Empire and colonies

The stretch most Greek histories skip: after Alexander dies in 323 BC the empire splits between his generals, and this works through the Seleucids, the Ptolemies, the Antigonids and the Greek kingdoms that reached India.

Mark Selleck works through the archaic and classical centuries in roughly forty minutes an episode, stopping to say which ancient author a claim comes from. A hundred and seven numbered episodes reach the Ionian War.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Spartan imperial policy from 404-396 BC: Lysandros' overreach and downfall, Agesilaos II taking the throne, Kinadon's foiled revolution, and an ultimately ineffective invasion of Persian-controlled Asia Minor, a consequence of which was a Persian-bankrolled fleet under Konon.

Part of Spartan History Podcast

With Trevor Culley

Trevor Culley, host of the History of Persia Podcast, introduces the Persian empire as the greatest threat Greek city-states faced until the Roman conquest of Greece in the 2nd century BCE, reaching the 5th century outbreak of Greco-Persian hostilities.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

The years 411 and 410 BC: the naval war shifting to the Hellespont, the Athenian democracy at Samos pressing on with victories at Kynossema and Kyzikos, radical democracy restored at Athens, and the switch from Thoukydides to Xenophon's Hellenika.

Part of Greeced Lightning

Sara, Luke, and Sam explore the life of the Macedonian king and general Alexander the Great, weighing four film versions, Irish accents, and a slip mixing Persian Wars with Peloponnesian.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

With Trevor Culley

Trevor Culley of the History of Persia Podcast on Persia's experience of the wars, its motivations and why it was ultimately unsuccessful, since most sources focus on the Greek experience.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

The Persian Wars' aftermath, the Delian League formed under Athens to carry on the war against Persia at sea, and the rival factions in Athens and Sparta struggling over foreign policy in the 470s BC.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

With Vanessa Gorman

Prof. Vanessa Gorman on Miletus, which Herodotus called the ornament of Ionia: its Bronze Age connections, its Archaic affluence, its decline under Lydian and Persian rule, and her open-source Greek course.

Part of The Ancients

In October 331 BC, on the plain of Gaugamela, a 25-year-old Alexander faced a large army gathered by the Persian king Darius III; Tristan gives a detailed run-down of the battle that would decide the fate of the Persian Empire.

Part of The Ancients

With Roel Konijnendijk, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

In 486 BC Xerxes ascended the Persian throne and sought revenge on Greece; Tristan Hughes, Dr Roel Konijnendijk and Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones explore his massive invasion through the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis in the accounts of Herodotus.

Part of New Books in Ancient History

With Paul Kosmin

Paul J. Kosmin's Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire (Harvard UP, 2018) traces Seleucid kings imposing continuous numbered years, met by rebels predicting history's total end.

Part of The Ancients

With Adrian Goldsworthy

Tristan Hughes and Dr Adrian Goldsworthy cover the sieges of Tyre and Gaza in 332 BC, Alexander's Egypt campaign, the Battle of Gaugamela, Persepolis's fall, and Darius III's demise as Alexander's army pushes further east into Bactria and Afghanistan.

Part of New Books in Ancient History

With Angelos Chaniotis

Angelos Chaniotis's Age of Conquests (Harvard UP, 2018) traces how Alexander's successors built an empire from the eastern Mediterranean as far as present-day Afghanistan, later dismantled one by one by Rome.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

The 2014 sequel 300: Rise of an Empire, centred on Artemisium and Salamis, compared with the ancient sources for what is well grounded, what is stretched, and where its creators wrote their own version.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Ptolemaic explorers, elephant hunters and mining teams travel as far as Somalia, exploit African riches, build infrastructure that leads to Indo-Mediterranean trade routes, and meet the Kingdom of Meroë in contact and conflict.

Part of Classical Stuff You Should Know

The second episode on the Landmark Herodotus covers the exploits of Cyrus the Great, with baby swapping, a kid kingdom, and blood wine offered to the dead.

Part of Greeced Lightning

Sara and Sam discuss the Battle of Pydna in Total War: Rome II, with Plutarch, Livy and Polybius on the Macedonian War, plus layoffs, unions and war elephants.

Part of History of Persia

A chat with Derek from the Hellenistic Age Podcast explains the basics of Hellenism, the new era that emerged in the aftermath of Alexander the Great's conquests.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

The years 428 and 427 BC: the introduction of Kleon and Nikias, the revolt of Mytilene on Lesbos from the Athenian empire, and a "prison-style breakout" from Plataia.

