Alexander the Great: life of the week

Stretching from Greece to India, Alexander the Great's empire was one of the largest in human history, and he'd conquered it all by the time he was 30 years old. So how did this young king of a small Greek kingdom defeat the mighty Persian Empire and become a godlike figure in the process? Alexander's astonishing journey is explored by Edmund Richardson in a new biography, and in this History Extra podcast episode, Edmund is joined by Rob Attar to explore Alexander's remarkable life and mysterious death. Alexander is one of the most famous people in all of world history. So how did you want to reshape our image of him with your new biography?

Honestly, just the thought of writing about this guy, like, why would you want to write about this guy after so many people had done so many thousand books about him? It seemed like such a fool's errand. And when I first thought about it, I was like, This is the worst idea I've ever I've ever had. I can't do a book about this guy, anything but this guy.

But what I found over the course of several years chasing after him was that so many of the things we've assumed about Alexander, so many of the parts of his story that seemed fixed and certain, actually anything but, and also so many of the parts of his story which seemed perpetually mysterious, so many of the questions which it for a long time seemed absolutely impossible to even try to answer. New discoveries and new technology and new approaches are starting to open up ways to address them. So In many ways I wanted to write about him because there was suddenly a chance to tell a very different kind of story about someone who has, as you said, been one of the most written about people in human history.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (50 minutes, 7,286 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.