Prequel to the Maccabean Revolt

Three father-and-son pairs shaped the Hellenistic world: Philip and Alexander, Hamilcar and Hannibal, and the two Ptolemies who built Alexandria. One raced his father, one completed his father's vendetta, and one simply invented a father he liked better. What each son said out loud about his dad turns out to explain the map. Along the way: the real height of the Pharos lighthouse, the legend of the seventy-two translators, and how a bill from Rome ends up threatening the Temple in Jerusalem.

You'll hear about:

• Alexander's drunken shouting match with Philip at a wedding

• The oath at the altar, and why Hannibal told it to a king

• The Pharos lighthouse measured against Liberty and the pyramids

• Seventy-two elders, seventy-two days, and one suspicious librarian

• How torah became nomos, and what that word choice cost

• Why Antiochus the Fourth was desperate for temple money

Sources & further reading:

• Plutarch, Life of Alexander 5, 6, 9, 10

• Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander 1.16.7

• Polybius, Histories 3.11-12; 21.42 (terms of Apamea)

• Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 21.1

• Strabo, Geography 17.1.6-9 (the Pharos and Alexandria)

• Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.6.2

• Letter of Aristeas

• Philo, Life of Moses 2.25-44

• Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 9a

• 1 Maccabees 1-2; 2 Maccabees 3-4

• Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Book 12

• J. G. Droysen, Geschichte des Hellenismus (1836)

• Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (1990)

• Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (English trans. 1974)

• Tessa Rajak, Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora (2009)

• Serge Lancel, Hannibal (1998)

• Gunther Holbl, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001)

Season 1 · Part 6 of 9 · Prequel to the Maccabean Revolt

Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps with elephants at twenty-nine and spent fifteen years loose in Italy, never losing a pitched battle on Roman soil. This episode traces the whole arc: the founding legend of Carthage and a queen's oxhide bargain, the mutiny that nearly destroyed the city before the war began, the slaughter at Cannae, and the young Roman who had to invent a way to beat him. Along the way: burning cattle used as a decoy, an elephant walking along a riverbed with its trunk as a snorkel, and a basket of gold rings poured out on a council chamber floor.

You'll hear about:

• Dido, the oxhide, and the founding of Carthage

• The Truceless War and Hamilcar's mercenary revolt

• Crossing the Rhone and the Alps with thirty-seven elephants

• Trebia, Trasimene, and the encirclement at Cannae

• Fabius the Delayer and Rome's refusal to negotiate

• Scipio in Spain, Masinissa's cavalry, and Zama

Corrections:

• Some of the kings Hannibal turned to in exile did use him against Rome: Antiochus III went to war with Rome and gave Hannibal a fleet, which the Rhodians defeated in 190 BC (Livy 37.23–24).

• Hannibal didn’t get the war indemnity paid off ahead of schedule. He showed Carthage could keep paying it without new taxes (Livy 33.47); Carthage later offered to pay the rest early, and Rome refused (Livy 36.4).

• Livy doesn’t say Hannibal laughed when Rome auctioned the field he was camped on. He says Hannibal took it as an insult and put the bankers’ shops around the Roman Forum up for sale in return (Livy 26.11).

Sources & further reading:

• Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus 18.4–6 (Elissa, the sacks of sand and the oxhide)

• Virgil, Aeneid 1.335–368 (the founding of Carthage) and 4.607–705 (Dido’s curse and death)

• Polybius, Histories 1.65–88 (the Truceless War: “throw!” 1.69; Naravas 1.78; the fate of Gisco 1.80; the Saw 1.84–85; Mathos 1.88) and 3.10 (Rome seizes Sardinia)

• Polybius, Histories, Book 3 (Saguntum 3.17; the fold of the toga 3.33; the march and the Alps 3.35–56; the Rhône elephants 3.46; the Trebia 3.70–74; the Arno marshes 3.78–79; Trasimene 3.82–85; Fabius and the burning oxen 3.87–94; Cannae 3.107–117)

