031: Age of Giants - Elephants in the Hellenistic Age

Hi there. You're listening to The Hellenistic Age Podcast. Episode 31. The Age of Giants. Elephants in the Hellenistic World. Within pop culture, there seems to be a number of set archetypes when it comes to the depiction of the ancient world, whether in film, literature, or video games. You have the stock standard ones like leather wristbands, sandals, and buildings of white marble stone as far as the eye can see. However, certain aspects over others seem to capture our imagination and add a sense of exoticism about the period. What I am talking about is none other than the war elephant. Giant beasts with great towers and their drivers, lumbering around the battlefield and smashing any poor soldier, typically Roman ones, in their way. The elephant was introduced as a weapon of war to the Greeks and Macedonians during the campaigns of Alexander the Great, and the birth of the Hellenistic Age saw them turn into a sort of wunderwaffen, a wonder weapon to bolster the status of any Hellenistic ruler worth their salt. But to exclusively describe them in a military context is too simple. These creatures became objects of immense fascination to the Hellenistic and later Roman authors, thinkers, and artists, and acted as symbols of power and prestige to the monarchies who utilized them. What I plan to do with this episode is to analyze all the various aspects of the elephant, ranging from their biology to their depictions in art and coinage, and to ultimately figure out why the Hellenistic period was an age of giants. I think an excellent place to start would be a brief zoology lesson regarding elephants. You'll have to forgive me for my indulgence, but my undergraduate years spent studying biology were heavily focused on animals and biodiversity, so this topic is right up my alley. The family Elephantidae contains a number of species of what we know as elephants, large herbivorous creatures most distinctively featured with large fan-like ears, gray wrinkled skin, and apprehensile proboscis on their face, known in layman's terms as their trunk. Currently, there are only three extant species left, the much larger African Savannah Elephant, males standing on average 13 feet or approximately 4 meters tall from toes to shoulder, and weighing in at a beefy 7 tons. Then there's their much smaller cousins, the African Forest Elephant, at only 2.5 meters, and the Asian Elephant, which comes in the middle at about 3.5 meters tall and about 6 tons on average. During the Hellenistic period, only two species of elephant would really be available to the Mediterranean and the Near East, the Asian Elephant, and another species that is now extinct, the North African Bush Elephant, also known as the Atlas Elephant or the Syrian Elephant. Asian elephants are conveniently geographically distributed across most of Southern Asia, including India, Cambodia, Vietnam, and dipping down into Malaysia and Indonesia. The Atlas Elephant's historical range included the majority of North Africa, including Syria and the forests of Sudan. These would be the same ones that the Carthaginians would utilize during the Punic Wars, but were seen as the less desirable species of the two, given that their small size was more close to their extant African Forest Elephant cousins, along with other reasons as I shall get to in a little bit. As a general rule, elephants are among the most clever animals to walk the earth, capable of levels of self-awareness rivaling chimpanzees and dolphins, and there are even reports of them engaging in ritualistic behaviors such as mourning the loss of family and group mates. They are highly social creatures, living in herds of roughly 10 to 20 individuals per family, largely dominated by females, as bull males tend to live alone until the mating season. In the context of human-elephant relationships, the Asian elephant is much less aggressive to their African counterparts, thus much more receptive towards being tamed and becoming a working animal, though they aren't completely devoid of self-preservation instincts, nor just becoming fed up with their drivers. The interaction between humanity and elephants has gone as far back as prehistoric times, such as the stereotypical mammoth hunting we commonly associate with the Ice Age, but the use of elephants as a working animal, a tool to assist with tasks such as carrying logs or moving heavy items, can date back to at least 2000 BC from Mesopotamian artifacts showing a man riding an Asian elephant. An important clarification must be made, though, when I speak of the elephant as a working animal. Unlike animals such as dogs, cattle, and horses, the elephant has not been subject to domestication, referring to the selective breeding of animal specimens as to get a creature bearing traits that are more amenable to human needs, such as docility or a greater output of animal products like meat and dairy. The word tame must also be used with great caution, since elephants aren't necessarily born with the fear of humans, but learn through experience, and to gain an elephant to quote-unquote agree with doing whatever tasks you need it to do, it has to be some sort of mutual partnership. I don't want to anthropomorphize them too much and argue that they are self-aware of the notion of voluntary labor, but they can certainly abide by the laws of operant conditioning, where if they perform certain tasks, they receive rewards