transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:15] In the year 1618, the Castilian Spaniard, Garcia de Silva y Figueroa, was traveling through the heartlands of Persia in what is today Iran. By then, Figueroa was about 61 years of age, a venerable statesman who had set out from Spain four years earlier as an ambassador from King Philip III. His mission was to meet with the Shah of the Safavid Persian Empire, flatter and befriend him, and encourage him to go to war with their common rival, the Ottoman Empire. But Figueroa's embassy got off to a bad start. When he arrived at the Shah's court, the Persian ruler tried to entertain his guest with a display of dancing girls, but the aging and pious Spaniard was unimpressed. Figueroa later wrote about what happened in his ambassador's report.

Speaker 2:
[01:30] The king then told all those present that the Spanish ambassador, because of his advanced age, did not like watching dancing girls. And turning to the ambassador, he said, It's no good trying to deceive us, leading us to believe that it is due to your virtue, when we know that the real reason is the impotence of your advanced age. At this, he and the other two ambassadors burst into laughter.

Speaker 1:
[01:59] Now that he was an object of ridicule, Figueroa's diplomatic aims would also come to nothing, and he soon left the Shah's court, despondent with his mission in ruins. The old Spaniard set out on the journey home, but on his way, he consoled himself by taking in some of the sites of the lands of Persia. Travelling through the mountainous region of the Iranian Plateau, he and his guides enjoyed the fruitful lands, still watered by ancient aqueducts.

Speaker 2:
[02:38] They praised the many palm trees and fruit orchards that are irrigated with that good water for their beauty and pleasant appearance, especially the many orange and lemon trees, which produced sweet lemons. These can be compared to the other ones from Valencia, Spain. In fact, they may even be better.

Speaker 1:
[02:59] It was while travelling through this pleasant region, known as the Marvdashed Plateau, along the main road between Isfahan and Shiraz, that his guides recommended they stop at a place that was surrounded by folklore, myths, and mystery. It was a site they called Chehel Minar, which in Persian means the forty pillars. As they approached, and Figueroa caught a glimpse of it in the mouth of a wide valley, he would have found out why. On the horizon were the towering shapes of a great number of massive stone columns reaching up into the sky.

Speaker 2:
[03:50] After crossing the river Bramir, we traveled through a beautiful valley, where the river fed many streams and ditches. Many populated villages and large herds of cattle of all kinds could be seen. Finally, from a distance, we could see the highest of the columns or minarets of Chehel Minar, only visible through a thick forest of orchards at the foot of a tall mountain.

Speaker 1:
[04:19] As they drew nearer, they caught sight of what lay ahead of them, a sprawling mass of impressive ruins carved from massive blocks of black stone.

Speaker 2:
[04:35] After the ambassador had eaten and rested, he was filled with the desire to see this famous and great structure that was so worthy of examination and study, not only because of its antiquity, but also because of its stupendous and magnificent size, especially since no one else had ever written the kind of accurate and erudite description it deserved.

Speaker 1:
[05:00] For much of that afternoon, Figueroa explored the ruins of this once grand city, which must have been built to a staggering scale.

Speaker 2:
[05:16] A very thick wall made of square stones enclosed a large area at the foot of the mountain. It was of marvellous dimensions, standing over two pikes tall, having been constructed with admirable symmetry and beautiful proportions. There were 48 standing columns in all. Some of them were seen to be broken and partially buried in the ground, and big pieces of others were spread around all over the plain.

Speaker 1:
[05:48] Although much of what remained was a crumbling mass of shattered stone and brick, in other places, he was astonished to see how well the structures had stood the test of time.

Speaker 2:
[06:05] We climbed both stairways to find a portico or entrance, supported by two huge horses that were constructed from white marble, each of them bigger than a large elephant, with enormous wings and lionine ferocity. The stairway as a whole seemed to have been finished just yesterday. This great and wonderful structure, for incalculable centuries, had resisted the ravages of time, which erodes and consumes all things.

Speaker 1:
[06:40] In places, the polished stone was still so fine, that it even caused some confusion to one particular member of their expedition.

Speaker 2:
[06:55] The lower sections were set with slabs of black stone that were so burnished and polished that anyone who stepped close to it could see his reflection. It happened that the ambassador's dog saw its own reflection in the inner surface. It began snarling and showing his teeth, and since its shadow and reflection performed the same actions, it attacked with great impetus and fury, attempting to bite the slab and rising up on its hind legs much to the mirth of those present.

Speaker 1:
[07:29] Figueroa was a great reader of classical history, and felt sure that he knew what this once great city had been. It was the fabled Persian capital of Persepolis.

Speaker 2:
[07:48] After closely observing the location of its beautiful and fertile countryside and the proximity of the ancient Araxes River, not only was there no doubt that this was once the site of the great and celebrated Persepolis, but anyone who sees the superb and magnificent monuments of such ancient majesty can declare it to be such with certainty. For its antiquity and the grandeur of its perfection and the imperishability of the material of which it is built, Persepolis is incomparable to any of the other wonders that antiquity has bequeathed to us.

Speaker 1:
[08:27] Figueroa's letter home about his journey would be the first written account to accurately identify the ruins of Chahal Minar as the ancient Persian capital. For centuries, this city had stood at the heart of what was at the time the largest empire the world had ever seen, the empire known today as the Achaemenid, or simply Persian Empire. It was a power that had ruled over a vast territory nearly the size of the United States today, and brought countless different cultures together within its borders. But for nearly two millennia, the ruins of Persepolis had stood alone in the rocky highlands. Now a mystery wreathed with folklore and legend, the names of its builders forgotten, and were with no one left to tell their story. My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory, and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time, who witnessed the end of their world? In this episode, I want to tell the story of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. I want to show how this remarkable ancient power sprung up from the rubble of a ruined world to become the most powerful human society on earth. I want to show how they raised their grand palaces and monuments, and brought an unprecedented number of people together within their borders. I want to show how they came into conflict and cooperation with other ancient peoples, and finally, I want to show what happened to bring the palaces of the Persian kings crashing down in fire and flame. The story of Persia begins in the ashes of the Old World, the world left behind by the Assyrian Empire. As we saw in our 13th episode, for much of the second and first millennia BC, the Assyrian Empire had been one of the great powers of the ancient world. They had sprung up in the northern reaches of the River Tigris in Mesopotamia, in what is now northern Iraq and Kurdistan, and from there had expanded their military might to eclipse all others. Assyria had ruled the region of Mesopotamia aided by its massive armies, which were equipped with iron weapons and armor and crushed all resistance to their empire. In 729 BC, the Assyrians were powerful enough to finally conquer their greatest rival, the largest and most powerful city in the southern marshlands of Mesopotamia, the city of Babylon, where our story begins. Babylon was at that time the world's greatest metropolis. Since its founding more than a thousand years earlier, it had grown to become the largest city in the world at two points in its history, and was probably the first city to have a population above 200,000 people. The great city of Babylon was now absorbed into the Assyrian Empire, but it would always be a difficult and rebellious subject. Its people were proud and belonged to an ancient lineage of independent kings. The Babylonians spoke their own dialect, and their god named Marduk rivaled the Assyrian deities in prominence. This meant that throughout the occupation of their city, Babylon's rulers were always looking for their chance to rise up and throw off the yoke of their Assyrian masters. There was a time when the might of Assyria must have looked completely unbeatable, but when the fall of Assyria came, it came all at once as a thunderclap, and it was the city of Babylon that proved instrumental in its collapse. After the death of the last great king of Assyria, Ashurbanipal, a period of weak kings and civil wars followed, and during this time, all of Assyria's enemies took the opportunity to unite against it. In the south, the Babylonians finally saw their moment. They rebelled and crowned a man named Nabopalassa as the new king of an independent Babylon, as one chronicle recalls.

Speaker 3:
[14:36] On the 26th day of Arasamna, Nabopalassa sat on the throne in Babylon. This was the beginning of the reign of Nabopalassa.

Speaker 1:
[14:48] The Assyrians had dealt with Babylonian rebellions before, but this time would be different. Now, the rebelling Babylonians were joined by a number of powerful allies. Chief among these were Ahadi horse-rearing people known as the Medes, who lived in the mountains and high plains of what is now Iran. In the year 615 BC, while Assyria was trying to contain the Babylonian revolt, the Medes swept down into the river plains of the Assyrian empire, raiding and ravaging as they went. The Assyrians were now fighting a war on two fronts against two very different enemies, and their mighty edifice began rapidly to crumble. One Babylonian carved stele dated around the middle of the 6th century BC records this alliance of Babylon and the Medes, who they refer to with the name Umunmanda, a name that evokes a terrifying horde sent by the gods.

Speaker 4:
[16:08] The god Marduk provided Nabopolassar, king of Babylon, with help, and gave him a companion for himself, the king of the Umunmanda, who has no rival he caused to come to his aid. Above and below, from right and left, the Umunmanda swept like a floodstorm, avenging Babylon in retaliation.

Speaker 1:
[16:36] The Medes rode swiftly across the land and overwhelmed the Assyrian forces. One by one, they besieged and captured each of the great Assyrian cities that for centuries had swelled with the wealth of their empire. Many of Assyria's cities were destroyed so utterly that they would never return as centers of population. This event, the collapse of the Assyrian empire, was one of the swiftest and most dramatic rearrangements of power in world history. The largest empire on earth had been toppled in only about three years, and in its wake it left a yawning chasm. In dividing up the territory of Assyria and the lands beyond, the Medes and the Babylonians mostly stuck to what they knew best. Like the Assyrians, the Babylonians were a settled people who lived in villages, towns, and walled cities with sophisticated art, technology, and an advanced understanding of mathematics and writing. They fielded large infantry armies, fed from fields watered by complex irrigation systems, where they grew barley, wheat, and fruit orchards. They were masters of trade, and their grand cities were resplendent, with goods brought from all over the Eurasian land mass, carried up and down the rivers Tigris and Euphrates on barges. For this reason, they happily swept north, and captured many of the Assyrian cities that still remained after the destruction that the Medes left behind. These they absorbed into a new Babylonian Empire, that in size, geography, and structure looked very much like the Assyrian Empire it had replaced. But the rocky mountains to the north and east, they left to the hardy Medes. The Medes were in fact only one of countless peoples who had lived for millennia in the rocky highlands of Iran's Zagros Mountains. Beginning around 100 million years ago, the Arabian tectonic plate began driving northwards into the Eurasian Plate, and over the next tens of millions of years, the constant pressure bent and buckled the land of the Eurasian side in what geologists call a fold and thrust zone. Today this landscape is known as the Iranian Plateau. At its southern edge, it looks like a piece of rumpled fabric, a series of alternating mountain ridges and deep valleys that are known as the Zagros Mountains. The region of the South Zagros would become known as Pars, and it is from this word that the name Persia would derive. In the late 4th century BC, the Greek historian Hieronymus of Cardia wrote the following description of the landscape of Persia.

Speaker 5:
[20:36] High land, blessed with a healthy climate and full of the fruits appropriate to the season. There were glens heavily wooded and shady cultivated trees of various kinds in parks, and also naturally converging glades and hills of trees of every sort, and streams of water, so that travellers lingered with delight in places pleasantly inviting repose. Also, there was an abundance of cattle of every kind.

Speaker 1:
[21:05] Through these mountains cut an ancient and well-used highway, later known as the Khorasan Road. The word Khorasan means sunrise, since this highway led to the east and the regions where the sun rose, and ultimately to the vast deserts and arid grasslands of the Eurasian steppe. As it would be for much of human history, the steppe was then home to great numbers of nomadic, horse-riding peoples, who lived by herding cattle and other animals, and moving from place to place to find ever newer pastures. Over the millennia, countless different peoples had passed along it, moving out of the Great Steppe and into the shady valleys of northern Iran. The first known of these people arrived more than 4,000 years ago, and called themselves the Arya, a word that in old Iranian languages likely meant noble or lord. They came from a vast area of Central Asia known in Sanskrit as Aryavarta, or the home of the Aryan people. Today, the word Aryan still forms the etymological root of the modern name of the nation today, Iran. Alongside these Arya, came further waves of migrations from the steppe into the sheltered hills and valleys of Persia. While much of the interior of Iran is characterized by vast sand dune deserts, the mountainous regions along the Caspian Sea are exceedingly green, forested with oak, and many of the highland plateaus are well watered and lined with poplar trees. Alongside these Arya, came further waves of migration into these sheltered hills and valleys. As a group, these people are today referred to as the Proto-Iranians, and they spoke many different related Iranian languages, among them Old Avestan, one of the oldest preserved languages in the Indo-European family. Because this is the same family as English, we can actually find a lot of linguistic similarity with our own language. For instance, the Old Avestan word for daughter is Dughadar. Mother was Martyr, and their word for brother was Brater. These Proto-Iranians settled all over Central Asia, from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the hills of Iran, and everywhere they went, they developed a wide range of cultures, all speaking related languages. Among these people were the Bahtries or Bactrians, the Suguda or Sogdians, the Parthava or Parthians, and importantly for our story, in the west of the Iranian Plateau appeared the Mardar or Medes. While the Babylonians were a centralized and stratified kingdom, with a king at the top, officials beneath, and priests and administrators running the empire, the Medes were likely more of a loose collection of tribes, bound together in a system of alliances, blood oaths, and relationships of marriage. Assyrian records particularly mention the skill of the Medes in horseback riding, and Assyrian sources always mention with pride the many fine horses they seized whenever they raided the Median lands, as this inscription by the Assyrian king Tiglath-Peleser III shows.

Speaker 3:
[25:23] In my ninth regnal year, I ordered my armies to march against the Medes. I conquered their cities, defeated them, and took their spoil. One hundred and thirty horses from Bittishtah and its districts. One hundred and twenty horses from the cities of Guinea-Zinnanou, Sadbat, Sissard. One hundred horses from Upash of Bidkapsi. One hundred horses of Ushru of Nikissi. One hundred horses of Uksatar and Bardada.

Speaker 1:
[26:02] The Assyrians had long put down the Medes with these kinds of raids, but now with the Assyrian Empire fallen, the Medes were free to expand. They had been living and thriving in the mountains for centuries, and so while the Babylonians took the fertile river lands of Mesopotamia, the Medes had free reign over the hills and mountains, in a broad stretch of what is now Iran, Azerbaijan, Syria, and Turkey. It's not clear the exact geographic bounds of their empire, or how centralized it ever was, but of all the peoples of the region, they were the greatest rival to the power of Babylon. So this is the world as we begin our story. In the fertile lowlands of Mesopotamia, the new Babylonian empire was just beginning to find its feet as an imperial power, and in the rocky mountains to the north and east were the loose tribal confederation of the horse-rearing Medes. This was a world of new and fragile powers, unstable, uncertain, and now increasingly paranoid. But for the right man, it could also be a world for the taking. It was into this landscape around the year 600 BC that a man was born who would shake up this fragile equilibrium and change the course of history. His name in Old Persian was Kourosh, but he has gone down in history by the name given to him by the Greeks, Cyrus, and he would come to be known as Cyrus the Great. Cyrus, or Kourush, was born into a family that ruled the province of Anshan, in the Zagros Mountains in southwestern Iran. The province was centered around the ancient city of Anshan, which had once been the original homeland of the people of Elam, an old and powerful society. But Elam had been all but destroyed by the Assyrian Empire in a cataclysmic war only 50 years or so earlier, as one tablet written by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal describes.

Speaker 6:
[28:54] The great holy city, abode of their gods, seeds of their mysteries, I conquered. I entered its palaces. I destroyed the ziggurat. I smashed its shining copper horns. I reduced the temples of Elam to naught. Their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds.

Speaker 1:
[29:18] After this destruction, what had once been a united Elamite kingdom fractured. Now, the city of Anshan stood in a state of ruin, its population much reduced from its former glory. Into this wasted land, sometime over the preceding century, a number of nomadic Iranian peoples had migrated from the north. They were cultural and linguistic cousins to the Medes, and agreed to swear allegiance to the Median king, likely offering to pay him tribute and fight for him in times of war. Archaeology shows them living a semi-nomadic lifestyle among the ruins, pitching their tents among the fallen columns and crumbling brick walls of the old Elamite capital. Since their arrival, these Iranian peoples intermarried and merged with what remained of the local Elamites, adopting some of their ancient dress and customs, and there they formed a new hybrid culture, one that was half nomadic and half belonging to the ancient devastated civilization of Elam. The three major tribes that made up these people were the Maspia, the Marafia, and the Parsagad. These were the people that today we call the Persians, and it was into this society that the baby boy Cyrus was born. It's worth pausing here and mentioning that we know very little for sure about the early life of Cyrus. His is a childhood that is wreathed in myth and mystery. That's because for much of the more than two millennia since the Persian Empire flourished, their story has been told largely by another people, a people who at times admired and emulated them, and at others hated and feared them, and against whom they fought many bitter wars. These were the people who lived in the rocky islands and mountainous mainland, where the Mediterranean meets the Black Sea, the Greeks, and one Greek in particular who has been given the name the Father of History. His name was Herodotus. Herodotus was born in the city of Halicarnassus, now the Turkish port town of Bodrum, around the year 485 BC, more than a hundred years after the birth of Cyrus the Great. He was a Greek, but this wasn't at all a simple identity. Greece was at that time divided between clusters of about a thousand independent city-states, speaking dialects including Ionian, Dorian, Attic, and Aeolian, and all constantly warring amongst themselves. The writer Plateau famously describes the Greek cities like so.

Speaker 2:
[32:54] The earth is very large, and we who dwell between the pillars of Hercules and the river Phacis live in a small part of it around the sea, like ants or frogs about a pond.

Speaker 1:
[33:07] But these cities were united by a shared culture, language, and reverence for a shared pantheon of gods. When he reached the age of about 30, Herodotus felt a calling to travel. Around the year 454 BC, he set out from his home of Halicarnassus and traveled to Egypt and Libya, then through Palestine to the Phoenician city of Tyre, and after that down the river Euphrates, possibly as far as Babylon. Everywhere he went, he asked people what they knew of the past of their region, and he wrote down everything he saw and heard as he went. These accounts he compiled into nine books he called Historiae, which in ancient Greek meant researches or inquiries, but is the origin of our word history. In the introduction to his work, Herodotus explains what motivated him.

Speaker 7:
[34:19] Herodotus of Halicarnassus hereby publishes the results of his inquiries, hoping to do two things, to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of the Greek and the non-Greek peoples, and more particularly to show how the two races came into conflict.

Speaker 1:
[34:44] There was no publishing industry in ancient Greece, no printing press or mass production of books, and so Herodotus wrote his work to be read aloud to audiences of citizens, often at popular festivals. One account by the writer Lucian claims that Herodotus first debuted his histories by reading them aloud at the Olympic Games to a rapt audience.

Speaker 4:
[35:14] The great Olympian Games were at hand, and Herodotus thought this the opportunity he had been hoping for. He waited for a packed audience to assemble, one containing the most eminent men from all Greece. He appeared in the temple chamber, presenting himself as a competitor for an Olympic honour. Then he recited his histories, and so bewitched his audience that his books were called after the muses, for they too were nine in number. By this time, he was much better known than the Olympic victors themselves. He had only to appear, and he was pointed out, that is that Herodotus who wrote the tale of the Persian Wars.

Speaker 1:
[35:59] Perhaps due to this need to captivate a crowd, Herodotus was a writer who brought his stories to life in vivid colour, full of dramatic characters, strange lands, gory murders, dream visions and prophecies, and sometimes fantastical creatures. Even for some ancient Greeks, Herodotus' wild tales went too far. Plutarch would later write a blistering essay entitled, On the Malice of Herodotus, tearing apart much of his histories. And the writer Theseus, himself also a source on the Persian Empire, supposedly rubbished many of Herodotus' claims too, as related by the chronicler Phocius.

Speaker 3:
[36:48] He differs almost entirely from Herodotus, whom he accuses of falsehood in many passages and calls an inventor of fables.

Speaker 1:
[36:58] But historians generally consider Theseus even less reliable than Herodotus. Even worse still is Xenophon's biography of Cyrus the Great, titled Chiropedia, which is best described as a piece of fan fiction, in which the Greek soldier and writer uses Cyrus as a blank slate onto which he can project a fictional version of an idealized king. But for better or worse, for many of the events that follow, Herodotus is the only source we have available. That's because in the light of history, the Persians themselves are all but silent. The Persians never wrote down the kind of narrative histories that made Herodotus famous. For learning about their past, they relied on a cast of oral storytellers or singers who would regale their people with stories of the old times, as the Greek writer Strabo records.

Speaker 8:
[38:07] As teachers of learning, they use the wisest men who weave in legends in order to make it useful. Both with and without song, they recite the deeds of the gods and the noblest men.

Speaker 1:
[38:24] Just like Herodotus, these tales were designed to be read out loud to an audience, but instead of writing them down, their storytellers simply remembered them using astonishing feats of memory. These tales, they would have passed on to one another by word of mouth, so long as the tradition of storytellers continued. But for this reason, the Persians are not able to tell their own story in the light of history. The historian Lloyd Llewellyn Jones puts the dilemma for historians bluntly.

Speaker 3:
[39:03] We cannot believe much of what Herodotus says, and yet we cannot do without him. Some historical truths about the Persians may well lie hidden in Herodotus, but one needs to dig deep through the layers of fantasy and fiction to find them.

Speaker 1:
[39:21] In the end, trying to glean the truth about this very ancient past can feel like exploring the depths of the deep ocean, where a single beam of light might illuminate whole ecosystem or an undiscovered species living down in the depths. But elsewhere, in all directions, there is only darkness. Like many momentous figures of this time, such fantasy and fiction completely shrouds the early life of Cyrus the Great. What we know for sure is that Cyrus was born into a royal family. He was the son of a Persian ruler named King Cambyses I of Anshan, and possibly his wife Mandaneh, who was reportedly a Mede. As such, Cyrus may have grown up speaking both old Persian and his mother's tongue of Median. His mother Mandaneh was also royalty. She was the daughter of the ruling king of the Medes, a man named Astyagis, who all the tribes of the Persians swore loyalty to. As such, Cyrus was likely born the immediate heir to the province of Anshan, and through his mother, a distant heir to the throne of the entire Median Empire, a unique situation that his mother would no doubt have reminded him of many times throughout his childhood. One legendary account of Cyrus' birth and upbringing is given by Herodotus.

Speaker 7:
[41:15] The first year after the marriage of his daughter, Astiagi saw a vision. A vine appeared to spring from his daughter, which overspread all Asia. On this occasion, also he consulted his interpreters. The result was that he sent for his daughter from Persia. When the time of her delivery approached, the Magi had declared the vision to intimate that the child of his daughter should supplant him on the throne. On her arrival, he kept a strict watch over her, intending to destroy her child.

