Hi there, you're listening to the Hellenistic Age podcast.

Interview episode on Alexander the Great in ancient art and literature with Meg Finlinson. Hi there, everyone. Today I have with me Meg Finlinson in order to talk about the image and legacy of Alexander the Great.

Meg is a recent graduate student, having received a Masters in Classics at the University of Edinburgh

and a Masters of Letters in Classics at University of St. Andrews. Her focus has been

largely on the image of Alexander the Great in ancient literature and art, having published

a dissertation on the Alexander sarcophagus and its relation to Near Eastern Royal

Iconography. First off, I'd like to say, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me.

As an up-and-coming classicist, could you give the audience a brief overview of what led you down

the road towards Alexander the Great and the ancient world in general? Yeah, so I've been

studying classics in one form or another for about seven years now. So I first fell into classics kind of by accident

when I was choosing my A-level options, which in the UK is the last two years of compulsory study

when you're about 16 to 18. I didn't really have much of a background in ancient history before

then. I think I did one year of Latin in school that we just kind of had an

elderly teacher and I think it was a bit of a favor to her to tick her over to retirement. So nobody

really took it very seriously. But when it came to choosing my options, I originally wanted to do

something very different. I was quite interested in Russian history and I was quite good at Spanish

as a language. So I thought I would just continue that on. But unfortunately, that didn't work out with the other options I'd chosen for my timetable. So the admin kind of sat me down and said, oh, you're going to have to choose something else. So I thought about it and just asked, well, what do you have that is the closest thing to history? And they said, well, the guy who teaches history also teaches

this other subject called Classics. So I thought, okay, just put me in that. Sounds fair enough.

And I was anticipating it to really go anywhere. But when I started studying for this class,

I started reading the text and, you know, participating in the lessons, something about classics

just really struck me and something

about the story of Alexander and the work that we were doing on the ancient sources, Aryan, Plutarch,

...