• Polybius, Histories 10.3 (the rescue at the Ticinus), 10.8–19 (New Carthage), 14.4–5 (the burning camps), 15.5–19 (Zama and the peace)

• Livy, History of Rome, Books 21–30 (Hasdrubal’s assassin 21.2; Hannibal’s portrait 21.4; the vinegar and the rock 21.37; the earthquake at Trasimene 22.5; Fabius’s farm 22.23; Maharbal 22.51; the mourning and the live burials 22.56–57; the rings 23.12; the auctioned field 26.11; the Metaurus and Hasdrubal’s head 27.43–51; the burning fleet and Hannibal’s laugh 30.43–44)

• Livy, History of Rome 33.45–49 (Hannibal as chief magistrate and his escape), 36.4 (Carthage offers to pay the indemnity early), 37.23–24 (Hannibal commands a fleet for Antiochus III), 39.51–52 (the deaths of Hannibal and Scipio)

• Appian, The Hannibalic War; Diodorus Siculus, Book 25 (fragments, including Hamilcar’s death)

• Plutarch, Life of Fabius Maximus; Life of Marcellus 14–19 (Archimedes at Syracuse)

• Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 8 (Cato on the elephant Surus); Cicero, Philippics 1.11 (“Hannibal at the gates”); Juvenal, Satire 10 (Hannibal’s ring)

• Cornelius Nepos, Hannibal (the exile and death)

• Adrian Goldsworthy, Cannae (2001); J. F. Lazenby, Hannibal’s War: A Military History of the Second Punic War (1978)

• Dexter Hoyos, Hannibal’s Dynasty: Power and Politics in the Western Mediterranean, 247–183 BC (2003) and Truceless War: Carthage’s Fight for Survival, 241 to 237 BC (2007)

• Eve MacDonald, Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life (Yale University Press, 2015); Richard Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed (2010)

Season 1 · Part 5 of 9 · Prequel to the Maccabean Revolt

Rome controlled all of Italy by 264 BC but had never fought a war it couldn't walk to. Carthage owned the sea. What follows is twenty-three years of improvised fleets, a boarding bridge called the raven, a Spartan mercenary who taught Carthage how to use its elephants, and the worst maritime disaster you've probably never heard of. It ends with a nine-year-old boy at an altar in Carthage.

You'll hear about:

• Mercenary gangsters at Messana and how the war started

• Building a hundred warships in sixty days

• The corvus: turning sea battles into land battles

• Regulus, the Bagradas serpent, and an oath kept

• Sacred chickens thrown overboard at Drepana

• Hamilcar Barca's six years the Romans could not end

Corrections:

• Hannibal told the story of his oath to King Antiochus III, at whose court he was living in exile, and that is the account Polybius records (Histories 3.11); it wasn’t told to Polybius’s own source.

Sources & further reading:

• Polybius, Histories, Book 1 (the Mamertines and Messana 1.7–12; a fleet copied from a captured Carthaginian ship, rowers trained on land 1.20–21; the surrender at Lipara 1.21; the corvus 1.22; Mylae 1.23; Ecnomus 1.25–28; Regulus and Xanthippus 1.29–36; the storm off Camarina 1.37; the rebuilt fleet and the second storm 1.38–39; Panormus 1.40; Drepana 1.49–52; Hamilcar at Heircte and Eryx 1.56–58; the citizen-funded fleet and the Aegates Islands 1.59–61; the peace 1.62–63)

• Polybius, Histories 3.11 (Hannibal tells King Antiochus III about his oath)

• Livy, History of Rome 21.1 (the oath) and Periochae 17–19

• Zonaras, Epitome, Book 8 (preserving Cassius Dio’s lost account, including Hanno’s crucifixion)

• Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Books 23–24 (fragments)

• Pliny the Elder, Natural History 16.192 (a fleet built in sixty days) and 8.37 (the serpent of the Bagradas)

• Cicero, On Old Age 44 (Duilius’s torchbearer and flute player); On the Nature of the Gods 2.7 (the sacred chickens); On Duties 3.99–115 (Regulus)