Part of The Ancients

With Polly Low

Tristan Hughes and Professor Polly Low explore the Delian League, the so-called ancient NATO, tracing tribute, revolt and contested sources as a defensive alliance from the Persian War origins slowly turns into Athens' hard-edged maritime empire.

Part of Dan Snow's History Hit

With Tristan Hughes

Tristan explains how Alexander the Great's death at Babylon in 323 BC triggered a gore-soaked showdown among his commanders and, within a fortnight, the first siege of the post-Alexander age.

Part of Classical Stuff You Should Know

Thomas continues his series on the Landmark Herodotus with the reign of Cambyses, a king remembered here for bad gifts, bad spies, and failing to draw a fancy bow.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Kyros' conquests of Lydia, the Greek city-states of western Anatolia, the nomadic tribes of central Asia and the Neo-Babylonian Empire, his multi-ethnic army, an empire from Anatolia to the Hindu-Kush, and why later historians called him Great.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Dareios takes the throne and campaigns to the Indus, Ahura-Mazda and Zoroastrianism in his reign, and the reforms: Old Persian script, Persepolis, satrapies, the Royal Road, a canal of sorts and the gold Daric.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

After Menander I Soter the Indo-Greeks decline over 150 years as Indo-Scythians seize the Punjab and the last king disappears by 10 AD, though evidence points to Hellenistic culture surviving nearly five centuries after Alexander.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Herodotos, the Father of History, with his influences, drawbacks and positives, then the Near East of the 7th and early 6th centuries BC: Medes and Neo-Babylonians destroying Assyria, and Kyros of Anshan overthrowing the Medes.

Part of The Ancients

With Eduardo Garcia-Molina

At its height the Seleucid Empire stretched from Thrace to the Indus River Valley before a devastating defeat by Rome at the Battle of Magnesia; Eduardo Garcia-Molina argues the Seleucids still resurged under Antiochus IV after that defeat.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Ai Khanoum hints at a flourishing Hellenic culture among Greek colonists while Bactrian and Sogdian traditions stay powerful, ending with Greek collapse amid nomadic invasions and civil war in the mid-second century BC.

Part of Ancient Greece Declassified

Military historian Adrian Goldsworthy asks how much of Alexander's success he owed to the work of his father Philip II of Macedonia.

Part of Ancient History Fangirl

With Liv Albert

Hadrian, the Roman emperor who commissioned Hadrian's Wall, combined an obsession with architecture and a passion for everything Greek to transform the city of Athens, as guest Liv Albert explains here.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

After the Mauryan collapse, Greco-Bactrian rulers invade India around 185 BC, Demetrius and Menander take Arachosia and Gandhara, and figures like Heliodorus and Sophytos hint at complex Greek and South Asian interactions.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

The team discusses magazine issue XIV.4, The Greco-Persian Wars, on how by the late sixth century BC it had become clear that the expanding Persian Empire and the Greek city states of Asia and the Aegean would soon collide.

Part of The Ancients

Focussing on 323 to 320 BC, Tristan's book tells the story of Thibron, a Spartan mercenary captain who set out from Crete with around 6,000 battle-hardened mercenaries to forge his own Greco-Libyan empire in North Africa after Alexander's death.

Part of The Ancients

With Joyce Tyldesley, Chris Naunton, Glenn Godenho

Born in 69BCE into the Ptolemaic dynasty, Cleopatra VII emerged victorious from a brutal civil war within two turbulent decades of taking Egypt's throne; Professor Joyce Tyldesley, Dr Chris Naunton and Dr Glenn Godenho discuss her rise and golden age.

Part of Ithaca Bound

With Charlotte Dunn

Dr Charlotte Dunn of the University of Tasmania returns to discuss how the relationship Greek polities had with the Kingdom of Macedon was mixed after Alexander III's death, some congenial, some acquiescing, others outright revolting.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Greek emigration to the Chalkidiki, Thrace, the Hellespont, the Bosporus, the Black Sea and northern Africa in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, relations with Lydian and Saite Egyptian kings, and the development of coinage.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Invited by the Aetolian League, Antiochus III invades mainland Greece in September 192 and declares war on Rome, is forced back to Asia, and meets Rome at Magnesia to decide the dominant Hellenistic power.

