Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. In most of the narratives of the past that we're exposed to, powerful individuals serve as the driving force. It's their actions that push the flow of history forward toward the seemingly inevitable conclusions that we know would have World War II. Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, FDR, Mussolini, Tojo. The American Revolution.
Washington, Jefferson, and the rest of the Founding Fathers. The printing press? Gutenberg. Exploration? Columbus. The stories we tell about what happened end up focusing on these people, whether they really deserve the credit or not. This, in a nutshell, is what is usually called the great man theory of history. Some people, the reasoning goes, are indispensable.
What they do inexorably pulls the rest of their societies forward through sheer force of will and genius. Human history is therefore mostly the stories of these powerful individuals. their interactions with one another, and the consequences their actions wrought on the broader world. When we put it in such straightforward terms, the Great Man approach to history is pretty obviously a flawed way of understanding the past.
Tens of millions of people fought in World War II. The American Revolution was about a lot of things, only some of which had to do with the people we know as the founders. Gutenberg's press was repossessed by his creditors.
Columbus, well, Columbus was a lot of things, but historically indispensable is not one of them. Yet I would argue that the great man approach to history, and a few carefully selected great women, is still the default mode through which the vast majority of people engage with the past. Biographies, popular histories in all media, and even Wikipedia summaries use the actions of famous individuals as shorthand for the much bigger and deeper processes that make up the actual stuff of history.
Maybe new great men and women are introduced, formerly towering colossi get cut down to size, and previously maligned figures get rehabilitated. Forgotten areas of the planet become an integral part of the story. Marginalized groups get their heroes and villains, but the essential focus remains much the same. I've spent most of my career as a historian making some form of the argument against Great Man history.
Not just against some of the absolute garbage who get put forth in that category as key historical actors, but against the tendency itself to single out the powerful as the main movers of the past. Without giving myself more credit than I deserve, I think I've done that pretty consistently over the years. But every once in a while, you run into someone you can't easily dislodge from the story of the past. What about Alexander the Great?
What course might history have taken had he not existed? That's what we'll explore today on Tides of History. At Matalan, the £5 and under baby event has landed. There's itsy bitsy teeny weeny prices across the cutest outfits and all the essentials in store and online. Plus, there's up to 20% off branded nursery when you...
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From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'm fascinated by Alexander the Great. That's not because I think he was a great guy in the moral sense, or because I would have loved to down a pitcher of wine with him. First of all, I know I couldn't hang with him as a drinker.
As outstanding a battlefield leader and conqueror as he was, he may actually have been a more accomplished drunk, which is surely saying something. Second, and more important, the people who got cross-eyed drunk with Alexander the Great often ended up dead, so I'm going to have to pass on that. What's undeniable is Alexander's impact on the world of his time and all the ages to come. It's difficult, if not impossible, to imagine another Macedonian king conquering half of Asia.
If Alexander had never conquered the Persian Empire, then we never would have gotten a Hellenistic world. If we never got a Hellenistic world, we probably never would have gotten a Roman Empire. And if we never got a Roman Empire, well, you get the idea.
Removing Alexander takes away one of the major props that supports the world of classical antiquity. Everything that follows, from Christianity and Islam all the way up to the present, is built atop a foundation that ultimately depends on Alexander. But what if Alexander hadn't been there? What would have happened? That is the fundamental question we'll explore today. For those of us who prefer to focus on the structural forces of the past as opposed to the agency of powerful people,
Alexander's centrality is genuinely challenging. Now, we could simply tell the story of the Macedonian conquests without depending as much on Alexander as an individual. That would place the emphasis on the dynamics of the the role his father played in building a Macedonian state, and the already long history of interactions between Greeks and Persians. There's nothing wrong with that, and in the many episodes I've done on Alexander and his time, it's more or less the path I've taken.
A lot of those stunning conquests didn't actually depend on Alexander himself. He was surrounded by what we might call in sports terms generational talents, ranging from his ruthless mother to Greek administrators like Eumenes.
to the coterie of experienced generals who led his armies and the highly competent soldiers who filled their ranks. Alexander personally didn't make them good at their jobs. He may have found roles for them, but the talent existed, and any discussion of the Macedonian conquests… needs to rely on the understanding that those people inhabited the world at that time, and they would have been there with or without Alexander. But Alexander was there.