Speaker 1:
[42:00] Unable to kill the small baby himself, Astyages enlists the help of a general named Harpagus, and tells him to take the baby Cyrus out into the wilds, and there leave him in the open to die. But Harpagus takes pity on the child, and lets him live.

Speaker 7:
[42:23] He instantly sent for a herdsman, who, as he knew, pursued his occupation in a place among mountains, frequented by savage beasts. When the herdsman had received his orders, he took the child and returned to his cottage.

Speaker 1:
[42:43] From here, this fairy tale unfolds with a colourful brutality. When the boy's identity is finally discovered, the king Astyages is enraged, and realizes that the general Harpagus has betrayed him. As punishment, he orders that Harpagus' son is to be secretly killed. Then, he invites the general to a banquet, at which he puts on a lurid spectacle.

Speaker 7:
[43:14] Before the rest, as well as before Astyages himself, dishes of mutton were placed. But to Harpagus, all the body of his son was served, except the head and the extremities, which were kept apart in a covered basket. After he seemed well satisfied, Astyages asked him how he liked his fare. Harpagus expressed himself greatly delighted. The attendants then brought him the basket, which contained the head and extremities of his child, and desired him to help himself to what he thought proper. Harpagus uncovered the vessel and beheld the remains of his son. He continued, however, a master of himself and betrayed no unusual emotions. When Astyages inquired if he knew of what flesh he had eaten, he acknowledged that he did, and that the king's will was always pleasing to him. Saying this, he took the remains of the body and returned to his house, meaning, as I suppose, to bury them together. Astyages thus revenged himself on Harpagus.

Speaker 1:
[44:33] Despite taking this brutal revenge on his general, Astyages' court priests or magi convinced the Median king not to kill Cyrus and to let him go. But the general Harpagus would never forget what the king had done. This story would no doubt have thrilled Herodotus' audience as he read it out to them, but we can be relatively sure that it is a piece of mythology. The trope of the abandoned child is one that reoccurs throughout folklore and myth, from the Greek story of Oedipus to the Akkadian king Sargon, to Moses and the fairy tale Snow White. The story of the king's vision is another theme that often occurs in the early lives of great men, and perhaps most famously in the Gospel of Matthew, when King Herod orders all the baby boys in Jerusalem to be killed when told of the birth of Jesus. And the most colourful and bloodthirsty part, the revenge taken by tricking someone into eating the flesh of their loved ones, also occurs throughout mythology and folklore, featuring, for instance, in the sixth book of Ovid's Metamorphosis, which then inspired Shakespeare's bloodthirsty play Titus Andronicus. For all these reasons, it's safe to assume that this story of Cyrus' early life is a work of literature rather than fact. But I include it to give a sense of the kinds of stories that constantly swirled around the life of this enigmatic character, as an example of why the accounts of Herodotus need to be treated carefully as we go forward. And of course, because no one can resist a good story. The rest of what we know about Cyrus' life can be gleaned in fragments. The Greek writer Xenophon records what Persians some centuries later still remembered about the character of Cyrus.

Speaker 5:
[47:08] Even to this day, the barbarians tell in story and in song that Cyrus was most handsome in person, most generous of heart, most devoted to learning, and most ambitious, so that he endured all sorts of labour and faced all sorts of danger for the sake of praise.

Speaker 1:
[47:29] As a boy, the young Cyrus would have been raised with all the skills needed by a man of the Persian royal line. The first five years of a boy's life, he would spend with his mother and the other women of the tribe, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 7:
[47:48] Until his fifth year, his father does not lay eyes on the boy who spends his time with the woman. This is done so that if he dies during his upbringing, he will not distress his father.

Speaker 1:
[48:05] During this time, his mother would have cared for her son, taught him the language and the songs of her people, and all the while must have looked at her little son growing. And wondered whether one day he might be destined for great things. But after that, the boy was handed over to his father and taught the ways of men. Although our typical impression of Persian royalty, derived largely from Greek sources, is one of luxury and decadence, in fact the early life of Cyrus would have been quite different. The Persians were a hardy pastoral people, who survived by herding cattle, hunting on horseback with a bow and arrow, and with trained hawks. And these are all the skills that the young Cyrus would have learned, as the Greek writer Strabo recounts.

Speaker 5:
[49:03] From age 5 to 25, they are trained to shoot with the bow, handle the spear, ride on horseback, and speak the truth. They gather the boys in one place, after rousing them before dawn with the noise of a bronze instrument, and order them to follow in a race, after marking out a distance of 30 to 40 stadia.

Speaker 1:
[49:23] Strabo records the broad education that a Persian prince was required to absorb.

Speaker 5:
[49:31] They train them in speaking loudly, how to breathe and use their lungs, and to endure heat and cold and rain, and to cross torrents, and also to herd flocks and live outdoors, surviving on wild fruit, terebinth, acorns, wild pears. Their daily diet, after exercising, consists of bread, barley, cardamom, grains of salt, and baked or boiled meat, and water to drink. They hunt by hurling spears from horseback, and with bows and lassoes. Towards evening they learn to cultivate plants, how to cut and collect roots, how to make weapons, and the technique of making linen cloth and hunter's nets.

Speaker 1:
[50:14] But while the Persians still lived a relatively humble and hardy existence, the later Greek writer Xenophon records that by this time the Medes were quite different.

Speaker 5:
[50:29] Cyrus noticed that his grandfather, Astigyes, was wearing makeup, with eyes outlined, color rubbed on his face, and false hair, as was the Median fashion. All this is Median, as are the purple tunics and sleeved coats, the necklaces worn around the neck, and the bracelets on their wrists, while the Persians, even now in their homes, have simpler clothes and a more humble lifestyle.

Speaker 1:
[50:58] When Cyrus was grown, he succeeded his father as the ruler of the Persian tribe of the Pasargad, and it's then that he found himself coming into conflict with his grandfather, the king of the Medes, Astyagis. The exact details of this conflict we can never know, but it's clear that Cyrus saw his moment. He gathered the tribes of the Persians around him, the Pasargadai, Marafia, the Massapia, the Darusiad, Germania, Dai, Mahdi, and Sagatia, all of them united by their language and shared culture. Herodotus imagines Cyrus giving a rousing speech.

Speaker 7:
[51:46] Cyrus collected and slaughtered all his father's goats, sheep, and oxen in preparation for entertaining the whole Persian army at a banquet, together with the best wine and bread he could procure. The next day the guests assembled and were told to sit down on the grass and enjoy themselves. Men of Persia, he exclaimed, you are the arbiters of your own fortune. My voice is the voice of freedom. I am the instrument of your prosperity. Decline all future obedience to Astyagis. The Persians, who had long spurned at the yoke imposed on them, were glad of such a leader and ardently obeyed to the call of liberty.

Speaker 1:
[52:39] All the tribes of the Persian peoples now united around Cyrus. Astyagis was naturally enraged. He ordered that all his court soothsayers, who had long ago convinced him to spare and release Cyrus, should be crucified. Then, with their screams still echoing in his ears, he gathered his armies and marched out to meet the Persian upstart. As he marched, he sent out messengers, demanding in furious terms that Cyrus come and bow at his feet, as Herodotus recounts.

Speaker 7:
[53:20] Cyrus sent the messenger back, with the threat that he would be there a good deal sooner than Astyagis liked. Astyagis thereupon armed the Medes to a man, and so far lost his wits as to appoint Harpagus to command them, having apparently forgotten how he had treated him. The result was that when he took the field and engaged the Persian army, some of Harpagus's men deserted to the Persians, and the greater number deliberately shirked fighting and took to their heels.

Speaker 1:
[54:01] With the betrayal of this general, Astyagis was forced to gather a militia made up of what citizens he could find, and made a last-ditch attempt to stop the army of Cyrus.

Speaker 7:
[54:16] When Astyagis learned of the disgraceful collapse of the Median army, he armed all Medes, both under and over military age, who had been left in the city, led them out to battle, and was defeated. His men were killed, and he himself was taken alive.

Speaker 1:
[54:39] Harpagus was a real person, attested in a number of sources, and one inscription found on a clay tablet in the ruins of Babylon, known as the Nabonidus Chronicle, also hints at a betrayal by one of Astyagis' generals, although the general isn't named.

Speaker 6:
[55:00] In the sixth year, King Astyagis called up his troops and marched against Cyrus, king of Anshan, in order to meet him in battle. The army of Astyagis revolted against him, and in fetters they delivered him to Cyrus. Cyrus marched against the country of Ekbatana, the royal residence he seized, silver, gold, other valuables of the country Ekbatana he took as loot and brought to Anshan.

Speaker 1:
[55:33] Whether because Astyagis really was the sadistic tyrant that Herodotus claims, we don't know. But after this, Harpagus would go on to become one of Cyrus' most loyal generals. And Herodotus claims that after the battle, Harpagus came to jeer at the captured Astyagis.

Speaker 7:
[55:58] After the capture of Astyagis, Harpagus came and jeered at him, asking what it felt like to be a slave instead of a king. Then said Astyagis, You are not only the wickedest but the most stupid of men. As things are, the innocent Medes have become slaves instead of masters, and the Persians, masters of the Medes.

Speaker 1:
[56:30] Cyrus was now the lord of the mountainous regions of the Near East, stretching from Persia right up to perhaps their most powerful rival. This was a kingdom in the region of Asia Minor, in what is now western Turkey, the Kingdom of Lydia. The Lydians were an ancient people. They were even mentioned in Homer's epic, the Iliad, where they are listed among the allies of the Trojans. They spoke their own Lydian language, which was in the same Indo-European family as Persian and Greek. And according to the account of Herodotus, throughout the war between Cyrus and Astyagis, the king of Lydia had been watching. He believed he had sensed an opening to take advantage of the chaos, and expand his borders even further. His name was Croesus. Croesus' kingdom of Lydia was astonishingly rich. In fact, the legendary king Midas, who had the power to turn anything to gold with his touch, was supposed to have once ruled over one of its regions. Lydia stood above a rich seam of Electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver that its people had eagerly mined for centuries. And in the preceding decades, they had learned how to remove the silver from this alloy, to create coins of pure gold on an industrial scale. As the first people in the world to produce gold in this manner, the Lydians were soon at the heart of the world's most lucrative industry. As a result, King Croesus soon gained a reputation as a new Midas, the richest man in the world. Plutarch, in his Life of Solon, gives one description of his legendary appearance at the Lydian capital of Sardis.

Speaker 4:
[58:59] He was decked out with everything in the way of precious stones, dyed raiment and wrought gold that men deem remarkable or extravagant or enviable, in order that he might present a most august and gorgeous spectacle.

Speaker 1:
[59:17] With these vast riches, King Croesus of Lydia had also spent lavishly on his army, the pride of which was a wing of well-trained armoured cavalry, as Herodotus recounts.

Speaker 7:
[59:35] Now, at this time, there was no nation in Asia more valiant or warlike than the Lydian. It was their custom to fight on horseback carrying long spears, and they were skilled in the management of horses.

Speaker 1:
[59:53] With this force, and bankrolled by his almost limitless wealth, Croesus had gone to war from the moment he became king. He ruthlessly conquered the various Greek city-state colonies that had been founded on the western coast of Asia Minor, the regions of Ionia, Aeolia, and Doria, until he ruled virtually all of the western segment of what is now Turkey. But still he dreamed of more, and he had watched the civil war unfolding in far-off Persia with some interest. Croesus was actually the brother-in-law of the Median king Astyagis, having married his sister as part of a peace treaty, one in which he had promised to keep his border at a river known to the Greeks as the Chalice, and which is known today as the Kizilirmak. But with Astyagis now toppled, Croesus believed the former treaty was no longer in effect. He now saw his chance to advance beyond this border, and become not just the richest, but also the most powerful man in the eastern Mediterranean. But Croesus was not an impulsive man. Before any course of action, he did what any sensible man of this time would do. He asked the gods. For this purpose, he sent out messages to all the oracles of Greece, asking them whether he should attack the Persians. Of all these oracles, the most famous and widely respected was the oracle at Delphi. The oracle at Delphi was a woman who bore the title of Pythia. For at least 200 years, people had flocked from all over the Greek world and beyond to ask the oracle what the future held. Once someone came to consult the oracle, they would be asked to make their offerings, often a laurel wreath and a black ram. Then they would be allowed to ask their question. The Pythia would then descend into a stone chamber called the aditon. Ancient sources describe this room filling with vapours, and from these vapours, she would enter into a state of spiritual possession, in which the god Apollo would actually speak through her, often in cryptic riddles. The Greek writer Strabo describes the effects of these gases.

Speaker 5:
[62:59] They say that the seat of the oracle is a cave that is hollowed out deep down in the earth, with a rather narrow mouth, from which arises breath that inspires a divine frenzy, and that over that mouth is placed a high tripod, mounting which the Pythian priestess receives the breath and then utters oracles.

Speaker 1:
[63:25] The writer Plutarch, who served as a priest of the temple at Delphi for many years some centuries later, described the strange smell of these fumes.

Speaker 4:
[63:38] Occasionally and fortuitously, the room in which they seat the gods consultants is filled with a fragrance and breeze, as if the aditon were sending forth the essences of the sweetest and most expensive perfumes.

Speaker 1:
[63:55] The description of this chamber is so specific and intriguing that archaeologists have long searched for a scientific explanation for these fits of ecstatic possession. It's been suggested that the area beneath the aditon was filled with smoldering branches of oleander, a common but extremely poisonous plant with bright pink flowers that grows around Greece and Asia Minor. Eating just one leaf of oleander is enough to kill a person, and inhaling its smoke can have powerful psychoactive effects, including hallucinations. Another suggestion is that the priestesses were inhaling fumes that actually emanated from the depths of the earth itself. Delphi sits at a lively geological zone, at a confluence of two major tectonic fault lines, and the limestone beneath it is high in content of hydrocarbon gases, and among them, the psychoactive gas ethylene. Ethylene has been used historically as an anesthetic, but inhaled in small amounts, it can bring about a conscious but trance-like state, which is said to include euphoria, out-of-body experiences, and in some cases, fits and convulsions. The gas also has a sweet smell, which might explain Plutarch's description of the chamber's aroma. Modern analysis has shown that spring water near the site of the oracle does contain traces of ethylene, and that at certain fissures in the rock, the gas may have been released in sufficient concentrations to account for the Pythia's visions. If this is the case, then it's no surprise that the shrine at Delphi had been revered for so many years, as a place where humans could commune with the voices of the gods, which seemed to breathe out of the rocks of the earth itself. What is certain is that the Delphic oracle was revered around all of Greece, and her word could make or break the fortunes of even the most powerful kings. It was to this priestess that King Croesus of Lydia sent his messengers, as he considered making war on Cyrus and the young power of Persia. These messengers came laden with gifts that spoke to the enormous wealth of the kingdom of Lydia, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 7:
[66:47] He melted down a vast store of gold and made of it ingots. These were a hundred and seventeen in number. He bade also to be made a figure of a line of refined gold, weighing ten talents. When these offerings were fully made, Croesus sent them to Delphi and other gifts besides, namely two very great bowls, one of gold and one of silver.

Speaker 1:
[67:19] With their lavish gifts handed over, Herodotus recounts the message that the oracle gave to King Croesus.

Speaker 7:
[67:28] The Lydians who were to bring these gifts to the temples were charged by Croesus to inquire of the oracles. Shall Croesus send an army against the Persians? The judgment given to Croesus by the oracle was that if he should send an army against the Persians, he would destroy a great empire.

Speaker 1:
[67:54] Boyed up by this seemingly enthusiastic advice, Croesus immediately readied himself for war. In 547 BC, King Cyrus of Persia got news that Croesus had marched out of his capital of Sardis and crossed the old border of the Halis River. From there, the Lydian forces had swept into the region of Cappadocia, a landscape of strange rock formations and white limestone gullies, and rounded on the regional capital of Teria, as Herodotus recounts.

Speaker 7:
[68:38] Croesus then passing over his army came to the part of Cappadocia called Teria, where he encamped, and laid waste the farms of the Syrians, and he took and enslaved the city of the Terians, and took also all the places about it, and drove the Syrians from their homes, though they had done him no harm.

Speaker 1:
[69:05] When Cyrus heard the news of this Lydian invasion, it must have troubled him. He was a new ruler in a warrior culture that revered strength above all else. If he failed to meet this challenge, he could lose the respect of all his subjects, and his young empire would fall apart as quickly as it had begun. He quickly gathered his forces of combined Persian and Median warriors, and marched out to meet King Croesus in the shadow of the now ruined city of Teria.

Speaker 7:
[69:44] Cyrus, mustering his army, and gathering to him all those who dwelt upon his way, went to meet Croesus. When Cyrus had come and encamped face to face with Croesus, the armies made trial of each other's strength with might. The battle was stubborn, many on both sides fell, and when they were parted at nightfall, neither had the advantage.

Speaker 1:
[70:14] Croesus was clearly surprised by the strength of Cyrus' response. Despite the famous Lydian cavalry, the clash had ended in a stalemate, and now his invasion had lost all momentum. To make matters worse, winter was drawing in. The mountainous geography of Asia Minor means its winters can be extremely punishing, with temperatures below freezing, and even dropping to minus 20 degrees in extreme conditions. In that season, snow could sit on the ground for weeks at a time, and military campaigns became impossible. As a result, Croesus decided to retreat back over the Halis River and return through the mountains to his capital of Sardis. There he would send out requests for reinforcements from his allies in Egypt and Babylon, even planning to request help from the warlike Greek city of Sparta.

Speaker 7:
[71:20] It was in his mind to muster all these forces and assemble his own army, then to wait till the winter was over and march against the Persians at the beginning of spring. With such intent, as soon as he returned to Sardis, he sent heralds to all his allies, summoning them to assemble at Sardis in five months' time.

Speaker 1:
[71:47] But none of this would come to pass. That's because Croesus had drastically underestimated the Persian king Cyrus. Rather than waiting out the winter as Croesus had expected, Cyrus took a remarkable decision.

Speaker 7:
[72:07] When Croesus marched away after the battle, Cyrus took counsel and perceived thereby that it was his business to march with all speed against Sardis, before the power of the Lydians could again be assembled. He marched his army into Lydia and so himself came to bring the news of it to Croesus.

Speaker 1:
[72:36] The march would have been a difficult one. Ahead of the Persian army lay nearly a thousand kilometers of rocky, mountainous territory, with unfamiliar routes and narrow passes through the mountains. Winter was coming, perhaps snow falling. As such, we can only imagine the astonishment of King Croesus of Lydia as he looked out over the walls of his capital of Sardis and saw the amassed forces of the Persian army arriving on the horizon. Herodotus recalls his shock.

Speaker 7:
[73:17] All had turned out contrary to Croesus' expectation, and he was in a great quandary. Nevertheless, he led out the Lydians to battle in the plain, wide and bare.

Speaker 1:
[73:35] As the Persians rode to battle, they would have been struck by the landscape they saw ahead of them, dominated by a remarkable series of monuments, the burial mounds of Lydia's ancient kings. For centuries, Lydians had buried their rulers in vast tombs, with bases built of stepped limestone and marble, and great heaps of earth towering above them. The largest of these, the mound thought to have been built for Croesus' father, Aulietes, has the same footprint as the Pyramid of Giza, and stands to nearly half its height, at 63 metres. Littered around the high plain to the north of Sardis stood around 150 of these burial mounds, and they would have made an imposing statement about the power and prestige of the ancient kingdom of Lydia. And up ahead stood the impregnable citadel of Sardis. While the main city was defended by a strong wall, it was the citadel that made the city virtually impossible to capture. It was perched on a knife edge of limestone jutting out of the plain, known as Mount Tumolis. Its sides so steep that the fortress barely needed walls in some places. Although the Persian army was large, Cyrus would need every one of his soldiers to take that fortress. And he had already seen the damage that the powerful Lydian cavalry could inflict on his army. But he brought a secret weapon to the battlefield, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 7:
[75:31] Assembling all the camels that followed his army bearing food and baggage, he took off their burdens and set men upon them equipped like cavalry men. He ordered them to advance ahead of his army against Croesus' horses. Horses fear camels and can endure neither the sight nor the smell of them. So, when battle was joined, as soon as the horses smelt and saw the camels, they turned to flight and all Croesus' hope was lost.

Speaker 1:
[76:06] With their cavalry scattered, the Lydians retreated to their lofty citadel, and the Persians besieged the steep-sided fortress. The siege went on for fourteen days, during which they must have wondered how they would ever capture it. But they were about to get a stroke of luck. Herodotus recalls that one side of the city's citadel looked out over a cliff so sheer that it was comparatively lightly defended, since no one could ever hope to climb it. On the eve of the fourteenth day of the siege, a soldier in the Persian army spotted a Lydian warrior climbing down a hidden route on this side of the fortress. As he watched, he saw the man climb down to an outcrop, where he reached down and picked up his helmet, which had fallen from the rampart. No doubt worried that he would be disciplined by his superiors for losing his helmet, this Lydian had dared the death-defying climb down to retrieve it. But he had also inadvertently shown the Persians the way up.

Speaker 7:
[77:24] This Mardian had seen one of the Lydians descend by this part of the citadel after a helmet that had fallen down and fetch it. He took note of this and considered it, and now he himself climbed up and other Persians after him. Many ascended, and thus was Sardis taken.

Speaker 1:
[77:50] King Croesus of Lydia was captured. With the fall of Sardis, the entirety of his powerful kingdom and its vast stores of gold passed into the hands of the Persians. Herodotus ends his story with the final ironic twist.

Speaker 7:
[78:11] So the Persians took Sardis and made Croesus himself prisoner, he having reigned fourteen years and been besieged fourteen days, and as the oracle foretold, the empire he brought to an end was his own.

Speaker 1:
[78:32] Herodotus recounts that Cyrus actually spared Croesus' life and took him on as an advisor. While we have no further evidence of this, it is plausible since we do have documentary evidence that Cyrus spared the lives of many of the men he conquered. With the kingdom of Lydia and its vast wealth now absorbed into his growing empire, Cyrus turned his sights on the lowlands of Mesopotamia, where the empire of Babylon now stretched. In the years since the fall of the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonians had become one of the most powerful empires in the world, conquering Syria and all the way down the coast of Palestine to the borders of Egypt. But they had experienced some considerable unrest among their conquered territories. Just one example was the incessant rebellions of the Jewish kingdom of Judah, centred around its ancient capital of Jerusalem. The people of Judah had despised the Assyrian Empire in its day, and now hated the Babylonian Empire that replaced it just as much. At the beginning of the 6th century BC, a number of the Judean cities in the Levant rebelled against Babylonian rule. As a result, in 597 BC, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon marched west and besieged the city of Jerusalem. After a gruelling 30-month siege, the city fell, and King Nebuchadnezzar sacked it and burned down the temple that stood on the Temple Mount, as the Hebrew Book of Kings recounts.