Part of Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

With Leah Lazar, Christy Constantakopoulou

Leah Lazar, postdoctoral researcher at Oxford's Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, and Christy Constantakopoulou examine Athens and its fifth-century subject allies, the Athenian empire Constantakopoulou traced in The Dance of the Islands.

Part of Dan Snow's History Hit

With Tristan Hughes

Tristan reads an abridged chapter from his book on the Perdiccas Years, telling of Spartan mercenary captain Thibron, who left Crete with thousands of mercenaries to forge a Greco-Libyan empire.

Part of Dan Snow's History Hit

With Tristan Hughes, Adrian Goldsworthy

Adrian Goldsworthy joins Tristan to discuss how Philip transformed Macedon into the dominant power in the Central Mediterranean, and how Alexander then conquered the Persian Empire and marched as far as the Indus.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

The Ionian Revolt: the failed Naxos expedition, Miletos' role, the Greek sack of Sardeis, the Persian counteroffensive, the naval victory at Lade and sack of Miletos, the Spartan destruction of Argos at Sepeia, and the early life of Themistokles.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Ptolemy I Soter, a commander of Alexander turned King and Pharaoh of Egypt and perhaps the craftiest Successor, founds what becomes the longest lasting Hellenistic Kingdom in a reign of nearly 40 years.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

The team discusses the latest magazine issue on Hellenistic mercenary armies in Southern Italy, where Tarentum, possibly a Spartan colony, called in outside help when pressured first by its Italic neighbours and then by Rome itself.

Part of The Rest Is History

In the second part of the Alexander the Great special, Tom and Dominic ask whether Alexander might have kept his empire together had he lived, what killed him, and why he appears in the Qur'an.

Part of The Ancients

With Chris Naunton

After Alexander's death, aged 32, his corpse became a talismanic symbol of legitimacy, and his tomb in Alexandria drew pilgrims until, by the end of the 4th century, all mention of it vanished; Tristan and Dr Chris Naunton discuss theories.

Part of The Ancients

With Tiziana D'Angelo, Kathryn Lomas

Paestum in southern Italy is home to some of the greatest ancient Greek temples; Dr Tiziana D'Angelo and Dr Kathryn Lomas guide Tristan Hughes from its Greek beginnings around 600 BC to takeover by Rome more than 300 years later.

Part of Dan Snow's History Hit

With Tristan Hughes, Chris Naunton

Dr Chris Naunton joins Tristan to explore what happened to the tomb of Alexander the Great, a place of holy pilgrimage in ancient Alexandria until all mention of it disappeared in the 4th century.

Part of The Ancients

With Nick Rauh

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great's death, monumental Hellenistic super fortresses were built in ancient Rough Cilicia, modern-day southeast Turkey; Nick Rauh takes Tristan through them and this area's importance to preceding superpowers such as the Assyrians and Persians.

Part of HistoryExtra podcast

With Edmund Richardson

Historian Edmund Richardson traces how Alexander the Great, king of a small Greek kingdom, built an empire stretching from Greece to India and defeated the Persian empire, all by the age of thirty, exploring his life and mysterious death.

Part of Greeced Lightning

Sara and Sam tackle the Chronicles: Battle for Greece campaign in Age of Empires 2, discussing Europeans stealing historical treasures, ancient tyrants and the Ionian revolt.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

The 460s BC: Kimon's dual land and naval victory at the Eurymedon, the assassination of Xerxes, Themistokles' medism trial and defection to Artaxerxes, the revolt of Thasos, the earthquake and resulting Helot revolt, Kimon's ostracism, and the ascendency of Perikles.

Part of Epic Greek History

The episode opens a two-part account of the Persian Empire's rise, arguing no historical event loomed larger for ancient Greeks than their defense against Persian military power.

Part of The Ancients

With Simon Elliott

Tristan is joined again by Simon Elliott to talk about some of the great clashes between Greeks and Romans, from Cynoscephalae to Magnesia to Pydna, and how the forces evolved in armour, weapons and strategy to compete against each other.

