Alexandria: A Hellenistic World Podcast

With Philip II

This performance covers Demosthenes's Third Philippic, which set Greece on the warpath against Philip II in 341 BCE, and his 338 BCE Funeral Oration after the catastrophic defeat.

A companion episode presents what Alexander may have been taught at Mieza in his tutors' own words, with excerpts from Aristotle's Politics and Anaximenes's Rhetoric to Alexander.

In the Athens agora of 338 BCE, the Theban merchant Ismenias watches the 98-year-old Isocrates starve himself to death, a teacher of rhetoric devoted to Persian-hating Pan-Hellenism.

With Philip II

In 341 BCE the Thracian Mukasokos, captured and enslaved by King Philip II's army, must learn the preferences and particularities of her new masters, the Macedonians.

In 341 BCE the Athenians Antiphanes and Charias have promised to vote against any war with Macedon, until Demosthenes, the greatest orator of Greece, proves persuasive.

The herald Eurybates tells Unnefer of Ptolemy the Macedonian's early life: his upbringing, his education in Pella, his service at Chaeronea, and the sack of Thebes.

In 331 BCE two Egyptian fishermen, Unnefer and Beknef, watch a rambling king found a new city, the start of a story that runs on to 322 BCE.

With André Laks, Glenn Most

The Derveni Papyrus, a 4th-century BCE philosophical treatise found in Macedon, narrates Orphic religion's creation of the world, the gods, and the origins of human beings.