Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Can you believe it?

It's amazing.

And that meant that, you know, a trade ship could go right the way down through the Nile, the Red Sea, around Arabia into the Persian Gulf.

I mean, you know, so I think...

the access there to the Aegean is something that really appealed to Xerxes and not made much of in the sources because, you know, Herodotus and the others want to make this an ideological war more than anything else.

I don't think it was for Xerxes.

And I think if we could put ourselves in Xerxes' shoes for a moment, I think that for him, you see, the Persian wars were a success.

What did he accomplish?

Well, he accomplished two things that he set out to do.

The first was the sack of Athens.

Great, perfect.

Burns down the wooden necropolis, isn't it?

The complete thing.

I mean, it's devastated.

And the second thing is he takes the head of Leonidas, the king of Sparta, and for Xerxes...

Leonidas would have represented chaos.

Thermopylae, exactly.

So that's hailed as a great tragedy for the Greeks, but also a moment of sort of ideological triumph where Greece comes into its own and Xerxes loses out on something.

I don't see that at all.

I think Xerxes would have seen this.