Hi there. You're listening to the Hellenistic Age podcast interview episode on Antigonus the second Gannatus with Robin Waterfield.

Hello once again, everyone. Today I have with me Robin Waterfield, an independent scholar

and writer on the ancient world. A classicist by training, Robin has translated numerous works for publishers like Oxford World Classics, with such authors under his belt like Plato, Plutarch, and Polybius, just to name a few. He has also published several non-fiction books about the classical and Hellenistic period, and today he is here to discuss his latest work, The Making of a King, Antigonus Ganatos of Macedon and, which is slated for release this April. First off, I'd like to just say welcome, and thank you very much for joining on us with the show. Well, thank you, Derek. Thank you for the opportunity. Now, beyond my cursory introduction, could you tell us a bit more about your background and what ultimately inspired you down the path of ancient historian and prolific author?

I don't know. How far back do you want to go? I mean, even when I was a child, if I had,

you know, if somebody gave me a book token for Christmas, I was likely to spend it on a book on

ancient Greek history or archaeology or something like that. I live in Greece now.

And in fact, I've just gained Greek citizenship

on top of my British citizenship and I like to say that I think my body is English but my soul is

Greek. So I've just always had this, I've always had this attraction to Greek history. In fact,

I spent quite a lot of my professional career doing philosophy, but increasingly I've been doing more and more history over the

past 20 years or so. I don't know. I've just always loved it. I mean, some people just love history,

right? I guess you do too. So it just happened to be ancient Greek. I had a very traditional

English education. I started Latin at the age of eight and Greek at the age of 10. And so, you know, classics was kind of imbued into me from an early age,

and it just so happened that I loved it, whereas most of my 10-year-old colleagues were saying,

well, you don't want to study dead languages, it's boring, it's boring, and so on like that.

But I just took to it.

Now, you have written multiple books on the Hellenistic Age, namely dividing the spoils,

which is centered around the wars of Alexander's successors, and taken at the flood,

which is based on the Roman conquest of Greece. Your upcoming book, The Making of a King, sort of acts as a mid-quil to these,

primarily focusing on the early to mid-third century

BC.

How does writing about this time period compare to your earlier works, at least when it

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