No matter how structural our viewpoint is, it's impossible to escape the fact that he was the driving force behind those conquests, from the first victories in Asia Minor until his death 11 long years and half a world away. Sure, Philip had sent an expeditionary force before his death to prepare for his eventual invasion, but how far would he have gone? Not to India. It's pretty telling to me that the instant Alexander died...
all appetite for further conquests among the Macedonians essentially ceased. The soldiers wouldn't have it, and none of the major figures left alive, no matter how gifted they were as military and political leaders, made even the slightest effort to push it. It's not that the horizons of the world had shrunk. Carthage was still there, so was Italy, and so was Arabia, which was supposed to be the next target. The army was still the most potent the world had ever seen.
The problem was that there was nobody left who really wanted to go out and conquer them, and the successors instead fell to fighting over the spoils of a decade of conquest. Alexander's men would have stopped after Issus or after Galgamella. and certainly prior to the years of slogging through Bactria, Sugdiana, and India. It was Alexander himself who kept pushing them, and in so doing set the boundaries of the Hellenistic world that followed his death.
Now, a great many professional historians aren't altogether fond of counterfactuals, because they push us into the realm of speculation. That's something with which the academic world isn't particularly comfortable. I'm not an academic, though, and moreover, I think there's real value in engaging with counterfactuals. They force us to examine our assumptions about the nature of the past, who and what mattered, and why.
I think Alexander is the greatest what-if case of all. As luck would have it, we can point to one specific moment on which that entire future depended, the Battle of the Granicus River in 334 BC. Alexander always led from the front. That was a major part of his charismatic appeal to his soldiers, and it's a fundamental part of his legend. He saw himself as a hero in the Homeric mold.
a new Achilles, and understanding him as someone who sought out greater and greater challenges for the sake of doing them makes just as much or more sense as focusing on his acts as empire building. War junkies, people who became addicted to the adrenaline rush of life-or-death combat, existed in the past, just as they exist now. From my perspective, Alexander fits that mold better than he does that of a visionary state founder.
He just also happened to be an extraordinary tactician, a motivator of soldiers, and a strategic mind. Yet, even when it held no discernible benefit for him, he still sought out the thrill of fighting and killing without much regard for his own safety. That is right there at the core of what made him who he was. We can't separate that bit out. And that's how Alexander found himself within a hair's breadth of death at the Granicus in 334 BC.
It's a cliche to say that the tiniest things can change the course of history. Again, structures and long-term processes matter far more, but those individual moments really do exist. The moments that saw Alexander in the midst of a bloody melee taking a sword or axe blow to the helmet and about to suffer worse were a hinge on which millennia of subsequent history turned.
As things happened, Black Cletus took off the hand of Alexander's would-be killer with a stroke of his own sword a split second before it would have killed the king. But if Cletus hadn't been there at that moment, Alexander would have died. Now, this wasn't the only occasion on which Alexander might have been killed. Leading the cavalry against the Theban sacred band at Kyreneia in 336 BC, plunging headlong into the Persian lines at Issus and Galgamela,
being the first one up the ladder at multiple assaults of fortified positions over the years? Any of those occasions could have killed him. Several nearly did, and only luck and medical intervention saved his life. But I like to think of the Granicus as the best point of divergence, because it came quite early in his reign, and the circumstances of his near death are so well recorded. Let's take this as our moment of departure today. Cletus isn't there.
The blow lands, and Alexander dies. What happens next? If the recent history of Macedonia was anything to go by, the Battle of the Granicus surely would have been lost. 26 years earlier, Perdiccas III had died on the battlefield fighting the Illyrians. His army collapsed, so did the campaign, and Macedonia itself sat on the brink of disaster. Philip II eventually came to the throne in the aftermath of that.
and embarked on one of the most stunning reversals of fortune in known history. He transformed Macedonia from a kingdom on the fringes of the Greek world to its dominant force in less than a single generation. To do that, Philip rose from relative obscurity, first as regent and then as king in his own right. But we have to remember that Philip was a member of the Argead royal house, which gave him inherent legitimacy.
There had literally never been a Macedonia without an Argead ruling it. Second, a fundamental part of Philip's success as king was the immense effort he expended to eliminate every possible rival within his extended family. Usually, Macedonia suffered from not a lack, but a surfeit of potential errors. The result was inevitably a nasty, violent succession struggle and occasionally a full-blown civil war as the various claimants jockeyed for position.
