Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

You know, sort of passionately in love with it and sort of gives it necklaces and earrings and as he would a mistress, okay?

And of course, you know, this has been picked up and handled in his opera Xerxes of the 1750s, you know?

That very famous lago, ombra, my foo, under your shade, is, you know, all to do with this.

Well, I think what the Greeks are doing there is obviously kind of making a mockery on something they don't quite understand.

Because remarkably, we have found a little seal, a little cylinder seal,

with the name of Xerxes on it, and it shows Xerxes in front of a tree.

And what he's doing is he's giving gold offerings to this tree because trees were kind of semi-sacred to the Persians.

So it's part of a tree cult.

So the Greeks are misremembering or deliberately twisting part of a Persian theological way of life that Xerxes would have been very familiar with.

So that's what I mean when we can look for a Persian version that sits beneath the kind of Greek gloss that goes on top of it.

So I think we should always be alert to the possibility

that there's something sitting beneath it.

It doesn't work all the time, but every now and then something emerges.

Okay, so his father has been on the throne, Darius the Great, for some 30 years at this point.

We have indeed, absolutely.

And so he is ruling the biggest empire the world had ever seen.

And here we're talking about the center of the empire, of course, is southwestern Iran, around the ancient sites of Persepolis and Susa and Pasargadae.

It's reaching out to Babylon as well, one of the main centers of Achaemenid life.

But it stretches then to the west.

It goes all the way to the deserts of Libya, right the way down the Nile to Ethiopia, north to the Crimea, and then in the east, right the way across the east to Afghanistan, Pakistan, to northern India.