Show 57 - Kings of Kings II
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What you're about to hear is part two of a multi-part series on the Achaemenid Persian Empire and especially its dealings with the Greeks. I suggest getting part one and listening to that first before you dive into this, but listen, I'm not here to tell you how to live your life. You do anything you want. I would like to point out that this is the Dan Carlin version of this story, which is always what you get with me.

which may or may not correspond to the traditional way these things are told. So please listen at your own risk. And if it sparks an interest in the subject, I'd be very happy about that. Nonetheless, without further ado and with proper warnings in place, this is Kings of Kings, part two. December 7th. It's history. 1941, a date which will live forever.

The events. The figures. I take pride in the words.

I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their presidents are corrupt.

Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. It's hardcore history. How many people out of a hundred that you could name, either people that you knew or people that you've heard of or read about, how many people out of a hundred do you think could handle absolute power without totally losing their mind?

And if you could handle it initially, if you could find that well-balanced person who could deal with it initially, what about dealing with it for the long haul? Because, you know, history shows that there are a lot of people that, you know, the power gets to you over time. It eats at you slowly. I mean, if you could handle absolute power initially, could you handle it for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years?

Those of us in democratic systems tend to assume, because it's kind of built into the thinking of our political systems, that nobody can handle absolute power. Or that it's certainly an unbelievably small number, right? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. How long have we all heard that term? And we assume it's a truism. I know I do. And yet I can prove myself wrong pretty easily.

by looking back at the past and realizing that by that sort of rationale shouldn't every emperor and king throughout history that had either close to or de facto absolute power shouldn't they all be crazy shouldn't they all lose their minds and while you could certainly say most of them probably lost perspective of for example what life was like for normal people the vast majority of them didn't go crazy which might be more interesting than assuming the opposite

Although we all know of the high profile examples, don't we? And, you know, I'll use the classic ones. Why not go right to Godwin's law? I mean, look at Hitler. You could say maybe it was a form of Parkinson's disease or maybe the Dr. Feelgood drugs he was being shot up with. At the same time, by the end of his rule, he's exhibiting the classic symptoms of megalomania and paranoia that come with the absolute power of

sort of stereotype look at a guy like alexander the great i mean he's almost another kind of godwin's law isn't he especially with this program by his early 30s he's as paranoid and as megalomaniacal as hitler is and again maybe some of that's connected to what a lot of historians would call rampant and terminal maybe at the point he was at alcoholism who knows it's difficult to separate but alexander seemed to be able to handle power initially and then somewhere along the line he couldn't

And the sources at the time, by the way, write about this growing megalomania and paranoia. Not very fair sources, maybe, too. Let's acknowledge that. When the near legendary and enormous historical figure of Cyrus the Great that we talked about in the first part of the story, when he dies or is killed in 530 or 529 BCE, he bequeaths to his son the most dangerous inheritance I can imagine.

He leaves him the empire that he had just won. And by doing so, he both creates an immense challenge for his son to overcome, absolute power or something very close to it and what that can do to him. But also he hands his son something that is so valuable that immediately other entities are going to be tempted by it.

"'It's like leaving him gold and jewels, "'which, you know, in effect he really did leave him, "'and then sending him out at two in the morning "'to walk down the most crime-ridden street in town. "'You're always going to be looking over your shoulder, "'and there may be other people very tempted by what you have. "'Cyrus the Great's oldest son was named Cambyses. "'Officially it's Cambyses II.'

As part of what made Cyrus such a visionary ruler, he paid a lot of attention before his death to making sure that there would be a smooth transition of power from him to his designated successor.

This is an era in human history where this was a very precarious affair a lot of the time. I mean, we take for granted in our democratic systems today that the transfer of power will be relatively smooth. And we consider it a really big deal in a constitutional crisis if, you know, we can't name the winner at the end of the day, you know, on an election day. And if it has to go to a court and if there's challenges to, you know, ballots in this state or that state, that's a huge deal.

In the ancient Near East, in West Asia, in the period we're talking about here, all kinds of nightmares happened, and any king or ruler would have known about them. There would be revolutions and coups and assassinations, and sons would kill their parents and go to war with each other. I mean, my favorite story about...

these kinds of affairs and it's it's a classic case i guess you could say the rule proving classic case is the assyrian king sennacherib who famously destroyed babylon and then lost his life supposedly while praying at the hands of at least one and maybe two of his sons

And in one tradition, by the way, killed with a statue that represented Babylon. So you get that wonderful, you know, ancient history tie in that the authors from ancient times all like where, you know, there's a certain karmic justice here. You destroyed Babylon and then the God of Babylon gets back at you. And then his sons go to war with each other. The tale tells him a third son maybe comes in, defeats both of them and then takes over the throne.

sounds perverse but not that unusual and a guy like cyrus the great would have understood you know the pitfalls right there's going to be a ton of entities out there that want the power that you just created remember cyrus is a guy who in a space of a single reign admittedly long reign took his people from a geographical backwater on the world stage and made them the masters of the greatest empire the world had ever seen a guy whose initial title when he came to the throne was king of anshan

and whose titles when he died were things like... King of the World, King of the Four Corners of the Earth, King of the Universe. As we said in the first part of this show... that's a heck of a promotion in one lifetime. And while it's hard enough for the self-made individual... that makes that progress in the space of a lifetime...

How much harder might it be for people who simply have that handed to them, the second generation or the third generation who begins to live a lifestyle that's different and expects these sorts of things?

You can see Cyrus training his son for years before his demise to make him, you know, ready, essentially on-the-job training. He's going to hand over the family business to his son, and so his son gets to be the viceroy of Babylon for a while, gets to hang out with the army for a while, do this, do that. He's learning how to be the king of kings. I wonder if that somehow increases your chances that you can do so without losing your mind and your perspective.

Cyrus also brokers an important deal because he has more than one son and you know if you look back at even recent history a guy like Cyrus would have been able to notice how much of a problem you have when you have more than one possible inheritor to the throne Cyrus in addition to his oldest son Cambyses has another one known by multiple names the most common probably to be mispronounced by yours truly is Bardia he's the younger son

And according to the ancient sources, take this for what it's worth, when Cyrus is crafting essentially his will, his inheritance, the deal, he makes Cambyses the next king of kings, but he gives sort of a consolation prize to the younger brother, right? You lose out on the fruits of empire, but here is your runner-up gift.

He gives to him a large territory in Central Asia to govern and apparently says that unlike all the other territories that are being governed in the name of the king, you can keep the taxes and the tribute, you know, from your places. You still are beholden to your older brother, but you have a nice little, you know, place to call your own sort of and keep the money. And initially this seems to work rather well because when Cyrus dies, he's

the transition to his chosen successor seems to be relatively seamless and then things begin to get corrupted so corrupted in fact that you actually have to look at the end of cambyses's reign and then work backward to the beginning because what happens at the end changes corrupts and alters all that we know about the reign cambyses the second's reign is going to be like a

game of clue did you ever play that game where you know you have to figure out the murder mystery and the weapon and what room it happened and it was colonel mustard in the library with the candlestick trying to figure out the reign of cambyses and who this guy was is a little like trying to figure out the whodunit of the game of clue because something happens to cambyses

And it might be that he goes insane because he can't handle the amount of absolute power he has. That's what the ancient sources indicate, right? Herodotus basically says Cambyses lost his mind. But a lot of modern historians don't buy that at all. They see a cover-up, a conspiracy, something that would not be unfamiliar to people who read, you know, things about the John F. Kennedy assassination and conspiracy tales about that because there's something about the demise of

Camp Isis that looks a lot like one of those John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy books or several of them. What's more, the people that may have gotten the king of kings, the founder of the Persian Empire's son out of the way may have been the ones who got to then decide how the history about him was written. And that has colored everything we know about the second ruler of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. A guy who had the very

unenviable task of trying to follow a legend i mean who could follow alexander the great well nobody they ripped his empire apart and started fighting over it rather quickly who could follow adolf hitler if his dreams of a thousand-year reich even partially came true

you can't even imagine it can you hitler's personality and dna was entwined all throughout the idea of the third reich you can't even imagine anyone succeeding him in any sort of a realistic way right as opposed to you know admiral donuts who succeeds him for a couple days to sign the peace agreement who could succeed napoleon cambyses the second is in an unenviable position but if modern historians are to be believed and i shouldn't see why they shouldn't be

He did a pretty good job for the time he had available to him. Was he insane? That's a much harder one to figure out. Depends on who you believe. But if he was, sure wouldn't be hard to imagine why how many people that you know out of 100 could handle absolute power. The idea that Cambyses was insane and that he did all these crazy things...

was one that took hold way back in ancient times and persisted up until really like the 1960s or 1970s. Will Durant in 1935, a great historian writing an outdated history, did a wonderful job. And by the way, taking it at face value, giving you the traditional Cambyses story is,

and it's a litany of horrors but it's fascinating as heck i mean if you're herodotus and we describe the ancient greek historian as an ancient screenwriter or script runner if you're herodotus don't you want a nice half-mad persian king to play around with because think about the possibilities inherent in that right

Here's the way Will Durant describes this in 1935, again taking the entire story at face value, but essentially giving you the story as it was understood and believed to have happened for thousands of years. He writes, starting to talk about Cyrus, Cambyses' father, and contrasting and comparing them. He says, quote,

One great defect had sullied his character, meaning Cyrus's character, occasional and incalculable cruelty. It was inherited, unmixed with Cyrus's generosity, by his half-mad son. Cambyses began by putting to death his brother and rival,

he means bardia he says smerdis i told you the guy had a lot of names by putting to death his brother and rival smerdis then lured by the accumulated wealth of egypt he set forth to extend the persian empire to the nile he succeeded but apparently at the cost of his sanity memphis was captured easily but an army of 50 000 persians sent to annex the oasis of amun perished in the desert

and the expedition to Carthage failed because the Phoenician crews of the Persian fleet refused to attack a Phoenician colony. Cambyses lost his head and abandoned the wise clemency and tolerance of his father. He publicly scoffed at the Egyptian religion and plunged his dagger derisively into the bull revered by the Egyptians as the god Apis.

He exhumed mummies and pried into royal tombs, regardless of ancient curses. He profaned the temples and ordered their idols to be burnt. He thought in this way to cure the Egyptians of superstition. But when he was stricken with an illness, apparently epileptic convulsions, the Egyptians were certain that their gods had punished him and that the theology was now confirmed beyond dispute.

As if again to illustrate the inconveniences of monarchy, Durant writes, Cambyses, with a Napoleonic kick in the stomach, killed his sister and wife Roxana, slew his son Przaspes with an arrow, buried twelve noble Persians alive, condemned Croesus to death, repented, rejoiced to learn that the sentence had not been carried out, and then punished the officers who delayed in executing it.

On his way back to Persia, he learned that a usurper had seized the throne and was being supported by widespread revolution. From that moment, he disappears from history. Tradition has it that he killed himself. End quote. If you're the ancient screenwriter that is Herodotus, you love this guy as a story element. But is it true?

Trying to investigate, you know, what happened here is like going into a crime scene and being an investigator. I've often thought that history is like a crime scene. And, you know, I am not a historian. I'm an admirer from afar. But I love those moments where historians are put into the sort of the Joe Friday, the Sergeant Joe Friday, or the, as I said, Columbo mode and go into the game of Clue and start investigating what happened.

And the guys from Durant's era and earlier, they're sort of like old-timer investigators. They go out there, they interview the witnesses, and they try to figure out what happened, and they give you the story as they understand it. But they don't have modern-day techniques, right? It's like investigating the Kennedy assassination, you know, with techniques from the early 1960s, or being able to have it happen today and investigate it with DNA evidence and modern-day ballistics and, you know, and audio samples and cameras on every street corner. I mean, the difference is...

you know astonishing and when modern day historians go back and examine this case they break it down to the same sorts of things you would if you were sergeant joe friday going into the scene you'd start looking at the physical evidence right the blood spatter and the fingerprints that's the archaeological stuff and you start comparing that to the stories you got from the witnesses and the different people around you know the neighborhood they're the you know written sources and the stuff that's come down to us

And you start compiling sort of a, you know, composite of what the person, the victim was like. And then maybe you send investigators down to the city hall and you start looking at the paper trail and see if there's any, you know, records on this person, arrest records, real estate transactions, anything like that. Those are the, you know, ancient sources like the Babylonian tablets that they've found. And you try to compile some sort of a semblance of what happened based on, you know, the total view of the evidence.

The story that Cambyses is insane comes from some of the, you know, witnesses at the crime scene. And they may have been giving you the information secondhand, and it may have come from biased sources. But if you're investigating, you know, this crime scene, you'll start with just the facts, as Sergeant Joe Friday might have said. The facts of Cambyses II reign that you can say with certainty...

is that he you know ruled for about eight years from about 530 bce to about 522 bce he was the king that first really gave the persian empire a naval capability and this may not sound like a big deal but really it made them the first of the powers that were based in mesopotamia and that area of the world to have any sort of significant naval capability ever

People like the Assyrians might have had the tribute and the nominal allegiance of some of these coastal cities on the Mediterranean, may have even been able to operate some coastal forces or forces in freshwater areas. But the Persians become the first of these people to have a fleet which is significant on the Mediterranean naval world stage. And it should be. They take over the one that was probably the best in the Mediterranean region.

Up until that time, they start absorbing Phoenician cities with the fabulous Phoenician navies. And the way the Persians governed, they didn't create their own navy or they didn't take the Phoenicians and make them as a base to start their own. They simply went in there and sort of subcontracted it and said, well, listen, what you have to offer the empire, militarily speaking, is

you know you already have a fleet so when we need a fleet your fleet is our fleet and you'll run it and you know what you're doing and there'll be a bonus in it for you if you do well the assyrians would have said something like you perform well or else the persians probably said something like you know you perform well and there'll be a little something extra at the end of the year

So Cambyses is the guy that does that. And that makes a huge difference in the story that's about to happen, because if the Persians don't have any naval power, well, a lot of the things that, you know, occur in the rest of their history can't. For example, the other thing Cambyses is absolutely known for, and that's a physical fact, and that's that he's the king of kings that takes over Egypt.

something that requires by the way this navy in order to do and that completes the conquest of his father remember his father you know when he first started off conquering things there were four kind of superpowers in the world at that time or their version of the world cyrus conquered three of them his son conquered the remaining one and egypt was a great state pretty much always they were no pushover although not a lot is known about you know the fighting and the battles and all that sort of stuff

There were some decent stories. One of the more perverse that one of the ancient sources wrote, you know, probably totally false, but said that the Persians took advantage of the ancient Egyptians' reverence for cats and strapped cats to their shields so that the Egyptian archers would be, you know, unsure of how to react to that. That would be exactly the kind of, you know, image that a Herodotus-type character would love to share with an audience. That's a colorful anecdote, isn't it?

But Herodotus himself says he actually saw bone fields in Egypt from some of these battles. And that would have been, you know, 75 years after the fact or something. So it would be very interesting. It's not like Herodotus to lie about what he actually sees or what he actually talks to somebody about seeing.

Herodotus tells a story from the fighting that says that the Persians at one point and this would be very like them by the way because didn't we talk about in the last program that they essentially did this with the Greeks and with other peoples they sent envoys to the Egyptian defenders at one point probably trying to offer them a typical Persian deal you know.