Part of Tides of History

With Lieve Donnellan

The episode presents Dr. Lieve Donnellan's use of network theory to study southern Italy and the Greek world in the Iron Age, offering fascinating and innovative ways of understanding the ancient Mediterranean.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Seleucus I Nicator goes from minor player in Alexander's campaigns to king of the largest Hellenistic realm, from administration in Babylon to wars against Chandragupta Maurya and the Diadochi.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

With Marc de Santis

The team discusses Ancient Warfare Magazine XII.4, on how the first decades of the Hellenistic era are known for the ever-growing warships of the Ptolemies, though naval warfare was not only about who had the biggest ships.

Part of The Ancients

With Silvannen Gerrard

Existing for almost 250 years, the Seleucid Empire relied on Indian elephants in almost all its major battles, from Ipsus to Magnesia; Dr Silvannen Gerrard explains how these elephants were trained, and their prestige value away from the battlefield.

Part of Ithaca Bound

With Charlotte Dunn

Dr Charlotte Dunn of the University of Tasmania returns to discuss the rise of Ptolemy I, forefather of an Egyptian dynasty that lasted nearly 300 years before ending with Cleopatra VII.

Part of Alexandria: A Hellenistic World Podcast

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.

Part of Epic Greek History

The episode follows Cambyses the Second subduing Egypt after the death of Cyrus in 530 BCE, then covers Darius the First reorganizing the empire and introducing Persian coinage.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

The Persian successions behind the return of Persia to Greek politics: the assassination of Xerxes, Artaxerxes I and the Egyptian revolt of Inaros, the violent climb of Darius II, and the strategies of Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus.

Part of Ithaca Bound

With Ian Worthington

Professor Ian Worthington of Macquarie University returns to discuss Ptolemy, whose reign in Egypt was successful by many standards, including an heir, Ptolemy II, who succeeded him without turbulence.

Part of Greeced Lightning

Sam and Sara pit two Total War versions of the Battle of Raphia against each other, covering the Hellenistic successor kingdoms, the pronunciation of Seleucid, and African and Asian elephants meeting in one clash.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

Why Greeks colonized, from population growth to civil strife, their settlement of southern Italy, Sicily, France, Spain, Corsica and Sardinia, the trireme, and tensions with Etruscans and Carthaginians until around 550 BC.

Part of The History of Ancient Greece

The years 454 to 446 BC: Athens behaving in an increasingly imperialistic way, and the final years of the First Peloponnesian War.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

The team looks at issue XIV.1, Crucible of Empires: Warfare in Hellenistic Asia Minor, on how, after Alexander the Great's fall, the Successors set to work carving out kingdoms of their own, with Asia Minor an important proving ground.

Part of New Books in Ancient History

With Rachel Kousser

Rachel Kousser's Alexander at the End of the World (Mariner Books, 2024) follows Alexander after he took Persepolis in 330 BC and his troops burned it, chasing rebellious ex-Persians into India.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Herodotus called Egypt the gift of the Nile, and the Ptolemies added the most rigorously developed, or exploitative, taxation system ever seen in Egypt, becoming the wealthiest people in the world of the 3rd century BC.

Part of Epic Greek History

The episode covers the Mycenaean civilization of warrior kings ruling from great palaces that dominated the surrounding territories, centuries before the Parthenon, Greek drama and the Olympic Games, tracing what it drew from Minoan Crete.

Part of In Our Time

Born into the Macedonian royal family in 356 BC, Alexander the Great gained control of Greece and conquered the Persian Empire by defeating its king Darius III, spreading Greek culture and language into regions it had not reached before.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

How Egyptians met Ptolemaic rule: Manetho writes his Aegyptiaca in Greek, the Greco-Egyptian family of Dryton and Senmonthis-Apollonia shows mixed identity, and tensions could explode in violence and rebellion.

Part of The Ancients

With Toby Wilkinson

In the chaos after Alexander the Great's death his former general Ptolemy claimed Egypt as his prize; Tristan Hughes and Dr Toby Wilkinson discuss how he laid the foundations for the last ancient dynasty of Egypt.

Part of The Ancients

With Peter Toth

Legends of Alexander the Great were told almost immediately upon his death, often merging fact with fiction; Tristan interviews Dr Peter Toth, curator of the new British Library Exhibition on Alexander the Great, about the Alexander Romance culture.

Part of Ithaca Bound

With Charlotte Dunn

Dr Charlotte Dunn of the University of Tasmania explains how the unexpected death of Alexander III of Macedon, known as Alexander the Great, closed the Classical period and opened the Hellenistic age.

