Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

So the thing about his narrative is that he struggles at first to kind of know where to start the story of Greeks coming into conflict with non-Greeks, right?

Coming into conflict with the Persians.

But what he chooses to do at the very beginning is to say like there was always this kind of conflict because you have all these...

stories that come from myth, essentially, of abductions between Greeks and Asians.

So Phoenicians will sail to Greece and abduct some princess in Argos, or the Greeks obviously sail to Phoenicia or to the coast of Lydia, and they abduct some people there.

And these are the kind of stories that he thinks are sort of the ultimate beginning, that there's always this sense of, you

And instead of trying to negotiate and arbitrate that conflict, they tried to kind of do it back at them.

And that sort of escalates.

And so he says the ultimate reason why Greeks and Persians went to war is that, you know, when the Asiatics did it again, when they took Helen from Sparta and took her to Troy, the Greeks escalated.

They went to war.

That is ultimately what started this sort of cycle of injustice because they are the ones who said, okay, well, we can't just let this go.

We have to actually do massive violence to you.

That starts this cycle of essentially Greeks and peoples from Asia doing massive violence to each other in retaliation.

So he's really interested in origins, as I said.

So he starts with that, and that means the origin of the Persian Empire, first of all.

So book one.

Book one, yeah.

So he's absolutely involved in, like, who is Cyrus the Great?

What is he doing?

How does he come into contact with the Greek world?