History Unplugged Podcast27 Helmi 2025

Failed Futures: If Alexander The Great Hadn’t Died, He Might Have Conquered Europe, Circumnavigated Africa, and Built His Own Silk Road

And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer. That’s a quote from Hans Gruber in Die Hard, which is a very convoluted paraphrase from Plutarch’s essay collection Moralia. There’s plenty of truth in that unattributed quote from Mr. Gruber.

Alexander the Great’s death at 323 BC in Babylon marked the end of the most consequential military campaign in antiquity. He left behind an empire that stretched from Greece to India, planted the seeds of the Silk Road, and made Greek an international language across Eurasia, all in 13 short years. He became and remained the biggest celebrity in the ancient world, probably only replaced by Jesus a few centuries into the Christian era.

But what if he had not died as a young man? What if he had lived years or decades more? How much more influence could he have had? We have clues about Alexander’s plans for the future – and they come from Greek chroniclers Diodorus and Arrian, writing centuries after his death. They include conquering the Mediterranean coast all the way to the Pillars of Hercules (Rock of Gibraltar), building a tomb for his father Philp that would be as large as the Great Pyramid of Giza, and transplanting populations from Greece to Persia and vice versa to unite his domains through intermarriage.
To explore this hypothetical scenario is Anthony Everitt, author of “Alexander the Great: His Life and Mysterious Death.” We look at the life of the most influential person in the ancient world, and explore the ramifications of his life having even more influence.

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Japan's Military Refused to Surrender Even After Two Atomic Bombs and a Coup Nearly Succeeded

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Is Patton America’s Most Overrated General?

George S. Patton is considered one of America’s greatest generals for his blitzes across Europe in World War 2. He is celebrated for breaking out of Normandy because his Third Army push out of their h...

1 Syys 52min

Stalin’s Ordered Killing of Trotsky Created the Playbook for Modern Political Assassination

Ramón Mercader expected to easily kill Leon Trotsky, silently and instantly. He had rehearsed the blow for months, practiced the angle, tailored a pocket into his raincoat to conceal the shortened ice...

27 Elo 48min

Belisarius Reconquered Africa and Italy for Rome. Why Did Rome Destroy Him for It?

In 533, a twenty-eight-year-old general named Belisarius sailed from Constantinople with 15,000 men to reconquer North Africa from the Vandals, a kingdom that had held it for nearly a century since th...

25 Elo 52min

Summer of Death: America’s Heat Wave of 1936 That Killed 12,000

A coast guardsman named Earl Cunningham froze to death on Lake Michigan trying to rescue five fishermen trapped on a drifting ice sheet. His last words were "I wish I could see my wife and three child...

20 Elo 45min

New Archeological Tech Is Rewriting Everything We Know About the Ancient Past

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18 Elo 55min

The AI Jobs Panic of the 1890s: The Linotype Triggered Fears of Mass Layoffs but Created an Explosion in Newspaper Work

One of the most feared inventions ever was the Linotype machine. Debuting in 1886, it was designed to eliminate tens of thousands of newspaper jobs, specifically the hand-compositors—the highly skille...

13 Elo 57min

April 1945 in Berlin: The Final Month of the Third Reich

When Heinrich Himmler was appointed to command the army group defending Berlin in January 1945, his operations officer described briefing him as "talking about colors with a blind man." Himmler couldn...

11 Elo 1h 1min