Tom Holland

So it's a kind of beautiful spot.

And Bardia is, or rather the fake Bardia, is hanging out there enjoying his concubines when Darius, the six other noblemen, and the kind of posse of men they've brought in.

burst in on him take the fake body completely by surprise he reaches for a a chair smashes it up tries to use the chair leg to fend them off it's no good he is dispatched and darius then proclaims to the world that there's you know there's been this terrible scam that body has been replaced by this false magus and that he is now the king quite deep waters i think i

Quite a lot of improbabilities there.

Yeah, and even that's not as improbable as the idea that, you know, there's a guy who looks exactly like...

The murdered king.

So I think the likelihood is there isn't a false Bardia, there isn't a kind of Magian doppelganger, and that the person who gets killed by Darius and his fellow conspirators in Scythia Vartish was actually Bardia himself.

And there's very good corroborating evidence for this.

Because the moment Darius announces his accession to the throne, there is a succession of rebellions.

And these take place in Persia itself, in Media, just to the north, and in Elam, which is a country in the southwest of Iran.

So basically, these are the absolute heartlands of the empire.

These are the kind of, you know, the Iranian strongholds.

And clearly, in these Iranian strongholds, they are viewing Darius as an illegitimate king.

And it takes him two years of desperate fighting to crush these rebellions.

And even once he's done it, the kind of the bushfires of insurrection keep kind of blazing.

It takes him a long, long time to stabilize and pacify all these kind of rebellions.

Yes.

Yes.

You mess with Darius and he will kill you and he will kill you.

very horribly.