• Suetonius, Tiberius 2 (Claudius Pulcher and his sister Claudia); Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 7.3–4 (the serpent; Regulus’s torture) and 10.6 (Claudia fined)

• Horace, Odes 3.5 (Regulus returns to Carthage); Augustine, City of God 1.15 (the spiked box)

• Cornelius Nepos, Hamilcar 1 (refusing to lay down his arms) and Hannibal 2 (the oath)

• J. F. Lazenby, The First Punic War: A Military History (1996)

• Adrian Goldsworthy, The Punic Wars (2000; reissued as The Fall of Carthage)

• Dexter Hoyos, Unplanned Wars: The Origins of the First and Second Punic Wars (1998)

Season 1 · Part 4 of 9 · Prequel to the Maccabean Revolt

For two thousand years, one narrow corridor between Egypt and Mesopotamia drew army after army to fight over it. This episode runs the five Syrian Wars between the Ptolemies and Seleucids, from a naval war of coastlines to the elephant clash at Raphia and the trap at Panium, and asks what these empires were really after. The answer isn't faith. It's timber, ports, trade roads, and the front door to Egypt, right up to the Roman line drawn in the sand.

You'll hear about:

• Why Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Persia all wanted this corridor

• Cedar, seaports, and caravan roads worth dying for

• The elephant clash at Raphia and a king who chased too far

• How a peace marriage became the next war

• Panium: why the mighty phalanx died on broken ground

• The Roman envoy who drew a line in the sand

Sources & further reading:

• Polybius, Histories, Book 5.79–86 (Raphia); Book 29.27 (Popilius Laenas at Eleusis)

• Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 45.12 (the line in the sand)

• Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus, Books 26–27 (the Laodicean War)

• Babylonian cuneiform chronicle recording a Ptolemy in Babylon, 246/245 B.C. (BCHP 11 / Ptolemy III Chronicle)

• Annals of Thutmose III at Karnak (Battle of Megiddo, c. 1457 B.C.)

• John D. Grainger, The Syrian Wars (2010)

• Günther Hölbl, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (2001)

• Amélie Kuhrt, The Ancient Near East c. 3000–330 BC (1995)

Season 1 · Part 3 of 9 · Prequel to the Maccabean Revolt

The Ptolemies wanted every book ever written, and they were willing to confiscate scrolls off docked ships to get them. What grew out of that ambition was less a library than the first research university, where Euclid systematized geometry, Eratosthenes measured the Earth with shadows, and Callimachus invented the catalogue. The same city later produced the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible whose disagreements with the standard Hebrew text turn out to be more useful than its agreements. Along the way, the familiar story of one catastrophic fire gives way to something slower and more unsettling.

You'll hear about:

• Why ships in Alexandria's harbor lost their books

• Callimachus and the first library catalogue ever built

• Eratosthenes measuring the Earth using noon shadows

• How the Library actually died, and why it matters

• Seventy-two translators, one island, and the Letter of Aristeas

• What Dead Sea Scrolls reveal about a fluid Hebrew text

Corrections:

• The story that the seventy-two translators worked in isolation from one another isn’t Philo’s. Philo describes their miraculously identical wording (On the Life of Moses 2.37); the separate-rooms version comes later, in the Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 9a) and Irenaeus (Against Heresies 3.21.2).

Sources & further reading:

• Letter of Aristeas (Demetrius of Phalerum and the Library’s ambitions 9–11; seventy-two translators, six from each tribe; the work on Pharos 301–307)

• Strabo, Geography 17.1.8 (the Museum and its shared dining hall) and 13.1.54 (Aristotle’s library and the kings of Egypt)

• Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 1.3a–b (Ptolemy II acquires Aristotle’s books) and 4.184b–c (Ptolemy VIII drives the scholars out)

• Galen, Commentary on Hippocrates’ Epidemics, Book III (the “books from the ships”)

• Proclus, Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements (Euclid in the time of Ptolemy I); Cleomedes, On the Heavens 1.7 (Eratosthenes measures the Earth); Archimedes, The Sand-Reckoner (Aristarchus’s sun-centered hypothesis)