The main reason Alexander's accession to the throne in the aftermath of Philip's death was so smooth was that there was almost nobody left to contest him. Philip spent much of his reign grooming Alexander to be his successor. He employed top-notch instructors in everything from writing and wrestling to more intellectual matters. When the boy was old enough, Phillips started to give him progressively greater responsibilities.
culminating in leading military campaigns and commanding the all-important cavalry at Kyreneia. No matter how difficult their relationship was at times, let's not forget Alexander mocking his drunken father at a banquet, Philip clearly believed that Alexander was the right heir. Alexander, by contrast, had no heirs at the time of his actual death in 323 BC. Had he died in 334 BC, 11 years earlier, there were even fewer options available.
The immediate aftermath of Alexander falling at the Granicus would have been the probable loss of the battle, followed by a succession struggle nastier than any Macedonia had ever seen before. There was nobody waiting to pick up the mantle and lead the kingdom. much less to continue the long-awaited campaign into Asia. The Macedonian conquest would have been over before it really began.
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If we remove Alexander from the equation in 334 BC, then we have to take some time to assess where Macedonia would be from a structural perspective. The state institutions, political culture, and social forms of the kingdom aren't going to change just because the king is dead. Anybody we slot in to rule Macedonia is going to be working within the same broad constraints and norms that their predecessors were.
The major difference here is that there's no competent Argead waiting to take over. Alexander's slightly older brother, Eridaeus, had disabilities of some significant kind and would have been viable only as a puppet, which was the fate he eventually suffered, of course. The most likely outcome here is a vicious struggle over the symbols of the Argead past, starting with Aridaeus and continuing with the daughters of Philip II.
Alexander's sisters, unlike his brothers and cousins, had been valuable assets and thus survived the now-dead king's purges at his accession in 336. Now, of course, they would have been worth their weight in gold to the various powerful figures within the Macedonian aristocracy who would seek to rule. What happened at Alexander's actual death in 323 BC wasn't an anomaly.
The wars of the successors were precisely what you'd expect in a highly personalized system of monarchical rule that vested all power in the king and then quite suddenly removed him. Even in much more deeply rooted kingdoms with highly developed bureaucracies and venerable institutions, the death of a king could always create chaos. In what amounted to a conquest state that was only a generation old,
The result was inevitably serious conflict. What made the situation in 323 BC so wild was the scale of the resources available to the various players. We can expect much the same in our hypothetical 334 BC succession struggle, albeit on a much smaller scale. Whoever could win the loyalty of the battle-hardened Macedonian army, carve out support among the fractious Macedonian nobility,
and for good measure find allies among Macedonia's neighbors would end up supreme. For my money, that's probably Antipater, whom Alexander had named his regent while he was gallivanting through Asia. or someone else of the generation that had made possible Philip's and Macedonia's rise to prominence. We shouldn't discount Philip's fierce daughter Kinane, Alexander's half-sister, who was a warrior of serious repute during her life and was unmarried at that time.
In fact, while we have less to go on with her than with her more famous brother, Philip may have been grooming her for a leadership role as well. Kanane had apparently accompanied her father on campaign against the Illyrians while still a teenager, and Much later sources tell us that she personally killed an enemy leader in hand-to-hand combat. Whoever allied with Canane would have been in the leading position to rule Macedonia. That's an intriguing possibility.
Because the viable Argeads at that time were women, and the leading nobles lacked the vast military resources they had in 323 BC, there's a good chance that whatever new Macedonian state emerged out of Alexander's early death would have been predicated on female power, authority, and legitimacy. That legitimacy aspect is really important for us here, much more so than turned out to be the case in the aftermath of Alexander's actual death.
Alexander's conquests empowered the Macedonian aristocracy who led his armies to such a degree that they could afford to dispense with the few remaining Argeads. Without those conquests and the vast resources offered by the Asian Empire Alexander had won,
They simply couldn't do away with the remaining children of Philip II. Kanane in particular would have been the most formidable remaining Argeat, and if she could overcome the hyper-macho culture of the nobility, she would have a good chance at holding onto the throne. But despite her obvious talents, and Kanane actually did defeat one of Alexander's generals in battle in 323 BC, it's hard to imagine her being able to replicate her brother's conquests. That's the power of ingrained structures.
Macedonia had never been ruled by a woman. Its political culture was deeply hostile to women wielding power. Even if Canane succeeded in gaining the throne, she would have been beset by foes close to home. It's more likely that the Argeads would have become extinct in short order as the aristocrats savaged one another to gain the throne. Kanane did, in fact, die at the hands of Peridicus's brother, Alquetas, and despite his soldiers' outcry, she still ended up dead.
