Hi there. You're listening to The Hellenistic Age podcast, interview episode, Alexander's Successors at War, The Perticus Years, with Tristan Hughes.

Hi there, everyone.

Joining us in the show today is Tristan Hughes, a fellow podcaster best known for his work on the ancients podcast series and history hit, which covers a wide variety of topics

throughout the ancient world.

Today he is here to

discuss his new book, Alexander's Successors at War, the Perticus Years, 323 to 320 BC, a volume

published by Penn and Sword books that chronicles the first tumultuous events following the death

of Alexander the Great and the sundering of his empire. Firstly, I'd just like to say congratulations on the book and welcome to the podcast. Well, thank you very much and I'm absolutely delighted to be here, Derek. Now, I'm sure that many of my listeners are probably sort of familiar with your work, to some degree or another, but would you care to tell us a bit about yourself? And given that your work spans across the ancient world, why did you choose to write about the early part of the wars of the successors?

Well, of course I'm very happy to. Well, the wars of the successors of all parts of ancient history, and it's all so fascinating.

But for me, like the first ancient history love, the real passion is always this early Hellenistic period.

What's happened after Alexander the Great's death? Because it's, in my opinion, it's such a

great question. Because we sometimes think, we always think the campaigns of Alexander the

great, the man, Alexander the Great, it's an extraordinary, remarkable career of this,

this terrible person. Let's be blunt about that.

And then you kind of fast forward sometimes to the Punic Wars, the rise of Republican Rome.

But really looking at that period in between, you know, what happens after Alexander the Great

dies to his empire, one of the largest empires the world had yet seen up to that point,

and how it fragmented into these various successor kingdoms

that would ultimately come into contact and be, should we say, overthrown,

overpowered by Rome just over a century later.

So really looking into that was fascinating,

and after getting the chance to do a series on the successes for the YouTube

...