like food to encourage them to keep doing said tasks. Forcing an elephant to do anything through reasons like fear and torment will only work for so long, as they will figure out that they are much stronger than you are, and will appropriately respond to often deadly effects, like Tyke the Elephant in Honolulu in 1994, or during many battles throughout the Hellenistic period. It has generally been accepted that the introduction of the elephant to the Greek world came during the campaigns of Alexander the Great. For sure he had encountered them while in India during the Battle of the Hydaspes, where King Porus used them to the terror of the Macedonian soldiers, and it is very likely he had come across them during his travels before this, given that the elephant was something of a prestige item in India at the time, and reports suggest he captured some after the Battle of Galgamela. However, Herodotus briefly mentions them in his histories, and there is evidence of fragmented writings by the Greek physician Ctesias, who had spent several years at the Persian court of Artaxerxes II during the 5th century, and authored a number of works, including a discussion on India. In it, he describes the elephant in both in terms of a weapon of war, and in terms of their biology, including a rather curious mention about how the semen of elephants dries out about as hard as amber, something that Aristotle sharply and specifically calls Ctesias as being flat out wrong upon, reminding me of the fact that despite a gap of over 2000 years, scientists and their petty little antics truly never change, speaking with experience. Speaking of which, Aristotle, the father of zoology, provides our next best account of the elephant, in his Historia Animalia. Tradition long has held that Aristotle was supplied with numerous plant and animal specimens from Alexander, the most famous being an elephant sent all the way back to the Greek peninsula to be studied, and implied to be dissected, though it has come under fire by scholars like J.S. Romm, who questions the plausibility of an elephant surviving the trip, never mind Alexander's then likely frosty relationship with Aristotle for numerous reasons. In any case, Aristotle provides a remarkably accurate account of the elephant's physical and behavioral characteristics, going so far as to describe their internal organs, suggesting that he either had saw him one himself, or had a remarkably trustworthy source. Later writers would take a less scientific approach to the study of the elephant, such as Pliny the Elder, who has anthropomorphized them to such a degree that they resemble the characters of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book rather than an actual animal. The elephant is the largest of them all, and in intelligence approaches the nearest to man. It understands the language of its country, it obeys commands, and it remembers all the duties which it has been taught. It is sensible alike the pleasures of love and glory, and, to a degree that is rare among men even, possesses the notions of honesty, prudence, and equity. It has a religious respect also for the stars, and the veneration for the sun and the moon. As proof of their extreme docility, they pay homage to the king, fall upon their knees, and offer him the crown." It is clear that even by Aristotle's time, the elephant was seen as an object of fascination, no doubt due to their large and imposing size, but also because of their natural magnificence and subtle gracefulness. What truly brought elephants from the periphery of the Greek world into the center stage of the New Hellenistic one was their obvious use for warfare and as a marker for power. Alexander recognized the potential for the effectiveness of using the elephants he had captured or received as tribute during the Indian campaigns to bolster his own army, and even commemorated a medallion bearing his victories in India using the elephant as the main decoration. By the time of the wars of the Diadohoi, the elephant was being used by the stand-in regent Perticus to execute political rivals, and widely employed in the armies of the successors to great effect, most famously by Seleucus I, to the point where he was able to be teased with the title, roughly translated as, Master of Elephants or The Elephant King. Mockery aside, their important contribution to great battles like Ipsus and against the Celts would mean that the elephant had now become a mainstay in the arsenal of the Hellenistic kingdoms, and it is in the context of ancient warfare that we will turn to next in this episode. Virtually every great power in the Hellenistic period, whether it's the Syrian Seleucids or the Egyptian Ptolemies, the Roman Republic or the Carthaginian Empire, all used elephants to some capacity in warfare. The question then becomes, how were they utilized? How did they acquire and train? From what our sources tell us, the acquisition of elephants was a laborious process. You ultimately had two options. You either had to capture them in the wild, or you would have to set up a captive breeding program. The problem with the latter is that elephant breeding is notoriously challenging, even in the context of modern zoos, who have tried to keep the captive population at a reasonable level. Elephants take a long time to develop in the womb, approximately one and a half to two years, and trying to get them to the size where they could be effective on the battlefield