This would leave a newcomer without dynastic legitimacy to rule the kingdom, and no matter that individual's military talents, the conquest of all Asia seems like an impossible order to fulfill. So, even in the best-case scenario where Canane becomes a fierce warrior queen or someone we know to be competent like Antipater or Antigonus the One-Eyed becomes king, it's difficult to imagine one of them going ahead with the campaign into the Persian Empire.
Greece would surely have rebelled at the first possible opportunity. The surrounding kingdoms of Epirus, Thrace, and Illyria obviously would have thrown off Macedonian hegemony in short order.
In other words, not only would the kingdom have been beset by a succession struggle or open civil war, its very survival might have been at stake. It's not impossible to believe that someone, Kanane or Antipater or whoever, could have secured control over Macedonia, beaten back the northern neighbors, maybe even retained hegemony over Greece.
But being the dominant power in the Aegean doesn't mean that the conquest of Asia was in the offing, especially because it's not like the Persians would have done nothing during all these events. Darius III, despite the slander he's received over the centuries, wasn't a fool. Remember that in 334 BC, he was just securing his own reign over the empire, and was actually doing a pretty good job of it.
Given a little more breathing space, there's every reason to believe Darius would have gone straight back to the policies that had served great kings well for more than a century, paying off the enemies of Aegean hegemons to keep them busy close to home.
Athens, the Thracian kingdoms, Sparta, and any other viable taker would have been rolling in Persian gold before long. With some measure of competence among the satraps in the far west, there's every reason to think that the Macedonians would have been confined to the Aegean for a long time.
even if they had succeeded in surviving and retaining their position of dominance. The idea that the Persian Empire was a rickety structure just waiting for someone to come in and give it a hard push into oblivion at the time of Alexander's conquest is fundamentally wrong.
At least, that's what a generation of recent scholarship on the Persian Empire has demonstrated over the past few decades. Succession struggles in civil wars, several of which had beset the great kings over the years prior to Alexander's invasion,
were actually part and parcel of political life in the Persian Empire. They were not a sign of structural weakness. Even the greatest of great kings, like Darius I, had to fight off rivals, pretenders, and satraps who had gotten too big for their riches. What we can say with certainty is that Alexander's invasion came at a very specific moment when the Persian Empire was particularly vulnerable. But that moment need not have lasted very long.
By the time of Issus in 333 BC, Darius had essentially quashed all the resistance to his rule. It says a lot about the strategic calculus of the great kings that dealing with those rivals had taken precedence for Darius over dealing with the Macedonian incursion.
Darius' decision on that front proved to be wrong in the long term, but how could he have known that Alexander would turn out to be one of history's most gifted and luckiest military leaders? He couldn't. While the real Darius paid the ultimate price for that miscalculation, one whose nemesis died at the Granicus in 334 BC, would have been in great shape for the foreseeable future. This is where we start to get into the discussion about structures versus contingency.
Structures are deeply rooted and hard to dislodge. Even Alexander's conquests, as violent as they were, didn't transform the satrapies of the Persian Empire overnight. It took decades for the provinces to become Hellenistic kingdoms. Even then, much of their fundamental machinery remained in place from the days of the great kings, or even before in the cases of Mesopotamia and Egypt. That's not a sign of a polity that's in imminent danger of collapse.
I think we can say that Alexander understood that, and it was a big part of the reason why he pushed so hard and so fast into Asia. Not only did it align with his fundamental character, He literally couldn't sit still except in the throes of a drinking binge. But he saw quite clearly that this was the time to strike. Time was always on the side of the great kings.
Only by attacking relentlessly without waiting could Alexander ever have hoped to accomplish what he did. That was a big part of what made Alexander special as a historical figure. the confluence of his own innate drive and talents with the favorable structural conditions of Macedonia in the mid-330s BC, and the momentary weakness of Persia at the same time.
Remove any one of those and Alexander's conquests would never have happened. Macedonia without Philip's reforms was no threat. Macedonia after Philip's reforms with no Alexander couldn't have pursued the conquests so rigorously or competently. A Persia with a firmly seated great king might lose some territory, but in the long run, it could afford to trade space for time while assembling an overwhelming force.
Who but Alexander would have stepped onto a battlefield with hundreds of thousands of Persians and felt confident of victory? It's not utterly impossible, but we can safely say that outcome looks pretty remote. Each morning, it's a new opportunity, a chance to start fresh. Up First from NPR makes each morning an opportunity to learn and to understand. Choose to join the world every morning with Up First, a podcast that hands you everything going on across the globe and down the street.