You give up this fight. We'll all benefit, blah, blah, blah. It'll be great, you know. And it must have been a sizable delegation because Herodotus says that the Egyptians seized the delegation and tore them limb from limb. And pretty much at any time in history, just about anywhere you go, envoys and ambassadors and whatnot are untouchable. I mean, there are usually very strong envoys

reasons to not abuse the envoys of another country and the Persians are no example and as we said in the last episode the Persians are very lenient empire sort of graded on a curve and

but they could be just as nasty as their predecessors in the region, you know, when they decided they wanted to send a message. And the Persians were very good at knowing who to send it to. Herodotus tells a story, who knows if it's true or not, about what the Egyptian punishment was when they lost the war and someone had to pay for the treatment of those envoys who were so horribly abused. Herodotus has Cambyses right after he captures Egypt.

summoning the Egyptian elite to the capital at Memphis to watch a demonstration of what happens to people who break the law. And I keep trying to imagine what a scene like this is like. It must have been, you know, intense enough with an oral historian like Herodotus talking about it to an audience. I can't imagine what the big screen, modern day blockbuster movie would be like. But here's what Herodotus says, and you try to imagine...

You know, what the sound of 2,000 parents watching their children being executed is like. Herodotus says, quote, Nine days after Cambyses had taken control over Memphis, he seated Seminitos, king of Egypt, who had reigned six months, and other Egyptians in front of the entrance to the town as an insult.

and he tested the spirit of Seminitos in this way. He had the daughter of the former king dressed like a slave and sent out carrying a jug to get water, along with other girls, selected daughters of the most eminent men, and all dressed in the same way as the daughter of Seminitos. As the girls walked past their fathers, they cried out and wept,

and all the other fathers, seeing their children so degraded, answered their cries and wept with their own. But Simonetus, after seeing and recognizing his daughter, only bent down in silence to the ground. Herodotus continues, quote,

"'After the girls had gone by with their water, Cambyses sent out the son of Samonitos, with two thousand other Egyptians the same age, bound with ropes around their necks and bits in their mouths. They were being led in this manner in order to pay the penalty for the Egyptians' destruction of the Mytileneans and their ship at Memphis, and for the decision of the royal judges was that for each member of the ship's crew, ten imminent Egyptians should be put to death in return.'

Samanito saw them passing by and realized that his son was being led to his death. But while the other Egyptians seated around him were crying and openly expressing their anguish, he behaved just as he had in the case of his daughter. End quote. I try to imagine that scene. The parents watching...

Their children put to death and the slavery thing might not hit home until you think about, you know, these girls were probably dressed extremely scantily. These are formerly the noble women, you know, of the realm. And they're dressed in a way that would be provocative to, let's just say, the male population looking for slaves for more than just menial labor.

We tend to forget that element of slavery over time, but it's undoubtable that sex was an integral part of the attraction of having someone that you owned available at any time. And if you're the parent watching your daughter in that situation, the anguish and then to watch your son being executed in front of you and then seeing, you know, the other people in your situation who are right next to you in this crowd, seeing, I mean, what's that sound like? But is this allegation true? There you begin to ask questions again.

that are part of investigating, you know, the crime scene. I'll tell you this, if it was true, it's not hard to imagine that Cambyses might have made a few enemies in Egyptian society and might not have the greatest reputation in Egypt, which is where you can start the investigative process. Herodotus is very open about where he was getting his information about these events, which happened about 75 years before, you know, he's writing. He says he got information from Persians and Egyptians.

well the egyptians might not have been too happy with cambyses to begin with and by the time herodotus is talking to them they're having problems with persia and they're not very happy and they've had some revolts and there's every reason to believe that herodotus's egyptian sources that he used were particularly anti-persian and particularly anti-cambyses and the persian sources were too which is a much harder question to answer you know why is the son of cyrus not more highly thought of amongst his own people

There's a lot of allegations against Cambyses, and we'll use the legal terms, right? Alleged, as though the lawyer is piling up the historical charges against him. He's alleged to have killed the children of those prominent Egyptians. He's alleged to have lost an entire 40 or 50,000-man army in the desert on the way to conquer an oasis, and supposedly a sandstorm blows up, buries the whole army, and they're still there.

Most historians and articles I've read do not believe they're still there, but it's an intriguing enough thing to capture the hearts of archaeologists about every 10 or so years who set out for expeditions or start talking about the likelihood of finding the lost army of Cambyses. Then supposedly, in his rage and haste, he's supposed to have attacked the people to the south of Egypt,

The vile Kush, the Egyptians called them once upon a time, the black African Egyptians, you know, if you will. When people think of, you know, dark sub-Saharan African pharaohs, they're thinking of the Kushites and the Kushites dominated Egypt for, you know, the time period, for example, around the Assyrian time period where you literally had black pharaohs and the culture of this area down south of Egypt was Egyptian also.

You know, the ancient sources say that Cambyses didn't prepare for this and his generals told him he had to have supplies and he didn't care and the army starts starving in the field. And they draw lots, the ancient sources say, and you pick a lot and the guy who gets the short end of the straw, one out of ten of the Persian soldiers has to sacrifice themselves for the army and into the pot they go. And then the same sources say that Cambyses, you know, bringing his cannibalistic decimated army back up to Egypt gets there and sees the Egyptians celebrating.

and so camp by sees assumes that the celebration is a celebration of his misfortune and he starts getting crazy and killing priests and interrogating them and then he does the thing that is the most sacrilegious in the tradition and he picks up a dagger he stabs the apis bowl if that's true there's very little that would have upset the Egyptians more than that the apis bowl is a sacred Egyptian symbol they are venerated treated with a huge amount of care and respect and

and so for cambyses to deliberately injure or hurt it would have been a huge religious transgression and shocking to the people of egypt and once upon a time the early investigators of this historical crime scene accepted that cambyses killed the apis bull and a lot of other things followed from that not hard to see that he's got bad press and is portrayed as insane erotitus straight up says he is

And the killing of the Apis Bull is one of the best pieces of evidence that proves it. But the modern day investigators, the Columbos, the Joe Fridays, have more tools at their disposal and more information at hand than the early investigators did. They might have had to rely on, you know, witness testimony back in the day of Will Durant in 1935 to

But by about the 1960s and 1970s, the records were becoming available and modern-day historians could look at the equivalent of fingerprints and the blood spatter evidence and they found out through Egyptian records that that Apis bull didn't die because it was killed. Not only did it die a normal death and was interred with the other Apis bulls from previous times, but the Persian king of kings, Cambyses,

As Pharaoh conducted all the normal sorts of religious rites and sacraments you would have expected a native-born Pharaoh to do, he behaved exactly as you would have expected him to if he was keeping a continuous policy, you know, the sort his father used to employ of tolerance and having the Persian king assume the legitimate mantle of the religious beliefs in the governments of all these countries and fit in perfectly. This is part of what began...

to make modern day historians suspicious of the official story so who was propagating the official story is this all based on you know greek writers like herodotus who had all sorts of undercurrents of other things he was writing about including you know the idea of the growth of persian decadence and how you know from the greatness of cyrus they were already beginning to fall one son into it who's drinking himself to death spending too much time in the harem and losing his mind and it's all downhill from there

to themes of oriental weakness and decadence and indulgence that have continued up until the present day. So you take everything he says with a grain of salt, but there's an influential Persian that sort of takes a swipe at Cambyses and adds fuel to the conspiracy fire when he says Cambyses killed his brother and kept it a secret. Quote,

"'Cambyses had a brother, Bardia by name, "'of the same mother and the same father as Cambyses. "'Afterwards Cambyses killed Bardia. "'When Cambyses had killed Bardia, "'it did not become known to the people that Bardia had been killed.'" Those ancient allegations are more than 2,500 years old. They were carved into the rock face of a sacred mountainside along which the old heavily traveled Royal Road used to run.

I've always thought of it as kind of one of the most successful examples of a roadside billboard ad ever, although I don't think it was very easy to see from the road. They put a garden around it and stuff, maybe more like a rest stop, and it contained a carving showing a scene involving human figures, and then in three different languages, a narration. The narration is the story...

of how one of the greatest kings in the Achaemenid Persian Empire, probably number two on most people's top ten list, behind Cyrus the Great. Hard to knock the founder of the empire off the top job, usually. But this other guy named Darius, or Darius the Great, I use both pronunciations interchangeably, and for that I apologize. I'm hopeless sometimes. Nonetheless, this is the story of how he gets the job of king of kings. As told...

by Darius the Great himself. It's an autobiography of sorts, but for that reason, it's a little self-serving. This is a guy who, by the way, would seem to have every quality you want in a perspective great king of kings, except for one thing, legitimacy. And this story that he tells on the mountainside, amongst other places, seems to be a quest to explain to you, the reader, that

you know, why he should have and deserves the top job, including the normal sorts of qualifications that the god wants him to have it. Ahura Mazda being the god, and this is a sort of a change in emphasis in religion for the Persian Empire, much too complicated for me to understand, but fascinating. Says Ahura Mazda, you know, is behind him and gives him all these great gifts and makes him the king and...

Wants him to have the job. Goes into his lineage and all the blue blood that's in his veins. These are standard justifications anyone would expect. But then his story veers into the weird. The weird and wonderful and conspiratorial and fantastic. I mean, what's funny about this is this is the official story. And the official story is twisted. Darius the Great is an interesting person to get this information from. Because Darius the Great in our historical crime scene...

is like Colonel Mustard in the game of Clue. He's a potential suspect because somehow this guy who is not directly connected to the royal line will end up in the top job. How does that happen? Well, it's an interesting story and Darius the Great carves it alongside a mountain to explain it to you and it starts off with Cambyses killing his brother and keeping it a secret. And the reason this is important is because apparently Cambyses had no heirs.

so what happens if the son of cyrus the king of kings were to die who's the only other person logically that you give that job to well the other son of cyrus right bardia the son who got the consolation prize of empire you've heard the line cyrus's sons were the heir cambyses and the spare bardia if something happens to cambyses you turn to the spare don't you

So how does Darius have the job? Why didn't the spare get the job? Well, funny you should ask. Cambyses killed the spare, and then he didn't tell anybody about it. And then he led the army to conquer Egypt. And Darius the Great, serving as his lance bearer or spear bearer, which is an official position, think of like a person on the general staff or something. I think he was like 28 years old, part of that increasingly nasty veteran Persian army that conquers Egypt.

And according to Darius, while they're away, or while they're on their way home, one or the other, they get the word that the throne has been seized by a usurper. A usurper claiming to be Bardia. But according to Darius, Bardia was dead. The problem, of course, is by not telling anyone, as he says Cambyses didn't, the people didn't know that Bardia wasn't alive anymore.

Darius says that the name of the imposter on the throne was Gaumata or Gaumata and he identifies him as a magus one of the magi our modern word magician is related to that and I didn't realize this until Tom Holland the historian pointed it out in his book Persian Fire but there may be a connection to the fact that this is a really sort of hard to believe story and

But now it has someone who could be considered to have potential supernatural powers involved, which explains away all kinds of story holes, doesn't it? When you have a problem, you just say, listen, the guy's a magus. You don't know what those people can do. Oh, yeah, that explains it. But after this, Galmatas, he's as the throne. The empire starts to come over to him. Darius admits on his rock carving that the people began to go over to this false Bardiya.

Barty has seemed to be popular, by the way, too. I compare it to the line that's well-known among football fans that the backup quarterback is the most popular player on the team because, you know, you can invest all your hopes in that. You don't know how that person would play, but you know you're not so happy with the starting quarterback. Cam Bices is the starting quarterback, and there were a lot of

And historians thinking that there were policies that Cambyses was a part of, for example, you know, cutting down the amount of money to the Egyptian priesthood, you know, eliminating or reducing the power of clan leaders and local nobles so that they could consolidate it in the central government, all these sorts of things, tax policy. He may not have been too popular with a lot of people, whereas this Bardia guy, well, you know, he's the backup quarterback. I think he'd play better if you just gave him the job.

So Darius says he was getting a lot of support. It was becoming a big problem. And he's with Cambyses at the time.

Herodotus tells this wonderful story again another movie scene where he has the representative from the new king showing up you know in front of the army and Cambyses while they're out in the field and proclaiming in front of the army that there's a new king on the throne and that they should no longer you know heed the orders of the very king who's with them you know visible those are great stories and then somehow in this story in 522 BCE Herodotus

Cambyses dies, and a bunch of historians will say, you know, suspiciously. It's suspicious that we don't know what happened to Cambyses. According to Darius on his rock carving, he says he died his own death.

For a while, that was also translated as by his own hand, which made us all think of suicide a while back. But more modern historians have pointed out that that's probably not the right translation. And that even if you use the way the Greek writers say he died, you could interpret that as by his own hand and not have it be a suicide question. For example, Herodotus says...

cambyses will die after he jumps on his horse and stabs himself with his sword because the tip of the scabbard had come off and that the leg wound will get infected and he will die several days later and by the way because herodotus has to tie this story up in a wonderful bow he says he stabs himself right at the spot on his thigh where he stabbed the apis bull in egypt see once again

karma herodotus is a big karma guy a lot of the ancient writers are they just don't call it that but you get your just desserts right in another greek author's tale which is you know strangely similar in its own way he says cambyses was whittling a piece of wood with his sword and he slipped and he cut himself on the thigh and same thing infected dies a few days later

So he died by his own hand, but that's not suicidal. Nonetheless, no one knows how he died. And there's a decent number, maybe I'd say 20% of the historians you read, you know, think that the guy probably was a victim of assassination by his underlings, one of whom was Darius the Great, and suspiciously the one who becomes the next, you know, big king. If you're at the historical crime scene, this Darius the Great guy is the one who's going to get all the stuff of the murder victim.

He's Colonel Mustard. He's a potential suspect here. And so his whole story has to be taken with a grain of salt because of what happens next. According to Darius, after Cambyses dies, he organizes what maybe you could call a hit team or an assassination squad, an oligarchic hit team. And he will set out...

to kill this person who is impersonating the dead brother of cambyses right because if you believe darius's official story when he and his six assassination cohorts go out to do this deed both of the sons of cyrus are dead now the story as told by darius on the mountainside at behistun or bizitun that's what the inscription is called

is in its own way dramatic enough although it's pretty bare bones once herodotus the screenwriter slash historian gets his hands on it it becomes this wonderful tale fully modern and probably the precursor to several repetitive movie themes we've all seen a hundred times but if that's the case herodotus is the guy who started this in his hands this assassination move is like a force 10 from navarone type movie

You know, where you have the assassins or the commandos, but they're working for the good guys and they'll, you know, go to this heavily armed, you know, Nazi island to take out the head of the Gestapo or something through all these guards with lots of explosions and all these things. That's a little like what the story sounds like.

Herodotus says that Darius and his compatriots go to a fortress where the false king the magus is staying and that they get past the guards because of their lofty status in the regime right these are the pillars of the regime the aristocracy this is the oligarchy walking in surely there are nothing to stop at the gates and fear that's the way Herodotus portrays the story so the force 10 from Navarone group get past the first level of defense then Herodotus has them encountering

royal eunuchs in the courtyard these royal messengers he says the persians like a lot of the regimes in that era had a lot of eunuchs and there's a lot of debate over whether or not they were sort of really castrated males taken as as young boys to provide a governmental class for the persians or whether they

castration had actually sort of become symbolic by that point and it was more of a a title it's hard to know probably the former though i tend to believe the weirdness when i can and these eunuchs recognize that these seven aristocratic nobles are there for no good and challenge them and then a knife fight in shoes making a lot of noise in the courtyard and again when you're reading herodotus at a

that a lot of historians think he was performing this live for an audience. And if that's the case, this is a Herodotan action scene. And so all that's missing really are the explosions and the Lucas sound and the big score and the popcorn.