Speaker 3:
[80:45] And it came to pass in the ninth year of his reign, that Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, came, he and all his army, against Jerusalem, and encamped against it. And they built forts against it round about. And he burned the house of the Lord, and the King's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem. Even every great man's house burned he with fire.

Speaker 1:
[81:14] The kingdom of Judah was now officially dissolved. Large numbers of its people captured in the sack of Jerusalem were rounded up and deported to Babylon to be resettled, a typical tactic of Mesopotamian empires when dealing with troublesome populations. But despite these troubles in some of its more restive provinces, the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II was prosperous, and it's during his reign that Babylon built its most famous landmark, the Ishtar Gate, a towering edifice faced all over with brilliant blue glazed bricks, which opened up onto a grand processional street. Nebuchadnezzar ruled for nearly 60 years, but after his death, the young empire fell into a period of turmoil. His son and chosen successor Amel Marduk was apparently incompetent, and ruled for only two years before being overthrown by his brother-in-law. This man ruled for only four years before dying and passing the throne to his son, who ruled for only two or three months before himself being killed and deposed. This period of turmoil came to an end with the reign of a king in Babylon named Nabonidus. He stands out in history as a truly enigmatic figure. He had no relation to any previous king, and the fact he even became king at all seems to have come as something of a surprise to him, as he writes in one inscription.

Speaker 6:
[83:03] I am Nabonidus, the only son who has nobody. In my mind, there was no thought of kingship.

Speaker 1:
[83:14] One strange aspect of Nabonidus is that he appears to have had somewhat unusual religious beliefs. The principal god of Babylon had always been Marduk, the king of the gods and lord of the universe. But Nabonidus was devoted instead to the moon god Sin, after apparently seeing him in a vision. In fact, carvings of Nabonidus often show him offering his reverence to the carved figure of the moon. This seems to have caused some friction in the country, as one Babylonian clay tablet complains.

Speaker 5:
[83:56] He made the image of a deity which nobody had ever seen in this country. He introduced it into the temple and placed it upon a pedestal. He called it by the name of Sin. It is adorned with a crown of lapis lazuli, its appearance that of the eclipsed moon.

Speaker 1:
[84:16] At one point, he seems to have taken a self-imposed exile from Babylon lasting 10 years, in which he devoted himself to quiet meditation in the faraway temple of Tamar, in what is today Saudi Arabia. This distanced him from his subjects and disrupted the ceremonial calendar of the city. He even failed to show his face at the annual Babylonian New Year Festival, celebrated at the spring equinox. Usually, the king would climb to the highest chamber of the city's temple, where the high priest of Marduk would ceremonially slap him on the face, reminding him to be humble to the gods. But Nabonidus, busy worshipping the moon god far away in Arabia, didn't attend, as one Babylonian inscription recounts.

Speaker 6:
[85:13] The king was in timer, while the crown prince, his officers, and his army were in Akkad. The king did not come to Babylon in the month Nisanu. The god Nabu did not come to Babylon. The New Year's festival did not take place.

Speaker 1:
[85:34] We don't know how the war with the Persians began, but it had clearly begun to seem inevitable. Around 540 BC, Nabonidus ordered that the statues of the gods of each city in his empire should be transported to Babylon for safekeeping. One Babylonian letter from an official in the city of Uruk describes the preparations to transport the goddess Ayyana down the river to Babylon on a raft buoyed up by inflated goat skins.

Speaker 8:
[86:10] Letter of Rimut to Nabomukh and Zeri. May Nabu and Marduk bless my brothers. Send me one leather mat and five inflated goat skins for the boat so that the lady Ayyana may go to Babylon on the Euphrates.

Speaker 1:
[86:27] Other tablets describe the priests continuing to give offerings of food to the holy statues as they sailed down the river on the way to Babylon. Soon war was declared and Cyrus marched down into the lowlands of Mesopotamia, arriving in the year 539 BC. King Nabonidus gathered his armies and set out to meet the invaders at a place called Opus. The text known as the Nabonidus Chronicle recounts in sparse terms what happened next.

Speaker 5:
[87:10] In the month Tashritu, when Cyrus did battle at Opus on the bank of the Tigris against the army of Babylon, the people of Babylon retreated. He carried off the plunder and slaughtered the people. On the fourteenth day, Sippar was captured without a battle. Nabonidus fled. On the sixteenth day, the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without a battle.

Speaker 1:
[87:41] One Babylonian text written afterwards on the order of Cyrus is called the Cyrus Cylinder. In this piece of official propaganda, he explains that the Babylonian god Marduk had called on him since King Nabonidus had so heretically turned his back on the city's patron deity.

Speaker 6:
[88:04] In Nabonidus's mind, reverential fear of Marduk, king of the gods, had come to an end. He did yet more evil to his city every day. He brought ruin on his people. Marduk inspected and checked all the countries, seeking for the upright king of his choice. He took the hand of Cyrus, king of the city of Anshan, and called him by his name, proclaiming him aloud for the kingship over all of everything. Marduk joyfully looked at Cyrus' good deeds and at his righteous heart. He made him take the road to Babylon and marched at his side like a friend and companion. Without combat or battle, he caused him to enter Babylon, his city. He saved Babylon from oppression.

Speaker 1:
[88:59] The people of Babylon must have feared the worst when Cyrus' army swept into the city, but they were pleasantly surprised. The Nabonidus Chronicle even describes how Cyrus ordered Persian soldiers to stand guard outside the great temple to Marduk called the Asajil to ensure its protection.

Speaker 6:
[89:23] Until the end of the month, the shield bearers of Persia surrounded the gates of the Asajil. There was no interruption of whatever rights in the Asajil and the other temples, and no ritual date was missed. There was peace in the city when Cyrus spoke greetings to all of Babylon. The gods of Akkad that Nabonidus had brought to Babylon returned safely to their cult places.

Speaker 1:
[89:52] All of this signaled that Cyrus wanted to promote an image of himself as a very different kind of ruler to those who had come before. When he arrived, Cyrus found Babylon full of captured peoples who had been seized from their lands in far-flung provinces and forced to relocate to the city. And remarkably, one of his first decrees as the ruler of Babylon was to allow all of these peoples, if they wished, to return home. These people came from all over the empire, Elamites and Medes from the Zagros, Arameans from Syria, Phoenicians from cities like Tyre and Sidon, even Egyptians and Arabs. But most famously, they also came from the Hebrew kingdom of Judah. The Hebrew Bible recalls this event.

Speaker 8:
[90:57] Now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and put it also in writing, saying, Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia, The Lord God of heaven have given me all the kingdoms of the earth. Who is there among you of all his people? His God be with him and let him go up to Jerusalem.

Speaker 1:
[91:23] Like the people of Babylon with Marduk, the Judeans interpreted Cyrus as having been chosen by their god, Yahweh, to set them free. Cyrus might have calculated that sending back these few thousand deportees would improve his reputation around his new empire, but he couldn't have predicted quite how long or how far this act of kindness would be remembered. Since the Hebrew Bible would form the basis for the future Christian religion, his good deed would be immortalized in the holy text of one of the world's major religions. The Hebrew poet prophet we know as Second Isaiah would even go so far as to name Cyrus with a title that in Hebrew was pronounced Mashiach, which meant the anointed one of God, a title which gives us the English word Messiah.

Speaker 5:
[92:23] This is what the Lord says to Cyrus, his Messiah, whose right hand he will empower. Before him, mighty kings will be paralyzed with fear. Their fortress gates will be opened never to shut again.

Speaker 1:
[92:41] Cyrus would be the first and only non-Jewish person to ever be awarded that title, a testament to his skill at winning people over. Meanwhile, the name Babylon would pass into memory as a byword for oppression, slavery, and corruption. A reminder that our actions in history can resonate far longer than we might ever expect. The empire that Cyrus forged, the Persians would refer to as Khashathra, meaning simply the kingdom, and it would always be a cultural melting pot. The Persians themselves had begun as a successful marriage of Iranian and Elamite cultures, but over the decades and centuries that followed, they would add elements of Mesopotamian dress, religion, art, and iconography. They also introduced ideas in architecture, medicine, and engineering from conquered regions like Lydia, the Greek cities of Asia Minor, Egypt, and Phoenicia. Herodotus describes this Persian ability to synthesize the ways of others.

Speaker 7:
[94:15] No race is so ready to adopt foreign ways as the Persian. For instance, they wear the Midian costume as they think it handsomer than their own, and their soldiers wear the Egyptian armor.

Speaker 1:
[94:32] Persia was an empire that combined and reproduced the best ideas from each culture it absorbed, and in that way it was remarkably successful. For the Greek writers who encountered Persians and described them, one of the most remarkable aspects of their appearance was their clothing, as Herodotus describes. Trousers were an innovation developed on the Eurasian steppe, designed to protect the legs while riding a horse night and day. In the years after the conquest of Babylon, the Persians would combine these with fine fabrics and expensive dyes to create new stylish garments. The Greek writer Xenophon describes the appearance of a Persian prince. a purple tunic shot with white.

Speaker 5:
[95:59] Trousers of scarlet dye about his legs, and a mantle all of purple.

Speaker 1:
[96:07] Greeks had for centuries worn simple tunics and cloaks, and always left their legs bare. They found the appearance of Persian trousers ridiculous, and mocked their baggy appearance, using the slang word thulakoi, a word which means sax. In fact, if an ancient Greek were somehow transported into the modern day, perhaps the first thing they would be struck by was how everyone around them was dressed like a Persian. Apart from their clothes, Persians also looked physically different to the Greek writers who documented them. When they captured Persian prisoners of war, ancient writers expressed surprise at how white their skins were compared to the sun-burned Greeks, and considered this a sign of their softness and effeminacy. When the Greeks depicted Persians in their art, their beards are always shown to be big and bushy, with long moustaches. And we also see the importance of beards in Persian culture, reflected in the carved palace reliefs at Persepolis. In these images, the men with the highest status are always shown to have the most formidable beards. Religion in the empire was complex and diverse, and it's not actually known for sure what religious beliefs early rulers like Cyrus would have held. But they were likely followers of an early form of Iranian religion, and what would later become Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrian faith was founded by a prophet named Zarathustra, who likely lived somewhere in the eastern regions of the Iranian world, perhaps in modern Afghanistan or Tajikistan. He was born sometime around the year 1000 BC, likely into a nomadic or semi-nomadic people. At the age of 30, while attending his people's annual spring festival, Zarathustra saw a vision in which a shining being appeared to him, and taught him about the god called Ahura Mazda, or wise lord. This shining being also told him about an evil entity known as Angra Maynu, or the destructive spirit. For all of time, Ahura Mazda and Angra Maynu had been locked in an eternal battle, in which the forces of Asha, or order, were pitted against the evil forces of Druj, or deception. After this vision, Zarathustra decided to devote his life to promoting the good force of Asha and spreading the word of the wise god Ahura Mazda. His life teachings would be collected in a series of texts known as the Gathas, the Divine Songs, which forms part of the Zoroastrian religious text, the Avesta. Fundamentally, Zarathustra taught that a person's thoughts, words, and actions formed an unbroken chain. If you strived to think only good thoughts, then you would speak only good words, and then commit only good actions. As the following Zoroastrian prayer song describes.

Speaker 9:
[100:10] With outspread hands in petition for that help, O Mazda, I will pray for the works of the Holy Spirit, O Thou the Right, whereby I may please the will of good thought. The wise whom Thou knowest as worthy, for their good deeds and their good thought, for them do Thou fulfill their longing.

Speaker 1:
[100:43] Part of the attainment of good thought and good words was an uncompromising adherence to speaking the truth, something that Persians took extremely seriously. Herodotus describes witnessing this first hand.

Speaker 7:
[101:01] They consider telling lies more disgraceful than anything else, and next to that, owing money. There are many reasons for their horror of debt, but the chief of their conviction is that a man who owes money is bound also to tell lies.

Speaker 1:
[101:23] Zoroastrians particularly held earth, fire and water to be sacred, and agents of purifying. Zoroastrian temples had at their heart an eternal flame that was supposed to never be put out. The priests of the temple would wear face masks over their mouths, so that their unclean breath would not pollute the sacred fire. Persians also held rivers and other bodies of water to be sacred, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 7:
[101:58] The following are certain Persian customs which I can describe from personal knowledge. The erection of statues and altars is not an acceptable practice amongst them, and anyone who does such a thing is considered a fool. God in their system is the whole circle of the heavens, and they sacrifice to Him from the tops of mountains. They also worship the sun, moon and earth, fire, water and winds, which are their only original deities. They have a profound reverence for rivers. They will never pollute a river with urine or spittle, or even wash their hands in one, or allow anyone else to do so.

Speaker 1:
[102:48] The inscriptions of the Persians continually reference the god Ahura Mazda. But the Persian court also held reverence for other gods, like the warrior goddess Anahita, an Elamite god named Human, and Mithra, god of the sun, guardian of cattle, the harvest, and the waters. Perhaps partly as a result of their religious conviction, the Persians were also prolific gardeners. While we can't reconstruct the true shape of Achaemenid religion, later Zoroastrians held that the dry and desert parts of the world were made barren by the destructive and deceptive spirit Angra Mainu. Meanwhile, the spirit of the good Ahura Mazda gave them the task of turning the deserts of the world green. What we know for sure is that wherever they went, the Persians cultivated ornamental gardens. These gardens they gave a name that suggested exclusivity and security, from the Persian words pairi and daitsa, meaning walled or bricked around, pairi daitsa. The name for these gardens passed into Greek as paradisos, which gives us the English word paradise. These places particularly impressed Greek travellers to Persia, since the Greeks at that time had no culture of ornamental gardens. In his rhetorical work Economicus, the Greek writer Xenophon describes with awe the flourishing paradises that the Persians built in the Lydian capital of Sardis, which he witnessed with his own eyes.

Speaker 5:
[104:45] He was astonished at the beauty of the trees within, all planted at equal intervals, the long straight rows of waving branches, the perfect regularity, the rectangular symmetry of the whole, and the many sweet scents which hung about them as they paced the park.

Speaker 1:
[105:06] These gardens also impressed Hebrew writers who adopted the word paredes into Hebrew to describe an orchard. They may have used these gardens as a model for the walled Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis, which is thought to have been written down in its final form during the Persian period. Since earth and water were both considered sacred elements in Iranian religion, it was considered blasphemy to pollute them with the remains of the dead. Instead, the bodies of those deceased were taken into high structures built on the tops of hills or mountains. Today, these have become known as the Towers of Silence, presided over by Zoroastrian priests known as Magi. Here, the bodies were laid out and left for the birds to pick apart, and then the bones were bleached by the sun and wind. Herodotus describes this practice with some distaste.

Speaker 7:
[106:26] So much I can say of them from my own certain knowledge, but there are other matters concerning the dead which are secretly and obscurely told. How the dead bodies of Persians are not buried before they have been mangled by birds or dogs, that this is the way of the Magi I know for certain, for they do not conceal the practice.

Speaker 1:
[106:53] It's not known exactly how widespread this practice was during the Persian period, and it was never used for rulers. Later, Achaemenid kings were buried in rock-cut tombs, usually in the sides of a cliff at a place called Naqsh-i-Rustam, a few kilometres northwest of Persepolis. There, the stone walls and floors of their chambers kept the bodies from making contact with the sacred earth beneath them, and as an added benefit, were visible in the distance from the great city, a potent reminder of the kings that had come before. Greeks like Herodotus were also bemused by the Persian's custom of each year celebrating the day of someone's birth.

Speaker 7:
[107:50] Of all days in the year, a Persian most distinguishes his birthday and celebrates it with a dinner of special magnificence. A rich Persian on his birthday will have an ox or a horse or a camel or a donkey baked whole in the oven and served up at the table. And the poor some smaller beast.

Speaker 1:
[108:15] At these celebrations, it's likely that a great amount of wine would have flowed. The nomadic ancestors of the Persians had likely drunk out of cups made of hollowed out cow horns. But the Persians had long since replaced bone for silver and gold. Now, they drank out of vessels called rytons that were still shaped like animal horns, but could be wrought in ornate patterns in precious metals. Wine was produced in the upland regions of Persia, in the area of modern Shiraz, and imported from vineyards in Syria and elsewhere. Persians not only enjoyed wine for its pleasurable effects, but believed it could actually help them consider the world from a different angle, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 7:
[109:12] They are very fond of wine. If an important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted. If not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.

Speaker 1:
[109:46] However, despite their love of the good things in life, Persians were still governed by strict rules about behaviour in public, as Xenophon recounts.

Speaker 5:
[110:00] There remains even under this day evidence of their moderate fare. For even to the present time it is a breach of decorum for a Persian to spit or to blow his nose. It is a breach of decorum also to be seen going apart, either to make water or for anything else of that kind. And this would not be possible for them if they did not lead an epistemeous life.

Speaker 1:
[110:31] With his vast empire conquered and his rule steadily solidifying across his domain, Cyrus settled down and began to build a grand palace complex, which he would name his capital. He elected to build this at the location of his decisive final battle against the Medes, at a place called Pasargadai. Archaeology has shown that the palace that Cyrus built would be of a strange and unprecedented design, a garden city dotted with pavilions and palace structures made of stone and decorated in marble. In this way, it actually mirrored the structure of a nomadic camp stretched out over the plain, but with stone structures instead of tents. It was a clear architectural nod to the nomadic roots of the Persian people, and perhaps the kind of habitation in which Cyrus himself felt the most comfortable, surrounded by nature. The defining feature of this palace would be its garden, a masterpiece of a Persian pareditza. Modern pollen analysis has shown that trees like cypress and hazelnut, oak, elm and pistachio were cultivated here. Fed by water channels cut from dressed stone, this paradise would have blossomed even on this high arid plateau in the middle of Persia. The garden was divided into four parts, and it's thought that this was designed to evoke the same phrase that Cyrus would use again and again whenever he described himself in his inscriptions.

Speaker 6:
[112:30] I am Cyrus, king of the four quarters of the world.

Speaker 1:
[112:40] This quarter design would become integral to the design of Persian gardens around the world, which followed the style known as Chahar Bagh or four-part gardens. In later centuries, these would be found across a vast stretch of the earth, from the gardens of Seville in southern Spain to those of northern India and the Taj Mahal. But it's a design that began here in the gardens of Cyrus the Great. Construction on the Palace of Pasagadai began in 546 BC and would continue for the next 16 years. But it would be brought to a sudden end by an event that must have sent shockwaves around the Persian Empire and beyond. That was the death in the year 530 of the King of Kings, king of the four quarters of the world, Cyrus the Great. Just as with his birth, there are many stories told of how Cyrus the Great met his end, and many of them have the hallmarks of mythology. What we know with some certainty is that Cyrus had decided to expand his empire into the northeast, in the great plain that stretches out between the Caspian and Aral seas. Much of the eastern half of the Persian Empire was unknown to the Greeks, and so our history of it is largely blank. From the perspective of written history, the eastern side of the empire is like the dark side of the moon, a place always in shadow. But according to Herodotus, this region was home to a warlike people known as the Masigatai. The people Herodotus called the Masigatai, likely called themselves something like the Masyakata, meaning the fish-eating people, since they made their livelihood fishing in the Caspian Sea. Herodotus describes their simple way of life.

Speaker 7:
[115:10] These are said to be a great people and mighty, dwelling towards the east and the sunrise, where men are said to live, whose food is raw fish, and their customary dress, sealskins.

Speaker 1:
[115:26] The Masigatai also seem to have used some kind of drug, possibly cannabis, during their ceremonies and celebrations, as Herodotus recounts.

Speaker 7:
[115:40] Assembling in companies and kindling a fire, the people sit around it and throw a plant into the flames. Then the smell of it as it burns makes them drunk as the Greeks are with wine, and more and more drunk as more is thrown on the fire. Till at last they rise up and dance and even sing. Such is said to be their way of life.

Speaker 1:
[116:08] Perhaps realising the dangerous nature of the campaign he was embarking on, Cyrus made sure to settle the matter of his succession before he set out. He named his son Cambyses as his successor, and also made him regent of the empire in his absence. He also had a younger son, Bardia, and to this man he gave a large and wealthy area in the east, which he also exempted from taxes. It was a clear sign that he hoped his sons would manage to live in peace once he was no longer around. According to Herodotus, the ruler of the Massagetai was a queen named Tomyris.

Speaker 7:
[116:56] Now at this time, the Messagetai were ruled by a queen called Tomyris, whose husband was dead. Cyrus sent a message with a pretense of wooing her for his wife, but Tomyris would have none of his advance, well understanding that he wooed not her, but her kingdom.

Speaker 1:
[117:19] After this peaceful approach failed, Herodotus claims that Cyrus lay an ambush at a feast, in which he served strong wine to a group of Massagetai noblemen, among them the son of the Queen Tomyris. These nomadic men, unused to strong wine, were soon roaring drunk, and in this helpless state, Cyrus' men fell on them and killed them all. After this deceitful act, the heartbroken Tomyris rallied her forces, and rode out to crush Cyrus with the rage of a grieving mother.

Speaker 7:
[118:00] There perished the greater part of the Persian army, and there fell Cyrus himself. Tomyris filled a skin with human blood, and sought for Cyrus' body among the Persian dead. When she found it, she put his head into the skin, and spoke these words of insult to the dead man. Even as I threatened, so will I do, and give thee thy fill of blood.

Speaker 1:
[118:31] Exciting and poetic as it is, this stirring tale of treachery and revenge is likely a folk tale. Herodotus himself points out that even at the time, multiple versions of the great man's death were already circulating.

Speaker 7:
[118:48] Many stories are related to Cyrus' death. This that I have told is the worthiest of cretins.

Speaker 1:
[119:03] In contrast, the Greek writer Xenophon has Cyrus die peacefully in bed, surrounded by his sons. The Greek Theseus, who lived in Persia, describes him being wounded in battle against the Scythians, but coming home to his palace at Pasargadai, where he later died of his wounds. Ultimately, we can never know the truth, which must lie somewhere between these accounts. What we know is that in the year 530 BC, Cyrus the Great died, likely on campaign in the east.

