Tom Holland

And meanwhile, in his rear, by this pontoon bridge on the Danube, there is also danger lurking.

Because Darius has set kind of squadrons to guard the pontoon bridge to make sure that no one attacks it.

And one of the people who've been set to guard this pontoon bridge is actively treacherous, is actively plotting the ruin and destruction of Darius.

So these guards are the Greeks, the Greeks who are subject to Darius.

They are the rulers of the various Ionian cities that dot the Aegean seaboard of what is now Turkey.

And these rulers are what the Greeks call tyrannoi, from which we get the English word tyrant.

But I think tyrant doesn't convey the right sense.

Essentially, populist strongmen.

They are Peron rather than Hitler.

I mean, it's kind of a better analogy.

And they are pretty loyal to the Persians because the Persians keep them in power.

The Persians use them as their tools to subdue popular risings or whatever in these various Greek cities.

However, there is one Tyrannos there, so kind of populist strongman, who is not Ionian, and he's the ruler of a very recently founded colony, and he's an aristocrat from a city on the far western side of the Aegean in mainland Greece, and this city is Athens.

And the name of this Tyrannos is Miltiades, and he is very able, he's very ruthless, and he's ambitious, I would say, to the point of overreach.

And he had sailed from Athens to what the ancients called the Thracian Chersonese, which is the thin peninsula which forms the European side of the Hellespont, and today is called Gallipoli.

Yeah, we'll be hearing a bit more about Gallipoli in a few weeks.

Yeah, in a few weeks' time.

So Miltiates, he set up this colony on the Thracian Chersonese, a.k.a.

Gallipoli.

And he's done it partly because the Hellespont is really, really important to Athens.