Tom Holland

Oh yeah, friend of the show.

Very much friend of the show.

A great fan of blood weddings and mass castrations and so on.

And obviously, this is the equivalent of people flying planes into the Twin Towers.

I mean, this is an appalling insult and appalling affront.

And there is no way that Darius, the great king, cannot respond to it.

I mean, in much the same way that George W. Bush felt that he had to respond to 9-11.

And in this episode and the next, we will be looking at what his response was.

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?