• Celsus, On Medicine, Prooemium 23–26 (Herophilus, Erasistratus and human dissection)

• Plutarch, Life of Caesar 49; Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind 9.5; Cassius Dio 42.38; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 7.17 (the fire of 48 BCE and the “700,000 scrolls”)

• Rufinus, Ecclesiastical History 11.22–30; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 5.16 (the destruction of the Serapeum)

• Philo, On the Life of Moses 2.25–44 (the translators’ identical wording); Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 12.11–118 (retelling Aristeas)

• Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 9a–b; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.21.2 (the translators placed apart from one another)

• Prologue to Sirach (the Law, the Prophets and “the rest of the books” already in Greek by the late second century BCE)

• Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 71 (an early Jewish–Christian dispute over the Greek text); Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.16 (Origen’s Hexapla)

• Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (Yale University Press, 2001); Roger S. Bagnall, “Alexandria: Library of Dreams,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (2002)

• P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford, 1972); Rudolf Blum, Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography (1991); Heinrich von Staden, Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early Alexandria (Cambridge, 1989)

• Jennifer M. Dines, The Septuagint (T&T Clark, 2004); Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Baker Academic, 2nd ed. 2015)

• Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Fortress, 3rd ed. 2012); Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Eerdmans, 1999)

Season 1 · Part 2 of 9 · Prequel to the Maccabean Revolt

A twelve-year-old notices something about a wild stallion that a yard full of grown horsemen missed, and that single habit of mind explains the next twenty years of conquest. From the razing of Thebes and the seven-month siege of an island city to a night climb up a cliff the defenders swore would need winged men, this is Alexander's campaign at ground level, including the drunken feast where he killed the officer who once saved his life. It ends with a dying man's four-word answer about who should inherit the largest empire on earth, and with the long, strange afterlife of his stolen corpse.

You'll hear about:

• Bucephalus, Aristotle, and a boyhood built for conquest

• The Gordian Knot and Alexander's way with impossible problems

• Gaugamela: outnumbered on ground Darius chose himself

• Cleitus the Black, from rescuer to victim

• The helmet of water in the Gedrosian Desert

• Competing theories on what killed him at thirty-two

Corrections:

• The last clear record of a visit to Alexander’s tomb isn’t from around AD 200: the emperor Caracalla visited it in AD 215 (Herodian 4.8.9).

Sources & further reading:

• Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander (Thebes 1.7–9; Troy and the sacred shield 1.11; the Granicus and Cleitus’s rescue 1.15–16; the Gordian knot 2.3; Issus and the royal women 2.6–12; Tyre 2.15–24; Siwa 3.3–4; Gaugamela 3.8–15; Persepolis 3.18; the death of Cleitus 4.8–9; the Sogdian Rock and Roxane 4.18–19; the Hydaspes and Porus 5.8–19; the Hyphasis 5.25–29; the arrow wound 6.9–11; Gedrosia and the helmet of water 6.24–26; the death and “to the strongest” 7.24–28)

• Plutarch, Life of Alexander (ancestry and Olympias 2–3; Bucephalus 6; Aristotle 7–8; the regency and Chaeronea 9; Thebes and Pindar’s house 11; the Gordian knot 18; Issus 20–21; Siwa 27; the Persepolis treasure and Thais 37–38; Cleitus 50–52; Porus 60; Bucephalus’s death 61; the Hyphasis 62; Gedrosia 66; the last illness 75–77)

• Quintus Curtius Rufus, Histories of Alexander the Great (including the body’s lack of decay, 10.10)

• Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Book 17; 18.26–28 (the funeral carriage and Ptolemy’s seizure of the body); 19.51 and 19.105 (the deaths of Olympias, Roxane and Alexander IV)

• Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus, Books 11–12

• Strabo, Geography 17.1.8 (Ptolemy takes the body; the tomb in Alexandria)

