Tom Holland

Yeah, and the Persians are masters of the protracted death, so they also have a hideous one where they kind of lock a bloke who's been covered in honey inside a...

You know, with the hands and the feet sticking out of two barges that have been placed over him.

And basically he just gets, you know, you get eaten by maggots and flies lay eggs in your eyes.

And I mean, just horrible, horrible.

Different times.

Let's face it.

Darius is doing what has to be done.

It's the kind of thing I think that would garner respect from the Sandbrook political position.

I know your ways and means.

So that's the Persians crushed, the Median rebels crushed, there are still the Elamites.

And what is, I mean, it's an incredibly obscure period of history, the Elamite rebellion, but I would argue that it's actually one of the most innovative episodes in world history.

And it marks Darius out as

a very consequential king, kind of almost up there with Constantine or Abdul Malik, the great Islamic caliph.

Because the Elamites keep rebelling.

Darius keeps crushing them and they keep rebelling again.

And so what he does is to weaponize a very distinctively Persian understanding of the supernatural.

Because the Persians, they're not like most other people in the Near East at this time, because they have essentially moralized the entire universe.

They see the universe as being governed by a perpetual cosmic war.

between truth, which they call Arta, and the lie, this universal lie, which they call Drauga.

And Darius casts himself as the agent of Arta, which means order as well as truth.