And you can hear the courtyard sound effects as there's a lot of noise and Herodotus basically says that the Magi and he's got two of them because why only have one supervillain in a story when you can double up. So instead of just having the Joker in this movie, he's got, you know, the Riddler to.

two of the magi and they look down in the courtyard they can hear the commotion so they arm themselves and then after the force 10 from navarone commandos get rid of the eunuchs you know they're running towards the stairs and you can hear just imagine the music right i mean this is a scene we've all seen right they run up there and there's a swashbuckling fight with the two magi and the force 10 from navarone commando guys

one guy gets stabbed people are wrestling and then again in a scene we've seen a million times the one principal magus the one who is the false bardia the one who's been sitting on the throne dressed as the king takes off and breaks up out of the room to be followed by a guy named gabrius and the soon to be down the road king of kings derias they take off you know after the one guy down the hallway through the door into the darkened room i mean imagine the music and the tension

Go for your popcorn here, right? And then Gabrius and the false king are wrestling in the dark room and Darius is sitting there with his sword, but he's afraid to stab because he's afraid of hitting his friend. And Gabrius says to him, Herodotus says, why are you hesitating? He goes, I don't want to hit you. And he says, stab us both. Are you crazy? So he runs him through, but only gets the bad guy. Darius in his rock carving is a little bit more bare bones than Herodotus is about what happened after pointing out that the

You know, fake king had led a reign of terror in Persia because he was wiping out anyone that could recognize that he was a faker. You know, anyone who knew what the real Bardiya looked like he was getting rid of so he could consolidate his position and not be called out a fraud. So after explaining that the reign of terror was going on, Darius says on his mountainside, quote,

No one dared say anything about Gaumata the Magus until I came. Afterwards I prayed to Ahura Mazda. Ahura Mazda brought me aid. In the month of Bagayadish ten days had passed, and then I, with a few men, slew Gaumata the Magus and the men who were his foremost followers. A fortress!

Sika Yavatish by name, and a district, Naseeh by name, in Medea, there I slew him. I took the kingship from him. By the favor of Ahura Mazda I became king. Ahura Mazda bestowed the kingship upon me." As several historians have said, in this entire account it does look a little bit like Darius doth protest too much, doesn't it?

The story of how he goes from simply being one of the assassins to the one that actually gets the top job involves a horse, and it's not very good to talk about at breakfast. It's a weird story, and it makes no sense at all, and there's no way anybody ever got picked to be a king that way. So it all becomes a little bit weird how Darius ends up at the throne, and no wonder he feels a need to explain it. Here's the problem he faces. If you don't believe...

that cambyses killed his brother look at how this entire story changes if you're the crime scene investigator and you approach it from that way well as historian pierre briand says the entire structure collapses like a house of cards because if cambyses didn't kill his brother bardia what happened to bardia hmm and this is where we get back to the game of clue where you're examining possibilities scenarios motives things like that i mean for example scenario number one is

is that maybe Bardiya led a rebellion. The very thing that Cyrus the Great was so worried about when he divided his empire and worried so much about giving Bardiya the consolation prize to empire and avoiding that terrible thing that happened so often in the ancient world, well, maybe it happened anyway. There are hints that the brothers may not have gotten along so well. Bardiya seemed to be very popular, had that backup quarterback thing going for him. Maybe he led a rebellion, in which case if Cambyses did kill him...

that wouldn't have been some slam on his historical reputation. It would have been a pretty standard thing for a ruler to do and probably justifiable. I think by leaving out the specifics of Cambyses' motive, Darius sort of slanders him for all eternity by letting your imagination or Herodotus' imagination fill in the blanks. Why did Cambyses kill his brother? Because he's insane. You know what I mean?

Nonetheless, the idea that Bardia may have led a rebellion with local elites and people trying to preserve their power or pushing a different approach for the empire, all of that's very possible, in which case Bardia may have died as a usurper, you know, killed by Cambyses. Another possibility has to do with, you know, a question of timing.

when this bardia character took the throne right if he took the throne when darius says he took the throne when cambyses is still alive and well well then that's a usurpation right he's a rebel basically but what if he takes it after cambyses had died and who knows how that happened but let's just say we're whittling wood we cut ourselves we die 10 days later from gangrene who does the empire go to well if cambyses really had no heirs the way the ancient authors said the empire should go to bardia shouldn't it

And things get really strange when you start asking the question about, you know, if this was the real Bardia, because if Bardia wasn't killed by Cambyses, who is it that Darius and his hit team take out when they go, you know, and kill the Magus, you know, the false Bardia, Galmata? Well, if it's not the false Bardia, it's the real Bardia.

When I think of the various scenarios out there, I think of our historical crime scene investigator, you know, showing back up at headquarters and telling their superior officer, you know, the old gray-haired, cynical veteran lieutenant officer,

The official story that they got from the crime scene that this Darius character tells them, yes, I stabbed this guy dressed as the king who had a name tag on that said, I am Bardia, the son of Cyrus, but he wasn't Bardia, and I saved the nation by killing this imposter. And the lieutenant, the grizzled veteran, looking at them like they're out of their mind and going, you don't really believe that crap, do you? Let me tell you what probably happened. This Darius guy killed Cambyses, his king, and then went and killed his brother, the guy who should have been the next king, and then took the throne for himself. Case closed.

Well, that might have happened, too. Historians just can't know, though. There's not enough information. It would tell you so much about what was going on to know the facts, but it's like the ultimate cold case file of all time, isn't it? I like the way historian...

Mark Vandemerup kind of sums up the situation and gives you the sense that it's suspicious, but we don't know what happened, and there's a lot of possibilities. He writes, quote, "'Our main source of information about events is the description by the final victor, Darius, who was not a legitimate successor to the throne. His account was carved in three languages on a rock facade at Beastun in a Zagros mountain valley connecting Babylonia and Iran.'

It was also spread throughout the empire in Aramaic translation on papyri, and possibly Herodotus used one of these as the basis for the story he told in his histories. We have thus a severely biased description by a usurper who justifies his actions in the text, and it is not easy to determine what really happened.

end quote but because it's so important all these historians who don't like to stray very far from the data but because there's so little data are forced to he gives you his best guess here quote

Cambyses' prolonged stay in Egypt gave his brother Bardia a chance to claim kingship at home. The latter abolished taxes and military levies for three years in order to gain popular support. Cambyses returned from Egypt but was probably assassinated, either by Bardia or by Darius, a high military commander who subsequently killed Bardia. End quote. There are other theories as well.

Heck, Risa Sargami in his book Discovering Cyrus says we shouldn't be so quick to throw out the official story. He's not specifically lining up with it, but he says, listen, if you look at a certain number of facts, history has been weirder than this. Maybe there was a Gaumata. Maybe he was impersonating the other son of Cyrus and maybe Cambyses had killed him. And of course, the final possibility is that it's partly true that Cambyses did go insane and that he did kill his brother and that he didn't tell anybody about that.

but that eventually, you know, the oligarchy is confronted with a king of kings who's not in his right mind. You can't exactly impeach one of those. So what's the logical alternative in a system, you know, to do away with an absolute ruler if the absolute ruler has lost his mind? Maybe in this case, Darius and, you know, the rest of the aristocracy was simply doing the logical common sense thing in that situation. Who knows?

To those historians who suggest that what we may have here when Darius comes to power is some sort of an oligarchic coup, he writes in the inscription on the side of the mountain, quote,

Darius the king says these are the men who at that time were there when I slew Galmata the Magus who called himself Bardia at that time these men cooperated as my followers and he goes on to name specifically you know six co-conspirators the other members of the assassination hit team one by one and then he says quote

You who shall be king hereafter, protect well the offspring of these men. End quote. How many descendants over a hundred years, let's just say, although the Persian Empire existed closer to 200, how many people can be the offspring of those six original conspiratorial Force Ten from Navarone comrades? The descendants of the assassins may have ended up being...

Like an oligarchy in the Persian Empire, or maybe a better way to phrase it is like an oligarchy on top of the already existing oligarchy. A creme de la creme, the descendants of the Hittite members. In Greek literature, they will usually be referred to as the Seven, and being one of the Seven may have been the equivalent of having your place in Persian society literally carved into stone.

by one of the greatest kings the Persian Empire ever produced. I've always seen the seven, you know, Darius and his six co-conspirators, a little like the initial investors in an assassination-related startup company. In this case, a startup company devoted to assassinating a ruler and taking the throne over. And if that's the case and it really did put those people into a permanent different class, well...

That's a heck of a long-term dividend return that paid off until basically the end of the empire. Not a bad deal. Historian Pierre Briand is one of some of the newer ones who questioned the entire idea behind this special class, by the way. Some of the newer historians suggest that these six Persians that were the co-conspirators, that that number might have been chosen for religious reasons.

that there maybe weren't six or more than six or less than six. Also, that it just so happens that these people may simply represent the powerful, you know, noble clans of Persia anyway. So the people that already were kind of the oligarchy in Persia just get their status reaffirmed. Doesn't matter which one of these people.

scenarios though that explains you know this weird period between the end of cambyses's reign and the beginning of a reign of a guy who doesn't seem to have any connection to the royal family darius doesn't matter which one of those scenarios are true and by the way we only scratched the surface on the many that are out there they're all pretty darn wild and woolly all of them would make a good film personally i think the best one

is you know this event's version of like the warren commission report the official narrative of darius makes the best movie if you ask me get herodotus to do the screenplay oliver stone to direct it make sure there's some lucas sound i'm in it's stuff like this that make this maybe the best coup d'etat slash assassination slash regime change conspiracy story out there i mean it's fantastic doesn't matter which one of them turns out to be true though

by 521 bce the end result is this guy darius is on the throne and he's got maybe you could say a legitimacy deficit maybe the only thing he's lacking and it causes him problems right away he's very open about this in this autobiographical account you know carved into the mountainside he lists all the places that rebel against his rule

He has to fight, he says, 19 battles in a year and a half to three years to quell all of the uprisings. And these places in Persia that are rebelling are some of its most important provinces, large places, right? Egypt, for example. And they're not rebelling so that they can band together and support some sort of rival claimant to the throne because historians think there might have been a bunch of people in the empire that thought they had as much of a connection to the throne as this Darius guy.

It looks instead like they're all kind of going rogue at the same time, like they want their independence back. They all seem to have kings that sprout from nowhere that are claiming royal descent from the last independent line all these places had, right? And in the same way that Darius on the mountainside inscription says that Gaumata lied about being Bardiya, remember the Persians have this thing about lying.

basically number one on their cultural naughty list at this point and so when he says they lied that's pretty bad but then he goes on to say that all of these kings in all of these provinces that have rebelled that are claiming descent from the old royal family that used to exist there before the persians showed up they're all lying historians refer to all these kings as the liar kings

Darius would have to go from place to place to place fighting battle after battle after battle he would send his generals to go fight some of these battles too had to conquer Babylon more than once you'll love this one of the liar kings that pops up also claims to be Bardia so this would be the second Bardia that shows up on the scene this is the the zombie now other son of Cyrus that cannot be killed

And I love the way, by the way, Darius on the mountainside inscription gives the orders to his forces to go quell these rebellions. He says the same thing every time, which probably means it's ritualized and somewhat, but it's still wonderful, you know, old school, ancient stuff terminology. He says, quote, go forth and defeat the rebellious army, which will not call itself mine, end quote. And then as he captures these rebels,

you know rebel leaders the ones who tie themselves to the old you know royal family from long ago he treats them all pretty darn badly sometimes they only show up in pieces the elamites when they find out he's basically on the way they kill their own independent king themselves and send body parts to darius that's sort of like saying oh we're sorry

But when he gets his hands on the whole liar king one at a time, he treats them like this. This involves one that rebelled in Medea named Fraortes, which is a Greek version of a name that's famous in Medean history. So rooted in the old royal family and then Darius got his hands on him. He writes on the Byzantine inscription on the mountainside, quote,

Darius the king says, Afterwards Fraiortes fled with a few horsemen. There is a district in Medea, Raga by name, and there he went.

"'After that I sent an army in pursuit. "'Fraortes was seized and led to me. "'I cut off his nose, ears, and tongue, "'and I put out one of his eyes. "'At my gate he was kept bound, "'and all the people looked at him. "'After that I impaled him at Ecbatana, "'and in the fortress at Ecbatana "'I hanged the men who were his foremost followers. "'I executed his nobles, a total of forty-seven. "'I hung their heads inside Ecbatana "'from the battlements of the fortress.'

end quote now we said the persians were more tolerant than a lot of the earlier empires in the region but that's graded on a curve this is still the ancient period where the sorts of treatments of prisoners and captives and people on the other side of justice for example more resembles the stuff that the very worst of the terrorists in our world today do that's often part of the legal codes of these early societies and

You know, I'm fascinated by the extremes of the human experience. And when you go far back in time, you see them everywhere. I mean, I was reading, for example, the process by which impalement as an execution is carried out in some places and sometimes. I think in our heads, we just think there's a sharpened stake sticking out of the ground. You throw the victim up, they land on the stake, impalement done. No muss, no fuss. Well, basically.

But instead I'm reading about, you know, a whole thing where they use a razor blade in advance and some of these places they would then put something on to stop the bleeding, fix you up a little bit so it went the way they wanted, greasing the steak. I mean, things that just doesn't make any sense to the modern mind. And you think about the people who did this and you think that they almost sound like a different species, don't they? But they're not. Right.

We could take a little newborn baby out of a modern hospital, put him in a time machine, send him back to ancient Persia, hand them off to a childless couple there, and go back in 20 years to check on how the modern kid's doing being raised in the ancient world, and they'll probably be able to explain to you the logical common sense moral rationale behind impaling people. They might even explain to you that they enjoy watching it.

Times change, of course, but we human beings are an interesting species, aren't we? Nonetheless, as horrifying as all that sounds, when you grade the Persians on a curve, they still come out as a rather lenient people by the standards of the place and time. The way that Darius handles the many revolts and uprisings and the need to placate whole areas and put in new structures and to keep fires from breaking out again is

is a foreshadowing of what's to come when it comes to the ability of this figure, Darius, who will eventually be called the Great. His gifts, though, are a little bit unusual for, you know, the kings of kings, these heads of state, especially, you know, from the Persian tradition where they're always thought to be like warriors, like Cyrus the Great, these, you know, leaders on horseback continually pushing the empire at the head of their troops. Darius is a little bit more...

like a white-collar worker, like a desk job guy. Herodotus says the Persians had a saying, and they said that Cyrus was the father, Cambyses the tyrant, and Darius the shopkeeper.

Which if you believe what people like Herodotus have written about the Persians and a lot of aristocratic peoples have felt this way over time, they sort of disdained as rather lower class by their standards things like mercantilism, getting your hands dirty with money, business, commerce, anything like that.

Of course, in the modern United States and much of the world, well, that's maybe the most highly thought of profession. And in a way, shopkeeper, which sounds a little like a slam at Darius, if you think about the size of the shop Darius was running, he was running Walmart. And we don't call those people shopkeepers. We call them CEOs. And when you look at Darius, that's what he looks like, a modern CEO, which does make you wonder,

again about how he gets the job because he seems so suited to it you can't help but think he's some sort of process of natural selection you know as part of his cast i mean we were only choosing from the aristocracy but that's a heck of a bigger talent pool than trying to choose from two sons of cyrus isn't that always the problem with monarchy right such a small talent pool to pick from in some countries you have to pick the oldest son and then there's no chance at all that's just a roll of the dice darius may have been the most capable amongst

you know the nobility of persia because he seems exactly what the empire needs at this time he is overly concerned with money is sort of the stereotype he thinks about profit and loss and he's an administrator and a person who organizes today we would think of him as a consultant who comes in and streamlines operations

I mean, he's credited, for example, with starting the satraps and the satrapies, which probably isn't true. He probably didn't start it, but he certainly reorganized the empire in a sort of a lasting way. He would handle things sometimes in a very cutthroat manner, sometimes in a very innovative manner, and in other ways, in a very deft manner, weighing his options. You know, clever is what they would say about him in some of the histories I've read when they wanted to be nice, but

but that could swing over into conniving, you know, when the pendulum moved too far in a different direction. You think about a guy like Steve Jobs, maybe, or some of those CEOs, not the ones who just go collect a paycheck or the ones who get paid $123 million and the stock's cut in half since I've been here. You think about the people who really, you know, have something to them where you go, okay, I may not like this guy or I may love this guy, but you can see that there's some genius there. And sometimes the genius is in things like

that maybe seem kind of mundane, you know? I mean, it's one thing to see an artistic or performance genius. It's another thing to see an administrative one. But when they're working their wonder sometimes, the benefits are incredible. And when you look at Darius and how he took the Persian Empire, essentially you could call it a startup company at the beginning.