• Suetonius, Augustus 18 (the crown and flowers; “a king, not corpses”) and Caligula 52 (Alexander’s breastplate); Cassius Dio 51.16 (the broken nose)

• Lucan, Civil War, Book 10 (Caesar at the tomb); Herodian 4.8.9 (Caracalla at the tomb, AD 215)

• Katherine Hall, “Did Alexander the Great Die from Guillain-Barré Syndrome?” The Ancient History Bulletin 32 (2018)

• A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge University Press, 1988)

• Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (1973)

• Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon, 356–323 B.C.: A Historical Biography (University of California Press, 1991)

• Further reading, the biblical connection: Daniel 8:5–8, 21–22; Daniel 11:3–4; 1 Maccabees 1:1–9

Season 1 · Part 1 of 9 · Prequel to the Maccabean Revolt

Before Alexander marched on Persia, his father built the machine that made it possible. This episode traces how Philip II inherited a broken, leaderless Macedon at twenty-three and turned it into the master of Greece — through a redesigned army, a river of mine gold, seven strategic marriages, and a holy war fought under Apollo's laurel. It opens with an undefeated band of three hundred lovers and closes on a murder, a mystery inheritance, and a tomb that still won't confirm whose bones it holds.

You'll hear about:

• Thebes' Sacred Band and the education Philip absorbed as a hostage

• Building a professional army: the sarissa, Companion Cavalry, and siege engineers

• Mount Pangaion's mines and a diplomacy of bribery

• The Third Sacred War and laurel wreaths at the Crocus Field

• Demosthenes' warnings versus Isocrates' dream of a Persian crusade

• Aristotle's tutoring, Chaeronea, and an unsolved assassination

Corrections:

• Thermopylae (480 BC) came a little over a century before the Sacred Band was founded (around 378 BC), not “nearly a century and a half earlier.”

• Onomarchus’s two victories in 353 BC were Philip’s only serious defeats in open battle, not of his entire career: he also had to abandon his sieges of Perinthus and Byzantium in 340 BC (Diodorus 16.74–77).

• Chaeronea was Alexander’s first great battle, not his first independent command: at sixteen, as regent, he had already campaigned against the Maedi and founded a city (Plutarch, Alexander 9).

• Not all the royal tombs at Vergina were unlooted: Tomb I had been robbed in antiquity, while Tombs II and III were found intact.

Sources & further reading:

• Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Book 16 (Philip’s reign: Perdiccas’s death 16.2; the Illyrian victory 16.4; the gold mines 16.8; the Crocus Field 16.35; the settlement of 346, 16.60; the assassination 16.91–94)

• Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas 18–19 (the Sacred Band; Philip’s tears at Chaeronea) and 26 (Philip as a hostage in Thebes)

• Plutarch, Life of Alexander 7–10 (Aristotle at Mieza, the Iliad, Chaeronea, the assassination)

• Plutarch, Sayings of Kings and Commanders, Moralia 178 (the donkey laden with gold)

• Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus, Books 7–9 (Philip as guardian of the young king 7.5; the laurel wreaths 8.2; the assassination 9.6–7)

• Xenophon, Hellenica 7.5.27 (Greece after Mantinea)

• Polyaenus, Stratagems 2.38 (the ram that draws back) and 4.2 (Philip’s stratagems and training marches)

• Plato, Symposium 178e–179a (an army of lovers)

• Demosthenes, Philippics and Olynthiacs; Isocrates, To Philip

• Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.40.10 (the Lion of Chaeronea)

• Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 13.557 (Philip’s seven marriages, from Satyrus)

• A. Bartsiokas et al., “The lameness of King Philip II and Royal Tomb I at Vergina, Macedonia,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2015)

• Y. Maniatis et al., “New scientific evidence for the history and occupants of Tomb I (Tomb of Persephone) in the Great Tumulus at Vergina,” Journal of Archaeological Science 179 (2025)

• N. G. L. Hammond and G. T. Griffith, A History of Macedonia, Volume II (Oxford, 1979)

• Ian Worthington, Philip II of Macedonia (Yale University Press, 2008)