Alexander's Successors and the Danube Frontier

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

While Alexander the Great's successors were fighting over control of his empire, Celtic-speaking migrants were moving east along the Danube River, mostly unseen and unnoticed by the Greeks to their south. The Macedonian kings should've been paying more attention, because soon, those Celts would launch one of the largest invasions of Greece in recorded history.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad-free right now.
0:04.6	Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
0:18.1	Eumenes, until recently, a citizen of the Polis of Athens Athens was having a spectacularly bad day and an even worse week.
0:25.8	He should have known that the Macedonian king's promise of land, free land, for proper Greeks like him and Thrace was a bad deal.
0:32.5	No land was ever free.
0:34.1	There were always other claimants, other interested parties who had designs on that land.
0:39.3	When he had come north with a dozen slaves, his wife and his children, three of them legitimate,
0:44.1	three by two different Illyrian women he owned, Eumenes thought that wealth and even an elected
0:48.9	office couldn't be far ahead. For a while, five years or so, Humane's had been right. His house wouldn't have
0:57.0	looked out of place on a hillside at home in Attica. The land was only a couple of days' journey
1:02.1	from the coast and a quick sea route to profitable markets. A dozen slaves had grown to 20,
1:07.4	then 30. Humini's fields were full of ripening grain.
1:11.4	Herds of sheep watched over by Thracian herdsmen he'd purchased in Byzantium,
1:15.4	raised the pastures in the low hills a few hours walked from the estate.
1:19.3	Planting vines and a second grove of olive trees was his next endeavor,
1:22.9	along with acquiring more enslaved workers to tend them.
1:26.1	The good life was just within reach.
1:29.0	Soon, his overseers and sons would be running things, and Eumenes would have nothing to do but
1:33.9	drink good imported wine, read books, and write letters to his old friends and relatives back in
1:38.9	Athens. But Eumenes knew Tyke was a fickle goddess. Fortune could turn so quickly.
1:46.9	The ropes chafed his neck, wrists, and ankles.
1:50.9	The insides of his thighs were rubbed raw.
	...

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