or to sexual maturity can take between 10 to 16 years of costly feeding and watering. Compare this to a horse's gestation period of about a year and maturity at five, and the logistical difficulties of getting two six-ton creatures to mate on demand, and it isn't surprising that we have very little, if any, evidence regarding attempts by the successor states to successfully launch such a program. So that leaves us with capturing them in the wild. The Hellenistic kingdoms had two species to choose from, the Asian or Indian elephant and the Atlas or North African bush elephant. According to authors like Polybius and MacAsthenes, the Indian elephant was considered the superior species for warfare, given their larger sizes and less timid nature. The only problem was that to get Asian elephants, there was only one supplier, India, which today holds about 50% of the world's Asian elephant population. In the early Hellenistic period, this wasn't as much of a problem, given that almost all of the main successor states had sizable elephant cores in their ranks following Alexander's death, especially the Seleucids, whose proximity and diplomacy with the Mauryan empire of India had provided an ample supply for most of the period. As time wore on, and the eastern territories fell out of Seleucid control, it became increasingly difficult to get a hold of Asian specimens. Thus, the Mediterranean world had to turn to the Atlas elephant. The Ptolemies had long been relying on this population already, given that the Seleucids would never allow their fiercest rivals access to the lucrative elephant trade. Therefore, hunting parties had to be established, traveling along the Red Sea from ports like Ptolemae Asteron into the regions of modern Sudan and Ethiopia to capture the beasts. If we assume that the tactics employed by these hunters were similar to the ones in India, as described by MacAsthenes, then it follows as such. Hunters construct what is known as the kadah or corral, which is shaped like a triangle, a wide opening that gradually narrows as you enter deeper into it. You then either bait the corral by using a tame female elephant to attract a full male, or you can flush an elephant herd into the trap by using loud sounds and fire. Once the elephants are subdued through exhaustion over a number of days, the hunters would then engage in a taming period, gradually getting them used to human contact and hand-feeding, soft-spoken words much like you would in order to coax your dog to get her in the bathtub, and apparently through the use of music, like softly beating drums. Once they have been reasonably calmed down, the elephants would be escorted to specialized transport craft known as elephantagoid, which were very wide and flat vessels with almost no space for rowers to drive the ship. From there, they could enter into the Nile Delta and transported to the mainland on foot. This practice would have been shared by the likes of Carthage and the Seleucids, and over time it would become more and more challenging as the demand would outrace the supply, something we will discuss in a little bit. With the elephants captured and properly trained, you now have your very own war elephants, something any self-respecting Hellenistic warlord worth his salt would employ in their armies. Leading the elephant was the driver, known as the mahout, who would sit atop of the creature's head, wielding javelins or a pike, and a special hammer and chisel used to euthanize the elephant should it get out of control. The mahout was also offhandedly referred to as indos, the Greek term for Indian, and many of the drivers were likely of Indian origin based upon their tradition of elephant training and handling, though it may be a term that designates a position practiced by Indians, but not necessarily that the person was of Indian ethnic origin. Supporting the mahout would be archers and javelins in what are called turrets or towers, allegedly pioneered by Pyrrhus of Epirus, and were large wooden platforms shaped like a hollow cube cut in half to be placed on top of the elephant's back to provide a stable platform to sit upon, giving additional firepower and protection for both the mahout and the elephant itself. The rest of the elephant could be protected with armor, and some were even outfitted with bells, apparently a common practice with pack animals in Asia, though the practical application in this context remains a mystery to me. So what would you actually use them on the battlefield for? It has become something of an anachronism to liken war elephants as being the tanks of the ancient world, and there is a degree of truth to this, their large bulky frames and high intelligence allows them to become a powerful force of destruction if given the opportunity. If an elephant was sent among a massive infantry, they could trample any poor fool who happened to be underfoot, pick up troops with their trunks and toss them around the field like a rag doll, or even gore them with their large tusks. Even killing the elephants could be problematic, such as was the case of the famous Jewish martyr Eliezer Avaran who was crushed beneath the body of the Seleucid elephant he speared during the Battle of Beth Saharia in the Maccabean Revolts. Elephants tactically could be used in a number of ways. Led by a commander known as the Elephant Harkos, an elephant squadron of 16 individuals could be used as a screen to discourage enemy troops from