Speaker 9:
[119:41] He would be buried in a modest tomb at his palace of Pasargadai, a monument that combines some elements of the mound tombs of Lydia that he had seen on his march to Sardis all those years before, and others based on the stepped design of a Mesopotamian or Elamite ziggurat, the stone base raising him above the sacred earth in accordance with Iranian tradition. The Greek traveller Arien passed through the region some centuries later, and wrote one description of the tomb's remaining finery.

Speaker 1:
[120:18] The tomb of the famous Cyrus was in the royal park at Pasargadai, and around it a grove of all kinds of trees had been planted. The park was also watered by a stream, and high grass grew in the meadow. In the building lay a golden coffin, in which the body of Cyrus had been buried. A carpet of Babylonian tapestry with purple rugs formed the bedding. Upon it were also a median coat with sleeves and other tunics.

Speaker 9:
[120:50] Perhaps since Iranians before that point typically didn't use gravestones or monuments for their burials, there is a distinctly defensive tone to the inscription reportedly carved over the tomb.

Speaker 1:
[121:05] Upon the tomb an inscription in Persian letters had been placed, which bore the following meaning in the Persian language. Oh man, I am Cyrus, son of Cambyses, who founded the empire of the Persians, and was king of Asia. Do not therefore grudge me this monument.

Speaker 9:
[121:30] With the death of Cyrus, his son Cambyses ascended to the throne. Cambyses' name in Old Persian was Cambujia. He was the son and heir of a king who had started with virtually nothing, the ruler of a small tribe, and with cunning, tactical genius, and political acumen, had carved out the world's largest empire in only three decades, and brought countless people under his banner. The expectation on this prince must have been immense, but unfortunately, he would not live up to the promise of his father. There seems to have been some question over the abilities of Cambyses from the very start. In 538 BC, his father had named him governor of Babylon and its surrounding areas, but he was removed from that position after only nine months. The reason for this is unclear, but we might take it as a warning sign that all would not be well when this young prince took the throne. According to the account of Herodotus, one of his first acts was to have his brother Bardia secretly killed, ensuring that no rival to his rule remained alive. To do this job, he enlisted the help of a priest or magi named Gaumata.

Speaker 2:
[123:09] Cambyses, as the Egyptians say, became absolutely mad, and the first of his evil deeds was that he put to death his brother Bardia, who was of the same father and the same mother as himself. Some say that he took him out to hunt and there slew him, others that he brought him to the Erythraean Sea and drowned him.

Speaker 9:
[123:38] When this Mejai Gaumata sent him word that his brother was dead and his reign secure, Cambyses set his sights on further territorial expansion, and the one great prize that would outdo the conquests of his esteemed father, the ancient and wealthy kingdom of Egypt. Egypt at this time was undergoing something of a renaissance. Under the long 44-year rule of its pharaoh Ahmose II, the lands of the Nile Valley had prospered, and regained some of the glory that had characterised its golden ages of the old, middle, and new kingdoms. But in 526 BC, this great pharaoh died, and the rule of Egypt passed on to his son, a man named Samtik III. Cambyses, perhaps knowing all too well the pressure of trying to live up to a high-achieving father, immediately prepared to invade the lands of Egypt. The very next year, in the spring of 525 BC, Cambyses set out. To help him on his campaign, he recruited an enormous force drawn from all corners of the empire. A Persian army of this time was made up of a patchwork of different units, who each fought in the traditional manner of their homeland. There were long-speared cavalry from Lydia, shielded spearmen from Babylonia, archers from the Medes and Elamites. He also recruited skilled sailors from the Phoenician cities on the Palestinian coast, along with their swift ships, and heavily armoured Greek hoplites from the Ionian cities of Asia. These Greek warriors would become known as the Bronze Men from the Sea, since they had trained to fight with heavy armour, covering most of their bodies. With this force of perhaps 50,000 soldiers, Cambyses set out to Egypt, sending half by land and half by sea on the Phoenician ships, and met at the port town of Pelusium, the gateway to the Nile Delta. At Pelusium, sources indicate that the pharaoh of Egypt had sent a man named Wedja Horesnet to command much of the Egyptian fleet, with orders to repel the advancing army of the Persians. But this man, for unknown reasons, decided to defect. Whether bribed or threatened, when Cambyses arrived, Wedja Horesnet turned his ships over to the Persian army, and swore allegiance to Cambyses. Now, without a navy and cut off on the waterways of the Nile Delta, the Egyptian army was swiftly surrounded and defeated. Wedger Horesnet was suitably rewarded for his part in the battle. One inscribed statue now kept in the Vatican describes the strange trajectory of his life, and perhaps gives some sense of why he refused to fight the Persians.

Speaker 4:
[127:22] The great king of all foreign lands, Cambyses, came to Egypt, bringing the foreigners of every foreign country with him. When he had taken possession of the entire country, and he was made great sovereign of Egypt, his majesty appointed me his chief physician. I protected the inhabitants from the very large troubles which had come from all over the whole country, and I defended the meek against the powerful. I saved those who were afraid.

Speaker 9:
[127:55] Canbises was crowned as the pharaoh of Egypt in August 525 BC, only a few months after setting out on campaign, in the city of Saïs in the western Nile Delta. There he was awarded the pshent, the double crown that combined the white bulbous crown of upper Egypt with the red crown of lower Egypt, a symbol that had been worn by Egyptian pharaohs for more than two and a half thousand years. But if Herodotus is to be believed, Canbises didn't share his father's diplomatic streak. When he captured the pharaoh's samtic, he seems to have enjoyed humiliating him with a cruel spectacle.

Speaker 2:
[128:47] On the tenth day after the surrender of the walled city of Memphis, Cambyses took Samtic, King of Egypt, who had reigned for six months, and confined him in the outer part of the city with other Egyptians to insult him. He dressed the daughter of the king as a slave and sent her out with a pitcher to fetch water, together with other girls from the families of the leading men. So when the girls went out before their father's eyes crying and lamenting, all the rest answered with cries and weeping, seeing their children abused. But Samtic only bowed himself to the ground.

Speaker 9:
[129:35] Next, the king's son was paraded before him in chains, to be led to his death. But once again the king did not cry. It was only when he saw an old servant of his walking among the crowd that his mask cracked.

Speaker 2:
[129:56] After these two had gone, it happened that there was one of his companions, a man past his prime who had lost all his possessions and begged of the army. This man now went out before Pharaoh Samtic and the Egyptians. When Samtic saw him, he broke into loud weeping, striking his head and calling on his companion by name.

Speaker 9:
[130:25] In Herodotus, Cambyses comes across as a sadist and a tyrant. He describes him brutally suppressing the religion of Egypt, destroying temples as a punishment for rebellions, flogging priests, and even killing the sacred Apis bull, a beloved and holy animal in the city of Memphis, believed to be the living offspring of the god Hathor. But actual Egyptian sources undermine this view. They show that Cambyses worked hard to ingratiate himself with his Egyptian subjects. Far from murdering an Apis bull, he actually attended the funeral services when one of these bulls died, and no Egyptian sources mention its murder. But the very existence of these stories, still circulating in Egypt about 80 years later when Herodotus passed through, shows us that Cambyses was unpopular. He appears to have attempted to reform the Egyptian tax system so that citizens no longer paid their taxes to the temples, something that would have enraged the ancient and powerful priestly class. While Cyrus had skillfully absorbed people into the empire by listening to what they wanted and ensuring he gave it to them, his son Cambyses tried to meddle in local affairs and alienated his people. Whether Egypt would have eventually erupted in rebellion against Cambyses, we will never know. That's because in 522 BC, only four years into his rule as Pharaoh, Cambyses got some remarkable and extremely disturbing news. Back in Babylon, a man had shown up claiming to be his younger brother Bardia, and this man had declared himself King of Persia. In the version of this story that Herodotus gives us, Cambyses had already secretly killed his younger brother Bardia. For this reason, he immediately realized that this Bardia must be an imposter, and the only person it could be is the only other person who knew that Bardia was dead, the Magi named Gaumata. Realizing that he might be about to lose his kingdom, Cambyses leapt onto his horse and set out to fight this imposter. But he would never reach the battlefield, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 2:
[133:26] Having wept his fill in great grief for all his mishap, he leapt upon his horse with intent to march forthwith to Susa against the Magi. As he mounted, the scabbard knob of his sword slipped off, and the naked blade struck his thigh, wounding him. After this, the bone became gangreened, and the thigh rotted, which took off Cambyses son of Cyrus, who had reigned in all seven years and five months, and left no sons or daughters at all.

Speaker 9:
[134:09] This was an unbelievable situation. With Cambyses dead, the imposter Bardia now ruled the Empire. This man, by a grand coincidence, happened to be the spitting image of the disappeared prince, a likeness so perfect that all but one of Bardia's wives failed to notice the difference between them. This wife, a woman named Fadime, alerted some members of the court. Aghast that an imposter was sitting on the throne, these six men began a plot to overthrow the false king. To help them in their plan, they recruited the help of a faithful general of the dead king Cambyses, and a distant member of the royal family, a man who in Old Persian was named Dari Vaush. His name would be rendered into Greek as Darius.

Speaker 2:
[135:10] Now came to Susa, Darius' son of Hystaspes, from Persia. And on his coming, the six Persians resolved to make Darius too their comrade. The seven then met and gave each other pledges and spoke together.

Speaker 9:
[135:30] Darius and his co-conspirators chose their moment, then struck. They drew their daggers and burst into the false king's apartment while he slept, managing to overpower his bodyguards. Finally, the conspirators found themselves in a bitter hand-to-hand struggle, which Herodotus renders in thrilling fashion.

Speaker 2:
[135:56] Two of the seven, Darius and Gobrius, hurled themselves into the chamber with him. Gobrius and the Magi grappled together, while Darius stood perplexed in the darkness, fearing to strike. Gobrius, seeing Darius stand idle, cried to know why he did not strike. For fear of stabbing you, quoth Darius. Nay, said Gobrius, thrust with your sword, though it be through both of us. So Darius thrust with his dagger, and by good luck it was the Magi that he stabbed. The imposter king lay dead, and in the aftermath of this assassination, the plotters swept in to consolidate their power.

Speaker 9:
[136:47] Finally, as the dust of the coup settled, Darius was made king, and the line of Cyrus the Great was saved. This official version of events would be immortalized not only by Herodotus, but also chiseled into the limestone face of a cliff on Mount Bisseton, a hundred meters above the ground and visible for all to see on the road from Ekbatana to Babylon. In this Bisseton inscription, Darius recounts the exact story that Herodotus does, of Cambyses killing his brother in secret, and the imposter Bardia taking the throne.

Speaker 5:
[137:44] A son of Cyrus named Cambyses, one of our dynasty, was king here before me. That Cambyses had a brother, Bardiya by name, and Cambyses slew this Bardiya. There was a certain man, a Magi, Gaumata by name, who raised a rebellion, saying, I am Bardiya, the son of Cyrus, the brother of Cambyses. He seized the kingdom, the people feared him exceedingly. For he slew many who had known the real Bardiya, so that no one would recognize him.

Speaker 9:
[138:41] The inscription is accompanied by a carving, showing Darius with one foot placed on the fallen body of the Magi Gaumata, beside which Darius recounts in his own words the plot to overthrow and murder the imposter king.

Speaker 5:
[139:06] There was none who dared to act against Gaumata, the Magi, until I came. Then I prayed to Ahura Mazda. Ahura Mazda brought me help. On the tenth day of the month, with a few men, I slew that Gaumata, the Magi. I dispossessed him of the kingdom. By the grace of the Ahura Mazda, I became king.

Speaker 9:
[139:48] This remarkable story is so outlandish that many modern historians actually don't believe it at all. They propose an alternate version of events, but this other version is in some ways just as incredible. It's now thought that the man who rose up in rebellion against Cambyses was actually his younger brother Bardia, and that everything that makes up the core of Herodotus' account and the Byzantine inscription was an audacious ruse by the man who had ultimately seized the throne, the usurper King Darius. We can never know whether all the conspirators were in on the lie, or whether Darius had actually convinced them that Bardia was an imposter. Either way, the official propaganda of Darius' new regime clearly won the day. Now inscribed in stone at Mount Bissetoun, and clearly circulating among the people to such an extent that they would recount it to Herodotus generations later, the story of the imposter Bardia had now, for all intents and purposes, become the truth. Darius was now the new King of Kings, King of the Four Quarters of the World. It's clear from the Bissetoun inscription that from the moment Darius seized power, he faced an understandable crisis of legitimacy. He was not the direct descendant of Cyrus the Great, but claimed to be a distant cousin of the great empire builder. In a culture completely dominated by the idea of telling the truth, the creeping suspicion that the new king might have lied his way to the throne must have eroded many people's faith in his rule. Perhaps as a result, more imposters were now popping up all over the land, as the Bissetoun inscription recounts.

Speaker 5:
[142:16] After I had slain Gaumata, the Magi, a certain man named Ashina raised a rebellion in Elam, and he spoke thus unto the people of Elam, I am king in Elam. Thereupon, the people of Elam became rebellious, and a certain Babylonian named Nidintu Bel raised a rebellion in Babylon. He lied to the people, saying, I am Nebuchadnezzar, the son of Nabonidus. While I was in Babylon, these provinces revolted from me. Persia, Elam, Nidia, Assyria, Egypt, Parthia, Magiana, Satyagidya, and Scythia.

Speaker 2:
[143:39] Margoosh, Tatagoosh, Saka.

Speaker 9:
[143:44] At least one of these rebel leaders also claimed to be Darius' missing brother, Bardiya, something that must have thrown up even more confusion. It was a time when people's shared reality was becoming completely untethered, and now no one knew who the rightful king was. For a time, it must have looked like the vast empire was about to collapse entirely. But this was not to be the case. That's because Darius seems to have been an exceptionally talented general, and gathered a number of capable allies among the Medes, Persians, and Armenians. These loyal generals swept around the empire, putting down one rebellion after another, and crucifying each of their leaders in cruel public displays of brutality. In just his first year of rule, Darius claimed to have put down no fewer than 19 rebellions.

Speaker 5:
[145:02] This is what I have done. By the grace of Ahura Mazda have I always acted. After I became king, I fought 19 battles in a single year. And by the grace of Ahura Mazda, I overthrew nine kings and I made them captive. As to these provinces which revolted, lies made them revolt so that they deceived the people. King Darius says, you who shall be king hereafter, protect yourself vigorously from lies and punish the liars well. Then, may your country be secure.

Speaker 9:
[145:59] To address his crisis of legitimacy, Darius set about marrying every available woman he could find descended from the family of Cyrus the Great, including two of Cyrus's daughters. In this way, he interjected himself and his sons into the line of succession, and silenced his critics. Darius even went so far as to create a legendary common ancestor, who he gave the name Hahamanish. This figure would be called Achaemenes by the Greeks, and it's by this name that the bloodline of Cyrus is often called today, the Achaemenes, even though Cyrus himself never mentioned the name in his inscriptions. To make this deception complete, Darius even sent stonemasons to Cyrus' palace at Pasargadai in a shameless attempt to rewrite history and link the great king with his own line. These men carved a simple message into the stone pillars, in the voice of the previous king.

Speaker 5:
[147:18] I am Cyrus the King, an Achaemenid.

Speaker 9:
[147:25] The only thing that gives the game away to modern archaeologists is that this message was carved in a type of cuneiform alphabet that would not be in use until the reign of Darius, since in other inscriptions, Darius boasts about introducing it. For this reason, most historians believe that it was not written by Cyrus. Eventually, after three years of near ceaseless fighting, the rebellions burned themselves out like wildfires running out of dry brush, and Darius was able to settle down into a relatively stable rule. And from that rocky start, Darius underwent a campaign of expansion, especially in the east. Conquest of parts of India had begun under Cyrus the Great, but Darius pushed the empire's boundaries right up to the area of the Punjab in northern India, conquering virtually all of what is today Pakistan. Although sources on this side of the empire are scant, it's worth remembering that the Persian Empire was a territory that straddled worlds, from the humid riverlands of India to the Eurasian steppe in the north, the Indian Ocean to the south, and Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean in the west. Darius now ruled over a land area of 5.5 million square kilometers, larger than the Roman Empire at its height, and with an estimated population of as many as 20 million people. With a world population at the time of little more than 100 million, this means that as much as 20% of the world's population now lived in Darius' Persian Empire. But throughout the years of rebellion, Darius had seen just how fragile the empire could be. He was determined to bring about a number of reforms designed to strengthen it, and turn it into a power that could last. To help him with the administration of this unwieldy territory, Darius reorganized the empire, dividing it into 20 regions over which governors ruled. These governors were called Khashathrapavan, which would enter Greek as the word.

Speaker 2:
[150:05] And Satrap.

Speaker 9:
[150:07] These regions would thus become known as Satrapes. Darius also issued a standard currency based on gold and silver coins called Darix, mostly used in the Western Empire. These were stamped with an image of a king holding a bow, and would soon be found all around the ancient world. He also standardized a system of weights and measures, allowing for a level of coordination in the Achaemenid economy. The economy is actually one of the few areas where the Persians themselves are able to speak in the light of history. And that is due to one remarkable find that occurred in 1933. In that year, archaeologists excavating the ruined palaces of Persepolis uncovered two small chambers within a bastion along the fortification wall at the edge of the great stone terrace. There, they discovered a vast cache of tens of thousands of clay tablets and fragments. These texts, which today are known as the Persepolis fortification tablets, offer a rare glimpse into the workings of the Achaemenid administrative system. They are written almost exclusively in Elamite, but some also appear in Phrygian, Aramaic, Old Persian and even Greek, and record the collection, transfer and storage of goods in the region around Persepolis, controlling the movements of grain and fruit, sheep, goats, cattle and poultry, as well as flour, bread, beer, wine, fruits, oil, meat and animal hides. These resources were distributed to temples, members of the royal family, courtiers, priests, religious officials, administrators, travelers, laborers and artisans. The following tablet written in Elamite shows the transfer of barley in the year 501 BC.

Speaker 3:
[152:32] 130 liters of barley from the possessions of Amavarta have been received by Barik El as his rations, given in the town of Ithima in the 21st year in the month Shibar.

Speaker 9:
[152:47] Other tablets describe payments in silver made to important officials.

Speaker 3:
[152:55] To Shaka the Treasurer, Budkama declares that Hurdkama the Egyptian was the chief of a team of 100 laborers, and is entitled to three kasha and two and a half shekels of silver as his wage.

Speaker 9:
[153:12] The historian Lloyd Llewellyn Jones describes this administrative regime.

Speaker 6:
[153:20] Nothing was too trivial to be logged. The number of nails needed to repair a wooden boat in Upper Egypt, or the fact that a plague of locusts meant that a mudbrick wall could not be built in Bactria. Each and every case was individually recorded, signed off, reported to the Central Administration in Persia, and methodically filed away.

Speaker 9:
[153:52] At the old Elamite capital of Susa, Darius would construct a palace that for much of the empire's history would act as the buzzing hive mind of this administration. Susa was well connected by road to all parts of the empire, and also by a canal that linked it to the Euphrates River, and from there the Persian Gulf. As a result, at Susa, messengers would come and go day in and day out, bearing tablets and missives, keeping this machinery moving, and the resources of the empire flowing out to its people. As a testament to his vision of an empire that brought peoples together, this palace would form an architectural representation of everything the empire had achieved. As Darius describes in one inscription, Yaka timber was brought from Gandhara and from Carmania.

Speaker 5:
[154:56] The gold was brought from Sardis and from Bactria. The precious stone, Lapitz Lazuli and Carnelian, was brought from Sogdiana. The stonecutters who brought the stone were Ionians and Sardians. The goldsmiths were Medes and Egyptians. The men who wrought the wood were Sardinians and Egyptians. The men who wrought the baked brick were Babylonians. The men who adorned the wall, those were Medes and Egyptians.

Speaker 9:
[155:33] Darius also commissioned a new palace that would be built at the site of Persepolis, lined with a series of beautiful reliefs that formed an artistic representation of his vision, showing scenes of all the different peoples of the empire wearing their distinctive dress, all coming to bring tribute to the King of Kings. Partly due to their roots in nomadic culture, the Persian royal court was mobile, and under Darius, they travelled between royal centres throughout the year. During the sweltering summer months, the king and his entourage, eunuchs, servants, bodyguards, children, and the palace women, moved up into the mountains to the summer capital of Ekbatana. But when the cold winters brought snow to the hills, the court would move to the lowlands in the foothills of the Zagros mountains, and the buzzing nerve centre of Susa. Spring festivals they would carry out in Persepolis. Perhaps partly due to his experience of marching armies back and forth, putting down ceaseless rebellions in the first years of his reign, one of Darius' first priorities was to improve the empire's road system. Chief among these crucial arteries was the highway known as the Royal Road. Some sections of this highway were already ancient, and had been maintained by the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. But Darius improved and expanded it, until it stretched from the empire's westernmost city of Sardis near the Mediterranean, all the way through Asia Minor and northern Mesopotamia, until it reached the winter capital of Susa, at the foot of the Zagros Mountains. Herodotus describes this well-made highway.

Speaker 2:
[157:47] All along the road are royal staging posts and excellent rest houses, and as it runs through inhabited country, the entire road is safe. If the royal road had been measured correctly, then the whole journey is exactly 90 days by foot.

Speaker 9:
[158:08] This royal road allowed the transfer of information at a speed yet unknown in the ancient world, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 2:
[158:20] There is nothing that travels faster and yet is still mortal than these couriers. It is said that there are as many horses and men posted at intervals as there are days required for the entire journey, so that one horse and one man are assigned to each day. And neither snow nor rain nor heat nor dark of night keeps them from completing their appointed course as swiftly as possible. The first courier passes on the instructions to the second, the second to the third, and from there they are transmitted from one to another, as in the torch race among the Greeks.

Speaker 9:
[159:10] It was along one of these roads in the year 499 BC that a messenger would have ridden, carrying news to Darius of a worrying development in the westernmost part of his empire. These were the Greek-speaking coastal regions of Asia Minor, or what is now Turkey. These areas had once been conquered by the wealthy king Croesus of Lydia, and were then absorbed by Cyrus. By this time, they had been ruled by Persia for the last 40 years. But now, a messenger brought news that they had exploded in revolt. And, worst of all, they had outside help. The Greek states along the western stretch of the coast of Lydia were divided into three main groups, the Aeolians, the Ionians, and the Dorians, who all spoke related dialects of Greek. It was the Ionians that had by this time had enough of Persian rule. These were a group of proud and wealthy cities in Asia Minor that were traditionally believed to have once been colonies of the city of Athens. The Persians had never really worked out how best to rule over independent Greek city-states. In much of their empire, they would rely on already existing structures of power to rule over conquered subjects. For instance, in the Hebrew world, they relied on local priesthoods to keep the peace, and in Egypt, they adopted the power of the pharaohs and temple priests. These provinces would then be appointed satraps to lead them, who were almost always Persians appointed by the king of kings. Very occasionally, they were local rulers who were allowed to keep most elements of their previous rule and the privileges of their position so long as they swore allegiance to the Persian Empire. According to Persian customs, this swearing of allegiance was done by offering the king of kings a gift of earth and water. These were the elements crucial for life, two of the three holy elements in Iranian belief, and they represented the elemental power of the monarch. But each Greek city-state was ruled by a chaotic mess of aristocratic factions, sharing power in complicated arrangements. For this reason, the Persians had simply settled for choosing a Greek from each city-state and appointing him ruler. These rulers, the Greeks referred to with a word they had loaned from Lydian, meaning monarch. That word was tyrannos, or tyrant. In his work, Politics, the Greek writer Aristotle describes the difference between a king and a tyrant.

