Tom Holland

They think, well, you know, we could beat these any day.

But equally, I think the fact that the Spartans are so concerned to go and make this inspection is a reflection of the fact not just that they've now woken up to just how major a threat the Persians are, but also this kind of nagging anxiety that even if the Persians have been defeated now at Marathon,

they probably will be back.

So we should try and get as much information on them as we possibly can.

I think they probably wouldn't even have mentioned marathon.

I mean, the thing is that the Persians don't write history in the way, say, that Herodotus does.

So we don't have any Persian accounts of any of the wars against the Greeks at all.

But Robert Graves, so as in I, Claudius, he wrote a fantastic poem called The Persian Version, in which he imagines how the Persians would have spun the defeat at Marathon.

So just a quote from it, some of the lines.

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon the trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.

Despite a strong defence and adverse weather, all arms combined magnificently together.

You know, superpowers never acknowledge the fact that they've been defeated.

I think it's even better than that, because don't forget, they have actually captured Naxos, they have captured Eretria, and they do lead their armada safely back to the Asian mainland.

Most of the ships have survived the Athenian attempt to destroy them.

And when they land back on Asian soil, they then lead the Eretrian captives to the great king in Persia, as they'd been ordered to do.

And to quote Herodotus on how Darius responds to the sight of these Eretrian prisoners, before they became the king's prisoners of war, the fury felt by Darius towards the Eretrians had been terrible, wronged as he had originally been by their unprovoked aggression.

So you see, Herodotus agrees with the Persian perception that

that basically the Eretrians had been terrorists.

But when Darius saw them led into his presence and utterly at his mercy, he inflicted no further miseries on them, but instead settled them in the land of Kisia.

So this is a display of mercy, but it's not a pardon because Kisia is a region of Iran that it's not the most attractive reason because it's full of oil wells.