Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

So he'll say, Xerxes became king, the eunuchs who were influential under him were blah, blah, blah, blah, and he will name them in that way.

So yes, there was definitely a reliance on these men who were advisors, civil servants, military men, all of these things wrapped into one.

That's right, yeah.

Not too far from Bodrum, modern-day Bodrum.

Yes, of Persian Empire, yeah.

not as much as the Greek sources suggest, but the Greeks are not irrelevant to him either.

And I think that's chiefly because during Xerxes' early reign, he's still looking at the idea of expanding the empire, both east and west.

That's still something that his father had done and he'd like to do, and that's the kind of thing that's reflected in these empire lists as well.

For the satraps on the western borders of the empire, so that is, you know, in modern-day Turkey, in these kind of Greek-speaking city-states like Miletus, Ephesus, Sardis, this kind of thing, then obviously what went on in the Aegean and across the Aegean in the Greek mainland was of importance to them, of course, you know.

And I think it's because of that...

that really Xerxes was kind of encouraged to think about bringing the Greek mainland under his control.

Don't forget, many of the Greek city-states of northern Greece, Macedon, Boeotia, Thebes, were already kind of, you know, Persian,

friendly Persian allies.

Some of them had even been satrapies.

So there wasn't this sharp divide between Greece and Persia that the kind of, you know, the traditional histories have portrayed.

It wasn't really like that.

But I think that Xerxes really wanted control of the Aegean more than anything else, because the Aegean obviously bleeds into the Mediterranean.

Mediterranean gives you access to the Nile.

His father Darius had dug a canal

which went from the River Nile across the desert to the Red Sea.