Speaker 7:
[162:48] Tyranny is monarchy exercising the rule of a master. Kings rule according to law over voluntary subjects, but tyrants over involuntary. The one are guarded by their fellow citizens, the others are guarded against them.

Speaker 9:
[163:08] These Greek tyrants found themselves in a difficult position. As Greeks themselves, they soaked up all the anger of their people towards Persian rule, and they were often incompetent, corrupt, and poorly suited to rule. Partly as a result of this system, by the year 499 BC, all of Ionia was bubbling over with rebellion. The man who would throw a spark into this dry tinder was named Aristagoras. The Greek tyrant of the Ionian city of Miletus. Miletus was a fine port town that was known as the Jewel of Ionia, and its tyrant Aristagoras was an unlikely revolutionary. In fact, he had ruled his city on behalf of the Persians for the last 12 years, but he had done a poor job. After attempting a failed invasion of the island of Naxos on behalf of the empire, he found himself deeply in debt and wildly unpopular among his people. Fearing that the Persians would replace him as the tyrant of Miletus due to his incompetence, he decided to change tactics, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 2:
[164:41] It was likely, he thought, that his lordship of Miletus would be taken away from him. With all these fears in mind, he began to plan revolt.

Speaker 9:
[164:55] But Aristagoras knew that rebelling against the Persian Empire would be useless unless he could get some outside help. To this end, he crossed the sea to Greece in secret, hoping to find allies. First, he approached the most powerful city in the large southern peninsula, known as the Peloponnese, the city of Sparta. The Spartans had for centuries cultivated a powerful mythos about themselves, and were widely regarded as the major military power in Greece. This reputation was sufficient that Sparta itself had never seen fit to build a city wall, boasting instead that its soldiers were all the wall it needed. Aristagoras knew that if his rebellion was to be a success, he would need the help of the Spartans. He went to appeal to one of Sparta's two kings, a man named Cleomenes, and with him he brought a novel innovation, as Herodotus recounts.

Speaker 2:
[166:11] Aristagoras, the despot of Meletus, came to Sparta, and when he had audience of the king, he brought with him a bronze tablet, on which the map of all the earth was engraved, and all the sea, and all the rivers.

Speaker 9:
[166:30] All the Spartans would need to do, he told the king, was cross into Asia, march to the Persian capital of Susa, and kill King Darius. The Spartan king began to suspect that this all sounded a bit too good to be true.

Speaker 2:
[166:50] The king asked Aristagoras how many days' journey it was from the Ionian Sea to the Persian king. He said that it was a three-month journey inland. At that, Cleomenes cut short all the rest that Aristagoras began to tell him about the journey, and bade his guest depart from Sparta before sunset. For never, he said, would the Spartans listen to the plan if Aristagoras desired to lead them to a three-month journey from the sea.

Speaker 9:
[167:34] The refusal of King Cleomenes partly had to do with the unique characteristic of Sparta as the Greek world's biggest slave state. Like most Greek city states, Sparta was a society built on slavery. But whereas other cities like Athens kept slaves to work in households and workshops, and usually had a slave population a little larger than their free population, Sparta was in a different league entirely. Practically its entire agricultural sector ran on a vast slave class known as helots, a kind of labouring serf bound to the land, who outnumbered the free population by perhaps as many as ten to one. And crucially these helots were Greek. Other Greek cities held a taboo against holding other Greeks as slaves, and their slave populations were made up of Scythians, Thracians, and other peoples who had been captured in piracy or war. In Sparta this helot underclass was made up of whole Greek ethnicities that had been conquered long ago, and they were reviled and brutally mistreated. The Greek writer Myron of Priene writes the following description of the helot's lot.

Speaker 1:
[169:11] They assigned to the helots every shameful task leading to disgrace, for they ordained that each one of them must wear a dogskin cap and wrap himself in skins and receive a stipulated number of beatings every year, regardless of any wrongdoing, so that they would never forget they were slaves.

Speaker 9:
[169:33] The helots were even ritually murdered each year in a little understood ceremony known as the cryptaea, a word meaning secret acts. Understandably unhappy with their condition, the helots rose up in rebellion against their Spartan abusers a number of times. As a result, the Spartan military was made constantly at the ready, and their soldiers carried their spears with them at all times. Cleomenes must have known that if the Spartan army was away from home for at least six months in Persia, the helots would likely take the opportunity to rebel, and Sparta would burn. Despite its great reputation for warfare, the Spartan army was tied down in its lands, and was all but useless for anything but the briefest and nearest campaigns. Discouraged, Aristagoras left, and travelled to appeal to the perhaps more unlikely allies. This was the Greek city-state of Athens. Although supposedly the mother city of the Ionian colonies, the city of Athens had no great reputation for warfare, and it was at that time in a state of some political upheaval. Until recently, it had been ruled by a tyrant of its own, a man named Hippias, but he had been overthrown, and in his place, the Athenians had brought in a radical system. This was an emerging form of government, named after the Greek words demos, or people, and kratos, meaning power. That name was democracy. The Athenian system allowed its citizens to participate in government through various councils and committees, and enabled them to vote on what policies and actions the government should take, usually by a show of hands, with special bronze ballots, or using white and black stones. Athens was not the only Greek democracy, or the first one, but it was the newest, largest, and the most powerful city yet to adopt it. Democracy in Athens was only available to adult male citizens, and women slaves, and the third or so of the population that were considered citizens of other cities were excluded. In reality, only about a third of the adult population was actually given any right to political participation, but it was still a relatively progressive system for the time. Greek critics of democracy argued that the system had merely replaced the whims of a king or tyrant with the whims of the mob, which could be no less capricious, arbitrary, or foolish. And when Aristagoras arrived in Athens that year, pleading for help in his foolhardy rebellion, some would say that the Athenian people proved their critics right, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 2:
[173:18] Coming before the people, Aristagoras spoke to the same effect as at Sparta of the good things of Asia, and how the Persians in war were wont to carry neither shield nor spear, and could easily be overcome. Truly it would seem that it is easier to deceive many than one, for he could not deceive King Cleomenas of Sparta, one single man, but 30,000 Athenians he could. The Athenians then were won over, and voted the sending of 20 ships in aid of the Ionians.

Speaker 9:
[174:01] The tiny city of Athens had just voted to attack the largest empire that the world had ever seen. The Athenians' 20 ships landed in Asia Minor in 498 BC, packed with soldiers. There, they met with the Ionian Greeks of Ephesus, who guided them through the mountains to their target, the old Lydian capital of Sardis. Sardis was the home of a Persian satrap who was the brother of the king of kings, Darius. It was home to a Persian military headquarters and a large armory, and the Greeks hoped that by seizing the city, they would strike a lethal blow to Persian rule. The Greeks moved quickly through the rocky valleys and took the unprepared Persian garrison by surprise, breaking into the city's lower reaches. The Persians retreated and holed up in the towering citadel that still looked down from the top of Mount Tommolus, just as King Croesus had half a century before. While the Greeks camped in the city, a fire broke out, whether accidentally or not, and it soon spread. The great capital of Sardis burned.

Speaker 2:
[175:51] The greater part of the houses in Sardis were of reeds, and as many as were of brick, even they had roofs of reeds. So it was that when one of these was set afire by a soldier, the flames spread from house to house all over the whole city. So Sardis was burned, and therein the temple of Kybella, the goddess of the country.

Speaker 9:
[176:22] The once grand city of Sardis was now a smoking ruin. The Athenians knew that a Persian army must have been racing towards them at that very moment to take the city back, and with the Temple of Kibbele destroyed, they now feared that the gods themselves might also have turned against them. The Athenians began to wonder if perhaps this whole venture had been a mistake. They fled the ruined city and pelted back to the coast and their ships. And along the royal road of the Persian Empire, the news raced back to King Darius at the pace of the empire's fastest horses. When Darius heard of the burning of the city of Sardis by this group of rebels, he must have been astonished and enraged. His own people rebelling was one thing, but the intervention of the Athenians was quite another. These insignificant people from across the Aegean Sea had meddled completely unprovoked in his empire, fomented a rebellion, landed a surprise attack on one of his most revered cities, and burned it to the ground, all before scuttling back to their ships and sailing away. To the great king of kings, the Athenians must have seemed little better than pirates, as Herodotus recounts.

Speaker 2:
[178:06] When it was reported to Darius that Sardis had been taken and burned by the Athenians, he asked who the Athenians were, and after receiving the answer, he called for his bow. This he took, and, placing an arrow on it, shot it into the sky, praying as he sent it aloft. O Zeus, grant me vengeance on the Athenians. Then he ordered one of his servants to say to him three times, whenever dinner was set before him, Master, remember the Athenians.

Speaker 9:
[178:48] The Athenian-Greeks loved repeating this story as a testament to the king's obsession with revenge against the city of Athens, for daring to stand up to the empire. They loved imagining the name of their city being spoken in the great court of Persia. But from the Persian perspective, we might also read it another way. That the Athenians were at that time so insignificant that without constant reminders, King Darius feared he might forget about them completely. Darius was a man who ruled by a code, and he inscribed this code of principles into the outer wall of his tomb at Naqsh-e Rostam. It's these principles that must have been running through his mind when considering how to deal with the Athenians.

Speaker 5:
[179:50] King Darius says, I am friend of the right, of wrong I am not a friend. It is not my wish that the weak should have harm done him by the strong, nor is it my wish that the strong should have harm done him by the weak. The right, that is my desire. The man who is cooperative, according to his cooperation, I reward him. Who does harm, him, according to the harm, I punish.

Speaker 9:
[180:35] Only two years later that punishment would come in the form of an invasion. The Greek mainland of Europe is separated from Asia by a narrow channel that connects the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, and in places this channel is only a mile or so wide. The narrowest of these straits are known as the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. For his 492 BC invasion, Darius appointed one of his own son-in-laws to lead the campaign, a young general named Mardonius. He ordered him to cross into Europe with a force of about 30,000 men, a small army by Persian standards, designed to move quickly and need minimal supplies. They crossed at the straits known today as the Dardanelles, but which in ancient times was known as the Hellespont or the Sea of Hellas, named after a mythical princess who drowned after falling from a flying golden ram in the myth of the Golden Fleece. These straits are about three kilometers across at their narrowest point, and Mardonius would have ferried his men over using ships. Once in Europe, Mardonius subjected the people of Thrace in what is now Eastern Greece and Bulgaria, and then marched south to the mountainous kingdom of Macedon, which they also subjugated and made a client state of the empire. With this large Persian army now on the doorstep of mainland Greece, Darius sent an offer to the cities of Athens and Sparta, requesting that they lay down their arms, swear allegiance to him, and give him the customary offering of earth and water. Herodotus recounts their reaction.

Speaker 2:
[183:06] When Darius sent men with this purpose, those who made the request were cast at the one city into a pit, and at the other, into a well, and bidden to obtain their earth and water for the king from these locations.

Speaker 9:
[183:29] It's not clear from Herodotus whether these men were killed or eventually fished out from the well. But either way, mistreating a messenger in this way was considered an abhorrent act in Persia. And when Darius heard how his ambassadors had been abused, it must have strengthened his belief that he was dealing with the very worst of barbarians, and steal his resolve to crush these tiny cities beneath his foot. But the general Mardonius met with some bad luck on the journey. His army was ambushed during the night by a people known as the Brighi, a Thracian tribe who killed many of his men. Mardonius himself was even injured when he was thrown from his horse during the battle. And at the same time, another force sent by ship across the Aegean was wrecked in a storm off the rocky coast of Mount Athos. It was the first intimation that Persians would get that conquering Greece might not be as easy as it seemed. Not discouraged, two years later, Darius sent another force of about 30,000 men on a fleet of ships sailing for Athens. These hocked from island to island across the Aegean, capturing them for the empire. With them they brought men, equipment, supplies, and horses, and even the old tyrant ruler of Athens, Hippius, who they intended to put back on the throne as a Persian puppet. In early September of 490 BC, they finally reached the coast of Attica, the region in which Athens sits. There, on the advice of Hippius, they landed at a bay about 40 kilometres, or 25 miles, northeast of Athens, at a place called Marathon. When the Athenians heard of the Persian army's landing, they gathered every single available fighting man in the city and marched out to meet them. The Persians had chosen their landing spot because the Bay of Marathon was one of the few large open spaces in Attica. It was a stretch of beach rising to a flat plain before quickly shooting up to rocky and impassable highlands broken by only a couple of narrow passes. The Greeks knew the area well and quickly moved to shut off the two main passes out of the bay. From there, they looked on as the Persian expeditionary force unloaded on the sand. Over the last 56 years of intermittent conflict, no Greek army had ever beaten a Persian one in battle. And this must have been playing through their minds as they watched the Persian ships landing one by one on the shore. For a time, both armies stood and watched one another, and neither were in a hurry to begin the battle, as Herodotus recounts.

Speaker 2:
[187:33] The Athenian generals were of divided opinion. Some advocating not fighting because they were too few to attack the army of the Persians, others advocating fighting.

Speaker 9:
[187:48] While they stood and watched their enemy mass on the beach, the Athenians were joined by men from the city of Plataea, and they had sent out word to other allies. One of these messengers was a man by the name of Phaedipides, who had set out on a journey of more than 240 kilometers over rocky mountainous terrain to ask for aid from the city of Sparta. The Greeks had nothing like the sophisticated road system of the Persian Empire, or the waystations where horse-riding messengers could swap out their tired horses. The Greeks were mostly not great horse-riders, and when they did ride, they did so without syrups or a saddle, making for a slow and uncomfortable ride. For this reason, if you wanted a message delivered in Greece at this time, you simply sent a runner, who trained his whole life for long-distance journeys of this kind. Phaedippides must have known that countless lives, and perhaps the freedom of his country, depended on him making that journey swiftly. But when he arrived in Sparta, he would be disappointed.

Speaker 2:
[189:15] He reached Sparta on the very next day after quitting the city of Athens. Upon his arrival, he went before the rulers and said to them, Men of Sparta, the Athenians beseech you to hasten to their aid and not allow that state, which is the most ancient in all Greece, to be enslaved by the barbarians. The Spartans wished to help the Athenians, but were unable to, as it was then the ninth day of the first decade, and they could not march out of Sparta when the moon had not reached the full.

Speaker 9:
[190:02] The Spartans were at that time celebrating their annual festival of the Carnea, during which campaigning was forbidden. Despite their carefully cultivated reputation for never backing down from a fight, it was surprisingly common, whenever it was called upon, for the city of Sparta to have something else terribly important to be doing. The Spartans would not even leave Sparta for another week, and the march would take them at least another three days. Phaedipides set out on the road back to Athens, to bring the bad news of this delay to the soldiers stuck back on the beach at Marathon. Outnumbered at least two to one, the Athenians elected to sit and wait for the Spartan reinforcements to arrive. But then something forced their hand. We're not entirely sure why the battle began when it did, before any Spartan reinforcements appeared, but it's possible that the Persians had come up with an idea. By now, they had realized that with every Athenian fighter waiting there on the beach, blocking their way in land, the city of Athens must be all but defenceless. The Persians may have begun to load up their ships, perhaps putting the horses on board first, preparing to set sail for the city immediately. Travelling by sea, they would be able to strike at Athens before the Athenians were able to run the 25 miles home by foot in their heavy armour. Once they saw this Persian plan unfolding, the Athenians had no choice but to attack right away. They advanced, breaking into a run across the marshy plain, and smashed into the lightly armoured Persian infantry as Herodotus recounts.

Speaker 2:
[192:19] The two armies fought together on the plain of Marathon for a length of time, and in the mid-battle where the Persians themselves and the Scythians had the place, the barbarians were victorious, and broke and pursued the Greeks into the inner country. But on the two wings the Athenians and the Plateans defeated the enemy. Having so dumb, they suffered the rooted barbarians to fly at their ease, and joining the two wings in one fell upon those who had broken their own centre and fought and conquered them. These likewise fled, and now the Athenians hung upon the runaways and cut them down, chasing them all the way to the shore.

Speaker 9:
[193:09] It's speculated that the Persian cavalry, either half-loaded onto the boats already, or simply useless on the marshy plain, were unable to help the trapped foot soldiers. The Persian forces were routed, and Herodotus claims that many thousands were killed on the beach. The Greeks managed to capture seven of the Persian ships, but the rest of the fleet escaped, and now attempted to play the final card available to them, a last-ditch attempt to attack the undefended city of Athens.

Speaker 2:
[193:51] The remainder of the barbarians pushed off, hoping to reach Athens before the return of the Athenians. But the Athenians, with all possible speed, marched away to the defense of their city, and succeeded in reaching Athens before the appearance of the barbarians.

Speaker 9:
[194:17] The Greeks had run half the afternoon through the blazing sun, at a distance of just over 25 miles, about the distance of what we today commemorate as a marathon. When the Persians arrived off the coast of Athens in the Bay of Phalarum, they saw with some astonishment that the Athenians had arrived back to defend their city, and were now standing on the city walls with their bright shields and helmets flashing in the sun.

Speaker 2:
[194:52] The barbarian fleet arrived and laid off Phalarum, which was at the time the harbour of Athens. But after resting a while upon their oars, they departed and sailed away to Asia.

Speaker 9:
[195:14] The Battle of Marathon has long been considered a turning point in the history of Athens. Although the Persian army that Darius sent was only a relatively small expeditionary force, it had been beaten by a Greek army only half its size. The Athenians had proven that they could fight by themselves without the aid of Sparta, and they had shown that by carefully choosing the battlefield, the Persian forces, previously thought unbeatable, could be overcome. The Greek dead of Marathon were cremated, and their ashes buried on the battlefield beneath two great mounds of earth. On the tomb of the Athenians, the poet Simeonides wrote the following epigraph.

Speaker 8:
[196:10] Hellenon promachundes Athenei Marathoni, chrisophoron meedon estoresan dinamin.

Speaker 3:
[196:19] Fighting at the forefront of the Greeks, the Athenians at Marathon laid low the army of the gilded Medes.

Speaker 9:
[196:32] Two days after the battle, Herodotus describes how 2,000 Spartans arrived on the beach at Marathon and saw the mounds of the dead.

Speaker 2:
[196:44] After the full moon, 2,000 Spartans came to Athens. Although they came too late for the battle, they desired to see the Persians, so they went to Marathon and saw them, and they departed again, praising the Athenians and their achievement.

Speaker 9:
[197:07] For the Spartans, the fact that Athens had fought and won without them would be a sore point that would last for at least the next decade. As for the great King Darius, when news reached him of the defeat at Marathon, we can only imagine the frosty atmosphere at court. Herodotus renders one version of his reaction.

Speaker 2:
[197:36] The message about the Battle of Marathon came to King Darius. So he was now more furious than ever and even more resolved to march against Greece. He immediately sent messengers to each city ordering them to prepare a much larger force than before, as well as ships, horses, grain, and vessels. As a result of these demands, Asia was a stir for three years, with the best men enrolled for service against Greece and getting ready for war.

Speaker 9:
[198:16] But by the time this massive force was ready to set sail for Greece, events in the empire overtook the great king. Darius's increasing demands for men and grain to service his Greek wars had caused resentment in the various satrapies of the empire, and especially in Egypt. The defeat at Marathon may also have emboldened some who wished to break free of the empire. Now around 486 BC, Egypt rose up against its Persian governor. The army that Darius had gathered to conquer Greece now sailed for Egypt instead. Darius, now a relatively old man of 65, prepared to go with them. But before he could depart, the king was taken suddenly ill. The Greek writer Theseus records the final days of Darius.

Speaker 4:
[199:23] Darius went back to Persia and made two sacrifices. And after an illness of 30 days, he passed away.

Speaker 9:
[199:39] Darius had been king for 36 years, and though his rule had started in scandal and lies, he had ushered in an era of stability and strength. Across the empire, Persians mourned for their king. They put out their sacred fires in recognition of their grief, shaved their heads, and clipped the mains of their horses as a sign of respect. On his tomb at Naqsh-e-Rostam, Darius had carved an illustration of his throne, supported from beneath by row upon row of people, each dressed in a distinctive fashion of one of the peoples of the empire. And alongside it, he wrote the following inscription that would serve as his epitaph.

Speaker 5:
[200:34] If now, you shall think, how many other countries which King Darius held? Look at the scouchers who bear the throne. Then shall you know the spear of a Persian man has gone forth far. Then shall it become known to you.

Speaker 9:
[201:04] The throne of the empire now passed to one of the oldest sons of Darius, a man who in old Persian was named Khashayarsha, a name which means he who rules over heroes. But the Greeks would call him Xerxes. In the days that followed, this Xerxes would have traveled to Pasargadai, the old capital of Cyrus, to be crowned. And there he would enter the sanctuary of the goddess Anahita. Plutarch describes the ceremony that would have ensued inside.

Speaker 8:
[201:48] There is a temple dedicated to a warlike goddess. The royal person to be initiated must enter it, must strip himself of his own robe, and put on the one that Cyrus I wore before he was king. Then, having devoured a cake of figs, he must chew turpentine resin and drink a cup of sour milk.