Part of History of Persia

A break from the Seleucids turns to their western neighbors: Egypt under Ptolemy II and Macedon under Antigonus II.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Tristan Hughes of The Ancients Podcast on his book about the Perdiccas years, 323 to 320 BC, framed around the regent Perdiccas and covering events across Europe and Asia as the Argead Empire struggles.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

With the Persian threat gone, suspicions between Greek states return: Athens ostracises Themistocles, Sparta contends with rising democratic factions on the Peloponnese, and both settle on post-war policies over a decade.

Part of Epic Greek History

The episode dates Greek colonization to the eighth century BCE, when settlements in southern Italy and Sicily grew numerous enough for the region to be called Magna Graecia.

Part of The Ancients

With Simon Elliott

Both described as the greatest military commander in the ancient world, Alexander the undefeated conqueror and Caesar, critical in creating what later became the Roman Empire, are compared by Tristan and Dr Simon Elliott, analysing leadership styles and victories.

Part of Tides of History

The episode traces nearly 30 years of the Peloponnesian War across the whole of Greece, concluding that Athens' fate was decided in faraway Sicily and not in Greece itself.

Part of Alexandria: A Hellenistic World Podcast

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.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

With Frank L. Holt

Numismatist Frank Lee Holt on how coins, the most enduring symbols of the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms, can be used or misused to tell their story, and their role in preserving threatened heritage.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

With Angus Jacobson

PhD candidate Angus Jacobson on the Flight of Seleucus story told by Libanius of Antioch, how the Successors used or manipulated events in royal propaganda, and the challenge of separating fact from fiction.

Part of Epic Greek History

The episode dates the Ionian revolt to 499 BCE, when Aristagoras of Miletus led Ionian Greek cities against the Persian Empire while Athens sent twenty ships in support.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

The team discusses magazine issue XVI.6, Alexander versus Darius, on how the king of Macedon, at just 20, spent two years securing his northern borders and Greece before crossing the Hellespont in 334 to invade Achaemenid Persia.

Part of Spartan History Podcast

Within a century Sparta's four villages on the Eurotas grow into a Peloponnesian powerhouse through aggressive expansion, unlike the colonisation other Greek cities chose, culminating in the 20 year first Messenian war.

Part of History of Persia

Little survives of the decade after Greek offensives against Xerxes until the Battle of the Eurymedon, when Athenian general Kimon leads a Delian League fleet to destroy the Persian fleet and army in southern Anatolia.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Demetrius II takes the throne in 145, Diodotus Tryphon endorses the infant Antiochus VI and then proclaims himself king, and Mithridates I of Parthia uses the instability in Syria to conquer Babylonia in 141.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Antiochus VII Sidetes slays the pretender Diodotus Tryphon, subdues John Hyrcanus, and gambles everything on a final anabasis in 130 BC to recover Babylonia from the inexperienced Phraates II.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

Alexander I of Macedon between Persia and Greece: his sister's marriage to a Persian governor suggests submission, yet as a friend of Athens he advises the Greeks while assisting Xerxes' march through his lands.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

Eastern Greeks, angered by Pausanias and the Spartan commanders, hand Athens the leadership, the episode asks how far Athens fostered that support, and a new league holds its first congress on Delos.

Part of The Ancients

With Anthony Delaney, Madeline Pelling

After ascending the throne aged 20 in 336 BCE, Alexander the Great's rule started with mass executions and political assassinations; in this crossover with After Dark, Tristan chats to Dr Anthony Delaney and Dr Madeline Pelling about his bloodthirsty reign.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Tens of thousands of Greeks immigrate to Egypt for posts in the bureaucracy or army, or perhaps to farm, and papyri show lives like Ptolemaeus, devotee of Serapis, and Kleon, chief engineer of the Fayyum reclamation.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

Persia's side of defeat, asking why an army that size failed to capture Greece and whether equipment, training or reliance on various nations undid it, and how an empire left intact was affected.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

Greek colonisation of Sicily goes on, with colonies founding their own, tyrants emerging as in the mother cities, and Carthage leading the opposition until it secures much of its trade interests by the end of the 6th century.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

After Mantinea Argos restores democracy, Nicias and Alcibiades unite to exile Hyperbolus in the final use of ostracism, and Athens conquers neutral Melos after the Melian Dialogue and executes its male citizens.