attacking, as was the case in the Battle of Ipsos when the Seleucids used his elephants to prevent Demetrius Polyarchides from returning to the battlefield. Elephants paradoxically were also an effective way to counteract other elephants. Polybius describes in great detail the way the elephants fought one another during the Battle of Raffia in 217, smashing each other with their heads, trunks, and tusks until one submitted or was seriously wounded. They also could be utilized to tear down fortifications, something which Perdiccas unsuccessfully tried against Ptolemy during the First War at the Diethohof. But perhaps the most valuable asset that an elephant can provide to the battlefield is their role in psychological warfare. The mere presence of an elephant on the battlefield is enough to unnerve any potential opponent who had never seen one before. But they also could be used to gradually exaggerate the size of your army, acting as sort of towers between the walls of the foot soldiers, and thus make you appear more imposing. The Romans' first encounter with elephants at the Battle of Heraclea had disastrous consequences for the troops having to try and deal with the great beasts, and the Celts, routed by Antiochus I in 275, were no doubt impeded by the sight of such bizarre and frightening creatures. Never mind their enormous size, elephants can be extremely loud, with some trumpeting reaching around 120 decibels, equivalent to a police siren and jet engine in your ear, and there often was dozens or hundreds of them shaking the earth as they stampeded about the battlefield, mingling with the screams of their crushed or terrified victims. Horses were often rendered ineffectual by the sound and smell of the elephants, throwing their riders off, and though traditional scholarship had once thought the main purpose of the elephant was to prevent the cavalry from being affected, they are as useful, if not more so, at keeping terrified infantrymen at bay. With all of these benefits, it seems that the elephant was an unstoppable force on the battlefield. The problem was, the peak of war elephant used in Hellenistic and later Roman warfare would only last between the 3rd and 1st century BC, with only very minor uses outside of this time period. So why did they become unpopular? There are a number of outside factors to explain this, but in the military context, the elephant had a number of weaknesses that rendered them ineffectual or outright damaging to their own size. From a logistical standpoint, trying to get an elephant properly fed and watered was extremely costly. Typically, an elephant requires about 4-7% of its body weight in food, no thanks to their large body size and relatively inefficient digestive system that leaves half of whatever they eat unprocessed, meaning that a single elephant on average could require about 500-600 pounds of food per day, never mind the cleanup of waste that would inevitably build up as a result. Once again, let's compare this to a horse, which needs about 2-2.5% of its body weight in food every day, roughly 25 pounds for a horse that weighs about half a ton, and this would be considered the average size of a war horse at the time. This means you could feed around 25 horses for every one elephant. Regardless of food and water, just getting them from point A to point B on anything beyond flat terrain could be a nightmare for the commanders involved. It is a testament to Hannibal's brilliance, or his stubbornness, that he was able to even keep one elephant alive during his crossing of the Alps, using elaborate systems of bridges and logs to trick the elephants into going up and down the slopes of the mountain. The problem of keeping your elephant supply up once attrition and warfare had taken their toll was also a huge problem. As I mentioned earlier, trying to arrange for a captive breeding program was basically impossible, and access to elephants in India became more and more costly and distant. Conversely, with the raiding on the elephants of North Africa reducing their population size, hunters would have to go farther and farther to capture the elephants, making the process very expensive and pointless relative to the benefits gained. Though the initial psychological impact of the elephant was indeed valuable, once an army has been properly exposed to it, they will know how to exploit it and turn the elephant into a disadvantage for their owners. A properly disciplined set of can nullify the effectiveness of the elephant by opening up gaps in their line during a charge, forming corridors that they can use to allow the beast to pass through and be taken down, such as was the case with Scipio Africanus at the Battle of Zama during the Second Punic War. Like all animals, elephants have a keen sense of self-preservation, and with their high intelligence and massive body size, trying to prevent one from running off was a huge issue, as attested in numerous battles. For example, the bond between Mahout and elephant could be extremely strong, and exploitable. McGasinley states that if the rider was killed, their mount could become despondent, cradling the Mahout's body and running amok in confusion and panic. Even if you couldn't hit the riders, the big mass of elephant provided enough of a target to cause sufficient pain with arrows and stones, driving the poor beast mad with grief or anger. This was often enough to send elephants into a mad dash through their own troops