So here we are, a few years after our hypothetical death of Alexander in 334 BC. Persia isn't about to collapse, and Macedonia is somewhere between riven by civil war and struggling to maintain its dominance over the Greeks and their neighbors. Where do we go from here? How does the course of history change?
Well, let's start by thinking about Macedonia and the northern fringes of the Greek world. More than one scholar has made the point that Macedonia was far from the only more or less Hellenized kingdom located in the Balkans and their environs in close proximity to the Greek mainland.
Imagine looking at this region around 360 BC without future knowledge of what Philip II and Alexander would do. There really wasn't much separating Macedonia from the various polities of the Thracians, Epirotes, Illyrians. and even lesser-known groups like the Paeonians. Under the right circumstances, a gifted coterie of nobles and a couple of strong rulers
It's not hard to imagine any one of them coalescing in much the same way Phillips Macedonia did between 359 and 336 BC. Structurally, they all had a ton in common. All of them had kings, nobles, succession disputes, and deeply rooted traditions of constant warfare. They all had exposure to the economic and political technologies and practices of the Greek world, namely writing, which is an extraordinarily useful tool.
They were quite closely linked with one another through relationships that combined animosity and alliance in equal measure. All were rich in timber and minerals, along with good farmland, and could support sizable populations. Crucially, none of them were urbanized to any significant degree, which meant that ambitious kings weren't burdened by the necessity of negotiating with every independent polis. If they could ride herd on their fractious nobles and point them in the right direction,
any one of those kingdoms could have turned into a truly potent force. The general lack of written sources that tell the stories of these people and their acts isn't because they weren't doing anything worth recording. It's that the observers of the Greek world only cared enough to write it all down when those kingdoms impinged on their specific concerns. The vast bulk of what we know about Macedonia prior to the reigns of has to do with their relationships with the various Greeks.
But if we reconstruct the Macedonian king's priorities on the basis of their actions, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they were just as much, if not more, concerned with their Balkan neighbors than anything happening with the Greeks to the south. Although these people are sometimes called tribal in a somewhat pejorative sense that treats them as pre-state entities, I don't think that's especially accurate.
They were no more or less tribal than the Macedonians, and we've grown accustomed to pushing back against Greek snobbery toward their eventual conquerors. It was just that, snobbery. which saw anybody outside the polist system as barbarians rather than some sort of objective description of reality in these kingdoms. They were kingdoms, with defined political cultures, institutions, and ideas about how kings and subjects were supposed to interact.
They all had the potential to become much more under the right circumstances. There's a really good reason that kingdoms and not police became the fundamental political form of the Hellenistic Age. They scaled. in a way that the face-to-face political communities of the Greek world did not. This is a core point if we want to think about a world without Alexander's conquests.
The Macedonians weren't the only ones who could have done what the Macedonians actually did. They were perhaps a bit more quote-unquote Greek than Thracians or Illyrians, but the Greeks didn't necessarily think so. Plenty of kings outside Macedonia were familiar with Greek culture and politics. More importantly, the broad conditions for state building on the fringes of the Greek world were pretty favorable in the 4th century BC.
As a past-colonial foundation, Syracuse was more closely tied to the Greek mainstream than the northern kingdoms, but shared a lot in common with them. Vast available resources, weak or non-existent polais with which to contend, and most of all, monarchical institutions that could scale up to control more territory. Palaes, as the Athenians, Spartans, and Thebans found to their detriment, struggled to make their institutions work beyond the territory immediately surrounding their cities.
Aristocrats, and especially kings, by contrast, could use all sorts of tools to integrate new territories and peoples. They could grant offices and military commands. They could give away chunks of territory. And they could create alliances through marriages, which were particularly useful in this regard. The Romans eventually got around this shortcoming through the senatorial elite's personal ties to newly absorbed areas.
That was something we talked about extensively in our interview with Nick Terranato a couple of months back. In this way, the Romans got the best of both worlds. The same was probably true for the Carthaginians, the other major emerging power of this period though our understanding of that process is far patchier for them. The core point here, however, is about scale and how to achieve it.
As it turned out, the tools that Macedonian kings used to state-build and conquer were well-suited to expansion. There was no major difference between Philip handing over a couple of estates to a keen nobleman in return for his support in a succession struggle, and one of the successors giving away a whole satrapy twice the size of Macedonia to a general to keep him loyal. Both of those acts were built on an understanding of royal power and the relationships necessary to support it.