Part of Tides of History

The episode traces how, after Alexander's death, the chance of a relative truly ruling the empire shrank while the generals fought for power, and the outlines of a new world order began to take shape.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

The Ionian War begins as Persian silver meets Spartan need: Alcibiades helps flip Chios, Miletus joins the revolt, Tissaphernes negotiates the first Sparta-Persia treaty, and Athens secures Samos by the end of 412 BC.

Part of Tides of History

While Alexander the Great's successors fought over control of his empire, Celtic-speaking migrants moved east along the Danube largely unnoticed by the Greeks to their south, before those Celts launched one of the largest invasions of Greece in recorded history.

Part of History of Persia

After losing territory in the east to Chandragupta Maurya, the Seleucids still engage their eastern neighbors: late in Seleucus' reign, Megasthenes establishes diplomatic ties, and in later generations diplomacy and trade stabilize both the Maurya and the Seleucids.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Steppe nomads between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC: new tribes set on a collision course with the Seleucid Empire and Greco-Bactrians, alongside steppe society, relations with the sedentary Greeks, and the emergence of the Parthians and Kushans.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

After the 30 years peace Pericles faces a conservative challenge, tribute lists hint at unrecorded revolts, and a war between Samos and Miletus brings Athenian intervention, a Samian revolt and indirect Persian aid.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

After Sicily Athens counts lost warships, thousands of dead citizens and a strained treasury, creates the proboloi and a 5% tax on maritime trade, while Persia reenters Greek affairs through Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus.

Part of Tides of History

The episode credits Antigonus the One-Eyed with coming closer than almost any other post-Alexander figure to recreating the dead king's empire, though his success aroused the other Successors' anger and his downfall soon followed.

Part of Tides of History

The episode follows Alexander the Great's campaigns beyond his defeat of the Persian king Darius III, into the Iranian Plateau, Central Asia, and finally south into India.

Part of Tides of History

The episode traces the Peloponnesian War's roots back to the Persian Wars, when Athens seized the chance to build an empire in their aftermath, setting up the 30-year conflict with Sparta for control of Classical Greece.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

The Hellenistic city from foundation to megalopolis, from Alexandria to Ai-Khanoum: royal building projects and military settlements, what makes a city Hellenistic, and its impact on disease and human health.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Ptolemy IV dies in 204, greedy ministers scheme around the boy-king Ptolemy V, and the Great Revolt of 206 to 186 takes Upper Egypt under a rival pharaoh, Haronnophoris, leaving the kingdom near collapse.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

The Achaean League, on mostly amicable terms with Rome since 167, campaigns against Sparta, and through the brief Achaean War and the sack of Corinth in 146 Rome makes clear it alone decides Greece's destiny.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

Sicily comes into the Greek periphery: trade returns, Greek cities found colonies to relieve overpopulation, and three indigenous cultures and the Phoenicians for the most part coexist peacefully during the 8th century BC.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

After Egypt Athens makes a truce with Sparta, forces revolting Delian league members back in as tribute payers, and sends Cimon to Cyprus, after which what appears to be some sort of peace with Persia follows.

Part of The Delicious Legacy

The ancient food traditions of Massalia, today Marseilles, where Greeks settled around 600 BCE with wine, grapes, olives and herbs, read through Archestratus and linked to Provençal sartanado and French bouillabaisse.

Part of History of Persia

After reclaiming Babylon, King Seleucus consolidates his power over the upper satrapies, but as he works to reclaim the Iranian east, the Mauryan Empire pushes out of India and across the mountains of Gandhara.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

John McTavish on forty years of Successors carving up Alexander's empire: the problems of early Hellenistic sources and chronology, the causes of rapid disintegration, and indigenous responses to the power vacuum.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

Anatolia before the Greeks: over 1 million years of habitation, Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe questioning views of hunter-gatherers, the Hittites and their capitol Hattusa, and descendants of the Mycenaeans settling the west coast.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

After the Hittites vanish Anatolia fragments; Greek cities dot the western coast and form Ionia, fall under Croesus and the Lydians, and pass to Cyrus the Great, whose Persians become their new master.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

After Persia destroys Lydia, the fence-sitting Ionian Greeks meet the anger of Cyrus, a Lydian revolt is crushed, and a generation of tyranny and tribute later the Ionians revolt and attack Sardis.