This is when it goes public, and Darius is when it gets its first really high-level CEO who takes it to the next level. There's a lot that has to be done to make that happen, and a lot of people in the Empire might not have liked it very much, which is another reason you have, you know, 19 battles you have to fight sometimes to quell all the fires that are springing up. But the difference between the Empire when this guy takes over and how he leaves it is profound.

There's a reason a guy comes out of nowhere in terms of his royal lineage ends up probably number two on the greatest Achaemenid Persian kings of all time. He's a highly energetic, highly competent, long-ruling figure who becomes important in the story as far as Westerners have been concerned for more than 2,000 years because he is the one that starts mixing it up with the Greeks, right?

and supposedly when i was growing up western civilization considered the greeks the home team this story is kind of a chance to highlight things from the visiting team's point of view in the battle for western civilization of course as we pointed out earlier that's pretty hard to do when you were working mostly with the equivalent of the home team's newspapers

and the way we've structured this story is to just do every king in the Achaemenid empire one after another in order as sort of the structure of this show but so far we've been dealing with kings that are so important and the sources especially the hometown newspapers and western civilization are so you know full of things involving them that we've been able to go into them in loving detail there will be whole kings that we will almost fast forward through

And it isn't because they didn't do anything. It's because if they didn't do anything to or with the Greeks, we don't know a lot about them. And what you do have is mostly what archaeological evidence can show you and things like that. So there will be kings that might have done a bunch of things very interesting over off in India or up in modern day Afghanistan or down in, you know, the area around southern Egypt today. Who knows if the Greek sources didn't write about it? Sometimes we don't know about it, in which case some of these kings are going to get short shrift indeed.

cyrus cambyses darius these are some of the heavyweights in the achaemenid empire and like a lot of empires their leadership is sort of front-loaded which is why it does so well for a while if you can tie competent or inspired leadership to you know the the good fortunes of an empire well at this point the persian empire is on the upswing and leadership is a large part of it and darius is perhaps in terms of total competency overall maybe the best they ever had

He concerns himself with the boring side of government, things like, you know, we would say today monetary policy. He's very famous, for example, for instituting maybe the first metal coinage in the region outside of Lydia, which is famous for having started metal coinage, certainly in that region. The gold coins will be called derricks after him. Shekels will be the silver coin. And the Persian...

gold and and the wealth of the empire will become an absolutely you know hallmark element of it they're known for having a lot of money and they use it and of course there's nothing new right in using bribes and money as a foreign policy tool and all that sort of stuff nothing new about that that goes back to time immemorial and you know during the period we're talking about here maybe only the chinese though are doing it on a comparable level

to what the Achaemenid Persian Empire is doing. And some of this plays into this CEO style of Darius too. Things are purely weighed on a profit and loss sort of criteria. And if, you know, we can solve this military problem without having to fight a war, let's do it that way. You know, that kind of an approach. He's concerned, for example, you can tell he's concerned like all Persian kings with the status of the office and protecting the authority and the reputation and all those kinds of things.

But, you know, I mean, if there's something that comes up where we can talk about some sort of a deal, I'm not, you know, totally closed minded to it. There are empires that have come around that have much more of a machismo to them where we don't, you know, deal. What do you mean deal? Do what I say or else. Whereas the Persians are kind of perennially open for business, if you will.

I like, and let's be honest, there could be some ritualization to this, but I like what Darius himself has carved on his, you know, he's buried on a mountainside eventually, and he will have a carving, sort of, you know, what he decided he wanted on his tomb. And he emphasized sort of the, you know, thinking man's approach to running an empire. On the tomb of Darius, it says, quote,

I am not hot-tempered. What things develop in my anger I hold firmly under control by my thinking power. I am firmly ruled over my own impulses. I have a strong body. As a soldier, I am a good soldier. I see who will rebel and who will not. First I will think, then I will act. End quote. There's an ancient line that money is the sinew of war.

And the Persians were not dominant militarily at everything. And in the areas where they lacked something, the ability to come up with a ton of cash as needed could compensate for a lot of those shortcomings. And believe me, a guy like Darius understood that better than anyone.

Historian Pierre Briant runs down Darius's qualities a bit and then points out how much of a change the period that he inaugurates in Persian history is. He says in a chapter subheading entitled A New Foundation for the Empire, quote,

The ways and means of Darius's accession to power, to the extent that we can reconstruct them, are a testimony to the new king's energy and decisiveness. Darius was undeniably an exceptional personality, but he also proved to have organizational ability. During the same time that he was reorganizing the entire tribute system, other projects were carried out in various regions. Construction of new capital,

the conquest of Samos, expeditions from the Indus to the Nile. In the year 518, he also commissioned the Satrap, Ariandes, to gather Egyptian sages to collect the, quote, end quote, Egyptian laws. Other measures affecting Jerusalem were affected at the same time. What is striking, he writes, is the care with which the king planned for the long term, end quote.

than discussing the era that he inaugurates due to his energetic efforts to you know create the support system long term for something Breon writes quote without in the least deprecating the work accomplished by his predecessors we may thus assert that the advent of Darius marks the foundation of a new dynastic and imperial order in this regard the first years of his reign definitely represent a decisive period in Achaemenid history end quote

One of the revisions to the structure of things that Darius works out is the succession. And he tries to create the conditions so that the way he came to power will never happen again.

One of the first things he did, this is a traditional thing, by the way, to do after a coup or a toppling of an old regime in the Middle East. You want to marry into the previous royal family because remember, this is all about sort of genetic blue blood. Even if a king is a bad guy or the regime is overthrowable and it would be a good thing, doesn't mean you don't want that blue blood in your lineage. It can go back to like, you know, pulling the sword out of the stone type legendary beginnings. You want to have that in your bloodline permanently.

So Darius takes care to marry two daughters of Cyrus the Great and his granddaughter. Some of these the previous wives of Cambyses, by the way. So in a way, I think of like the Ford Motor Corporation and Henry Ford, the big founder. Maybe he's like Cyrus the Great.

And then, you know, Henry Ford's son takes over the company. And then by hook or by crook, Colonel Mustard may intervene. Who knows? All of a sudden, you have this guy who wasn't in the family tree, not the direct one anyway, maybe a second cousin or something. And he's running the Ford company. And then all of a sudden, he marries, you know, the daughters and granddaughter of Henry Ford. Maybe one of these was married to Henry Ford's son. Who knows? But eventually, you know, some guy from outside the direct line of the Ford family is running Ford Motor Company. Right.

here's the thing though he may not be a member of the ford family but his kids will be so that's how you tie yourself back into the early royal line you may change a few statues and you know hide your tracks a little bit too in your building projects historians are starting to think that they see more and more that the entire lineage of darius connecting him to the great cyrus of old may have been sort of forged in reverse reverse legitimacy as we called it earlier once again smart

Darius becomes the king that expands Persian authority more to the east of the empire, which is territory that because the Greeks didn't know much about, you don't hear much about. You know that it happens, though, because soon you'll have satraps in the east that are Indian, essentially. What's now modern-day Pakistan is the part of India that the Persians conquered one way or another.

And as far as the ancient Greeks were concerned, that was like the end of the known world. They didn't know about anything maybe that existed past that. That could be dragons, unicorns, or, you know, hostile barbarians as far as the eye could see. Maybe the Persians knew, but they weren't telling Herodotus.

Darius will do some more conquests, you know, in in northeastern Africa. But this is kind of like it's almost like the blob a little bit. I mean, he just the Persian Empire goes from these amazing, you know, startup company type growth rates to a steady, you know, healthy growth rate where the empire is expanding nicely. Thank you very much, but not so fast that we can't incorporate everything nicely.

and absorb everything appears to be the inevitable long-term outcome of things if you're looking at a map of this region you know in 515 514 513 bce because the persian empire looks like you know the 1950s horror movie blob slowly you know advancing in all directions and spreading out and just you know naturally absorbing everything on the fringes

And while there are certainly natural limitations an empire could run into, might reach the limits of communication, for example, or run into climate and environmental things you can't deal with. I mean, I'm sure the Persian army in this period can defeat the Indian army in the interiors of India. But can you deal with the jungles and the snakes and the weather and all that? Ask Alexander in a couple of hundred years how much of an impediment that's going to be. You know, can you deal with transportation questions?

and of course revolts are always a threat, especially the larger you get, but who's going to act as any kind of a military counterforce to the great king and the Persians as things stand, you know, around 515, 514 BCE? Look at a map. Who's there? There's no one to have World War III with. The Chinese, they'd be a fun fantasy matchup, but they're on the other side of the world in their own little civilizational bubble, and

if at all aware of the Persians, simply probably through, you know, some traitors who actually make the long journey, but who knows? So those armies aren't fighting. So who is going to stop the blob from taking over literally everything until they reach their natural limits? Well, that's what makes this story so compelling. That's what sets it up for the movie that Herodotus is going to give you when he explains to you how, you know, this David will beat this Goliath.

how someone will stop the blob and by the way thereby save everyone like so many other people who've been interested in the persian army from this period i became interested in them because i was interested in the greeks and the persians are the uber adversary the arch nemesis right of the greeks from the you know classical era and after a while it's

You know, you become a little curious about these people that, you know, the classical authors mostly portray, but, you know, you even get this up until the modern time as sort of zombies or orcs who only are formidable because of their numbers, but their numbers are so huge that they're massively formidable. Millions of them. They drink rivers dry. There are so many of them. And you become kind of curious about these people. You know, once you get past these numbers after a while, and once you get into it

The Persians become so fascinating because they're the final installment of the ancient military system of the Near East, the final development. And that doesn't really mean the apex of its development because it's possible that that happened during Assyrian times, but the last of the armies fielded on principles that were developed in Sumeria and nurtured by peoples like the Assyrians and the Babylonians before them.

inheritors to a 2500 year old military tradition is what historian nigel talus says and once you get rid of the very large numbers that the classical authors give you turning them into orcs you realize how good they must have been at what they did i mean if there weren't millions of them look how nasty the smaller numbers of them were look what they did look what they conquered

if you believe the ancient authors and you're thinking well of course they conquered all of them there were millions of them they swarmed over the defenders but if there weren't millions of them if there were roughly equal numbers then all of a sudden the fighting quality of these persian armies which had always assumed to be relatively low gets increased you know by a lot and the quality begins to look like the kind of quality you would have to have to win an empire like this and to hold it

And we told you in the first part of this story when we were talking about Cyrus the Great and he was doing all these conquests with his army and we kept talking about his army, but we couldn't really discuss what that army was like because they don't really know. It's a shame, too, because that's an army worth knowing about, right? Look what that did.

But by the time of Darius the Great, sort of the mists part a little bit and give you a look into the military organization and the equipment and whatnot of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. And by Darius, I don't know if you could say it's the height of military development, but they're still fighting at a very high level. They are a veteran army that fights a lot. So they have a lot of actual practical real world experience.

and the army is relatively unbeaten they have a setback here or there sometimes but by and large you know the places they want to conquer they conquer good luck though getting any agreement amongst modern day historians concerning exactly how they did this because just because they've you know done away with those crazy numbers from the ancient sources the two million men type things doesn't mean that they figured out any better ones automatically that everyone agrees upon

The numbers that the Persian armies brought to the battlefield, not the entire number available to the empire if they mustered everybody, but these battles that are famous that involved the Persian army, how many men were there? Well, when you see that it ranges from a low of like 12,000 to 15,000 men and a high of like 250,000 or 300,000 men,

you begin to see what a huge difference, you know, these different peoples have on how this army operated. Just to give you one example, it's well known that a corps, you would call them maybe guards, today existed in this army, 10,000 to 12,000 men strong, you know, when you incorporate the extra super royal guards, and that these troops were superior in general to most of the other troops on the battlefield.

They were what you would call today regulars. They may have been drilled, right? The best troops in the army. If your army is 300,000 men and 10 to 12,000 of them are these guys, well, you might not even be able to call them the tip of the spear in an army that large. They may just be the king's guard.

If, on the other hand, these armies are closer to 25,000 or 30,000 men strong in reality, well, then a guard of 10,000 to 12,000 regular drilled troops is a third to half your entire army. That's a huge difference, isn't it? That's a much better army. So right there, that would impact, you know, the impression of how these armies did what they did.

I will say that as a fan of the Persian army, it's been wonderful over the last 20, 25 years to really see a more modern view of how the army fought and was organized crystallize. Very exciting. And this could change, by the way, down the road. I mean, this is just the latest interpretation of the evidence.

It should also be pointed out that when I talk about the Persian army, this is an empire that stretched over 200 years. The army will change and evolve and become different, you know, from the start of the empire to the end of the empire. We are freeze-framing a moment in time here, but it's a moment that according to the Greek sources pretty much determined whether or not Western civilization would continue, so it's worth focusing on. It's also worth focusing on because the majority of historians for more than 2,000 years have

history pinpointed the reason that history went the way it did down to a question of weapon systems on the battlefield and how they interacted as strange as that sounds i know because we normally think of you know the things that impact history as being either massive sort of forces like industrialization mixing with colonization mixing with a newly unified and very nationalistic germany looking for their place in the sun all those things together boom you have a

Or maybe it's the extraordinary individual who comes along at just the right time and, you know, catches a few breaks here or there, and boom, you have Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar or Oliver Cromwell or Tecumseh. And most of the time, obviously, it's a combination of things, right? The extraordinary individual showing up just at the time the colonization, you know, is going the way it's going and Germany needs its place in the sun, right? All those things working together, boom, you have a historical moment. But another one of those areas where history can turn is

Seems almost banal by comparison, but it can come down to the simple question of weapon systems on the battlefield. And remember, in this era we're talking about, the battlefield is like, you know, 2,500 yards long maybe, just on average. And the decision point happens in a couple of hours or an afternoon. And it can be determined by something else.

You know, if you go back to, well, the majority of historians, even now probably, but certainly the way Herodotus saw it, to a question of something like whether or not you're armed with a spear or a bow, or whether or not your weapon system includes a lot of body armor or doesn't. And if you think that that's a little kooky...

well if you think about one side having firearms and the other side not you can see what a difference a weapon system differential could make to an outcome of a battle and i don't have to convince you do i that the way battles and wars turn out you know have a huge impact on the way history goes right imagine if you lost the second world war gonna look a little different isn't it

So a great many historians for more than 2,000 years have boiled down to why things happened the way they happened to a question of how armies interacted with each other, Greek armies and Persian armies. So you have to understand the Persian army that's going to go into these conflicts with the Greeks to understand what happened if those historians are right.

The first thing to understand is that the Persian army, you know, to we ancient history war gamers, and I know you're out there, to us, this is the army you get when you like a lot of bow fire. I mean, like machine gun level bow fire. A buddy of mine once said that you could historically justify giving every single person in the army during this time period a bow if you want to. But how many arrows does it take to blot out the sun?

during his story of the last stand of the 300 spartans remember those clindestwood types in bronze herodotus tells a story of a local person who goes up to one of the spartans and says you know that the persian archers are so numerous that when they shoot their arrows they hide the sun and the famous one liner that comes back you know the bravado from the shore to die spartan was something to the effect of that'll be great because then we can fight in the shade

But it's indicative of what this Persian army was known for, archery. And is it hyperbole to suggest that they could blot out the sun with it? Don't you wish you had video of one of these ancient battles to get some idea of what we're talking about here and the capabilities?

