Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

I mean, this is vast, vast territories.

And Darius the Great had kind of secured this.

Darius was one of those kind of born bureaucrats.

You know, he just had like red tape, you know, running in his veins.

And he was the one who kind of, you know, set up the satrapy systems, the system of governors, usually members of the royal family.

So by the time Xerxes come to the throne, what we have there is a mature and safe system.

essentially, you know, Darius has really set the rules, the king's law, the data of the king is flourishing in every part of the realm, all of which are linked together with incredible communication systems.

Amazing, amazing roads that crisscross the whole empire.

And we know that people are traveling enormous distances because we've got these little sort of travel rations, you know, in these Persepolis fortification tablets, which we spoke about a long time ago.

Some of my favorite things.

You'd think they're going to be as dry as the dust they're written on, but, you know, they're absolutely packed full of detail.

And we get, you know, accounts of people traveling from Memphis in Egypt

all the way to Kandahar in Afghanistan and being supplied with food and drink and translators and all of that as they go.

I mean, it's a really remarkable system.

So that's the world that Darius leaves behind him.

So at the time of his death, we know that Darius had had at least six wives.

I mean, concurrently, Persian kings were polygynous.

plus any number of concubines as well.

So the harems of his palaces were packed with women and with children.

Now, one of the, I think, the real failures of the Persian royal system was that they never adopted women.