Part of The Ancients

With Ben Raynor

In 334BC, as Alexander the Great advanced east to conquer the Persian Empire, his uncle Alexander I of Molossia was travelling west to southern Italy; Ben Raynor explores his formative years in Philip's court and his omission from popular history.

Part of Tides of History

The episode describes the troubled final years of Alexander's reign, when his soldiers were spent from campaigning even as the king wanted to keep fighting, until his sudden death left the generals to decide the empire's fate.

Part of Tides of History

The episode dates Greece as an unremarkable corner of the Aegean in 800 BC, tracing a century in which its population exploded, cities emerged, long-distance trade boomed, and the first overseas colonies were founded.

Part of Ancient History Hound

The Greeks founded numerous colonies in southern Italy, and this episode explores how they interacted with local peoples and each other, featuring dancing animals and a drunken diplomatic incident.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

With Rachel Mairs

Rachel Mairs, author of The Hellenistic Far East, on Ai Khanoum, local Bactrian traditions and new identities, and how to reassess Greekness in a complex archaeological and epigraphical record.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Twenty years of chaos end during the reign of Ptolemy V: his marriage to Cleopatra I Syra, the Great Revolt put down in 186, Egypt as a second-class power, and the history of the Rosetta Stone.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

The Delian league's first decade under Cimon: campaigns against Persian controlled regions on the Thracian coast, then against other Greeks, and Naxos, attempting to leave, kept in by force, an ominous sign of the league's direction.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

Thasos revolts from the Delian league, reportedly for economic reasons, and under siege turns to Sparta, which secretly agrees to attack Athenian territory until a great earthquake devastates the Peloponnese.

Part of Epic Greek History

The episode traces Sparta extending influence in the Peloponnese from an attempted conquest of Arcadian Tegea into a policy of alliances, while Athens transformed under Solon and Pisistratus.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

The Seleucids as prolific city-founders turn North Syria into a new imperial heartland standing in for Macedonia, and peoples from Babylonia and Jerusalem to Greek immigrants respond to Seleucid rule and Greek culture.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

The ministers of young Ptolemy VI, Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra II campaign against Antiochus IV over Coele Syria, and he invades Egypt twice and besieges Alexandria, unless the Roman Republic has something to say about it.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Demetrius I Soter restores a degree of order, crushing Timarchos in Babylonia and the rebellion of Judas Maccabee, yet alienates kings like Attalus II and Ptolemy VI, who bankroll the usurper Alexander Balas.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

The third player before the Greco-Persian Wars: the Persians, a relatively small group in the Zagros Mountains, expand under Cyrus the Great, absorb the Lydian Empire and create the largest empire the world had yet known.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

After Samos, Athens secures the edges of its empire: streamlining the Carian tribute list, courting Byzantium as the key to the Black Sea, and founding colonies in Thrace, until it fits the definition of an empire.

Part of The Ancients

With Franck Goddio

Founded by Alexander the Great in 323BC and nurtured by the Ptolemies, Alexandria flourished through the Late Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods before much of it sank beneath the harbour; underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio shares his team's excavation findings.

Part of The Ancients

With Jane Draycott

Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra VII and final ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, grew up during Ancient Egypt's last days and in Rome during its new empire's first years before ruling Mauretania; Dr Jane Draycott tells her story.

Part of History of Persia

After the Persian defeat at Mycale the Greco-Persian war drags on: late 479 BCE brings Greek offensives into Persian territory that outlast Sparta's withdrawal in 478, and the third year against Xerxes sees Athens found the Delian League.

Part of History of Persia

During and after the Second Syrian War, Antiochus II juggles the Cappadocian monarchy, threats over Bithynia, and Parthia and Bactria's autonomy against the Parni, in a busy mid-3rd Century BCE for the Seleucid Empire.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

After twelve peaceful years under Seleucus IV, Antiochus IV Epiphanes usurps the throne, gives generously to cities and temples often in honor of Zeus Olympios, and earns from Polybius the nickname Epimanes, The Madman.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Iranian civilization outlives the conquest of Persia as dynasties rule in their own right, among them Mithridates I Ktistes of Pontus, Orontes I of Armenia, and Amastris, last Achaemenid princess and first Hellenistic queen.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Robin Waterfield on his book The Making of a King, about Antigonus II Gonatas, who restored peace in Macedonia in a 40-year reign and of whom very little is known.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

The Attalids of Pergamon, founded by the eunuch Philetaerus, are the first Greek monarchy outside the Successor Kingdoms and sponsor buildings and art celebrating them as defenders of Greek civilization against the Galatians.