I've said many times that if I ever get that time machine, I want to be transported into a hot air balloon floating about 100 feet over one of these ancient battlefields so I can see what's going on. I'll answer 100 questions in about a minute and a half. As soon as I can just visualize it. There's no video. It'd be very gory and awful if there were, but I'd look at it just to try to get a picture of what we're talking about here. We haven't done this in so long, nobody knows what it was like. It's the same thing when I was studying...

Western sword fighting techniques. Nobody knows that either. Everybody's trying to recreate how people did medieval sword fighting with a long sword based on still two-dimensional images from books because no one kept alive the art form, say, the way the Japanese did with their sword fighting techniques.

right that's alive and well but nobody knows for sure even with some pretty darn good recreations out there how western sword fighting did it you don't do something for a while you don't have video of it yet you lose the ability to understand it totally same thing with these ancient battles right

oftentimes these ancient authors that you would use as your your best pieces of evidence to explain and colorize what it all looked like leave out the most important parts of the story because to them it's just known stuff right i don't have to explain the most basic stuff to you everybody understands what happens when for example two blocks of human beings you know a thousand men strong run into each other during a charge right

Well, no, I don't know what happened there and neither do historians. And if I was in my hot air balloon 100 feet over the battlefield, I would finally be able to answer the question. Do those blocks of human beings actually run into each other and go face to face, tooth to tooth, toe to toe in a claustrophobic, horrible scrum, you know, where people are so cramped together they can hardly use their weapons and the people in the front row are being squished to death by the people in the back and pushed onto the spears of their adversaries? Is that how it goes?

Or is it more like other historians have theorized, where at the last second there's something inherent in human beings where they won't throw themselves on the weapons of their enemies and they stop with a four or an eight foot gap between the two blocks of human beings, a no man's land, if you will.

where they're stabbing and throwing stuff across the gap and champions are running out from each side and challenging each other in the no man's land and other brave people are running across to the other side and grabbing somebody out of the ranks and pulling them back to their side is that how it was there's other historians who split the difference and say that the units run into each other for a second and then you know over the first minute and a half or two minutes or whatever slowly pull back from each other creating that dead space in the middle

But nobody knows. Nobody knows if cavalry will charge infantry or under what conditions. I mean, there's just stuff that's still debated by the experts because how would we know? You could do some mathematics, though, if you're not terrible at math, and I'm not that good, but I was able to handle round numbers like this to try to get an idea of certain capabilities.

One of the wonderful things about ancient warfare is that even if you can't know what it was like, you can understand that there are certain realities to it, physical laws, if you will. Let's call it the physics of the battlefield in pre-gunpowder times that are limited by certain bedrock elements that don't change. Human beings, for example, horses, other flesh and blood creatures like camels and elephants that are often used in battles.

There's a limit to human endurance. There's a limit to human morale. There's a limit to muscle power. And those sorts of, you know, constraints were operating in the armies of the Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, all the way to the armies of Richard II, the Lionheart, you know, in the Holy Land during the Crusades.

There's something about, you know, battle over the eras until gunpowder takes over where commanders from different eras could have commanded armies from other eras and not been too deep out of the water for them to understand, you know, what they were dealing with because certain elements didn't change.

When you're talking about the sorts of armies that these great states threw against each other, they generally included, you know, close order infantry as sort of the rock around which you built your army. The battle line, you would say, in some periods. A good estimate for a traditional set piece battle with a Persian army might be a 2,500 or 3,000 yard or meter front. Think about, you know, 25 or 30 football fields long.

and a solid line of men across a ton of that space the battle line would generally make up maybe if you wanted to just get a off the top of your head estimate say 70 to 75 percent of each army side is made up of these phalanxes units of men packed shoulder to shoulder next to each other and keeping that packed nature of things staying together and then multiple ranks behind them the rank depth changed and if you had four ranks behind you that's a pretty shallow formation and

in the hellenistic period you'll get some hellenistic phalanxes that'll go 72 men deep the armies of this periods near east tended to be organized decimally so the smallest unit would be 10 men then up to 100 then a thousand we're told the persians had 10 000 man units the tweak that the persians are supposed to have made modern historians think to the age-old formations of the assyrians and the babylonians has to do with how many ranks of archers they have versus how many ranks of spearmen

historian nigel talus is one of many who points out that the assyrians thought and the babylonians copied them that you needed to have half of your units ready for hand-to-hand combat and the other half could be armed with missile weapons and so what they would do is pack the front half of the unit with the spearmen and with a big spear heavy big shield a helmet if you could an armor if you could and so if you had a formation that was

Eight ranks deep, the first four in the Syrian army would usually be the hand-to-hand combat guys, the rear four, the archers, and the archers would shoot over the head of the spearmen. Creates a very flexible formation. Any enemy that won't come to grips with you, you can strike from a distance. Any enemy you want to advance on and close with, you can weaken before your spearmen have to engage in hand-to-hand combat. Anyone who just sits there, you can shoot for a while.

and anyone who comes at your unit you can kill on the way in, making an easier job for your spearmen when they finally get to you. Historians think that the Persians tweaked that formation by taking out most of the ranks of close-order infantry, the spearmen, and replacing them with archers, often archers with little or no armor and no shields.

Most of these Persian units are going to have a front rank of spear armed, shielded, often armored, but not always infantry that protect the archers behind them. They have a shield that's made of wicker, but that looks like a boogie board for you Americans, almost a man's size, tall wicker plank cut square. And it looks like when all the front rank decided to close together, those things are going to fit together like a perfect wall and

So imagine, you know, 70 to 75 percent of your 2,500 to 3,000 yard front has a wall of wicker shields in front of it protecting, you know, your archers from any missile fire back. But your archers are shooting over the heads of those troops and just blowing people away. So I did some calculations, assuming low numbers at every step. Imagine a 50,000 man Persian army, which would be a low number, believe it or not.

Imagine that in that battle line that the Persians have probably increased the firepower over Assyrian versions by, you know, 20 or 30 percent more. Imagine that 20,000 archers are in that main battle line. Each archer fires about five arrows a minute and their quivers carry 120, but just for the sake of argument, we'll say that they're not full and we'll give them all 100 arrows each. That means that across that battle line,

where these troops who are sitting behind the wall of wicker shields are shooting they're shooting a hundred thousand arrows a minute from the main battle line you know to a distance of about 200 yards in front of the army beyond that they can shoot but effective range is 175 to 200 yards

they can keep up this fire for as long as their muscles will hold out or until their arrows run out which at that rate would be after about 20 minutes of shooting and after 20 minutes of shooting they would have fired two million arrows now infantry with armor might be able to withstand that but if you're on a horse in front of that crowd you're dead

if you're driving a chariot you're gone you don't get anywhere near the battle line right you're blown away at a distance that's a great sort of military change that they made over the assyrians if you're fighting the kind of enemies the persians usually are they improved those assyrian formations unless of course enemy you know hand-to-hand combat troops

finally get to you. Here's the way historian Nigel Tallis talks about, you know, this change that the Persians did to tweak the traditional Assyrian formation, quote, It is likely that a battle array of this kind would be highly effective when facing the large mounted forces known in the Near East since at least the second millennium B.C. A horse is a large and vulnerable target for archery. Well-equipped infantry is less vulnerable.

as the Persians were to discover. It is probable that Achaemenid formations followed the Elamite tradition of maximizing the number of archers in the infantry units, unlike the Assyrians, who seemed to have maintained a 50-50 ratio of archers to shielded spearmen." Now, it's tempting to think of all this as minutiae, right? Wargamer geek stuff.

But if the majority of historians for more than two millennia are right, this is the kind of minutia that determines why these battles we're about to talk about go the way they do. Now, whereas the majority of the Persians in this time period are going to be in that battle line we just talked about, they're also going to have some cavalry, and the Persians had great cavalry.

I've often thought of the Persian army in this period as a more, for lack of a better word, barbarized version of the Assyrian army at its height. And I often compare it to like ancient Rome. If you look at the Roman Empire at their height, it's so tempting to see them almost as like the Nazi Germany era where they're all marching in almost lockstep, goose step formation with intricate precision, immaculate drill. You know, everybody's sleeping in the barracks, everyone professional and the whole thing.

And then I think of the Roman Empire, you know, a couple hundred years later where the armies lost some of that spit and polish. And instead of having everybody or the majority of troops, you know, at the top being Roman, you have, you know, some barbarians, the Romans would call them, tribal peoples, more aristocratic. I mean, Hans Delbruck calls the Persians from this period the cavalry knights. So

So imagine, you know, a more barbarized version of the Roman Empire's army with Normans. And maybe that's a little like what the Persians are. I think the Persians could give the Assyrians a run for their money. But there there's not as much spit and polish and there is more aristocratic tribal nobility. But their cavalry can fight like hell. And there's a lot of them.

They fight a little bit like the Scythians and the Huns and the Mongols and those people. They shoot you, you know, from a distance in small units with bows. Generally, it's thought that the big unit of cavalry would go over to near where it wants to attack, stay at a distance and then send out subunits, you know, smaller squadrons who would then go up to where they want to attack, unleash all their javelins and arrows until they're out.

ride back to the main body and then another smaller squadron comes and repeats the process until the unit that they're firing at begins to get all disorganized or their morale breaks or they become so weakened that they're you know easy prey for the persian infantry once they've run out of their two million missiles or however many it is to come and mop up and of course once an army broke and started to run away all that persian cavalry becomes absolutely lethal

They do nothing better, cavalry, than running down, fleeing, routing troops.

Now, this cavalry was one of the most feared elements of the Persian army, and it worked in conjunction with the infantry. In fact, it's tempting to make a case that the Persians might have rationalized getting rid of all those close combat troops and replacing them with archers by suggesting that their overwhelming cavalry could make up for the difference and that their battle system required combining what the cavalry was probably doing on the flanks with what the infantry was doing in front, and close cooperation would create a lethal combined arms battle

sort of approach when it worked the persians also had those guard units we talked about they were called the immortals also called the attendants or the attendees probably armored may have fought in a similar way to the rest of the normal troops but just at a higher quality level also the persians used mercenaries and hired them more and more by the way as the empire went on

and lastly the empire could levy troops from its own empire which is what it did with the main forces the main forces are persian and median and elamite and and the troops from the center of the empire but they had all these provinces stretching from modern-day pakistan to modern-day libya up all the way to afghanistan and down all the way to like practically saudi arabia

It's a huge territory, and they could levy troops for the entire thing. And when you read your Herodotus, by the way, he says that at least nominal units from all those areas showed up. The Persians ruled over like 80 different people.

and Herodotus runs down more than 40 of them, you know, when he runs down the Persian army. So you have all these people we just talked about, but then you have all the exotic people from the periphery of the Persian empire, and Herodotus talks about the Indian troops that are in the army. He talks about the troops from Africa who will paint half their body white and half their body red and tip their spears with antelope horn, black troops from modern-day Sudan, and

He'll talk about what he calls the black Ethiopians from India, which modern historians think are probably Dravidians because they're dark, but they have straight hair and horsehair helmets. I mean, it's a wonderful exotic list, and historians think that part of what the Persians were doing is showing the flag a little bit to these people that they were fighting, basically saying, look at the breadth of

and scope of the people we can draw from this is how big our empire is that we encompass all these groups and you're seeing just a small number of them imagine how many are back at home that we could call on if we needed them historians are unsure how much those troops played a role in a typical set piece battle

But it just kind of shows the width and breadth of the Persian king of kings' ability to call on troops, you know, as needed. And sometimes because of their specific skill. You know, I need this done. Call up the Ethiopians. I mean, for example, that's how the, you know, Persians get the greatest navy in the world, like overnight. Right?

When they take over the Phoenician cities that are on the coast, they essentially, I would say subcontract, but there's no choice in the deal. It's like, you know, the CEO Darius of Persia Corps announces the acquisition of the Phoenician Navy. And now the Phoenician Navy is a division of Persia Corps. I mean, something like that.

But that's how they are with everything, right? We take over the local institutions and we let you do things your way as much as possible. I mean, part of the fun of running a Persian army in ancient wargaming was that all these troops got to fight in their own local style. Again, that was sort of a subsidiary of the Persians letting you do things your way. They kind of go up to you, according to the way we used to think anyway, and say, you

listen what is it you do well well we're very good at spear throwing okay why don't you do that for us you'll be just like the phoenician navy they're really good on the water according to historian jf lazenby he lists the persian army's real strong points and they're all sort of above the tactical level he lists intelligence as something they do wonderfully you know reconnaissance sending out diplomats and spies and merchants who report back i mean they usually know quite a bit about the territories around them

He cites diplomatic warfare as his number two thing that he says the Persians just have a huge advantage in. As we've been saying, they kind of are always ready to make a deal, measure the profit loss, you know, that kind of thing. And if you weren't so willing to make a deal, you know, when the Persian army was a long way away, they send diplomats with the army so that, you know, they just check back with you to make sure you're sure on that deal decision. You know, when they have 30, 50, 100,000 men with them armed heavily, you

lazenby says meticulous planning was one of their strong suits and you know you would think that as inheritors of the whole mesopotamian tradition greatest record keepers in the ancient world right the babylonians and sumerians and all those people you'd think that you inherited the ability to you know handle that sort of thing well keep your records keep your books and be organized but that actually played into how far away from the homeland you could move your armies

Because if you weren't a meticulous planner, those armies starve when they get a certain distance away. Every army is constrained by sort of a range of motion, you know, by how well you could supply it. And the sheer fact that what we call the Greek and Persian wars will happen in Greece shows you, you know, how good the Persian planning was. They could project their power a long way. And finally, Lazenby says that they had an engineering expertise that he says was, quote, of a high order, end quote.

Basically, the Greeks were blown away by the Persian ability to bridge rivers, to dig canals, to knock down walls. And this is really key when you think about it. We've been comparing the Persian approach and conquest of territories and expansion to the blob. But you could also think about it like really slow, thick lava expansion.

they just kind of, you know, when they have to reconquer territories, they just sort of go in there and one after another, slowly but surely, knock down, reliably knock down the walls of the city, take it, move on to the next city. And there's a very businesslike approach to the whole thing. And if you weren't good at that, you wouldn't have been able to do what the Persians did. Too many cities had walls and that was such a huge part of conquest.

As I said before, I would love to see what this all looked like actually in battle. I actually go watch, by the way, you know, some of the worst riots you've ever seen that are on the Internet and everything, because you'll see oftentimes police who have big shields that are like the Romans and they're kind of packed into formations. And you'll see the rioters on the other side and flinging things and and attacking sometimes. And sometimes cavalry comes into it. You think to yourself, OK, well,

it's not really apples and apples at all but they're certain we get back to the physics of the battlefield elements to it that make me think okay maybe this is a little what it's like look at how those two bodies of people move when they get close to each other look what happens when a horse enters the picture i mean maybe you can just get the tiniest taste of what the physics of battle that everybody up until the time period that gunpowder took over would have known instinctively or through experience or simply through common knowledge

According to ancient Greek authors, the Greeks had, especially before, you know, the big tangle happened, a healthy respect, a very healthy respect for the great king's armies and capabilities. And as we said, up until this time, this is an army that basically wins. But then sometime between 515 and 510 BCE, Darius decides to give this army one of those tests,

that are so difficult it would be a surprise if they didn't fail. Many great armies over history have failed a similar test, by the way. He decides to go invade the land occupied by the Central Asian nomads.

and becomes just another one of those you know leaders over time who found out that people who live on the wide open expenses of the step whether in ancient times or 20th century versions of them have the option of simply retreating into the interior and then you have to follow them ask napoleon how well that can work

And that was in an era, by the way, Napoleon's time, when there were cities and things that could be burned down and taken. The secret weapon of these people Darius tries to conquer is that there's nothing to conquer.

they're nomads there are no cities there are no urban centers and how you with your fantastic army deal with them if their strategy to deal with you is to simply retreat in front of you and keep going and going and going while your supply lines get longer and longer and longer because guess what you aren't central asian tribal nomadic horse archers and you can't just supply a huge army whatever that means with lots of infantry and horses and camels and all sorts of things endlessly

on a wild goose chase or in this case a wild centaur chase now there are two reasons why this gets a ton of historical attention because darius had actually had to quell a revolt against central asian people right when he came to power this gets a ton of attention though for two reasons one herodotus makes it a key scene in his narrative so when he's giving his performance he has another opportunity to emphasize the wonderful

colorful nature of the skithians hit one of his favorite subjects and let's be honest one of mine too because if you're trying to entertain people these people are the color brilliant historical color and fearsome and nasty and scary and full of all sorts of exotic customs they play the same role in his story that native americans play in the old dime novel westerns right

And there's a similar feel, by the way. I mean, Americans would recognize a lot of the same things because tribal people share certain qualities. And in the same way, for example, that tribes would band together into confederations in the Americas, and we've always considered them, fairly or otherwise, to be the next level in state development when you go from individual tribes to confederacies banding together into super tribes like the Iroquois Confederation.

