Dominic Sandbrook

Translated by me.

Thank you.

I was thinking it was a worm tongue thing going on with that servant.

Yeah, so we're going to be looking at how the Persians try to suppress the Ionian revolt, how they send this extraordinary amphibious operation across the Aegean with orders to destroy the city of Athens and to bring its people back as slaves.

The Persians end up landing on a plain near Athens called Marathon, and then a battle is fought at Marathon.

One way or another, it is from that battle that we get the marathon, don't we?

What a lovely fact that is.

So let's begin with our protagonist.

who is not a Greek, but a Persian.

He is the great king, the king of kings.

And he is, so Darius is by far the most powerful man on earth at this point.

He did.

He had a party.

I think a party that's occurred more than once in the rest of history or been covered more than once because it was one of history's most disastrous parties.

So he held this huge blowout in 1971 to celebrate what they claimed was the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire.

What the Shah wanted to do in the 1960s and 70s was to lay claim to the heritage of Cyrus and to say he is a new Cyrus building Persia up.

you know, from nothing to become a genuine superpower.

And Cyrus, unlike the Shah, was a really, really serious person, wasn't he?

I mean, he was the great empire builder, arguably, in all history.

The prototypical empire builder.