Tom Holland

It's not a conquest.

You are blessed.

You've been absorbed into the eternal order of the cosmos.

And what this means in turn, of course, is that if the empire of the Persians is to be cast as a kind of earthly reflection of the divine order of the cosmos, then it means that all those peoples who are not in the empire, who lurk on the fringes of it, that they belong to the dimensions of the lie, that they are essentially worshippers of demons.

That's why he's the king of kings.

It's why he's the king of lands.

It's kind of implicit in those titles.

Yeah, it is a kind of universalizing dream.

And that means that Darius feels he has the perfect right to go around attacking people beyond the frontiers of the empire.

And high on the list of people that he wants to attack are people that the Greeks call the Scythians and that the Persians called the Saka.

And these are horsemen who lurk in the steppes

to the north of the Persian Empire.

They have tall pointy hats.

They love a bong.

They're incredibly proficient horsemen.

And Duraz decides it's time to pacify them, to bring truth and order to the steppe lands.

And so he decides that he's going to attack them in the west.

So he arrives in Sardis with an enormous expedition.

And Sardis, of course, we said, is the capital of the Lydian kings.

And it's now the seat of the satrap, the provincial governor of Anatolia.