Well, they did this in this entire world of the Central Asian nomads. And so the tribes that we actually know the names of are, in fact, confederations of many tribes. And it's a hard enough army to try to deal with when the Central Asian, the barbarian nomadic peoples from the steppe, that's the traditional, we would say today, probably racist, culturally elitist, xenophobic, and we have a million names to describe how Herodotus' views of the barbarians are.

But it's one thing to try to deal with them when they break into your territory. That's hard enough. Trying to deal with them in their territory. But let's put it this way. It won't be too long, you know, down into history where Macedonian armies from the period of Alexander the Greater leaving their bones, you know, on these desolate steps trying to chase down these armies of horse nomads. In Herodotus' story, there are wonderful scenes. He, of course, makes it a personal thing. He puts dialogue in people's mouths.

And the Scythians, you know, they play the Genghis Khan role in this story. They are a combination of merciless and menacing. And by the way, now, if you look at a map showing, you know, the route that Darius took, he crosses that little strip of water that separates Europe from Asia, you know, in modern day Turkey.

becoming an invader now from the ancient Near East, stepping foot on European soil, and then moves through, you know, the area east of modern-day Romania and up into the southern Ukrainian area. I mean, it's an enormously long razia or raid, burning, pillaging, looting, whatever there might be, in an attempt to somehow bring these people to battle. But they won't stop running. And Herodotus, in his account, writes, quote,

As there seemed to be no end to this pursuit, which had gone on for a long time, Darius sent a horseman to Idan Thyrsus, king of the Scythians, with this message. "'You extraordinary man! Why do you keep fleeing when you could certainly do otherwise? If you think you are able to challenge my power, then stop your wandering and stand to fight it out. Or, if you acknowledge that you are too weak for that course, then you should stop running away. Bring gifts of earth and water to your master.'

and enter into negotiations with him end quote sounds like a civilized kingly approach right let's settle this here and now but that's not how they did business on the central asian steps and erototus has the reply from the very scary you know barbarian central asian you know tribal leader he writes quote

To this, Aedenthysus, king of the Scythians, responded, This is my situation, Persian. I've never yet fled from anyone out of fear before, and I'm not fleeing from you now. What I have been doing is, in fact, no different from what I'm accustomed to do in times of peace.

"'I'll tell you why I do not engage you now. "'It is because we have neither towns nor cultivated land "'to worry about being captured or raised, "'which might induce us to engage you in battle sooner. "'But if you really must come to battle without further delay, "'know that we do have ancestral graves. "'So come on, then, find them and try to destroy them, "'and you will know whether or not we shall fight for the graves.'

But before that, we shall not engage you in battle unless we see fit to do so. He then says, quote, Instead of gifts of earth and water, I shall send you the kind of tokens you really merit. And in response to your claim to be my master, I tell you, weep. That is your answer from the Scythians. End quote. Weep.

That's a great scene in Herodotus' movie, isn't it? So is this one, as recalled by historian M.A. Dandemiev, quote, "'The Scythians did not dare risk a decisive battle against the huge army of their adversaries. They therefore resorted to their beloved scorched-earth tactic. They retreated, taking with them their livestock, burning the grass, and filling in the water pits. In addition, Scythian cavalry repeatedly attacked and destroyed small Persian hunting parties.'

The Persians were worn out by their protracted pursuit of the Scythians deep into their own territory. When Darius was looking for a way out of this predicament, the Scythian leaders, in response to his demand that they would either come out for an open battle or submit voluntarily, sent a messenger to the Persian camp. Subsequently, if Herodotus is to be believed, Darius was presented by the messenger with a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows.

Darius thought that the Scythians thus announced their submission. Gabrius, however, one of the seven conspirators against Smyrdas, Bardia, gave a completely different explanation. If the Persians could not fly in the sky like birds, could not burrow into the ground like mice, or jump into the lakes like frogs, then they should expect to die by arrows."

There's a lot of different ways to interpret this. Generally, it's always been considered to be some kind of a loss and the Persians come struggling back to Asia, lucky to make it over a bridge of boats held by Greeks. But modern day historians look at this in a number of different ways, one of which is that

that these leaders, people who were descendants from steppe tribes themselves, who dealt with them all the time, knew that you couldn't capture them or force them into battle. And so, in effect, what they were doing was something like what the Chinese did for millennia to try to control the people on their border. Sometimes you have to just punch at them, just launch a raid, essentially, with a huge army, go smack them around. Sometimes you can depose their leaders and put in a client king because as...

Dan Demiurge points out you can't actually you know put a Persian ruler like a satrap to rule over these tribal peoples they won't you know you can't they have to have a tribal chieftain or something like that but you can handpick that guy so in other words Darius might have just punched these tribes exactly how he wanted to but the other thing that modern historians point out in which case you almost have to look at this as a victory is that when King Darius comes home supposedly struggling with the Scythians close on his heels the

He leaves a general in Thrace. Thrace is in the modern-day Balkans. And this general's orders are to continue the conquest and subject that entire area. That entire area is Europe, north of Greece, the northern part of the Black Sea, a place where cities like Athens depend on grain shipments that all of a sudden are threatened by an army of

whose capital is located in modern-day Iran, but these Persians are in the Balkans. This is the setup for what's about to happen. And what's about to happen kicks off with a revolt in cities that are in modern-day Turkey, Greek cities, but cities that were under Persian domination at this time.

Many of these cities, you know, were in a province of, you know, what's now modern-day Turkey. Asia Minor called Ionia. So they're called Ionian Greeks, and this revolt is called the Ionian Revolt. And it'll go from like 499 to like 493 BCE.

The Greeks were great colonizers and had cities all over the Mediterranean, not just the coast of Turkey on the Aegean like these cities. I mean, they had many of the islands in that whole region were Greek. They had colonies on the North African coast. They had one outside of Egypt. They had many on Sicily. They had some in Italy. They had some in southern France. I mean, these are great colonizers. And so they have cousins all over the Mediterranean, though.

And it is to the mainland Greeks that the Ionians go for help after they rebel and realize, oh, you know, we're screwed. Right. If we don't get some help here, we're in terrible, terrible trouble. So they send a guy named Aristagoras, who's one of the leaders of this revolt, back to mainland Greece to essentially make a pitch like a business proposition. And I know this whole show has a sort of a corporate business feel, but this is the way Herodotus portrays it. He actually has this guy go in here with like a PowerPoint presentation first to the Spartans.

and has him acting as a clever businessman to try to sell sparta on intervention in their revolt against the persians and it's one of the great parts of herodotus where you know essentially he has the story of aristogorus first going to king cleomenes of the spartans and remember the spartans had two of them two kings in this case cleomenes

aristagoras goes in there with his bronze tablet so you think of your you know laptop powerpoint presentation and he sits down with the spartan king and he starts giving him the rundown of all the good things you'll get if you invest in this you know ionian revolt idea that i have here for you today

This is from my Purvis translation, and he translates, as he should, by the way, the word Greeks as Hellenes. So when we say Hellenes, we mean Greeks, and when we say Lacedaemonians, we mean Spartans. Quote,

According to the account of the Lacedaemonians, when he went to talk with Cleomenes, Aristagoras had with him a bronze tablet on which a map of the entire world was engraved, including all rivers and every sea. To begin the discussion, Aristagoras said, "'Cleomenes, do not be surprised at my urgency in coming here, for this is how matters stand, that the sons of the Ionians are slaves instead of free men is a disgrace, and the most painful anguish to us.'

"'but also to you, especially of all the others, "'inasmuch as you are the leaders of Hellas. "'So now, by the gods of the Hellenes, "'come rescue the Ionians from slavery. "'They're of the same blood as you, after all. "'This will be easy for you to accomplish, "'since the barbarians are not valiant, "'while you've attained the highest degree of excellence in war.'

Since they fight with bows and short spears, wearing trousers and turbans on their head, they're easily subdued. Further, the inhabitants of that continent possess more good things than all the other people of the world put together. To begin with, they have gold as well as silver, bronze, colorful clothing, beasts of burden and slaves, all of which could be yours if you really desired them."

he then runs down every territory that the persians have at least the ones herodotus knows about and with each one he says what it has this one has a lot of gold and silver this one has a lot of cattle you know this one has a lot of slaves in other words you know he's running down the benefits right of this business proposition of his the leader of sparta says all right go away let me think about this for a couple of days and i'll come back and give you my answer okay he comes back and he asks a simple question of this aristogorus guy and he says

He says, so how far is it from where we are now to where this king is? He wants to know how far it is to the Persian capital. How far do I have to go to win this war that you're trying to sell me on? Herodotus says at this point, this business proposition goes sour when Aristagoras makes a key mistake when he takes the opportunity to not lie to the Spartans at this point.

This is how Herodotus, from my De Selincor translation, puts it, you know, right before they're supposed to meet again for the Spartans to give the answer as to how they feel about investing in this Ionian revolt thing. Quote, "'That was as far as they got at the moment. But when the day came on which Cleomenes had agreed to give his decision and they met at the appointed place, he asked Aristagoras how far off Susa was,' Susa, the Persian capital, "'and how many days it took to reach it from the Ionian coast.'

up to this aristogorus had been clever and had led cleomenes on with great success but in answering this question he made a bad mistake if he wanted to induce the spartans to invade asia he never ought to have told them the truth but he did and he said it took three months end quote

herodotus writing 2500 years ago i mean think this is a great scene right that you almost think about him as the sort of the sleazy you know salesman type comes in here and tries to sort of put one over on the spartan king and then all of a sudden falls into the trap and says three months is how long it's going to take to get to the persian capital and cleomenes basically says get the hell out of here he says be out of sparta by sundown are you crazy

and sort of instantly understands that this whole time, you know, he's been led on. And Herodotus says that, you know, Cleomenes goes back home and the sales guy follows him.

tries to start bribing him you know to do the deal come on i'll give you 50 talents if you do it i'll give you 100 talents if you do it that kind of thing and herodotus says a little spartan boy one of the sons of clemenes was in the room and said something like daddy you better get out of here because this man's going to corrupt you if things keep going the way they're going it's another one of those stories about the uncorruptible spartans now because he fails with the spartans this aristogoras character then goes to the athenians

who have been a democracy now for 10 15 20 years i mean it's a short new kind of system they're running with there and it's not like a democracy you or i would recognize but as herodotus points out instead of having to convince a king or two in sparta to invest in your idea here you have to kind of convince the majority of whomever it is that makes the decisions here that they should invest in the idea in other words voters whomever the heck that might be in an ancient democracy

This also from the De Celencore translation, quote, "'It was at this moment when the Athenians had made their decision and were already on bad terms with Persia that Aristagoras of Miletus, who had been turned out of Sparta by Cleomenes, arrived in Athens.'

"'He knew that Athens at this time was the next most powerful state in Greece. "'Accordingly, he appeared before the people and made a speech "'in which he repeated the arguments he'd previously used at Sparta, "'about all the good things to be found in Asia, "'and the Persian methods of warfare, "'how they used neither shields nor spears and were easy to beat.'

in addition to this he pointed out that meletus had been founded by athenian settlers so it was only natural that the athenians powerful as they were should help her out in her need indeed so anxious was he to get athenian aid that he promised everything that came into his head until at last he succeeded apparently it's easier to impose upon a crowd than upon an individual for aristagoras who had failed to impose upon cleomenes succeeded with 30 000 athenians

Once persuaded to accede to Aristagoras' appeal, the Athenians passed a decree for the dispatch of 20 ships to Ionia under the command of Melanthius, a distinguished Athenian. Herodotus then says, the sailing of this fleet was the beginning of trouble not only for Greece but for other peoples. End quote. That translation of that line differs book to book, translation to translation. But that's the schwerpunkt. That's the moment when the Athenians decide...

to do something that's a little bit crazy because they essentially give in and Herodotus sort of blames democracy for this saying, you know, that one Spartan king could see the flaw in this dude's proposal, you know, from the get go, right? Spotted the flaw like the shark tank investor, venture capitalists said, get the heck out of here. Don't you try to cheat me. But 30,000 Athenian, you know, voters, part of the electorate there, they could have the wool pulled over their eyes by a clever salesman, right?

and the Athenians send 20 ships to go help the Ionian revolt. But 20 ships is not enough to do anything except get you in trouble. These Athenian ships will join with other ships. They will disembark and join rebellious Ionian troops who will, among other things, burn the provincial capital at Sardis, maybe accidentally.

And then that army will get caught by one of the provincial Persian armies and crushed with heavy casualties. At this point, the Athenians, whose support for this Ionian revolt is kind of like not a little more than symbolic, but quite a bit less than useful. They kind of pull back and go, oh, yeah, you know, we're not that into it anymore.

We can kind of see echoes in an inconsistent policy where public opinion just sort of changes, right? There's no king here to say we're going to stay the course. The public wasn't sure anyway. And all of a sudden, maybe these Persians didn't look like the pushovers that the salesmen for the Ionian revolt said they'd be. Yeah, we're out. And hopefully, we'll just forget that this ever happened.

Of course, Herodotus makes a point to say that Darius, of course, is not going to forget that it happened. And one of Herodotus' great stories revolves around, you know, Darius trying to make sure that he didn't forget amongst all his problems, you know, in his empire, those people, the Athenians. Herodotus' story talks about after the burning of Sardis and Darius gets the news about that. Quote,

It is said that when Darius first heard this report, he disregarded the Ionians, since he knew that they at least would not escape punishment for their revolts. But he inquired as to who the Athenians were, and after he had been told, he asked for a bow. He took the bow, set an arrow on the string, and shot the arrow toward the heavens. And as it flew high into the air, he said, Zeus, let it be granted to me to punish the Athenians.

after saying this he appointed one of his attendants to repeat to him three times whenever his dinner was served my lord remember the athenians end quote that's how they did things back in the analog era no word on whether the attendant's name was siri

Nonetheless, great story, though it may be probably either just totally false or, you know, another way to look at it is that this Athenian problem of Darius was so small he had to have someone remind him every day three times at dinner, otherwise he'd forget about it with all the things he had to deal with.