Speaker 9:
[202:12] This ritual was supposed to remind each new king of the hard life that the founder of the empire had lived, and the meager foods he had subsisted on while on campaign. A ceremony designed to remind them that being king involved hardship and sacrifice. When he left that sanctuary, Xerxes was the new king of kings, king of the four quarters of the world, and emperor of the Persians. Perhaps throughout this ceremony, while the priests chanted their songs around him, his father's last words to him would have echoed in his head. We will never know what those might have been, but given the choices that Xerxes would make during his rule, it might not be far-fetched to imagine that Darius had made his son promise him that no matter what, he would make the Athenians pay for what they had done. When Xerxes got to the throne, the first six years of his reign were spent crushing the revolt still ongoing in Egypt, and then putting down another two that arose in Babylon. But the moment his empire was secure, he turned his sights on the prize that had slipped from his father's grasp, and where the empire's great humiliation had taken place. In the spring of 480 BC, the army of Xerxes was ready, a large force of perhaps 60,000 to 80,000 soldiers, more than twice the size of the army that had been beaten at Marathon. At the head of these men, he marched out from the Lydian capital of Sardis and towards the crossing of the Hellespont. With him, he brought a man with direct experience of fighting in Greece, the general that had led his father's campaign, the now middle-aged Mardonius. To cross the narrow sea channel of the Hellespont, Xerxes ordered a remarkable piece of infrastructure to be built. Two great floating pontoon bridges, each made out of more than 300 ships tied together with ropes of flax and papyrus, and with a wooden road surface laid across them. These bridges even had canvas screens on either side so that the horses would not become scared at the sight of the rocking waters beneath them. These bridges would stretch more than 1.4 kilometres across the waters of the Hellespont, making them the longest bridges that the world had ever seen. And they crossed a stretch of sea that experiences some of the strongest currents in the Mediterranean. It was a clear statement of the empire's ambition, resources, and determination to crush their enemies. But the weather would conspire against Xerxes' ambition, and Herodotus describes one account of his furious reaction.

Speaker 2:
[206:21] But no sooner had the strait been bridged, than a great storm swept down and broke and scattered all the work. When Xerxes heard of that, he was very angry and gave command that the helispont be scourged with three hundred lashes, and a pair of fetters be thrown into the sea. Thou bitter water, they should say. Our master thus punishes thee, because thou didst him wrong.

Speaker 9:
[207:00] This legend of Xerxes ordering the sea to be whipped is likely a Greek tale designed to make the king look despotic and ridiculous. And in fact, with everything we know about the Persian reverence for water, it seems incredibly unlikely. We can be sure that Xerxes would have offered prayers and offerings to the waters before crossing them, and perhaps it is a Greek misunderstanding of these ceremonies that Herodotus is recounting. For much of the story that follows, for better or worse, Herodotus is our only source. He was certainly interested in portraying the truth of past events, but he was also trying to tell a ripping story that glorified the exploits of the Greeks. Herodotus was writing about 50 years after the Persian wars, and by that time, this conflict had taken on epic proportions in the Greek imagination. To the Greeks, the Persian wars held a similar place as the Second World War to us today, a great clash between good and evil, a fight over the nature of civilization, and the fiery conflict in which the world as they knew it had been born. For this reason, the account of Herodotus is a crucial source, but one that has to be treated very carefully. With his bridges suitably repaired, Xerxes marched into Europe, and there he would meet with remarkable success. He marched through his subject of Thrace and received help from his allies in Macedon, a king named Alexander. Xerxes was marching to war, but he was also demonstrating the power and breadth of his empire. He ensured that his army was made up of one unit from every one of the empire's provinces, a colorful and garish display that would have had a simple message. The entire world is marching against Greece. You are either with me or against me. From Macedon, Xerxes marched south, his army moving in three columns, each with a separate route so they wouldn't clog the road. They made such an impressive sight that many generations later, the local Thracians still pointed out to travellers the road along which the great army had travelled. The size of the force was such that Greek writers like Herodotus would inflate it to the absurd size of two or three million men. But modern analysis of the constraints of supply and transport in the ancient world reckon that about a hundred thousand soldiers is a reasonable estimate for the maximum possible size of an army at this time. Along the way, the engineers of Xerxes improved the roads and built bridges, cutting through the mountains and bending the landscape to his will. At the peninsula of Mount Athos, where one of his father's fleets had been wrecked in a storm, Xerxes ordered the digging of a mile-long canal that cut through the isthmus and allowed his ships to avoid sailing around the dangerous headland. On the way, Herodotus describes with perhaps some exaggeration the army draining lakes dry while watering their pack animals. But it's true that supplying this great army was no easy task. For that reason, they never strayed far from the sea, where the Persian navy was able to support them, and continually bring food and fodder for the animals. Behind them, an ant's trail of supply carts must have led back along the road, bringing supplies over from their crucial bridges of boats, and supply depots that had been set up years in advance fed the soldiers on their march. On their way, Herodotus describes the Persians suffering problems with the local Greek wildlife.

Speaker 2:
[211:51] As Xerxes thus marched, lions attacked the camels that carried his provisions. Nightly, they would come down out of their lairs and made havoc.

Speaker 9:
[212:06] Despite these challenges, Xerxes' army soon passed the towering grey rock faces of Mount Olympus, and marched south into the large fertile plains of Thessaly. Ahead of his advance, he sent messengers to the northern Greek regions and cities, demanding that they give him offerings of earth and water. Many Greeks did so, and thereby went over to the Persian side. These included the Greeks of Thessaly and Thebes, who hated the Athenians, and even the people of the sacred center of Delphi. Some of these Greeks must have felt that they had no other choice when faced with the might of Persia, while others may have reveled in the opportunity to shift the dominance of Athens and Sparta in the Greek world. Others chose their stance simply due to petty rivalries within Greece, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 2:
[213:18] The Phocians alone of all that region would not take the Persians side, and that for no other reason than their hatred of the Thessalians. Had the Thessalians aided the Greek side, then the Phocians would certainly have stood for the Persians.

Speaker 9:
[213:39] But to Athens and Sparta, King Xerxes sent no messengers, remembering bitterly how they had mistreated his father's ambassadors a generation earlier. The Greeks who chose to stand up to the empire were now outnumbered. They needed to find a way to gain an advantage, and they would do this by using the landscape of Greece itself, a landscape of mountainous highlands broken by narrow passes. Xerxes and his army were following the sea shore, staying close to their supply ships, and their route would take them along one narrow passage between the sea and the mountains. As the summer came to an end, this was the place that the allied Greeks chose to defend the whole of the south. A place about 200 kilometres north-west of Athens at a site called Thermopylae. Herodotus describes their deliberation.

Speaker 2:
[214:53] The Greeks consulted together how and where they should stand to fight. The council that prevailed was that they should guard the pass of Thermopylae, for they saw that it was narrower than the pass into Thessaly and moreover near a home.

Speaker 9:
[215:14] The name Thermopylae means hot gates, so named for the sulfurous thermal springs that rise up out of the earth nearby. One legend has it that the waters here are hot, because it was here that the hero Heracles had tried to wash off the poison of the fearsome Hydra. Today, the battlefield looks very different, since silt buildup from the nearby Spairchaos River has pushed back the ancient coastline and created a wide plain, where once a rocky bay stood. But in ancient times, the sea would have lapped close up to the sheer-sided slope of Mount Caledromos, creating a number of narrow bottlenecks, which the Greeks called gates. In ancient times, the Phocian people had built a wall at the pass of Thermopylae to keep out the hated Thessalians, a rivalry that still burned to that day. But now this crumbling Phocian wall would help repel a much different enemy. The Greeks hoped that with 20,000 to 30,000 heavily armoured hoplites holding the pass of Thermopylae, the Persians would have no hope but to turn back. But things would not go according to their plan. This was partly because August was the Greek season of leisure. The harvest had been brought in, the days were long and languid, and the Olympic festival was taking place across Greece. This was a religious celebration of the king of the gods, Zeus, combined with a series of athletic challenges held at the religious sanctuary of Olympia every four years. Greeks had long observed a truce during the games, so that athletes and religious pilgrims could travel the roads without fear, and no one wanted to go to war during the festival. In their rocky peninsula, the Spartans were once again celebrating their annual festival of the Carnea when military campaigning was officially restricted. Perhaps if the Greeks had realised how quickly the Persian army was advancing, they would have felt more urgency to rush to the battlefield, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 2:
[218:01] They intended, when they had celebrated the Carnean festival, to leave a garrison in Sparta, and hasten in full force to join the army. The rest of the allies also intended to act similarly, for it had happened that the Olympic festival fell exactly at this same period. None of them looked to see the contest at Thermopylae decided so speedily.

Speaker 9:
[218:33] But rebuilding the Focian Wall would take time, and they wanted to make sure it was ready when the main army arrived. To secure the pass and begin the work of rebuilding this wall, the Spartans bent the rules and sent a small unit of only 300 soldiers, led by a son of King Cleomenes, a man whose name meant son of the lion. His name was Leonidas. Leonidas and his small contingent were to rendezvous at Thermopylae with a number of soldiers gathered from other Greek allies, totalling about 7,000 men, and ensure that no Persian advance party slipped through the pass. It was not a large army, but it wasn't small either. In fact, it was only a few thousand smaller than the force that had beat the Persians at Marathon. But Xerxes's army had moved faster than anyone realised. The Persians arrived at the pass of Thermopylae in early August to find only this small holding force stationed between the mountains and the sea, blocking their way. The Greeks under Leonidas were taken completely by surprise, and an awkward standoff ensued. At first, Xerxes didn't believe that the Greeks actually intended to fight in this narrow pass. They were outnumbered as much as ten to one, and in fact, the Persian king waited there for four days, expecting the Greeks to withdraw. But on the fourth day, they were still there, blocking his only path. Frustrated at the lack of progress, Xerxes ordered his men to attack. But the Greeks were perfectly suited to this kind of warfare. Greek hoplites were heavily armoured and carried large round shields, fighting in a shield wall with long seven-foot spears that kept their enemy at bay. On an open battlefield, they were naturally weak to cavalry and vulnerable to being surrounded. But in the narrow pass of Thermopylae, these weaknesses evaporated, and they simply refused to budge. Persian warriors on the whole were lightly equipped, designed to move fast and travel long distances across the empire to fight wherever they were needed. They were also from a culture with nomadic warrior roots that may have viewed the heavy armour of the Greeks as an expression of cowardice. The Greeks in turn looked down on the Persian tactics, and considered the bow and arrow to be a cowardly weapon. Herodotus describes the ensuing combat.

Speaker 2:
[222:02] When the Persians moved forward and attacked the Greeks, there fell many of them, and others kept coming up continually. And during these onsets it is said that the king, looking on, three times leapt up from his seat, struck with fear for his army.

Speaker 9:
[222:23] Next, the Persians tried to pelt the Greeks with arrows to weaken their position, but this bombardment only rained down on the broad shields of the hotlights. And soon the Greeks were even cracking jokes about it.

Speaker 2:
[222:41] The Spartan Dionysus is said to have proved himself the best man of all. Being informed by one of the men of Traxxas that when the barbarians discharged their arrows, they obscured the light of the sun by the multitude of the arrows, he was not dismayed by this. He said that their guest from Traxxas brought them very good news, for if the Medes obscured the light of the sun, the battle against them would be in the shade.

Speaker 9:
[223:16] The fighting went on for three days. Throughout this time, the Greeks rotated out the men who fought at the front of their lines so they didn't become exhausted. And by this time, Xerxes' frustration must have grown to genuine concern. The pass of Thermopylae had been held to great effect by only 7,000 men, and he began to realise that if the main force of Greeks arrived, probably three or four times that number, it might hold out forever, and his invasion of Greece would stop right there on the rocky shore of the Malian Gulf. But in the end, Xerxes would prevail, and his victory would come not at the tip of a spear, but with Persian experience at the careful and meticulous gathering of intelligence. Wherever they went, they were adept at developing a network of spies and informers, and everywhere the flash of Persian gold, each coin stamped with the symbol of an archer, paid the way to the information they needed. At Thermopylae, they soon found a local man who was able to show them another pass through the mountains, concealed with forests of oak.

Speaker 2:
[224:44] Ephialtes, the son of Eurydamus, came to Xerxes and was admitted to a conference. Stirred by the hope of receiving a rich reward at the king's hands, he had come to tell him of the pathway which led across the mountain to Thermopylae, by which disclosure he brought destruction on the band of Greeks, who had there withstood the barbarians.

Speaker 9:
[225:14] This path would allow them to cut off, surround, and utterly destroy the army, blocking the Thermopylae pass. When the Greeks heard of the Persian plan, they saw that they would be surrounded, and King Leonidas knew that the battle was lost. He ordered the rest of the army to retreat, and stayed behind with his royal bodyguard, and some assorted Thespian and Theban allies to hold the pass a little while longer. This was an act of personal bravery by the Spartans who remained, but it was also a tactical necessity. If the whole army retreated, Persian heavy cavalry would have pursued them and likely cut them down to a man. Spartan hoplites had also been raised within a brutal warrior culture that demanded their sacrifice in battle. Men who returned from losing battles were often treated as cowards and shunned in Spartan society. Even two men who Leonidas sent away from Thermopylae due to injuries were treated as outcasts when they returned to the city, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 2:
[226:44] When Aristodemus returned to Sparta, reproached and disgrace awaited him. No Spartan would give him a light to kindle his fire, or so much as address a word to him. All spoke of him as the coward. Another of the three hundred is likewise said to have survived the battle, a man named Pantitis.

Speaker 9:
[227:20] For Xerxes, the battle at Thermopylae had been a resounding victory. He had surprised his enemy before their reinforcements were able to arrive, outmaneuvered them on their home soil, and forced them to retreat from the chokepoint they had hoped to defend. And, thrown into the bargain, he had cut off and killed one of the two kings of Sparta, meaning that a child now sat on one of its thrones. For the Greeks, Thermopylae was a sorry defeat, tactically and strategically. But virtually from the moment the battle ended, they began putting it to another purpose. That was of propaganda. The legend of the heroic last stand of Leonidas would be repeated over and over, and used as a rallying call to other Greeks to fight against the Persians. Herodotus himself was so inspired by the story of the battle, that he claimed to have memorized the names of all 300 of the Spartans who fought there.

Speaker 2:
[228:36] Leonidas fell fighting bravely, together with many other famous Spartans, whose names I have taken care to learn on account of their great worthiness, as indeed I have those of all the 300.

Speaker 9:
[228:55] At the same time that the battle of Thermopylae was going on, the Greek fleet had also clashed with the Persian Navy at the nearby straits of Artemisium, and on the sea the contest was a little more even. Both sides took heavy losses, but the heavily outnumbered Greek fleet was forced to retreat when they heard about the defeat at Thermopylae. Their ships were scattered and limped home to the island of Salamis, which sits just off the Athenian coast. With the final choke point on the way to Athens now overcome, the Persian Army eagerly advanced into southern Greece, looting and burning as they went. The Athenians hoped that the Spartans would help defend their city, but they would be disappointed. Sparta withdrew all its forces right back to the Peloponnese Peninsula, where they began building a wall across its narrow isthmus of Corinth, trying to achieve there what they had failed to do at Thermopylae. But that meant that the city of Athens was left all but defenceless. Realizing that they were now alone, the Athenians fled the city. The refugees boarded ships and escaped to the nearby island of Salamis, leaving Athens a ghost town.

Speaker 2:
[230:38] They made a proclamation that every Athenian should save his children and servants as he best could. Thereupon, most of them sent the members of their households to Trosun, and some to Agena and Salamis.

Speaker 9:
[230:56] The Persians swept into the deserted city, killed a few determined defenders holed up in the Acropolis, and burned Athens to the ground. Its tightly packed houses of wood and mud brick burned swiftly. The burning of Sardis had finally been avenged. Xerxes must have been delighted. In only four months, he had achieved the dream of his father, and now stood upon the smouldering ruins of Athens. His invasion had been a roaring success, and his enemies now scattered before him. All he needed to do was round on the now isolated city of Sparta, break through their makeshift Corinthian wall, and crush them completely. At the sight of the Persian army on the horizon, it's likely that Sparta's helot underclass would have taken the opportunity to rebel, and facing their enemies from within and without, and the last independent power in Greece would have fallen. But this Xerxes didn't do. Instead, he made an enormous mistake. Against the advice of one of his chief naval commanders, a queen named Artemisia of Halicarnassus, he ordered his fleet to round on the island of Salamis, where the Athenian refugees were sheltering, and destroy what remained of the Greek ships harbored there. This Greek fleet had actually been built only three years earlier on the urging of a particular Athenian statesman named Themistocles, as Herodotus recounts.

Speaker 2:
[233:02] Now there was a certain Athenian, by name Themistocles, who had lately risen to be among their chief men. Themistocles persuaded the Athenians to build two hundred ships of war, compelling the Athenians to become sailors.

Speaker 9:
[233:25] These ships were of the latest design, large and heavy warships that dwarfed the smaller Persian ships. But they were also drastically outnumbered by the Persian fleet, which had perhaps 500 vessels. Now sure of victory, the Persians sailed in and descended on the scattered Athenians. But things would not go to Xerxes' plan. Once again, the Greeks chose their battlefield well. In the cramped straits of Salamis, the Persian warships were forced to cram together, preventing their oars from moving. Meanwhile, the Greeks knew the winds and currents of these waters. Some of them would have been sailing and fishing there since they were children. They rammed into the flanks of the trapped Persian fleet to devastating effect. The playwright Aeschylus, likely an eyewitness of the battle, and who would lose his brother in the fighting, would write the following description of the carnage.

Speaker 5:
[234:44] When the mass of their ships had been crowded in the narrows, and none could render another aid, and each crashed its bronze prow against each of its own line, they splintered their whole bank of oars. Then the Greek galleys hemmed them in and battered them on every side. The shores and reefs were crowded with dead, and every ship that formed a part of the barbarian fleet plied its oars in disorderly flight. Groans and shrieks together filled the open sea until the face of Black Knight hid the scene.

Speaker 9:
[235:37] The Battle of Salamis was a disaster. Among the dead were several of Xerxes's own brothers and countless Persian noblemen from the court of Persepolis. When news reached the Persians of what had happened, Herodotus imagines their reaction.

Speaker 2:
[236:00] When the first message came to Susa, telling that Xerxes had taken Athens, it gave such delight to the Persians who were left at home, that they strewn all the roads with myrtle boughs and burnt incense and gave themselves up to sacrificial feasts and jollity. But the second message, coming on the heels of the first, so confounded them, that they all rent their tunics and cried and lamented without ceasing.

Speaker 9:
[236:37] Once the dust of the battle had settled, Xerxes must have realised the enormity of his mistake. His fleet was a crucial element in his invasion. With it destroyed, his army now had no way of getting supplies from the Persian mainland. And they feared being stranded in Europe, as Herodotus describes.

Speaker 2:
[237:04] When Xerxes was aware of the calamity that had befallen him, he feared lest the Greeks might sail to the Hellespont to break his bridges, and he might be cut off in Europe and in peril of his life. And so he planned to flee.

Speaker 9:
[237:26] Xerxes soon departed, and took more than half of his army with him. His most capable troops he left in the care of the veteran general Mardonius, and took the rest north, crossing back over his bridges of boats. The reasons for this departure we can never know. Herodotus paints a picture of a cowardly king fleeing in panic, but it may not have looked like this from the Persian side. They had achieved virtually all of their war aims, and the king had to return home to participate in the ceremonial calendar of Persian royalty. He may have assumed that the war was simply over. But regardless, the king's departure certainly emboldened the Greeks. In 479 BC, the Greek allies were able to amass an enormous force, perhaps the largest Greek army ever gathered, and marched out to meet the Persians, who were still camped in the ruins of Athens. When he heard that this army was approaching, the Persian general Mardonius ordered that everything left standing in the city be torn down to the very foundations. Then he retreated to a wide plain, at a place called Platea. There, the combined forces of Athens and Sparta converged on the Persians, and the twenty to thirty thousand Greek allies who fought alongside them. Now surrounded, exhausted, and cut off from their supplies, and with their king departed for home, the Persians were finally overcome.

Speaker 2:
[239:26] So long as Mardonius was alive, the Persians stood their ground and defended themselves, overthrowing many Spartans. But when Mardonius was slain, and his guards, who were the strongest part of the army, then the rest too yielded and gave ground.

Speaker 9:
[239:48] The Persian army retreated from the battle to their fortified camp, which the Greeks surrounded. They breached the walls and began a general slaughter that left few alive. The general Mardonius was killed. From this moment on, the Persian force that Xerxes had brought to Greece was no more, and all Persian attempts to conquer the Greek mainland came to an end. But Xerxes for his part put a typical Persian spin on the situation. On one of his inscriptions he had carved at Persepolis, he includes one oblique reference that many think refers to this disastrous campaign.

Speaker 1:
[240:51] When I became king, there was one among the countries which was in disorder. By the favor of Ahura Mazda, I overwhelmed that country and put it in its proper place.

Speaker 9:
[241:14] Despite Xerxes's attempts to spin it, the defeat in Greece was not a minor setback for the empire. Persia had marched across the Hellespont with a huge force of men, brought from every corner of its domain, and these had been all but eradicated. In Egypt, women let their hair fall loose and scattered sand on their heads, as incense drifted through the streets. In Babylon, wives tore their robes and sat in silence with ash on their faces. In Media, riders wore black wool and led their horses unbridled through the streets. And everywhere, the empire's failure would have been understood. Even in the Persian royal court, a significant period of mourning must have followed. Xerxes' own sister was the wife of the general Mardonius, who he had abandoned to fight at Platea. And a multitude of courtiers now lay at the bottom of the Bay of Salamis. The campaign was a strategic disaster too. For the next fifty years, the Persian Empire would have to contend with the fleets of the emboldened Greek states buzzing like hornets around its western fringes. And whenever a rebellion flared up anywhere in Persia, the Greeks made sure to support it. But the blow was far from a fatal one, and in fact the Persian Empire continued to flourish for another 150 years. And during this time, it continued to export its influence overseas. Over the next decades, while the Greeks rebuilt their devastated cities, they regaled each other with tales of the Persian Wars, now as momentous in their minds as the Trojan War once had been. The playwright Aeschylus, himself a veteran of many of the battles, delighted Athenian audiences by putting words into the mouth of Xerxes himself in his play, The Persians, which he debuted only eight years after the Battle of Salamis.

Speaker 1:
[244:10] Alas, wretched I am, who have met this cruel doom, which did not give the faintest sign of its coming. In what savage mood has fortune trampled upon the Persian race? What misery is yet in store for me? Unhappy wretch! The land bewails her native youth, slaughtered for Xerxes, who has crowded the underworld with Persians slain.

Speaker 9:
[244:47] But as much as they enjoyed stories of their underdog victory, throughout the decades that followed, Greeks and especially Athenians began to develop a taste for Persian things. One of the biggest influences on Athens was in the realm of fashion. By the middle of the 5th century BC, we can see from painted vases that clothes with sleeves began to appear on Athenian streets, patterned in Persian styles. Some of these garments were made in Athens, but others were actually imported from Persia itself. Archaeologists have found traces of Indian cotton and Chinese silk in Athenian graves beginning around this time, showing that Persian goods were flowing into the city in record amounts. Athenians also began wearing Persian style slippers on their feet. In his work, A History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides criticizes the Athenian love of these Eastern fashions.