and cause chaos and disorder in their wake. The Battle of Beneventum saw the Romans either wounding a baby elephant of the Epirotes and causing its mother to flip out, or more likely, they injured elephants with javelins and caused them to panic, with either way resulting in elephants thrashing the lines of Pyrrhus and causing a general rout of his soldiers. There have been some rather interesting adaptations to the elephant problem, ranging from simple to complex to downright bizarre. Elephants can be deterred by the presence of moats or trenches, which don't need to be terribly big to discourage them from trying to climb down or across, thanks to the musculature and bone structure of an elephant's feet and legs. Simple devices existed like caltrops, tetrahedron-shaped objects made of metal or sharpened wood, arranged in such a way that a large spike would always be face up. Think the game of jacks on steroids. These could be scattered across the battlefield or hidden, and would easily puncture the soft underside of an elephant's feet. Dionysius of Halicarnassus reports that the Romans constructed an elaborate anti-elephant wagon to combat Pyrrhus of Epirus's animals, which used a combination of spinning scythes and tridents, flames and javelin tossers. But the most infamous and somewhat ingenious method of dealing with elephants could be the use of our friend Sus scrofa domesticus, the domestic pig. Elephants were apparently tormented by the squeals of pigs, something I can attest to having known friends with pig farmer relatives deafened by the noise they generate. Multiple accounts from different authors like Ilian and Procopius refer to screaming pigs as a legitimate tactic, but the most gruesome of all comes from the collected strategies of Polyianus, referring to the campaigns of Antigonus Gonatas. Quote, At the siege of Megara, Antigonus brought his elephants into the attack, but the Megarians daubed some swine with pitch, set fire to it, and let them loose among the elephants. The pigs grunted and shrieked into the torture of fire, and sprang forwards as hard as they could among the elephants, who broke their ranks in confusion and fright, and ran off in different directions. From this time onwards, Antigonus ordered the Indians, when they trained up their elephants, to bring up swine among them, so that the elephants might thus become accustomed to the sight of them and to their noise. End quote. In time, the elephant became something of an oddball on the battlefield. The Romans would adopt elephants on a few occasions, such as the battle of Canoscephalae in the 2nd century, or the battle of Thapsus in the 1st, which would be the last case of elephants being used in open warfare in the Mediterranean. They seem to have preferred sending them to the arena rather than using them for war, whereas elephants remain a fixture in Persian and especially Indian warfare down to the age of gunpowder. However, this is way beyond our scope of time, and I think I have spent long enough on their context in military matters, so we will thus turn next to the elephant and its symbolism instead. From their very introduction by way of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the elephant was immediately transformed into a symbol to be utilized and exploited by the Hellenistic kings who followed afterwards. Traditionally, elephants had already long been seen as symbols of power in places like Persia and India, with some outside observers like Megasthenes claiming that to own an elephant was strictly limited to the Indian kings, probably due to them being the ones with enough capital and resources to feed and hold them in the first place rather than some outright legal decree. But famous Indian texts like the Mahabharata describe elephant keeping as a kingly activity, and numerous deities like Indra and more famously Ganesha are synonymous with elephant imagery. It is therefore little surprise that Alexander developed an affinity for them. His first encounter was technically at the Battle of Galgamela, capturing a number of Indian elephants among Darai's baggage train, but as far as I can tell, I am not sure where or what he did with them. He also received them as tribute from the various tribes and leaders he conquered during his venture into India, along with elephant trainers and hunters. Clearly they made an impression on the Macedonian king, and to commemorate his victories in India and bolster his own prestige, Alexander ordered the creation of medallions bearing the image of a Macedonian warrior, and on the reverse a Macedonian cavalryman charging an Indian war elephant and its mahout. And the great funeral carriage of Alexander, as described by Diodorus Siculus, had carved elephants as one of the four pillars of the Macedonian army. Conscious emulation of Alexander led the successor kings, known as the Diodoroi, to use the elephant imagery in order to bolster their own legitimacy and connections to the great conqueror. One of the coins of Ptolemy issued around 320 BC shows Alexander wearing the cap of an elephant skin, soon to be followed by a coin of Ptolemy himself also wearing an elephant cap, possibly an emulation of the Greek hero Heracles and his lion skin, but it also shows how the elephant would become a shorthand representation for Asia, India, and sometimes Africa. It should be noted that in the context of royal coinage, this would be usually the equivalent of a war trophy, showing