The only thing that changed was the size of the grants. So long as the size of those grants didn't outstrip what was still available to the king, royal power wouldn't suffer in comparison. This is, in fact, the logic that underpins all conquest states. It's how they get so big so quick. The power of the aristocracy, who are the king's essential partners in rule, could rise exponentially so long as the king's power grew along with it.
The border lords of the Ottoman Empire commanded resources on a par with those of the rulers they faced on the Christian side of the frontier, but they paled in comparison to what the sultan brought to the table. Alexander's generals individually wielded more military force than the Spartan kings of the Peloponnesian War could have dreamed of, but none could ever hope to truly challenge Alexander while he lived.
There's absolutely no reason to think that those same dynamics couldn't have functioned equally well in the hands of an Illyrian, Epirote, or Thracian king with ambition and talent. From my perspective, the Palaes, at the core of the Greek world, were always going to be doomed to suffer the fate the Macedonians imposed on them. Their rulers might have been different. A Syracusan tyrant, a Thracian conqueror, maybe even a Celtic-speaking warlord.
But the result would ultimately have been much the same. If we strip away the mythologizing, the peculiar genius of Philip and Alexander, and the bias of hindsight, we should view that string of Macedonian rulers as state-builders. They were remaking old royal institutions and creating new ones to buttress the centralized power at the heart of their kingdoms. State building, as a process, can and has happened many different times in many different places.
But there are some times and places that are more conducive to it than others. I think at a basic level that we should view the fringes of the Greek world as one of those places. In the Greek core, the deeply rooted political institutions of the polis were anathema to increasingly centralized power. Sure, there were plenty of tyrants throughout Greek history. Maybe one of them could have figured it out.
But they were always going to be running counter to the ingrained tendencies of the political culture in those poleis, in effect trying to roll a stone uphill like Sisyphus. I think it's really telling that tyranny proved most durable and effective on the fringes.
and the coherent monarchies were only viable outside the core region of mainland Greece. State building is always a difficult task because you have to either co-opt existing power holders or displace them. But there are degrees of difficulty. countervailing institutions make it much harder, which is a big part of why the Holy Roman Empire never coalesced in the way that France, Spain, or England did in the late Middle Ages. So too with the fringes of the Greek world, I think.
The eventual fusion of monarchical power and institutions, Greek economic and political sophistication, and vast geographic scale was the hallmark of the Hellenistic world. There's no reason that had to be restricted to Macedonia when similar conditions also existed nearby. But let's say alternative centers of monarchical power, other newborn states.
did emerge in that region in the aftermath of our hypothetical early death of Alexander the Not-Yet-Great. Would any of them have succeeded in doing what Alexander did in conquering the Persian Empire? Obviously, because this is counterfactual, we'll never know, but this is where I have to say no. Alexander was a truly extraordinary individual who happened to live at exactly the right place and time to accomplish what he did.
If we put the same man on the throne of Macedonia 30 years earlier, before his father's reforms, he wouldn't have done it. If we put someone else in Alexander's place, as if he never existed at all, they probably wouldn't have done it.
It is frankly miraculous, the product of a thousand different conjunctions of luck and deeply rooted structures, that Alexander wasn't killed at the Granicus or even beforehand. He could have fallen off Bucephalus and broken his neck the first time he wrote him as an adolescent.
He could have run face-first into a Theban spear at Kyreneia. He could have caught pneumonia and died, or gotten drunk and fallen and cracked his skull, or fallen victim to a palace conspiracy. He didn't. It took all of those things not happening. and for many others to happen, for Alexander to conquer the Persian Empire. Without Alexander, there's no Hellenistic Age, there's quite possibly no Roman Empire or one that looks much different, probably no Christianity or Islam,
and a dramatically altered future world. This is the weakness of structural explanations of history, as much as I like them. I think they tell us more than those focused on great men and their doings, on balance, but they don't tell us everything. Because the world is such a complicated place. The tapestry of history is woven together by millions upon millions of threads. Some of them are obvious, but many more are not.
Tug on any one of them and things can look much different very quickly. But the vast majority of history's seemingly outstanding figures weren't Alexander the Great. I hope this has been a fun experiment for you all. It certainly has been for me. Next time, we'll return to our regularly scheduled programming and discuss the ongoing rivalry of Carthage and Syracuse in the central Mediterranean.
If you like Tides of History, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. The sound engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffe. From Wondery, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Louis. Thanks again for listening.
Until next time, from Wondery, this has been Tides of History. a seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near LA in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death.
The last person seen with him was Laney Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder.
Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.