Speaker 3:
[246:06] The Athenians were the first to lay aside their weapons, and to adopt an easier and more luxurious mode of life. Indeed, their rich old men had the luxury of wearing undergarments of linen, and fastening a knot of their hair with a tie of golden grasshoppers.

Speaker 9:
[246:24] For a long time, Greeks had particularly mocked the Persian custom of carrying parasols to protect themselves from the sun. But in the decades following the Persian Wars, wealthy Greeks in Athens themselves began carrying parasols. And for the especially wealthy Athenians, they imitated Persian kings in having their slaves carry the parasols for them. It has even been suggested that when the Greeks rebuilt the Parthenon at the heart of the Athenian Acropolis, on top of the rubble left by the Persians, the Athenians imitated the styles of the palaces of Persia. In particular, the Persepolis freezes. Just like the palace of Persepolis, the Parthenon marbles show all the peoples of the Athenian lands, bringing goods and tribute to the great city. It's possible that the craftsmen they brought in to do the work had also honed their craft while working on Persian palaces. The great King Xerxes never let go of his obsession. Over the next decade, he gathered another army and fleet in order to crush what was now an open rebellion among Greek city-states all along the western coast of his empire. But these forces were destroyed in the Battle of Eurymedon in 469 BC, a daring strike by the Greeks that actually took place in Persian lands, as Thucydides recounts.

Speaker 3:
[248:22] The Athenians won both battles on the same day and captured and destroyed the whole Phoenician fleet, consisting of 200 vessels.

Speaker 9:
[248:33] This battle was a symptom of just how emboldened the Greeks had now become. Perhaps it was this final defeat that would have turned Xerxes away from Greece forever, but we will never know. That's because four years later, in the autumn of 465 BC, a commander of the king's bodyguard named Artabanus conspired along with a palace eunuch to seize the throne, as the Greek writer Tisius recounts.

Speaker 4:
[249:11] Artabanus, the commander of the guard, plotted against Xerxes. He went in by night to the king's chamber and slew him while he slept.

Speaker 9:
[249:23] The son and heir of Xerxes, named Darius, was also killed in the violence that suddenly engulfed the palace. When the conspiracy was discovered, another of Xerxes' sons drew his sword and came to revenge his father. He managed to kill the plotting eunuch and the general Artabanus and foil their plan. This man's name in old Persian was Artakhshatra, or he who holds power through truth. But in Greek, he would come to be known as Artakh-Xerxes. King Artaxerxes seems to have had a quite different temperament to his rash and vengeful father Xerxes. We can see this demonstrated in the story of the incredible career of one Athenian Greek who had been instrumental in the defeat of Xerxes only 30 years earlier. That was the Athenian statesman and admiral Themistocles. Themistocles was the man who had first convinced the Athenians to build a fleet, and he had commanded it during the pivotal battle of Salamis. He was perhaps the one man most responsible for repelling the Persian invasion, but in the years since, Themistocles had fallen out of favour in Athens. Eventually, its citizens voted to ostracise him from the city, a kind of exile. Humiliated and outcast, Themistocles then left Greece. But instead of fading into obscurity, he took the decision to travel to Persia, where he presented himself at the court of the son of his great enemy, King Artaxerxes. This was an especially daring move, because in Persia, Themistocles actually had a bounty on his head, set at 200 talents or more than five metric tons of silver. But when Themistocles presented himself before the new Persian king of kings, Artaxerxes seemed more amused than anything, as Plutarch recounts.

Speaker 5:
[252:22] When he had come into the king's presence, the king welcomed him and spake him kindly, and said he already owed the Greek 200 talents. For since he had delivered himself up, it was only just that he should receive the reward proclaimed for his capture.

Speaker 9:
[252:41] The king next asked Themistocles to explain why he had come before him, but the Greek apologized that he had not yet learned the Persian language.

Speaker 5:
[252:54] Themistocles answered that the speech of man was like embroidered tapestries, since when it was rolled up, it concealed and distorted its patterns. For this reason, he had need of time. Themistocles asked for a year, and in that time, he learned the Persian language sufficiently to have interviews with the king by himself, without interpreters.

Speaker 9:
[253:21] Themistocles soon became a trusted advisor to the Persian king, and over the next six or seven years, taught him how to deal with his Greek enemies. And perhaps partly due to the advice of the man who had once destroyed his father's fleet, Atak Xerxes struck upon a new way of handling the Greek problem. By this time, the Athenians were becoming so bold that they were actually supporting a rebellion in Egypt, clearly aiming to break the Persian Empire apart piece by piece. In response, Artaxerxes began a policy so simple and effective that its remarkable no Persian king had thought of it before. He began pouring funds towards Athens' enemies in Greece, and the greatest rival of Athens was of course Sparta. The Greek writer Thucydides wrote the following description of what happened next.

Speaker 6:
[254:37] For a short time, the Greek League held together, till the Spartans and Athenians quarreled, and made war upon each other with their allies, a duel into which all the Greeks sooner or later were drawn, though some might at first remain neutral, so that the whole period from the Persian War to this, with some peaceful intervals, was spent by each power in war.

Speaker 9:
[255:07] This conflict would become known as the Peloponnesian War, and it would rage for nearly three decades after 431 BC. During all this time, the Persians made sure to put all of their resources at Sparta's disposal. And in exchange, the Greeks were willing to give the Persians concessions that up to that point had seemed unthinkable. They would soon relinquish any claim to the Greek cities in Asia Minor, as the following treaty proposed between Persia and Sparta states.

Speaker 2:
[255:50] Whatever country or cities the king has, or the king's ancestors had, shall be the king's. And whatever came into the Athenians from these cities, either money or any other thing, the king and the Spartans shall jointly hinder the Athenians from receiving. The war with the Athenians shall be carried on jointly by the king and by the Spartans and their allies.

Speaker 9:
[256:20] Sparta had always been a land power and had hardly any navy, something that put them at a disadvantage to the Athenians in war. But the Persians funded the construction of a large fleet for Sparta to match the Athenians at sea and to ensure that the war dragged on for as long as possible. Some decades later, during the Corinthian War that followed, the Persians would in turn fund the Athenians to build a new fleet of their own, to destroy a Spartan fleet that the Persians had also funded. While this policy may have seemed circular and a little ridiculous, it successfully kept the major cities of Greece occupied fighting one another. Never again would they marshal the kind of united force that had defeated the Persians at Platea. One Spartan king would later remark bitterly that the Greeks had been defeated by 10,000 Persian archers, meaning not an army, but the symbol of an archer that the empire stamped on each one of its gold coins. With this shrewd foreign policy, the Persian Empire's western border finally achieved a level of stability. Artaxerxes ruled for 41 years, longer than either of the more famous kings, Darius or Xerxes, and his rule was arguably more successful. His shrewd foreign policy coupled with domestic stability, and the empire flourished. But after his death in 424 BC, the trouble began. His son Xerxes II would rule for only 45 days, before two of his brothers plotted to depose him. One of these brothers named Sogdianus took the throne, but ruled for only six months before himself being deposed. The empire returned to some degree of stability during the 20-year reign of King Darius II, but when he died in 404 BC, it would once more return to a bloody and destructive state of civil war. This conflict came about due to a rivalry between two of Darius' sons, his eldest son Arceus and the younger son Cyrus. While Arceus had always been favoured by his father the king, as a thoughtful and pragmatic young man, Cyrus was the most beloved of their mother, as the Greek writer Xenophon records.

Speaker 7:
[259:38] Darius had two sons, the elder was named Arceus and the younger Cyrus. Now, as Darius lay sick and felt that the end of life drew near, he wished both his sons to be with him. But Cyrus' mother had more love for Cyrus than for Arceus upon his throne.

Speaker 9:
[259:59] When Darius died, his chosen heir Arceus became king, and took on the throne name Artaxerxes II. But his brother Cyrus would not be satisfied. Artaxerxes soon uncovered a plot by Cyrus to kill him, and take the throne for himself. Artaxerxes had his brother arrested, and dragged before the court to answer for himself. Everyone expected Cyrus to be executed for his crime, but at the last moment their mother intervened. She threw herself before the king, and pleaded for her favorite son's life. Moved by his mother's pleas, Artaxerxes chose to let his brother go, and instead sent him away back to his home province of Lydia. But this would turn out to be a mistake.

Speaker 7:
[261:04] Artaxerxes laid hands upon Cyrus, desiring to put him to death, but his mother made intercession for him, and instead he sent him back again in safety to his province. Cyrus then, having so escaped through peril and dishonor, fell to considering, not only how he might avoid ever again being in his brother's power, but how, if possible, he might become king in his stead.

Speaker 9:
[261:34] Back in his home province, Cyrus began gathering an army in secret. This force would include 20,000 warriors of his own, but he knew this wouldn't be enough. To supplement his forces, he hired 12,000 mercenaries. Of these 10,000 were Greek hoplites, come to sell their spears in Persia. With the addition of these Greeks, the would-be usurper Cyrus now commanded the largest army of hoplites anywhere in the world, twice the size of the Spartan army at the time. Among these 10,000 was the Greek writer and adventurer Xenophon. Once the war began, Xenophon and his 10,000 men marched across Persia under the command of Cyrus. On his journey, Xenophon was impressed by the sights of the empire, among them several pontoon bridges of the kind that the Persians excelled in, and a number of Persian garden paradises.

Speaker 7:
[262:53] Thus Cyrus set out from Sardis and marched on and on through Lydia to the river Meander. That river is 200 feet broad, but was spanned by a bridge consisting of seven boats. Crossing it, he marched to Kelenay, a popular city, large and prosperous. Here Cyrus owned a palace and a large pack full of wild beasts, which he used to hunt on horseback whenever he wished to give himself or his horses exercise. Through the midst of the park flows the river.

Speaker 9:
[263:29] The usurper Cyrus finally met his brother in battle at a place called Kunaxa. There in the midst of the melee, he saw the king Ataxerxes. Cyrus charged into the thick of the fighting, as Xenophon describes.

Speaker 7:
[263:50] With the cry of, I see the man, Cyrus rushed upon him and struck him in the breast and wounded him through his breastplate. While Cyrus was delivering his stroke, however, someone hit him with a hard blow under the eye with a javelin, and then followed a struggle between the king and Cyrus and the attendants who supported each of them.

Speaker 9:
[264:13] While reeling from this wound, Cyrus was stabbed in the leg, and fell to the ground where his head struck a stone, and he was killed. Xenophon's Greeks had carried themselves well in the battle, but now with the usurper dead, his cause died with him. His army scattered in all directions, and the Greeks had to flee back westwards as fast as they could, with the Persians chasing close behind. The War of the Brothers was over, but Artaxerxes' reign, although a long one at 46 years, was to be a troubled one. Egypt successfully rebelled against him at the start of his rule, and his attempts to retake it would fail. In fact, Egypt would leave the Empire entirely for a full 60 years. This imperial failure emboldened others, and soon further rebellions spread all around the Empire. One of these, known as the Great Satraps Revolt, saw Western satrapies in Asia Minor such as Lydia, Armenia, and Phrygia rise up against Artaxerxes' rule. Added to this, the Greeks of Sparta were now aiding the rebels. The writer Diodorus Siculus writes about the situation the king faced, as the whole Empire seemed to rise up in revolt.

Speaker 8:
[265:57] The inhabitants of the Asiatic coast revolted from Persia, and some of the satraps and generals rising in insurrection made war on Artaxerxes. At the same time, Tacos, the Egyptian king, decided to fight the Persians, and prepared ships and gathered infantry forces. At one and the same time, he had to fight the Egyptian king, the Greek cities of Asia, the Spartans, and the allies of these who had agreed upon making common cause with them.

Speaker 9:
[266:25] To quell these rebellions, the king increasingly relied on the services of mercenaries, many of them Greeks. Using these forces, he was able to put down the revolt by 362 BC, but each conflict was ruinously expensive, and the empire must have felt increasingly fragile as the decades of the mid-fourth century wore on. His son, Ataxerxes III, carried on in this vein. He led one unsuccessful campaign to recapture Egypt, but managed it on his second try. But Egypt, by that point, had had a taste of freedom and would never again sit happily within the empire. Due to their constant rebellions, Ataxerxes III set about a reign of terror in Egypt, during which many were killed and temples were destroyed. He raised taxes there to punishingly cruel amounts, hoping to impoverish the Egyptians and reduce their ability to rebel. One Egyptian text known as the Demotic Chronicle seems to record this time of hardship and cruelty.

Speaker 2:
[267:50] Our lakes and our islands are full of tears. The houses of the people of Egypt don't have people to live in them. The Persians will massacre them. They will take their houses and live there. They are massacring the people of Egypt while the sun looks on.

Speaker 9:
[268:10] The Persian Empire had always ruled with a degree of compromise and consent from its subjects, but now that era was coming to an end. But the end of the Persian Empire would not come through rebellion. In the final years of Artaxerxes' reign, he became concerned about the growing threat of one northerly Greek kingdom, one that was slowly gathering power to itself and achieving what neither Athens nor Sparta had ever been able to do, the near unification of Greece under a single king. That power was Macedon, and the man who ruled it was named Philip. Macedon had once been a Persian subject. They had helped King Xerxes during his invasion of Greece, but after the Persian withdrawal from Europe, following their defeat at the Battle of Platea, Macedon was left to its own devices. It had flourished as a Persian subject, and adopted elements of the Persian courtly culture into its royal palaces. Although they spoke a dialect of Greek and shared many aspects of Greek culture, the Macedonians were always considered outsiders by the Athenians and other Southern Greeks. They looked down on Macedonians as brash and rough, and were shocked at their seemingly barbarian customs. They married multiple wives, drank their wine without watering it down, and rode and hunted on horseback. In fact, the Macedonian cavalry was among the most skilled in the region. The king of Macedon was a man named Philip II. He had become king at the age of 23, at a time when the kingdom was struggling, faced with numerous powerful Greek rivals. But over the next decades, he, along with his generals and advisors, continued a series of rapid reforms that led to enormous success. A key part of this success was Philip's reforming of the Macedonian army. For centuries, Greek soldiers had fought in phalanxes, a formation where they locked their shields together and formed a bristling wall of spears. The Greeks had used this formation to devastating effect on battlefields like Marathon and Thermopylae. These spears were 2 to 3 meters in length, and since they were longer than the spears used by the Persians, they had allowed Greek soldiers a crucial tactical advantage, allowing multiple lines of men to engage the enemy at once. Philip's new idea was quite simple– to make these spears even longer. In fact, they would be about as long as it was possible for a man to carry, about five to seven metres in length, as tall as a lamp post. The Roman writer Polybius describes the formation of these phalanxes.

Speaker 10:
[271:58] When the phalanx has its characteristic virtue and strength, nothing can sustain its frontal attack or withstand the charge. For since, when it has closed up for action, the length of the pikes is sixteen cubits. Thus, each man of the first rank must have the points of five pikes extending beyond him, each at a distance of two cubits from the next.

Speaker 9:
[272:26] These spears would form a bristling porcupine that was able to effortlessly hold enemy troops at bay. And while the enemy was thus held in place, the Macedonian heavy cavalry would sweep into their sides, like a hammer on an anvil. This combination of pike and horse was so effective that in little more than ten years, Philip of Macedon was able to conquer a large area of mainland Greece, and even defeated the ancient cities of Athens and Thebes. After that, he founded an alliance known as the League of Corinth, a confederacy of Greek cities that recognized Macedon and Philip as the ruler of all Greece. But Philip was not content. He believed that across the sea, the Empire of Persia was now a weakened edifice. It had expended its strength on internal rebellions and civil wars, but had also grown complacent when it came to outside threats. Their soldiers hadn't fought a battle against a foreign enemy in decades. Their tactics were outdated, and their commanders were inexperienced. Meanwhile, the Macedonians had honed their skills over years of combat within Greece. Now, with virtually all Greece united around him, Philip set his sights on Asia. Whether King Artaxerxes III would have been able to meet the disaster that was about to land on his shores, we will never know, since he would meet his end in another episode of Persian court intrigue. In the year 338 BC, a court eunuch called Bagoas plotted with the king's physician to poison him. After that, Bagoas installed the king's youngest son on the throne, presumably intending to use him as a puppet. But when the young boy wasn't as pliable as he hoped, he had him poisoned too. Then Bagoas installed a distant relative named Artaxerxes to rule. This man would take the throne name of Darius III, and one of his first acts was quite wisely to have the poisoning eunuch Bagoas killed by drinking his own poison. Darius was about 44 years old when he came to the throne. As a young man, he had distinguished himself as a warrior, once killing an enemy on the battlefield in single combat, and had been awarded by being made the satrap of Armenia. But his warrior days were now well behind him, and he had spent the last years as the head of the empire's postal service, a distinguished but relatively peaceful position. He had come to the throne in peculiar and murky circumstances, and people's faith in his rule must have been fragile. What Darius III needed was time. Time to shore up loyalty among his satraps. Time to cement his hold on power in the empire. Time to ensure the quality of his fighting forces. But time was the one thing that Darius didn't have. That's because on the other side of the sea, at the same time as the new king Darius was being crowned, another assassination took place. In Macedon, in the capital of Aegi, the Macedonian king Philip II was celebrating the wedding of one of his daughters. Diodorus Siculus paints a picture of the scene.

Speaker 8:
[277:07] He wanted as many Greeks as possible to take part in the festivities in honor of the gods, and so planned brilliant musical contests and lavish banquets for his friends and guests. But, as the praises and congratulations of all rang in his ears, suddenly, without warning, the plot against the king was revealed, as death struck.

Speaker 9:
[277:31] From the crowd, a man bearing a dagger stepped forwards.

Speaker 8:
[277:39] When Philip directed his attending friends to proceed him into the theatre, while the guards kept their distance, he saw that the king was left alone, rushed at him, pierced him through his ribs, and stretched him out dead.

Speaker 9:
[277:55] According to ancient sources, this man killed Philip because the king had failed to punish one of his vassals who had abused him. It was a story of petty court rivalries and wounded honour. But the king's young son and heir believed differently. He believed that his father had been killed by a trained assassin, paid for by their great rivals across the sea, the Persian Empire, and the new king of kings, Darius III. Now Philip's Macedonian Empire and its revolutionary and battle-hardened army would pass on to his son, whose heart was filled with rage and thoughts of vengeance. A young man of about 20, whose name meant defender of men, from the Greek Alexein, to defend, and Andros, men. His name was Alexandros, but we know him as Alexander. Just as with previous conquerors like Cyrus the Great, the life of Alexander has been pieced together from incomplete and fragmentary sources, all of them written down centuries after he was born, and often far away in the Roman Empire, although some do draw on earlier texts that have been lost. What we do know is that during the first two years of his reign as king of Macedon, the young Alexander distinguished himself for his ruthlessness and brutality. After the death of Philip, the cities of southern Greece saw their opportunity for freedom from Macedonian control. The city of Thebes broke out in open rebellion, and Alexander marched south to crush them. He spent much of his youth accompanying his father on campaign, and he was well-versed in the Macedonians' innovative style of warfare. He captured the city of Thebes and utterly destroyed it, massacring its population and selling 30,000 of its people into slavery, as Diodorus of Sicily recounts.

Speaker 8:
[280:51] As the slaughter mounted and every corner of the city was piled high with corpses, no one could have failed to pity the plight of the unfortunates. So it was that many terrible things befell the city. Greeks were mercilessly slain by Greeks, relatives were butchered by their own relatives, and even a common dialect induced no pity.

Speaker 9:
[281:16] The selling of Greeks into slavery was still considered a great taboo, and it was a clear sign that Alexander intended to continue ruling over Greece with an iron fist. In Thebes, Alexander left only the temples to the gods standing, and reportedly a house that had once belonged to the poet Pindar whom he admired. With the rest of Greece now terrified into line, Alexander set out on what had been his father's great ambition, a full-scale invasion of the Persian Empire, now infused with all the impetuousness of youth, as Diodorus of Sicily describes.

Speaker 8:
[282:07] The king returned with his army to Macedonia, assembled his military commanders and his noblest friends, and posed for discussion the plan for crossing over to Asia. His generals advised him to produce an heir first, and then to turn his hand to so ambitious an enterprise. But Alexander was eager for action, and opposed to any postponement.

Speaker 9:
[282:33] That Alexander was a young man who had never lost a battle was reason enough for him to be confident. But all his life he had also been told that he was descended from the mythical demigod Heracles through his father's line. He had also grown up reading the stories of Homer's Iliad, a story of a great war in the east, and he was inspired by the story of the great hero Achilles. All of this combined to make him a man of singular and remorseless focus. In spring of 334 BC, Alexander crossed the Hellespont with 30,000 to 40,000 of Macedon's best warriors. When the local Persian satraps heard about the arrival of this army, they gathered their own forces, along with a few thousand Greek mercenaries, and went out to meet him. One Greek general from Rhodes, a man named Memnon, who, like Themistocles, had come to Persia to seek his fortune, acted as an advisor to the western satraps. He advised the Persians not to fight Alexander with their inexperienced forces, and instead to adopt a scorched earth policy, luring his men into the interior, and denying them any food or supplies, as the Roman period writer Arian recounts.

Speaker 3:
[284:14] Memnon, the Rhodian, advised them not to risk a conflict with the Macedonians, since they were far superior to themselves in infantry, and Alexander was there in person, whereas Darius was not with them. He advised them to advance and destroy the fields by trampling them down under their horses' hooves, to burn the crops in the country, and not even to spare the very cities, for then Alexander will not be able to stay in the land from lack of provisions.

Speaker 9:
[284:47] The Persians, understandably reluctant to burn their own people's property, refused. They met Alexander in battle at the Granicus River, and there his experienced Macedonian spearmen and hardened cavalry smashed the Persian force. Alexander allowed the Persian army to leave the battlefield, but the Greek mercenaries who had fought on the Persian side, he treated with exceptional severity as traitors, as Arrian recounts.

Speaker 3:
[285:24] He soon completely surrounded them and cut them up, so that none of them escaped, except such as might have concealed themselves among the dead bodies.

