Alexander the Great: Soldier, Priest, and God. Interview with Professor Fred Naiden

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Professor Fred Naiden wrote one of my favorite books on Alexander the Great - Soldier, Priest, and God - and it provides a much different view of Alexander than the warrior king we so often see in modern treatments. Alexander was a deeply religious person, and his ideas and beliefs about religion were at the core of understanding his actions.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wunderry Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now.
0:04.4	Join Wunderry Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hi everybody from Wundere, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.
0:21.6	I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today.
0:24.0	Alexander the Great is one of history's most compelling individuals.
0:27.0	He reshaped the political, cultural, and linguistic map of the Eastern Mediterranean and Central and Western Asia, bringing the Greek world to the Indus
0:34.2	Valley, the Caucasus, and the Steps.
0:36.5	Even more mind-boggling is the fact that he did it in a little more than a decade between
0:40.3	his accession to the throne of Macedonia and 336 BC and his death in 323.
0:45.1	Yet despite being one of the best documented individuals of antiquity,
0:48.4	with numerous written histories pertaining to his life and activities,
0:51.7	inscriptions and incidental texts, and of course,
0:54.0	archaeology, Alexander remains an enigma.
0:57.0	Why did he do what he did?
0:58.8	What did he believe about his place in the mundane and divine order of the world. Why conquer it all?
1:04.0	23 centuries after his life and death,
1:06.0	these questions are still not settled, and scholars continue to spill gallons of ink addressing them.
1:10.0	To help us better understand Alexander in his world, we could not hope to have a better guest.
1:15.0	Fred Naiden is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one of the world's foremost experts on ancient Greek religion and Alexander the Great, which is a fascinating
1:24.2	combination. He's the author of a book that I found absolutely invaluable and which I highly recommend to you,
1:30.0	entitled Soldier, Priest, and God, a Life of Alexander the Great.
1:33.9	It's the most original and illuminating life of Alexander that I've read.
1:37.4	That's only the most recent of Professor Naden's many publications, which include edited
	...

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