Paul Cartledge
speaker
193 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Paul Cartledge’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You started off in 478, so I'm going to take you back.
70-plus years, to about 550.
And that's when the Persian Empire, sometimes we say the Achaemenid Persian Empire, rose very, very suddenly in, of course, Iran.
Within 50 years, it had spread east-west, far east as Afghanistan, Pakistan, as far west as the Aegean Sea, and indeed slightly over into Europe.
So we're dealing with a vast...
territorial empire, such as the Greeks, never were to know for quite a long time until after the period we're looking at.
So what was Greece?
Well, there was no such thing as a nation state of Greece.
There was a Kulturkreis, German for a cultural circle, of Hellas, people who spoke Greek, thought Greek, behaved Greek.
And they were spread all over the Mediterranean, all around the Black Sea.
So no one focus.
But the nearest bit of the Greek world to the Persians was actually within the Persian Empire.
So as the Persians expanded west in the second half of the 6th century BC, they conquered a whole string of Greek cities along the western seaboard of what is the Aegean Sea for the Greeks.
You have therefore a confrontation potentially, a potential crunch point at the Aegean border of the Western Persian Empire.
But 50 years or so after they'd first been incorporated in the Persian Empire, a bunch of Greeks decided they didn't want to be in the Persian Empire anymore.
So one particular Greek city is called Miletus.
It's now in Western Turkey.
A representative went to mainland Greece seeking aid in order to support them militarily, that is, principally with ships, but also with men and money, in rising up against the Persian Empire.
The Athenians accepted, and that is the beginning of the Greco-Persian Wars as seen from the mainland of Greece.
If you're looking at it all from Iran, well, these pesky Greeks on the far west side
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