Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, add free listening,

early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join

the club. That is, the rest is history.com. Hello everyone, it's Tom Holland here, and I have teamed up with the Great Mary

Beard to bring you four episodes on what we together have decided are the four most

iconic themes in ancient history. And today we are looking at

Alexander the Great. Here's a short extract of that episode. No one was like him. Terrible were his

crimes. But if you wish to blackguard the great king, think how mean, obscure,

and dull you are, your labours lowly and your merits less. That was the great American poet,

Robert Lowell, talking about Alexander the Great, who is the theme of today's episode. I'm in

a conversation with the great Mary Beard. And Mary, I assume you would agree with Robert Lowell

that Alexander's, well, let's not call them crimes, but I mean, he spilled a lot of blood. He's a killer of men.

But would you also acknowledge a sense that he is, I mean, almost a figure of myth,

kind of terrifying and potent in a way beyond the mortal norm?

I was going to say that I thought you read that out just to annoy me, Tom, really.

Oh, kind of. I wanted to get you in the mood for this.

You can't deny that Alexander the Great is worth looking at because so many people have,

so many people have copied him. He's become such a, going to mythic figure, not just in

Western civilization, but actually, you know, throughout the world.

Well, he appears in the Quran, amazingly. Yeah, exactly. So the idea of me being sniffy,

as I'm quite tempted to be, but I'm resisting it. The idea of being sniffy and saying,

oh, I don't, you know, a young drunken butcher, that isn't good enough.

You know, I think we do have to press at both the truth and the myth of Alexander the Great, actually.

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