Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Okay.

So Xerxes has a long reign and long reigns tend to be dangerous for kings towards the end.

So how long are we talking?

What are we saying here?

We're talking about 30 odd years on the throne.

Yes, maybe 15, something like that.

But here he's got a family of sons who are already in their 20s.

Some of them are actually early 30s as well.

And so they're all sort of chomping at the bit to have a go at being king.

And there's one in particular boy who is known as Ocus.

He seems to be particularly sort of ambitious for the crown.

And if we pull together all of the different classical versions that we have of Ocus,

what happens next.

It seems that Ocus starts working with a group of courtiers, in particular a group of influential eunuchs, in order to plot perhaps the overthrow of his father Xerxes.

Now, this might sound again like a kind of Orientalist fantasy,

But we have a Babylonian text which becomes so important for us because the Babylonians, of course, were great astronomers, sky watchers.

They were always looking out for omens.

And in the Babylonian star chart, which is essentially like a diary of what goes on in the sky every day…

Some Babylonian astrologer simply writes down, you know, there was an eclipse of the moon, a normal happening, nothing incredible on this particular date.

And then the entry ends.