the power and dominance of the ruler over the said lands, and no Hellenistic king would ever be seen or heard of riding one, barring Ptolemy Kerenes, during his battle with the Celts, where he died after being tossed off by his pachyderm steed. The coins of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, some of the finest ever produced, beautifully show the monarchs like Agathocles and Demetrius I continuing to practice this motif, and the later Indo-Greek kings would sometimes just place the image of an elephant on their coinage, likely a way to more easily integrate themselves with the traditional practices of Indian rulers to their native subjects, but still maintain that warrior image. The depiction of the elephant on Carthaginian coins is also reminiscent of Hellenistic practices, with the Barcat family minting beautiful pieces, with the front picturing the head of Heracles Melkart, and on the reverse, an elephant. The elephant as a prestige item became part of the propaganda tool of the Hellenistic ruler. Kings like Antiochus IV Epiphanes and Ptolemy II Philadelphos made sure to include a collection of armored elephants as one of the main highlights of their grand processions. The center of diplomacy between the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Maurya Empire would be the gifting or transaction of elephants, most famously by Seleucus I, who managed to net 500 elephants as part of a peace treaty with Chandragupta, as would follow with the Greco-Bactrian king. In some respects, the Hellenistic age was gripped in an elephant frenzy, but it was not meant to last. When it came to the Romans and their perception of the elephant, they were not as keen to adopt them or view them as anything particularly positive. The first great Hellenistic king to come into contact with the Roman Republic was Pyrrhus of Epirus, introducing elephants to Italy. Another great conqueror, Hannibal Barca of Carthage, managed to penetrate the peninsula and wreaked considerable havoc at the Battle of Trebia with the beasts. Generally, the elephant carried negative regal connotations, thanks to their past experience with Seleucid, Pyrrhic, and Carthaginian specimens, and were often only incorporated into the Roman army vis-à-vis gifts from client kings of territories like Numidia and the Near East, or captured from subjugated armies. Furthermore, the Romans managed to subdue all of these powers and defeat them in battle. Thus, they saw no poop of the elephant's worth in combat, unlike what had occurred for the Hellenistic kingdoms at the Battle of Ipsus. Rather than integrating them with their military to any large degree, the Romans seemed to have been more satisfied by them being sacrificed in the beast hunts of the arena. A few exceptions pop up here and there, such as Pompey the Great, a keen admirer of Alexander the Great, as given away by his title, who had attempted to use the elephants in his celebrations for his African conquests twice, once to pull his chariot, which failed since the elephants were too big to fit into the gates of Rome, and once to stage wild beast hunts and gladiatorial events, which also failed because the screaming of the elephants brought the audience to tears and rage in response to their plight. A few instances seize the adoption of the elephant motif in Roman artistic and numismatic endeavors, but the final deployment of the war elephant against Julius Caesar at the Battle of Thapsus would demonstrate to the Romans that their usefulness had long passed. Ivory hunters, warfare, and the Roman amphitheater contributed to the collapse and eventual extinction of the Atlas elephant population, and with the Parthian empire limiting access to the Indian elephant, the end of the Hellenistic age marked the end of the elephant in the Mediterranean world in anything but very small doses. The Romans would not counter them on the field again for another 500 years, when they would fight the elephant corps of the Sassanids of Persia, but that is another story far beyond our line of sight. And so it is here we will take our leave from the elephant, though this won't be the last time we'll see them. In fact, our next episode will be taking us back to India, in order to learn more about the great imperial state that often supplied the Hellenistic kings with the beasts, the Moria Empire, and our most important eyewitness, Megasthenes. Before you go though, I also have a small announcement. I have recently created a Ko-fi page to allow for one-time donations to the show. Now, this doesn't mean I have plans on changing the show's format, nor will donations grant special privileges over those who don't, nor will the amount of donations affect the show's schedule in any way. It would just help along with some of the accrued costs of hosting, gathering research materials like books, and it just makes things a bit easier to keep doing what I love to do for you all anyways. The link will be provided in the show notes for this episode, or you can look me up at HellenisticAgePodcast on ko-fi, that's spelled K-O-dash-F-I. Once again, I thank you all for the wonderful support, and you can find the sources I used for this episode on my website under the show notes. And if you wanted to get in contact with me, you can follow me on the Twitter and Facebook groups, or shoot me an email at HellenisticAgePodcast at gmail.com. So, until next time, you've been listening to The Hellenistic Age Podcast.