Dr. Roel Konijnendijk
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1,157 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 15 Mar
Dr. Roel Konijnendijk’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And then when Philip expands southward, he encounters essentially the Spartans rather than the Thebans.
But I don't know how that would have made any difference because the whole point is that these
Greek states have been exhausting each other in this constant infighting, and there is still obviously manpower and expertise left in that world, but there isn't the unity that you would need to make a stand against Philip.
Well, we've got a new king on the throne of Persia, and that's an important thing to acknowledge. Xerxes had come to the throne, not ever guaranteed to be the heir of Darius. There was no premogeniture in Persia, so it was always a bit of a free-for-all. But I think what Xerxes had in his favor is that he had the blood of Cyrus the Great and of his father Darius in his veins.
So I think that pushed him into the purple realm. And one thing that all Achaemenid kings needed to do at their accession, really, was first of all, bury their fathers and then show themselves to be militarily capable. So Xerxes is already up for a fight. The first opportunity comes, actually, with a sort of mini rebellion that goes on in Egypt.
And straight away, I mean, within the first months of his reign, he himself leads an army into Egypt and crushes whatever events are going on there in the Nile Delta and then returns to Persia. with a kind of, you know, his battle spirit up, really. It was a successful campaign. Xerxes was clearly not never been afraid of wars.
You know, he's been stationed, we know, as a young prince in places like Parthia on some of the border zones. Just the arrival of Xerxes onto the scene in itself is enough of a momentum to start thinking about change.
We have some cuneiform evidence now that he had been sent there by his father, probably as a satrap. Again, this is where kings learned their craft, really, was by doing jobs within the satrapies variously around the empire.
Yeah, he would have been still quite young at that time. So now he's, you know, into his early 20s, mid 20s, possibly at this point. needing to show himself as a capable king. Because even though, as we said in the last episode, the empire itself was run as a kind of family affair. In fact, there was constant infighting within that family.
And there were a myriad of brothers and half-brothers around Xerxes who were more than happy to take on the mantle of kingship and sit on the throne as well. So it was very important for Xerxes to get himself a family and get himself some victories.
At one point in one inscription, which we found at Persepolis, he actually states, my father had other sons older than I, but I was the greatest. Mathishta is the word he uses. So yeah, you're like my father, see what I'm going to do.
I think it's also important to add to this that while our literary sources might not be as forthcoming as we'd like, we can turn to archaeology for a bit more evidence of the continued presence of Persia, at least in the Greek mind. Because from late in the reign of Darius, we found within Athens, hordes of Persian coinage, for instance. both gold, derricks, and silver sigloy.
The Persians, of course, had minted coins in Asia Minor and parts of the Levant. And these were kind of being hoarded by wealthy Athenians for a rainy day, essentially. And they carried on them, of course, a very important image, and that is the kind of preordained Persian image of the great king as a warrior.
And he often shows himself, you know, armed with his spear and bows and arrows, or even on horseback as well. There's that that goes on. We know that they're aware of the Persian king's image, but also we find in this period, and this really is thanks to the work of Meg Miller in Australia, she showed how from late in the reign of Darius into the reign of Xerxes,
we get Persianisms entering into Athenian culture. So we should think of these as kind of like the chinoiserie that entered into Europe in the 17th and 18th century. So elite Athenians were collecting Persian goods. So we find very, very stylish Persian-formed tableware, for instance, drinking cups, bowls, jugs.
But also from this same period, we start to see Athenian potters emulating those precious silver metal tableware in clay as well. So there's a vogue for Persian things. So, you know, we should never think of the world in bipartisan terms as at war or at peace. there's always elements of the both swirling around, you know.
And now Greece is very much within the orbit of the huge cultural sphere that is Persia. And to show that you were anybody in Athens, you wanted Persian things too. So that trade that Raoul talks about is certainly very apparent in the wealthy houses of Athens and permeating now down into lower echelons of Athenian society as well.
That's precisely right, he does have. It's not the first thing on his agenda. Having put down Greece, he has to turn his attention to Babylon too, because at the changeover succession, of course, Babylon always is an issue for him. So he has to go and stabilize Babylon first. Now, of course, again, we don't have the Persian version of these accounts, okay?
But if you look at some of Xerxes' tribute lists... from Persepolis and from Susa, you'll see that the Jauner are listed as part of his empire already. So like, as far as he's concerned, they were never out of it. And who are the Jauner, just to remind us, who are the Jauner again? It's the kind of all-inclusive Persian word for Greeks, of Greeks of all sorts of people. So they're there.
They're next to the Egyptians and the Parthians and the Ethiopians. The Yauna are there. So as far as Xerxes is concerned, well, they've never gone anywhere. So it's hard to say from Xerxes' point of view when or why he decided to turn his attention to Greece. For that, I think we have to go back to the Greek sources.
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