Part of Casting Through Ancient Greece

Persia after Cyrus: Cambyses conquers Egypt and dies amid a crisis, a pretender holds power for seven months, and Darius, one of the conspiring nobles, becomes king, expands the empire and collides with the Greeks.

Part of HistoryExtra podcast

With Alex Rowson

Historian Alex Rowson tells Spencer Mizen that Alexander the Great's talents as a warrior and empire-builder grew from an upbringing marked by political assassinations, a dysfunctional relationship with his father and the finest martial training money could buy.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

Antiochus I Soter takes over the gargantuan empire, and a Celtic invasion, the First Syrian War and a passionate forbidden romance fill the reign of the last King of the Universe.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

How the Seleucids ruled the largest Hellenistic realm: kings seen through Macedonian-Greek, Near-Eastern or Iranian lenses, satrapies kept in check by a travelling court, and the revolutionary Seleucid Era.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

Jasper, Michael, Lindsay and Josho look at Pyrrhus, second cousin to Alexander the Great, who at age two began his career as a penniless exile after his father was dethroned, and rose to become King of Epirus, Macedon and Sicily.

Part of History of Persia

Following the Fourth Syrian War, Ptolemy IV Philopator returns to Egypt to enjoy his victory and leave administration to his advisers, until native Egyptian revolts bring Egypt's royal party to a screeching halt.

Part of Chronicles of Ancient Greece

The episode covers Magna Graecia, as colonies are founded all over the Mediterranean.

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast

A prelude to the Fourth Syrian War: Antiochus III and Ptolemy IV are crowned in 222 BC, and while Antiochus tries to hold his realm together, Ptolemy's laziness lets the Alexandrian court fall into conspiracy and corruption.

Part of The Ancients · History Hit's interview show; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Adrian Goldsworthy

Part of The Ancients · History Hit's interview show; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Adrian Goldsworthy

Part of The Ancients · History Hit's interview show; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast · The three centuries between Alexander and Actium

Part of The Ancients · History Hit's interview show; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Graham Wrightson

Part of The Ancients · History Hit's interview show; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Mai Musié

Part of The Ancients · History Hit's interview show; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Roel Konijnendijk, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · Panel discussions from Ancient Warfare Magazine; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Marc de Santis

Part of The Ancients · History Hit's interview show; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Adrian Goldsworthy

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · Panel discussions from Ancient Warfare Magazine; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of New Books in Ancient History · Scholars on their new books, interviewed by a peer; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Richard Billows

Part of In Our Time · The BBC seminar format; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Tristan Hughes

Part of History of Persia · Persia from Cyrus onward; only the episodes where the Greek world is the subject are indexed

Part of Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas · Johanna Hanink talks with fellow Hellenists about their latest work

With Rachel Kousser

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Louise Hitchcock

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · Panel discussions from Ancient Warfare Magazine; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Marc de Santis

Part of History of Persia · Persia from Cyrus onward; only the episodes where the Greek world is the subject are indexed

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · Panel discussions from Ancient Warfare Magazine; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Marc de Santis, Seán Hußmann

Part of The Ancients · History Hit's interview show; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · Panel discussions from Ancient Warfare Magazine; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Owen Rees

Part of New Books in Ancient History · Scholars on their new books, interviewed by a peer; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Frank L. Holt

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast · Panel discussions from Ancient Warfare Magazine; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Michael Taylor, Michael Park, Murray Dahm

Part of History of Persia · Persia from Cyrus onward; only the episodes where the Greek world is the subject are indexed

Part of Tides of History · Patrick Wyman's survey of the deep past; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of The Ancients · History Hit's interview show; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Owen Rees

Part of The Ancients · History Hit's interview show; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Polly Low

Part of Tides of History · Patrick Wyman's survey of the deep past; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of Tides of History · Patrick Wyman's survey of the deep past; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of Tides of History · Patrick Wyman's survey of the deep past; only the Greek episodes are indexed

Part of The Hellenistic Age Podcast · The three centuries between Alexander and Actium

Part of The Ancients · History Hit's interview show; only the Greek episodes are indexed

With Ali Ansari