In 336 BCE, a young man from northern Greece took over a nearly bankrupt kingdom. Within 13 years he had established dominance over the rest of Greece, claimed the crowns of Egypt and Persian, and built the second-largest empire in the world to that time. He also burned whole cities to the ground, left thousands of bodies crucifed along a beach in Lebanon, and may well have been responsible for the death of nearly 1% of the global population.
He was Aristotle's pupil, Alexander the Great.
In this episode, we look at Alexander's biography and how his epic smash-and-grab campaign may just have led to the preservation of Greek literature as we know it today—including the works of Aristotle.
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