Tom Holland

So it's a really gripping, I mean, extraordinary story.

I mean, he is the most powerful man who has ever lived.

I think it's no exaggeration at this point to say that.

So, yeah, he's got these incredible titles, Great King, King of Kings, King of Lands.

You know, he's essentially an Iranian patriot.

So he describes himself in his inscriptions as being a Persian, the son of a Persian.

He's very proud of that.

As a Persian, he is the lord of a people who essentially in the course of a single lifetime have gone from

Provincial obscurity to becoming the rulers of the greatest empire that the world has ever seen.

And under Darius, it stretches from the Aegean all the way to the Hindu Kush and the Indus.

And the man who had won the Persians this great empire is a man who we have already met in the rest of history this year.

And that is Cyrus the Great, because Dominic, the Shah of Iran, as in Jimmy Carter, was a big fan of Cyrus the Great, wasn't he?

Yeah, so he dies in 529 BC.

Before that, he'd ruled for three decades.

And over the course of that reign, he enjoys one of the greatest winning streaks in the whole of history.

Yeah.

So he's up there with Alexander, Julius Caesar, one of the greats.

And he topples a succession of famous and ancient empires.

So the first empire that he topples is the empire of the Medes, and they occupy kind of north,

west iran so tehran would be um in what was media um and the persians had been subjects to the medes so the persians actually see the medes as cousins and when they conquer the medes they essentially incorporate the medes in as kind of junior partners in the entire enterprise of running this empire