To show you what a low priority this whole revolt is for the Persian Empire, the great king himself doesn't even worry about the Ionian revolt. He delegates it to an underling and the Persians, like slow-moving lava, methodically reduce these rebellious cities in Asia Minor and off the coast. And it's often awful, you know, the retribution that these empires mete out to rebellious cities. But let's understand that's something that in much of the world is still treated rather harshly.

and in this time period standard operating procedure was an extreme human experience so for example the home city of aristagoras the powerpoint presenter of herodotus he gets his city leveled meletus is the name of it and the men are for the most part killed but the boys we're told are castrated and sent back to persia to be eunuchs the girls and women sold into slavery

and so if you don't look at aristogoras the way herodotus did like some clever manipulator and instead look at him as someone who one way or another gets involved in this revolt but once you're in the stakes are everything i mean you see what happened to his home city when it got you know retaken by the persians he knows what the stakes are if you're thinking every man dies every boy gets castrated every woman and girl gets sold into slavery and your city's leveled wouldn't you do anything

wouldn't you by hook or by crook tell the athenians anything that they needed to hear to get public opinion on your side enough to send help and even though herodotus sort of makes this aristogoras in his movie version of events out to be a little like professor harold hill and the music man coming in to sell river city on the idea of a boy's band with instruments that'll never show up and the people of athens or at least a sizable percentage of their electorate is easily hoodwinked by professor hill and

It's clear that for at least some Athenians, this issue of Ionian freedom for Greeks in Asia Minor is big and passionate and important. Historian Peter Green tells a story of a play that aired in Athens right after the Ionian revolt collapsed. He says it may have been the first time that recent historical events, as opposed to myths, had been represented in the Athenian theater. And he writes, quote,

In the early spring of 493, the dramatist Phryneikos put on a play called The Capture of Miletus, vividly depicting the collapse of the Ionian revolt. The effect was remarkable. Phryneikos saw his audience weep tears of grief at patriotic shame. Stung into swift action, the pro-Persian lobby got the play banned.

when in doubt green writes fall back on censorship for nikes himself was fined a thousand drachmas almost three years pay for the average working man but the idea of subservience to darius however reasonable it might be now rapidly lost ground end quote how modern does that sound public opinion altered by a popular portrayal of events that were relatively current

And while historian Peter Green, writing in 1970, you know, shares an attitude that we probably would share today, living when and where we do, that censorship is not a good thing. Censorship of the arts is not a good thing and that public opinion should matter, right? And a democracy or a republic, it should matter. And remember, Athens is in what you could call the testing phase, maybe, of how this whole democracy thing is going to work.

There certainly must have been other democratic experiments the world over, but Athens is credited with being the quote-end-quote first democracy, and they probably are given the scale, you know, first major attempt at the experiment that is democracy. Only 10 or 20 years old at this point.

And if you're watching from the sidelines and you're a member of the conservative former but still powerful ruling class, and you're looking at how public opinion is doing so far at trying to, you know, govern things intelligently, they've already done something the Spartan king refused to do and got involved in a revolt that tweaked the nose of the great king of Persia.

that never had a chance of achieving anything really meaningful with the small amount of people they sent but was just enough to get you into trouble you already did that and now this playwright is writing plays that get them all fired up about confronting persia because of all the injustices of darth vader and the evil star empire if this is the same thing as like remember the main was the newspaper campaign that fired up americans in the spanish-american war period to you know go to war with spain

It's a little bit different because in that conflict, you could argue about historical justice and all that kind of stuff, but the United States was going to kick Spain's rear end. So propaganda that got public opinion to support the idea of kicking Spain's rear end is something that is not too detrimental to the country.

This is much more like the people in Latvia being encouraged and their passions roused and a war fever stoked in order to confront the Russians or the Mexicans, you know, having the propaganda and the entertainment and public opinion and everything pushing towards, you know, going back and reconquering those states they lost to the United States a century and a half ago.

That's something that in that case is public opinion leading you towards national suicide. And they'd already shown a propensity to get you into trouble. That's why you're on the, you know, great king's naughty list already. It's no wonder that guy was fined. You know, stoking those kinds of emotions at this time and at this place, that's an existential threat to Athens at this point.

It is interesting the ability to portray the Persians in such an evil light, though, because if you actually look at the Ionian revolt and how the Persians dealt with it afterwards, they actually did so in a way that was just typical of their style. They punished the rebellious cities horribly, as we said, but then went in and tried to figure out why the Ionians kept revolting.

lowered some taxes in places, changed some trade deals in others, tried to alleviate the problem at its core. And ironically enough, because some of these cities that had revolted didn't like the tyrants that were ruling them, this newfangled thing called democracy, they wanted a piece of that too. The Persians let them have it.

Remember, they were known for allowing local customs, you know, to stay in place as long as things still worked out for them. And if the local custom was going to be to elect your own leaders in your own city, the Persians were fine with that as long as the city stayed loyal to Persia. So once again, the Persians kind of look like the place we'd all like to live if we had to live back in those days in a, you know, absolute monarchy, right? On the ancient monarchy scale, you know, they score very highly for leniency, tolerance, compassion,

common sense but if you're greek you're not going to look at it that way at least not if you're athenian the last thing you want to do is have a king you have a democracy now and if you're spartan you want a king but you want a spartan king the last thing you want is some barbarian king so no people ever in the path of being conquered by any other people could see the upsides can you blame them

But, you know, I've always thought that if you were another city-state in Greece, remember, Greece is not a unified place. It's a bunch of competing, often warring, in some cases, bitter enemy city-states. Sparta's a city-state. Athens is a city-state. Thebes, Corinth, a bunch of places. Argos.

"'What the Athenian democracy did by sending those twenty ships to aid the Ionian revolt "'is take the great king of kings gaze, the most powerful figure in the world, "'and turn it into your direction. "'And he doesn't just see Athens, he sees everything over there. "'What did the people in Argos do to deserve that? "'They might have eventually been absorbed by the blob, who knows?'

But the Athenians essentially declared war on Persia, but lived in a neighborhood that the Persians couldn't help but trample on on their way to punishing the Athenians. And this is partly why this story has magnified in terms of importance. For the people in Greece, this is life or death. To the Persians, this is a frontier disturbance. Historian A.T. Olmsted has a chapter, I love the title, it's Problems on the Greek Frontier.

historian george cockwell entitled his whole book the greek wars instead of the persian wars because the persian wars makes it sound you know like the greeks are talking about it because to them that's what this was but to the rest of the you know world that was centered around mesopotamia these were the greek wars something over on the frontier something that in no way you could ever imagine could threaten the empire the athenians however were doomed and they knew it was coming

during this whole period traditionally there's a lot of focus on athenian internal politics and the war party versus you know what the athenians sometimes called collaborators they had a word for it based on you know it was the persians and the medes so they called it medizing when you were medizing you were talking about collaborating or giving into the great king and so they had these different factions led by different powerful families you know sort of

sparring and fighting it out and meanwhile you know the existential threat in 492 bce gets going

led by a son of one of the assassination hit squad members who also happened to marry into the royal family. So, you know, you can see how incestuous all this assassination hit squad thing is starting to be. His name is Mardonius. He's fascinating. I wish we knew more about him. He's an interesting, you know, Persian general. And he takes an army and a fleet working together in a way we would call land sea operations today in

and leaves Asia, crosses the Dardanelles into Europe. Now, nobody knows the size of this army. Herodotus says it was 300 ships. Take that with a grain of salt, but it doesn't matter if it's half that big. This is a mammoth operation for navies in the ancient world.

The Persians, of course, did not create their own navy. They took over the best one in the world and then they tasked it with things it never could have been tasked with before. Like, okay, we want you to support a 20 or 30 or 40,000 man army with your navy. That's a new level of sophistication and operations. And what the Persians are doing in this conquest of Greece, which is something that they might have done in Egypt too earlier, but this is where you really get a chance to see it on display, is

is a precursor to, you know, land-sea operations today involving, you know, marine amphibious landings, everything. These fleets can be used to sit offshore and follow an army that's marching along the coast and feed it, extending operations. Nobody knows how many troops Mardonius had, but he lands in this area controlled by Thracians.

The entire region around the Balkans during this time period, and this particular area, of course, is up in sort of by where modern northeastern tip of Greece is, you know, up in that area, all a bunch of Thracian tribes. Herodotus labeled them the second most populous nation in the world after the Indians and extremely warlike. He said that they would have conquered the world if they didn't love fighting each other too much.

and they are you know you don't want to be so stereotypical about barbarians because all these people had wonderful cultures and values and and religious beliefs and and and you know puberty rights i mean it's all a part of it but you can't help but look at a thracian and think there's your hollywood casting director's idea of a barbarian they look a lot like a skithian without the horse they got the war paint they got the tattoos they like to you know carry severed heads around with them when they're trying to intimidate their enemies and they're tough

and they like ambushes and they like to kill prisoners i mean they scare people and this area had submitted to darius this whole area when he came along chasing those scythians a while back

But, you know, the Persian army then goes home and they kind of, you know, get a little lax. And, yeah, we haven't heard from him in a while and, you know, whatever. And then the army comes back and says, you know what, we're just going to tighten that relationship a little bit more and made all of those areas that had been formerly sort of just, yeah, we're your vassals kind of deal into official provinces run by governors appointed by the Persian king.

one of these provinces is the is the is the next little kingdom i guess you could say on the way to greece you go from thrace to macedonia if the name rings a bell the king at the time will you know ring it even harder his name is alexander alexander the first of macedonia you know what he does when the persian army under mardonius shows up he submits

becomes a governor under the control of the Persians and some historians in a wonderful ironic twist of history say that if not for the stability and centralization and state building climate that Persian control you know gave Macedonia during this period they may never have coalesced into a strong centralized state that would eventually evolve into something that could destroy the very people who made that centralized state possible

Oh, and just for the fun of it, do it under a king with the same name. Don't you just love history? Nonetheless, the Thracian tribes do get one good sucker punch in on Mardonius before they get crushed brutally. A tribe of them will ambush the Persian army at night and create great havoc, including wounding Mardonius.

right around the same time this fleet that is accompanying the persian army will try to round a point called mount athos and herodotus says as soon you know it's like going around the tip of florida think about it that way and as soon as the fleet hits the tip it gets hit by winds strong winds according to herodotus and he says 300 ships sank and 20 000 men died

Here's what my Purvis translation of Herodotus says, quote, From Thassos the fleet crossed over and sailed close to the shore of the mainland, up to Acanthos, from which they set out in an attempt to round Mount Athos. But as they were sailing around, a strong north wind came up on them, which was so impossible to deal with that it battered them badly and wrecked many of their ships against the shore of Mount Athos.

in fact it is said that about 300 of their ships were destroyed with more than 20,000 men and since this sea is full of savage creatures some were snatched up and killed by them while others were dashed against the sharp rocks some men perished because they did not know how to swim and still others died from the cold so that is what happened to the fleet there end quote i'm sorry in my head right now i just think to myself what did that look like 300 ships

20,000 men? That's somewhere between 13 and 14 Titanics going down in terms of lives lost if Herodotus' numbers are anywhere near correct. But even more from a visual standpoint is the idea of 300 ships wrecked. All, I mean, what did that, I mean, are they all bunched together in one place or are they scattered around an entire coastline? I mean, what is the visual on this? If Herodotus is doing the movie, who's doing the cinematography on that?

And how much do we have to use, you know, CGI computer graphics because there's no way otherwise to, you know, show that scene? How much would it cost to do that 1950s Elizabeth Taylor Richard Burton style, right? Analog. Have to get 300 fake ships. I mean, think about the visuals. It's just all the people in the water. I mean, everything that people find so horrifying about going down in the Titanic, you have happening, you know, around Mount Athos.

And, you know, when you think about the precariousness of maritime travel, I mean, bad storms will sink ships today, as we all know. Well, the farther back you go in history, in general, the more rickety these vessels become. During this period, they didn't even like to stray away from the coast very much. Standard operating procedure was to beach these ships at night, and then in the morning push them back out. And they're big ships, but you still beach them. 140 guys, I read, it took to...

essentially lift a trireme onto the shore at night. So I wonder how much it took to actually give these fleets trouble. But the idea of 300 vessels going down when they rounded a cape, it's just, it boggles the mind. And yet you can find historical examples all over the place. I mean, the most famous has to be the Kamikaze, right? The divine wind.

When Japan was saved, you know, from the Mongol horde because the storm came up and battered the fleet, sank all these ships, scotched the invasion, right? Maybe this was Greece's own version of a kamikaze. But one thing that the Greeks knew is that this was not going to save them. This kamikaze was not a deliverer. It was a delayer.

And in a mere two years, Darius will have his next invasion force ready. Understand something, 300 ships lost, 20,000 men lost, that will stop most ancient empires in their tracks. The Persians methodically just put together another one. You know, in 490, it's ready to go and it is bigger, it is nastier.

It is going to be handled better, and we're going to take into account everything we learned from the failures of the last expedition, and this time it is going to be aimed right at the heart of Athens. And it's tempting to see Darius in his CEO role,

as already seeing that the odds are massively in his favor i mean in the celestial casino in the sky the battle between athens and the persians is off the books they're not taking bets on that there are no odds there is no chance and darius is still trying to get a little edge here or there

he leaves no stone unturned planning wise he sends out envoys in the year between you know the first expedition that founders off the rocks of mount athos and the one coming up he sends envoys to greece and they go to all these greek states and these greek islands and they ask for earth and water remember earlier we said that was the traditional token of submission and most of these places give it to them

vast majority of the islands a bunch of greek states two notable holdouts though athens who either throws their persian envoy into a pit that they usually have for convicts awaiting execution or throws them off a cliff take your pick and the spartans who in one of the famous moves of all time although some historians doubt it ever happened supposedly throw the persian envoy into a well when he asks for earth and water and tells him he can get both of them down there

that kills the Persian envoy and puts both the Spartans and the Athenians if they really did that onto the ledger of you know misdemeanors and high crimes that the Persians are keeping track of remember what happened to the Egyptians when they killed Persian envoys Cambyses got to sit there and watch a thousand or two thousand of their kids executed and sold into slavery

A bunch of Greek cities, states, and islands chose what you probably have to see as the only realistic answer and submitted earth and water to the Persians as asked.

and instantly becoming not just neutral in this struggle that Athens is about to engage in, but adversaries. I mean, other city-states in Greece all of a sudden were subjects of the great king. That's like the slow-moving lava on the other side of the Aegean all of a sudden launches embers into the sky that drop down on city-states in Greece near Athens.

The great king is going to levy troops from these other Greek cities to use against the Athenians. So if you already were going to crush poor little Greece with your Persian forces, well, now he's isolated the Athenians for the most part, the Spartans with them. So now he's just going to crush that little part of Greece. Now he's going to add Greek city-states to his side and their armies to his. I mean, this is a guy who really likes to load the dice, right?

And when you hear the scale of this attack and what it takes to launch, it gives you an absolutely new appreciation for the capabilities of ancient peoples. And you really do think to yourself, could we do this today if we had no computers and none of the modern stuff we normally use? I mean, you try to take, let's just say, a 50,000 stadium-size crowd of people and

and transport it over water and land a long way and not have it be a catastrophe historian tom holland you know has both of the generals of this expedition one guy's name is artafranes and he's related to the royal family the other's called datus and he's a mead and they command this expedition and from their eyes

he has them see the preparations that were so large and massive and went on for a whole year and there's no doubt the athenians knew this was going on holland writes quote

Every day's journey westward brought them fresh evidence of the barely believable scale of the great king's resources. The labor gangs toiling to maintain the roads, whole populations sometimes transplanted from the furthest reaches of the earth, the guards stationed beside every bridge, every flotilla of pontoons, every mountain pass, the troops in their own rear, not merely Persians and Medes,

but levies drawn from further east, Bactrians, Sogdians, and axe-wielding Saka. What was Athens to people such as these? Not even a name.

Yet on they marched, directed by the will of their far-off, all-seeing king, and every evening, no matter where they halted, these men from the steppes, from the mountains, from the villages of Iran, they would be provisioned out of monstrous depots, supplied punctually with jugs of wine and loaves of bread and barley for their horses.

And when at last, having passed through the Syrian gates and descended into the plains of Calicchia on the southeastern coast of modern-day Turkey, they found there waiting for them an immense fleet of ships, some built as weapons of war, others as horse transports. End quote. In the history of naval warfare, what the Persians are about to do here is

It's hard to find an earlier version. It's hard to imagine that anyone moved tens of thousands of troops across the water and landed them in like an amphibious assault situation. What the Persians are doing here is breathtaking. And remember, two years ago, a year and a half ago, two years ago, they lost 300 ships and 20,000 men doing something like this. So they know what might happen.

