Never the Same Way Twice

Ten years, four great battles and a siege nobody thought possible — told through the two things that actually governed them: how little the sources agree, and how much grain a man eats in a day.

A course on the thought of Alexander.

Philosophy · Antiquity

Course outline

1. The Brook — The first battle of the invasion is the one we can say least about. Two of the best modern accounts read the same sentence of Arrian and reach opposite conclusions; the sources disagree about what…
2. The Doctrine That Isn't — Every account of Alexander's battles contains the same rule: the phalanx pins the enemy, the cavalry delivers the blow. It is a good rule. It is not in any ancient source, and it fails the moment you…
3. Three Pounds of Grain — What an army eats is the least glamorous fact about it and the one that decides where it can go. Engels worked the arithmetic out, and it does two things at once: it explains the campaign's shape…
4. A Decade on a Schedule — An army that can carry ten days of food must be fed by the country it is in, which means the country has to agree in advance. Engels's reconstruction of how that was arranged turns a decade of…
5. The Constraint He Learned to Use — In Cilicia the supply constraint stopped being something to work around and became something to use. Two historians reach that conclusion independently, which is as close to proof as this subject…
6. Seven Months — An island fortress that had never been taken, a channel too deep to wade, walls a hundred and fifty feet high — and a siege that two very good historians assess in opposite terms. One calls it the…
7. The Battle Nobody Could See — The largest battle of the reign, fought on ground the Persians had levelled for their own chariots, in a dust cloud that made it invisible to the people in it. Four sources describe it and they…
8. The Monsoon — In 325 he took an army into the Makran desert and lost a great many of it. The explanation everyone reaches for is a flaw in his character. The man who counted the rations says it was a weather…

Works read in this course

• The Anabasis of Alexander — Chinnock's 1884 translation, public domain. Arrian follows Ptolemy and Aristobulus and names them.
• The History of Alexander — Yardley's translation. The most vivid of the four on what a battle was like from inside it.
• Library of History, Book XVII — Welles, Loeb 1963. Carries the physical detail Arrian declines to record.

Built from

This course was built from 8 books.

• Donald Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army
• J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Alexander the Great
• A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire
• Paul Cartledge, Alexander the Great
• Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander (Chinnock)
• Quintus Curtius Rufus, The History of Alexander (Yardley)
• Diodorus Siculus, Library of History XVII (Welles)
• Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon

Terms introduced

Companion cavalry, phalanx, baggage train, satrap, hypaspists

Part of the Simposeum course library.