Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

And he ends with this brutal scene of a siege of Sestos, where the Athenians really commit all sorts of atrocities on the Persian garrison.

That's on the Dardanelles area.

That's right, on the Hellespont, essentially.

So this is strategically super important for the Athenians.

This is where they get their grain from.

So they actually really care about this area and liberating it or liberating or taking back control of it.

And so they really commit some atrocities of their own, which has often been interpreted as a sort of mirror image of like, look, if you object to imperialism, if you object to a figure like Xerxes behaving as he pleases, you shouldn't then sort of do the same thing.

But the lure of imperialist power is kind of drawing you in that direction.

That's usually how it's interpreted, but there are different ways that we might see this.

But then he ends with, you know, there's some vagaries of Xerxes' travel back to Asia where he gets into this spat because he's having, you know, he's trying to have an affair with somebody who's married to a relative or the daughter of that person.

It's a really complex little sort of court story that kind of maybe anticipates the murder of Xerxes some years later, but more likely it's just kind of

looking ahead to the decadence and the sort of corruption within the Persian court, which is also a theme that obviously runs throughout.

And then, weirdly, he has a little flashback to Cyrus the Great receiving someone in his court.

And this seems to be a sort of general programmatic statement about what he's trying to say.

There is this person who supposedly was trying to lure Cyrus into further conquest and said, you can conquer these places because the people who live there, you know, they live in luxury and so they are easy prey and you can just take them.

Cyrus objects to this and he says, I don't think we should do this because we are living in Iran, which is a hard place.

We are living in Paris and it's arid and it's dry and it's high up and it's a hard place.

We've become a hard people.

We've become very tough.

We could easily conquer these people who live in Mesopotamia where it's fertile and where life is abundant and rich, but we would start to become like them.