Speaker 9:
[285:36] From there, he conquered all the way through Asia Minor, capturing Greek cities like Ephesus, Miletus, and Herodotus' hometown of Halicarnassus. The Persians likely assumed that he would stop there, interested only in liberating the Greek-speaking regions of the empire. But to their dismay, Alexander kept going. In autumn of 333 BC, he marched through the Silician gates and down into the region of Syria. Distraught, the Persian king Darius III now marched to meet Alexander. He was able to surprise the Macedonian, sweeping down on the rear of his ranks at a wide plain near a place called Issus, now on the Syrian border with Turkey. Alexander swung around to prevent being cut off, and the armies came together. At first, the Persians had great success. Darius had brought with him a large number of Greek mercenaries, perhaps as many as 12,000 men. And these fared well against the Macedonians. But at a crucial moment in the battle, Alexander made a daring and impetuous gamble. He rode at the head of his cavalry, and led them in a desperate charge directly at Darius himself, ensconced in his royal bodyguard. It was a dangerous and unorthodox move. Darius, seeing that he was the target of this charge, withdrew to a safer position. But this withdrawal began a domino effect among the Persian lines. The historian Aryan recounts what happened next.

Speaker 3:
[287:47] The Persians did not give way until they perceived that Darius had fled. Then at last, there ensued a decided flight and on all sides. The horses of the Persians suffered much injury in the retreat. And the horsemen themselves, being so many in number and retreating in panic terror without any regard to order along narrow roads, were trampled on, and injured no less by each other than by the pursuing enemy.

Speaker 9:
[288:17] The battle was a disaster. Darius barely escaped with his life, and the Persian army was scattered in all directions. As a final devastating blow, Alexander swept into Darius' camp and captured the women of his court, his mother, his wives, and concubines. Humiliated and eager to plead for the safe return of his family, Darius sent an envoy to Alexander. But the Macedonian refused to free the court women, and sent back the following reply to the Persian king.

Speaker 4:
[289:01] Your ancestors invaded Macedonia and the rest of Greece, and did us harm, although we have not done you any previous injury. I have been appointed commander in chief of the Greeks, and it is with the aim of punishing the Persians that I have crossed into Asia.

Speaker 9:
[289:22] To many Greeks, this may have appeared somewhat hypocritical, since Alexander himself had invaded much of Greece alongside his father, and had burned Thebes, one of its most ancient cities, to the ground. Still, Alexander's list of accusations went on.

Speaker 4:
[289:45] My father died at the hands of conspirators instigated by you. You sent unfriendly letters to the Greeks about me, to push them to war against me, and sent money to the Spartans and some other Greeks. But now I have defeated in battle first your generals and satraps, and now you in person in your army. And by the grace of the gods I control the country. Approach me therefore as the Lord of all Asia. If you wish to lay claim to the title of king, then stand your ground and fight for it. Do not take to flight, as I shall pursue you wherever you may be.

Speaker 9:
[290:36] From there, Alexander marched through Palestine, conquering cities as he went. He besieged the Phoenician island city of Tyre, which held out for seven months, after which he ordered its population to be massacred, and 2,000 of its defenders to be crucified along the shoreline for daring to hold out against him. This was an exceptionally brutal act by Greek standards, and few Persian kings had ever used such a gruesome spectacle. In the town of Gaza, Alexander also slaughtered every one of the 10,000 men in the city, and sold the women and children into slavery. When the Persian commander refused to kneel to him, Alexander ordered that he be dragged behind a horse until he died, a punishment likely inspired by Homer's Iliad, in which Achilles drags the Trojan hero Hector behind his chariot. From there he marched into Egypt. There sources claim that he was welcomed with open arms, since the relationship between Egypt and Persia had soured so much in the preceding decades. But really, the Egyptians had little choice. They had been largely disarmed after their recent rebellions, and Alexander had made clear in Tyre and Gaza that he was willing to take revenge against civilian populations who resisted him. In 332 BC, Alexander was crowned pharaoh in Memphis, nearly 200 years after Cyrus the Great's son, Cambyses. After the wounding loss at Issus, Darius III retreated to Babylon, and there began to gather an even more massive army. Seemingly as a ploy to buy time, Darius sent Alexander an envoy, offering to surrender the western half of the empire, everything beyond the river Euphrates, to Alexander. But the Macedonian refused, repeating once again that he was now king of all Asia, and that soon all of Darius' empire would be his. The final decisive clash would occur in 331 BC, when Alexander set out again for Mesopotamia, to confront Darius III for good. On the 20th of September, ten days before the battle, the Babylonian astronomical diaries record that an apocalyptic sign appeared in the heavens just after sunset.

Speaker 2:
[293:45] On the 13th day of the month of Ululu, in the 5th year of Darius, there was an eclipse of the moon, which was entirely darkened as Jupiter set. Saturn was four fingers distant. As the eclipse became total, a westerly wind was blowing. As the moon became visible again, an easterly wind arose. During the eclipse, there were deaths and plagues.

Speaker 9:
[294:19] For the Macedonians, this celestial event was an omen of victory, a sign that a great empire would soon also be eclipsed. But for the Persians, the event was an omen of doom. The two armies met at a small village named Gaugamela on the banks of the river Bumodus near to modern-day Erbil in northern Iraq on the 1st of October 331 BC. During the battle that followed, despite being outnumbered, Alexander once again prevailed, and Darius fled east. Now completely unopposed, Alexander marched to Babylon, and the great cities surrendered without a fight. He entered through the great Ishtar gate and down the processional way in triumph. The Roman period writer, Curtius Rufus, describes this moment.

Speaker 5:
[295:35] Alexander put himself at the head of his column, which he formed into a square, and ordered his men to advance into the city as if they were going into battle. A large number of the Babylonians had taken up a position on the walls, eager to have a view of their new king, but most went out to meet him. They had carpeted the whole road with flowers and garlands, and set up at intervals on both sides, silver altars heaped not just with frankincense, but with all manner of perfumes. Herds of cattle and horses, and lions too, and leopards, carried along in cages. Next came the Magi, chanting a song in their native fashion, and also musicians.

Speaker 9:
[296:26] Alexander and his men were astonished at the sight of Babylon, by far the largest, wealthiest, and most well-developed city they had ever seen.

Speaker 5:
[296:40] It was the city itself, with its beauty and antiquity, that commanded the attention not only of the king, but of all the Macedonians. Its wall is ten meters wide, and it is said that two chariots meeting on it can safely pass each other. The two parts of the city are connected by a stone bridge over the river, and this is also reckoned among the wonders of the east.

Speaker 9:
[297:08] The Macedonians, who had grown up in the hardy mountains of northern Greece, were greatly affected by the sights of the sophisticated and wealthy Persian Empire, and found Persian influences already taking hold of them, as Diodorus of Sicily recounts.

Speaker 8:
[297:28] Alexander began to imitate the Persian luxury and the extravagant display of the kings of Asia. He put on the Persian diadem and dressed himself in the white robe and the Persian sash, and everything else except the trousers and the long-sleeved upper garment. He distributed to his companions cloaks with purple borders. And dressed the horses in Persian harness.

Speaker 9:
[297:55] Others feared that Alexander was less overcoming Persia, and more being overcome by it, as the Roman historian Curtius Rufus remarks.

Speaker 5:
[298:08] In the whole camp, the feeling and the talk of all was that more had been lost by victory than had been gained by war. That they themselves were conquered men when they had surrendered themselves to alien and foreign habits.

Speaker 9:
[298:29] While Alexander reveled in his victory and tried on new clothes, the Persian emperor Darius fled ever further eastwards, up into the Iranian plateau. There he hoped to gather another army, to stop the relentless advance of the Macedonians. And around him, the Persian empire began to collapse. After a month's stay in Babylon, around November 331 BC, Alexander set out in pursuit. The fine Persian roads, dotted with wells, way stations, and supply depots, had once been the empire's great strength, but now they became a liability. Alexander and his men advanced rapidly along these highways, and were soon at the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, the only obstacle now standing between them and the capital of Persepolis. There, in a remarkable echo of the Battle of Thermopylae, a Persian army under the command of Ariobart Sanis, the satrap of Parsa, staged a heroic defense in the mouth of a narrow pass called the Persian Gates. The Persians held this pass for a full month, during which time Alexander's soldiers were brought to a standstill and suffered heavy losses. But just as Xerxes had 150 years earlier, the Macedonians eventually found a narrow path through the mountains and were able to surround the Persian defenders. The path to the Persian capital was now open. In late January of 330 BC, four years after he had landed in Asia, Alexander and his men arrived in Persepolis. The Greek writer Diodorus of Sicily recounts the fine city that Alexander found.

Speaker 8:
[300:58] It was the richest city under the sun, and the private houses had been furnished with every sort of wealth over the years. Many of the houses belonged to the common people and were abundantly supplied with furniture and wearing apparel of every kind. The citadel is a noteworthy one and is surrounded by a triple wall. Scattered about the royal terrace were residences of the kings and quarters for the great generals. All luxuriously furnished and buildings suitably made for guarding the royal treasure.

Speaker 9:
[301:33] Perhaps in retribution for holding out so long at the Persian gates, Alexander ordered his soldiers to treat the people of Persepolis much like those of Tyre and Gaza. They slaughtered all the men and enslaved all the women. The palace they looted with impunity. Archaeology shows that they tore through the halls of Persepolis in haste, ripping gold ornaments from the walls and leaving much behind scattered on the flagstones. Much of the fine stone tableware and everything else too heavy to take with them, they simply smashed on the floor. After picking the palace clean of every gold object they could carry, either deliberately or as a drunken accident according to some sources, Alexander then burned down the royal palace of the great king and much of the city around it. The flames would have been visible for miles, and a great column of black smoke would have climbed into the sky. The thick cedar rafters of the hundred columned halls would have smouldered and finally fallen in. The gold looted from the treasuries of Persepolis supposedly weighed 120,000 talents, or nearly 4,000 tons. The Macedonians needed thousands of camels to carry it away. This gold had been the treasury of the empire that kept its well-oiled machine running. And in looting it, Alexander had ripped the heart out of the Achaemenid system. Next, Alexander marched to Pasargaday, where he briefly stopped at the tomb of Cyrus the Great, as Strabo describes.

Speaker 6:
[303:55] Alexander then went to Pasargaday, and this too was an ancient royal residence. Here he saw also, in a park, the tomb of Cyrus. It was a small tower, and was concealed within the dense growth of trees. He passed through the entrance and saw a golden couch, a table with cups, a golden coffin, and numerous garments and ornaments set with precious stones. And that he saw all these things on his first visit, but that on a later visit, the place had been robbed, and everything had been carried off, and that the robbers had removed the corpse to another place.

Speaker 9:
[304:38] If this is true, then it's clear that Persian royal authority had by that point completely collapsed. From there, Alexander continued to pursue Darius high up into the Iranian Plateau, chasing him a distance of more than a thousand kilometers across the winding roads of the Eastern Empire. But he would not catch him. Darius III was eventually murdered by his own satrap, a man named Besus, high in the hills near Ekbatana. Besus would name himself the new Achaemenid king, even taking the royal name Ataxesixes V, and intending to raise an army in the eastern province of Bactria. But by this time, he controlled only the easternmost quadrant of the empire, and his time would be short. Eventually, Besus was captured, and Alexander perhaps enraged that he had robbed him of the joy of killing himself, and ordered the treacherous general to be flogged, mutilated, and finally killed in an ostentatious display of cruelty. With the death of Besus, Persia was now completely in the hands of Alexander. But his men were exhausted, and it's clear that Alexander was beginning to lose touch with reality. In his escapade across the collapsing empire, he had met with little resistance, and he had begun to believe that he could conquer the entire world, as one anecdote related in Plutarch's Moralia illustrates.

Speaker 5:
[306:31] It is reported that King Alexander the Great, hearing Anaxarchus, the philosopher, discoursing that there were infinite worlds, fell a-weeping, having not good cause to weep, quoth he, that being as there are an infinite number of worlds, I'm not yet the lord of one?

Speaker 9:
[306:52] Finally Alexander reached the easternmost border of the empire that he had destroyed, and even then he wanted to keep on conquering. With the Himalayan mountains rising blue in the far distance, he led an expedition into the Punjab in northern India, and here the adventure came to an end. Alexander's men were by that point used to facing the scattered remnants of Persian resistance, but the moment they left the old empire, they faced the strong independent kingdoms of India, and Alexander's forces struggled, as Plutarch recounts.

Speaker 5:
[307:39] The combat in India was of a more mixed kind, but maintained with such obstinacy, that it was not decided till the eighth hour of the day. As for the Macedonians, this struggle blunted their courage and stayed their further advance into India, for they were told that the kings of India were awaiting them with 80,000 horsemen, 200,000 footmen, 8,000 chariots, and 6,000 fighting elephants.

Speaker 9:
[308:10] While Alexander may have styled himself as the lord of all Asia, in reality, he had only defeated a single power, the Achaemenid Empire, and inherited its ruins. Alexander eventually listened to reason and agreed to turn back. On the return journey to Babylon, for unknown reasons, Alexander declined to use the well-worn Persian road that led inland, and instead ordered his men to march through a waste known as the Gedrosian Desert, now in modern Pakistan. Some sources claim he did this in order to punish his men for refusing to continue on into India, whereas others say he wanted to complete another glorious exploit, like his ancestor Heracles, to add to his growing legend. Either way, the route was a disaster, as the writer Arien describes.

Speaker 3:
[309:16] The blazing heat and the lack of water caused innumerable casualties, of thirst or from the effects of the deep burning sun-baked sand. Sometimes, they met with lofty hills of sand, loose, deep sand into which they sank as if it were mud or untrodden snow. The mules and horses suffered even greater distress from the uneven and treacherous surface of the track.

Speaker 9:
[309:42] It was perhaps at this moment that Alexander might have realized the debt he owed to the Persian road builders who had made his eastward journey so easy.

Speaker 3:
[309:55] The fact that they never knew when they would find water made regular, normal marches impossible. Casualties among the animals were very numerous. Often they were killed deliberately by the men, who butchered the mules and horses whenever supplies gave out and then ate their flesh.

Speaker 9:
[310:13] It was only through a stroke of luck that the army was able to find the sea coast, and followed it west out of the desert and towards home. By some reports, three quarters of Alexander's men died on this stretch of the journey. In the Gedrosian desert, Alexander may have realized that it wasn't so easy conquering, when someone hadn't already done most of the work for you. But what had Alexander conquered? It was an empire that he had no hope of successfully administrating, an empire made up of people who didn't speak his language, held together by an administrative regime he didn't understand, and by the promise of Persian safety, stability, and gold. Alexander didn't have any heirs, since he had left home as a young man and spent his whole adult life chasing glory across Asia. When he returned to Babylon in April of 323 BC, weakened and exhausted from his journey across the Gedrosian desert, Alexander didn't have long left to live. Our story began in the city of Babylon with its rebellion against the Assyrian Empire, and it's in this city that our story will also end. In June, just two months after returning to Babylon, Alexander sickened and died, refusing to name a successor. The territory that had once been the Persian Empire, the largest and wealthiest the world had ever known, was carved up among his generals. These generals and their descendants would spend the next 200 years fighting amongst one another, as Diodorus of Sicily recalls.

Speaker 8:
[312:32] When he was quitting life in Babylon, and at his last breath was asked by his friends to whom he was leaving the kingdom, he said, To the best man, for I foresee that a great combat of my friends will be my funeral games. And this actually happened, for after the death of Alexander, the foremost of his friends quarrelled about the primacy, and joined in many great combats.

Speaker 9:
[313:03] With these wars, the descendants of the Macedonian conquerors would try to put back together what they had broken, to reunify an empire that had ruled instability for more than two centuries. But none of them would succeed. Before long, the Achaemenid Persian Empire was all but forgotten, except as the villains in the stories that the Greeks still told themselves in their streets and theatres. The language of old Persian would gradually pass out of use, along with the use of cuneiform, and as the centuries went by, people forgot how to read the inscriptions still carved into the palaces and pillars, into the stones and cliff faces of the Iranian mountains. The empires that followed, the Sassanians and the Parthians, drew their lineages back to a mythical Iranian heritage, but the legacy of the Achaemenids was remembered only in the tiniest fragments. While some Achaemenid cities like Susa and Ekbatana continued to be important population centers in later periods, others saw a more rapid decline. The garden city of Pasagadai, always more of a royal complex than a true city, was rapidly abandoned. Its blooming parkland would have overgrown with scrub and weeds, its water channels filled with silt and finally stopped working entirely. Its imported trees and shrubs would have died, and before long, the once paradise of the Persian kings would have blown away with the loose layer of topsoil. The blackened ruin of the palaces at Persepolis would stand for some time over the city, and over the following centuries it would decline steadily. Eventually it was little more than a village, and then the people left entirely. Sand and earth would soon blow over the slowly crumbling stones of the palace that still bore the following inscription.

Speaker 1:
[315:33] King of Kings, King of Countries, containing many kinds of men, King in this great earth, far and wide.

Speaker 9:
[315:55] In 1906, the American scholar of Iranian languages, AV. Williams Jackson, traveled through Persia and visited the site of Pasargadai. There, he wrote the following description of its wasted and melancholy appearance.

Speaker 11:
[316:17] Asargadai and Persepolis are sad themes, for both are silent cities of a dead past. Cyrus and Darius still remain in effigy of stone, and the vestiges of royal halls, untenanted for more than two thousand years, bear witness to the departed splendour of a period of grandeur.

Speaker 9:
[316:47] To Jackson, the ruins appeared as reminders of the fearsome power of time.

Speaker 11:
[316:54] Here ruin reigns supreme, and even the tombs that housed the bodies of the dead kings have been crumbling for ages. Time's relentless touch has worn away the clear-cut features of these monuments, and destroyed the beauty of their liniments. Yet they still endure to mark a daily by their shadows the advance of centuries across the dial of eternity.

Speaker 9:
[317:28] Williams Jackson also visited the tomb of Cyrus the Great. He even stepped inside its inner chamber, but what he found disappointed him.

Speaker 11:
[317:42] The condition of the royal chamber is not what it once was. Innumerable graffiti cover the walls, but most inharmonious of all, for it hung all over the place where the body must have lain, was a cord with an incongruous collection of worthless trash, in the way of votive offerings. A piece of rag, a bit of brass, a fragment of a lamp, a bell, a copper ring and whatnot, made up the motley string.

Speaker 9:
[318:21] He turned to leave, but as he did, for a moment, the ancient power of the sight reasserted itself, and for a moment, he felt connected to the monumental nature of the history that had happened here.

Speaker 11:
[318:44] As I slowly descended the deep steps and mounted my horse, the sun sank low behind the western hills. I turned for a last look at the historic shrine. A vision seemed to rise before my view, and I saw in fancy the scene of the last rites of the great king. I still could hear the tramplings of the horses that led the funeral train. The measured tread of the soldiers in clanking armor rang dully on my ear, and the chanting voice of the Magian priest intoning perchance the Zoroastrian psalm, Kham Nimoy Zom, to what land am I going, beat rhythmically through my brain. Then the shroud of darkness fell like a pall upon the plain, and the moon rose slowly over the distant hills.

Speaker 9:
[320:06] The Athenian playwright Aeschylus fought the Persians for much of his life. He had been a hoplite at the Battle of Marathon when he was around 35 years old, and fought again ten years later at the Sea Battle of Salamis, and the final decisive confrontation of Plataea. He would be remembered to history as the father of Greek tragedy, and the writer of more than 70 plays, of which only 7 have survived. But when he died, he wanted to be remembered not for his writing, but for the part he had played on the battlefield. On his gravestone, he asked that the following inscription be left.

Speaker 2:
[321:15] A memory of his failed Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian, who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Jela. Of his noble prowess, the grove of Marathon can speak, and the long-haired Persian knows it well.

Speaker 9:
[321:41] But despite his pride in the part he had taken in these battles, Aeschylus also knew the horrors of war. While his plays glorified Greek victories, they also gave voice to his Persian enemies, and asked his audience to extend the hand of humanity to the Persian men who had died on the beaches and in the fields of Greece for the vanity of kings. In his play The Persians, he offers a kind of lament for all those who had died in these wars. This lament now stands as a kind of epitaph for the entire Persian Empire, as its palaces stood in ruins, its people scattered, and the sun finally set on the Achaemenid world.

Speaker 1:
[322:39] The true guardians are we, of many a temple rich in gold, and holy whom our Lord and King for age and honor has extolled, to watch his land forlorn. For all the strength of Asia born, like hounds at a young master's horn, baying away has flown. From Agbatan, from Susa Tor, from ancient Kisius guarded wall, we saw the horse and chariot go, the gliding ships, the footmen slow. So has the flower of Persia's youth departed, and in fierce longing, full many a wife and mother stay, waiting as day still follows day, and dread the lengthening delay. Therefore does my spirit mourn, robed in darkness, racked with fear, lest a cry the people hear. Woe, woe, woe for Persia's host forlorn, ringing through the wide empty streets of Susa's lonely land.

Speaker 9:
[324:43] Thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast. I'd like to thank my voice actors for this episode, Michael Hajiantonis, Alexandra Boulton, Simon Jackson, Tom Marshall-Lee, Chris Harvey, Jack Jacobs, Nick Denton, Amrit Sandhu, Paul Cassell, Tim Stephenson, and Amin Taher. Readings in Old Persian were performed by Dr. Mateen M. Arghandehpour. In Spanish by Scott Fins. Readings in Greek were performed by Dimitris Chavres. Singing of the Zoroastrian Gathas was performed by Ardalan. The theme music is Home at Last by John Bartmann. Sound design was by Alexey Sibikin. I'd also like to thank my historical advisor for this episode, Dr. Mateen M. Arghandehpour at the University of Oxford. Mateen works with the research team Invisible East, which works to shed new light on the medieval history of Iran, Afghanistan, and neighbouring regions. You can find them on YouTube and social media channels. Major sources used in this episode were Lindsay Allen's The Persian Empire, A History, The Persian Empire edited by Amelie Kurt, Persians The Age of the Great Kings by Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, Ancient Persia by Matt Waters, and A History of Ancient Persia by Maria Brosius. A full list of sources will be available as a link in the podcast and video description. I love to hear your thoughts and responses on social media, so please come and tell me what you thought. You can find me on Instagram at paulmmcooper and on bluesky at paulmmcooper.com. If you'd like updates about the podcast and announcements about new episodes, you can follow the podcast on bluesky at fallofcivilizations.com. This podcast can only keep going with the support of our generous subscribers on Patreon. You keep me running and help me to cover my costs. You also let me dedicate more time to researching, writing, recording, and editing to get the episodes out to you faster, and bring as much life and detail to them as possible. As a thank you, all subscribers are able to listen to Fall of Civilizations completely ad-free, and watch all video episodes also ad-free. I want to thank all my subscribers for making this show possible. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider heading on to patreon.com/fall of Civilizations underscore podcast, or just google Fall of Civilizations Patreon. That's P-A-T-R-E-O-N. For now, all the best and thanks for listening.

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