This time, by the way, they're going to go a much more direct route. None of this going around the long way and supplying, you know, the army. We're going to transport the army on the ships and we're going to island hop across the Aegean from Turkey to Greece and take the islands on the way.

If you are in Greece, especially if you are in Athens, it's hard to imagine those folks feeling a whole lot different than the British in the Second World War after France fell and they knew, they just knew, okay, brace yourself. I mean, the storm is coming. And for the Athenians, in 490, the storm breaks. In the summer of 490 BCE, the Persian expedition gets underway.

Herodotus says it consists of 600 ships now modern-day historians have done a great job poking holes in the ancient authors numbers whether we're talking ships or men but they have no real agreement over what numbers to plug in for them and there's broad disagreement in fact historians are not even sure what the goal of this mission is is this a mission just to punish Athens and some of their you know small island friends and whatnot and

well if so you require in a one-size-force if on the other hand this is an expedition with the intention to punish Athens and conquer the rest degrees you need another size for so even trying to figure out you know your numbers requires you to make certain assumptions and historians differ I've mentioned earlier that this operation is really a different sort of operation than what you saw before this period

The Persians, as we said, may have done this already a generation before when conquering Egypt. But in earlier periods, you always had naval warfare. But it was something more like a glorified version of what the Vikings did than this. What the Persians are doing is really the precursor, you know, that will eventually evolve into, say, the D-Day landings in June 1944. It's the father and mother of that.

Because when the Trojan Wars happen, for example, and the Mycenaeans come over from, you know, the area that's now Greece and they invade and you have the Trojan Wars, they come over on ships too. But they don't bring sophisticated horse transports and food-carrying ships that do nothing but bring the supplies that keep everybody fed and watered. That's a modern-day operation.

When the Sea Peoples came to Egypt in ancient times, they didn't bring horse transports and everything they needed to supply an army with them by sea. In 1944, when the Allies crossed the English Channel, they did. And they did here too. By going island hopping, when these islands in the Aegean are relatively close to each other, the Persians can avoid having to cross like a large stretch of open water. They can go from place to place to place and, you know, most of the time probably just beach their ships at night. Some cities get...

the destruction treatment the first one they go to is one called naxos and they owed some payback to that one and so even though the population fled up into the mountains places got burned you know bad things happened but then they arrive at another island one that is supposedly the birthplace of the god apollo and the population runs away they're all scared and the persians stop and they tell them to come back you have nothing to fear because that island didn't do anything you know they submitted

Then the Persian general goes up to the altar of Apollo and burns an outrageous amount of frankincense, sort of massively over-tipping the god as a kind of a way to say, listen, you know, when we're around, this god's going to get even more than he's used to, you know, when you were taking care of things. I mean, it's the carrot and stick approach that the Persians always use. Then they go to another city and they rip it to shreds. The city's name was Eritrea. It was one of the two cities...

you know, along with Athens that really supported the Ionian revolt. So it's on the hit list for the Persians and they take advantage of the divisions that seem to be in almost all these Greek cities, maybe not Sparta, but maybe even Sparta, using their gold, their promises, and this carrot and stick approach of theirs to essentially, you know, tear the Greeks up from within to exploit divisions that already exist. One of the great advantages the Persians have against the Greeks is they're united and the Greeks aren't.

But it's not just a division between this city-state. You know, Argos does not get along with Sparta. It's divisions within city-states. For example, here's how M.A. Dandemiev describes what happens when the Persians launch this expedition to the islands and begin to punish people. Quote,

The Persians disembarked on Naxos, which was still independent. They conquered the island and pillaged it. The majority of the people of the island fled to the mountains. Thereupon, the Persian army sailed to the town of Eritrea on Euboea. At that time, Eritrea suffered from the strong antagonism between two political parties.

The aristocrats wanted to defend their town, while the democrats were inclined to surrender. The Eritreans offered resistance against the Persians for six days. On the seventh day, the democrats surrendered their city, in the hope that the Persians would give them the power over Eritrea.

The Persians, however, burnt and destroyed the city and its temples and led away its people into captivity. They were deported to Susa, in modern-day Iran, and thereupon by orders of Darius settled in the village of Adirika in the Elamite district of Kisia. End quote. Supposedly, the great king's orders to his generals had been to reduce Eritrea and Athens to slavery and then to bring the slaves to him.

"'And I kind of always assumed that to be rhetorical. "'You know, he doesn't mean really, like, scoop up all the people in this city-state, "'put them on the ships, send the ships back to the Asian mainland, "'then march them three months to him in chains and Sousa, does he? "'And then I remember that, you know, people have been moving whole populations of other people since time began. "'I mean, if you wanted to, couldn't you look at history through a lens of population movement "'and start by determining that there's two basic kinds?'

the voluntary population movement and involuntary population movement you know the movement of peoples who want to go elsewhere and the movement of peoples that somebody else wants to go elsewhere joseph stalin was doing this kind of stuff in the 1950s wasn't he so maybe not that hard to believe and certainly if you were the athenians you get worried about this eritrean disaster and you get an idea of you know what your very near future probably looks like

And you have divisions within your city every bit as contentious as those that brought down Eritrea. And you can't help but notice once again that in a very modern move, the Persians are taking advantage of this. With them, leading them, guiding them, and helping them on this expedition towards Athens is a guy that used to run the place. They're bringing back an old tyrant, and I stress the word old because that's what Herodotus does.

This is a guy who ruled the place before democracy broke out, and the Persians are bringing him back. They're interested, we would say today, in regime change, and they're bringing a foreign army to back it. But the assumption is that there's going to be a bunch of people in Athens who welcome this from the other party, if you will.

supposedly there are high signs and all kinds of other things that conspirators and those who want the regime to revert back to the you know old days I mean the city divisions in Athens are clear they're open they're talked about by the primary sources and the Persians appear designing their strategy to take advantage of this it seems just like them doesn't it you know how we're going to rule this fractious very political place well let's bring somebody back in who knows the lay of the land and who has the support of a percentage of the people already and

And that faction in Athens is opposed by some of the most famous people in this story. If you're looking at it from the traditional Greek point of view, guys like Themistocles, who a lot of historians compare to, you know, a Churchill figure in this story, and another one named Miltiades, who will play a key general role in this upcoming, you know, face-off that we're about to happen.

According to Herodotus, it is the former Athenian tyrant in between wheezing and coughing fits that supposedly tells the Persians the best place to land for their amphibious operation, a plane called Marathon. About 25 miles outside the city of Athens, Marathon

you could call it a staging point for your amphibious operation right unload everything get yourself all put together and then you can march on the city or you can just act as the incentive for Athens to you know change public opinion favoring more these people who are saying it would be great to have the old tyrant back and at the same time we'll be realist about cutting our losses against the great king who now has an army 25 miles from here by the way did I mention that you

in a war party, Themistocles, Miltiades. What are you going to do about that? And of course, this leads now to a famous encounter. First of all, the Athenians do the smart thing and they send a runner, which boggles the mind when you think about how this is a life or death issue. Do we send a horseman? No, there had to be a reason why, and I don't know what it is. We'll leave it to a historian to explain why somebody would run to Sparta.

But that's what they do. They send a runner because they need help and, you know, who you're going to call. Most of Greece is already working now with the Persians. And besides, the Spartans could kick all their rear ends in combat. Anyway, send the runner to the Spartans and begin to put your own house in order and get your soldiers together. And this is where the story once again needs to focus a bit on the soldiers. We described the Persian army earlier and we pointed out at that time that

There's a real importance to things happening on the battlefield level, tactical questions that impact the rest of human history. Because remember, this is an encounter that should be off the books at the betting casino, the Celestial Casino. I mean, this is the Great Persian Empire encompassing most of Asia, at least the part of Asia that anybody knows about all the way to India and Athens. What is going to make...

resistance anything other than completely futile maybe the weapon systems it's kind of crazy to think about when you realize how long military history has been happening in places like you know the the middle east right or or china or any of those places they've already got thousands of years of military history under their belt but in 490 really this this era right that we're talking about bce this is the emergence the beginning of

the entrance on the historical stage of European military history. Now, obviously, there's as much European military history as there is anything else. If you can, you know, if we had the tribal records from all the peoples that existed on what's now the European continent going back to 10,000 BCE, but we don't.

And historians can try to reconstruct, you know, some sort of dark age or heroic period of Greek history, you know, during the time of the Trojan Wars. But by and large, you know, the first records we have of European armies are these armies we're talking about right now in Greece. The vast majority of them made up of average everyday folks dressed and equipped and fighting as heavy infantry.

Now, because this is the earliest form of Western military history, you will have whole schools of historical thought. And they were dominant for the last 2,500 years, most of the time, that will assert that there are qualities in these Greeks, either what makes them fight or how they fight or their theories behind how you should fight.

that have influenced, maybe even made Western militaries dominant for the last 2,500 years. I'm reciting a phrase you might hear from someone from the Victor Davis Hanson School of, you know, historical thought on these questions. For example, the idea that the Greeks were people who believed in decisive battle

and that we ourselves are the inheritors in the modern world of that same idea. I mean, it's a whole, I mean, it's easy to get lost in the rabbit hole, and I will leave it to the mainstream historians. You know, Hansen's a provocative character, but he gets a lot of pushback, and there's a lot of great arguments for people like yours truly to watch. But part of what makes the ancient period of warfare so fun for a guy like me...

is that you get to see the most variation between cultures and peoples and societies and their influence on warfare than you see in any other period. I mean, we're very standardized now. If you look at a military from, say, modern-day South America and compare it to one from modern-day Asia...

They're going to be dressed the same. They're going to be using the same equipment. They're going to be using very similar tactics. I mean, the difference between the two will be minimal. It's standardized.

But the farther back in time you go, especially to the ancient period, all of these cultures are in their most exuberant, shall we say, flamboyant maybe, and distinctive sort of cultural incarnations, for lack of a better phrase. They all look very like their culture. They fight in ways that are connected to their culture, their organization, everything.

The contrast is part of what I love about the period when the Persians and the Greeks first meet in this period that we're talking about right now. This is a clash of cultures literally. And that's part of what makes this such a rabbit hole of stereotypes and motifs and everything like that to go down because, you know, it's been this West East dynamic ever since.

But you can't help but notice the wonderful distinctiveness. For example, the Persians are a combined arms army. When we talked about them, you have all these different things you talk about. First, you talk about the cavalry. Then you talk about the light troops. Then you talk about the line infantry. The Greeks don't have much of that during this time period. They have heavy infantry, hoplites. If you were a war gamer, it's part of what makes Greek armies from this period kind of boring. Everything you get is a hoplite, basically.

The hoplite is the quintessentially Greek heavy infantryman. And they're one of the examples that historians often look to to try to answer an unanswerable but fascinating question, especially from the pre-gunpowder period of military history as to why some people think

you know, develop weapons types and weapons systems and soldiery that others can't imitate? I mean, why are there samurai in Japan? Why can't the Chinese emperor just decide one day, those samurai are really badass. I want some samurai. So I'm going to get a disgruntled samurai, bring him over here, let him train my guys. I'll give them the same weapons and armor and soon I'll have samurai too.

Well, you can't do that, can you? There's something cultural, right? The cultural carrots and sticks that are reinforced by the Japanese feudal society that, you know, you can't create samurai just because you want them. In history, when the Roman legionaries were reigning supreme during the Roman Empire period, other commanders tried to imitate that. They're known as imitation legionaries, by the way.

Go get a couple of centurions, buy the same armor and weapons, and I'll have legionaries too, but they never quite measured up. You just can't do that. There have to be some of the cultural aspects that are very hard to reproduce. Same thing with hoplites. Historian Victor Davis Hanson gives a remarkable statistic in his writing. He says, quote,

For nearly 300 years, from 650 to 350 BC, no foreign army, despite any numerical superiority, withstood the charge of a Greek phalanx. The battles at Marathon and Plataea demonstrate this clearly. Relatively small numbers of well-led, heavily armed Greeks had little difficulty in breaking right through the hordes of their more lightly equipped and less cohesively ranked adversaries from the east."

Why? This is a fascinating question to ponder, and it goes down roads that are unquantifiable and unmeasurable. You know, when you start getting into questions of things like toughness,

How on earth does one measure toughness and how is toughness infused? You know, if you could take all the children from a so-called tough civilization and transfer them to the parents from a so-called weak civilization, whatever tough and weak mean in the military sense, and take the children from the weak civilization and give them all to the parents of the tough generation, a generation from then, do you change the power relationships at all? Does the weak civilization stay weak or does it get tough and vice versa? And then why?

What is toughness anyway? What the heck is this dominance that these hoplites have? Or could it be something that's simply based on, you know, the way they fight? I mean, their formations and their weapons and stuff like that. This is the stuff that historians argue about. Victor Davis Hanson probably is the, you know, leading proponent of what maybe you could call the traditionalist approach to thinking about hoplites as he calls them at one point in one of his books. I love the way he phrased it.

He called them heavily armed and armored farmers. And each city-state is a little like a sports team, and they all have personalities. I mean, if you think of the Pittsburgh Steelers as tough blue-collar, you know, guys, and that's reflected in the way that they play and the toughness of their teams, it's a little like, you know, you have Thebes, the city-state of rustic farmers, and they're known to be kind of brawny because they're always out there farming, but they're a little rustic. I mean, every city-state had sort of its own kind of reputation, right?

and record versus you know traditional opponents how are the Spartans doing against the Argives and some of these city-states were considered to be tougher than others but according to the traditional approach most hoplite armies are militias they're the citizens of the city-state usually just a percentage of them but as Hansen points out you know about 80 percent of most of these city-states were made up of farmers or people who made money in farming

Athens and Sparta are always kind of exceptions to the city-state rule, by the way. Athens is kind of the New York City or the Paris or the London of ancient Greece. It's a little bit more chic, a little bit more gossipy, a little bit more gossamer into the theater and the latest trends and very glib, politically speaking. Talented, funny, humorous, wonderful entertainers.

And the Spartans are a laboratory experiment. I love these things where you use human beings as the guinea pigs on whether or not you can create a soldier, you know, that's extra special if all the societal carrots and sticks are arranged correctly. When I was growing up, there was a ton of admiration for Sparta and their system and everything. Nowadays, even conservative historians are much more hard on the Spartan system than they used to be. I mean, Victor Davis Hanson himself will say about Sparta, quote,

Sparta's closed militaristic society produced an army of professionals immune from pressing economic or other peacetime obligations they were free to threaten the farms of others to fight year-round if need be secure in the knowledge that in their nightmarish system of apartheid servants were busy with their own harvests end quote

Now, there's all kinds of debate and discussion and disagreement amongst historians about a lot of things. I mean, you have Victor Davis Hanson in one corner. You got a guy like Hans Van Wies, for example, in another. And he wrote a fascinating book called Greek Warfare Myths and Realities that I'm still trying to get my mind around because it's so challenging to traditional beliefs. Doesn't make it true. Doesn't make Hanson true. As one reviewer I read said, maybe it's more like something in between the two is true.

But von Wiest says that everything we know about hoplite warfare comes from a later period than this, 50, 75 years afterwards, and that the armies we're talking about here are much more rustic even than the ones, you know, from classical Greece, as it's called. This is still archaic Greece to him. He says the only reason that the Spartans are considered dangerous at all is because they're the only Greek city-state that prepares for war at all,

What's that line in a world where everyone's blind, the one-eyed man is king? Maybe the Spartans aren't so badass compared to anybody who actually trains for war. That seems heretical. But his point is that if most of these city-states are simply getting all their people together, you know, the ones who fight the 30 or 40 percent of the male population out there, free male population that actually fights...

When you get them out there, if they're not trained to move as a group, you know, to follow commands and do drills, what are they going to do out there?

And von Weiss's point is that the Spartans actually did do that drilling, which made them seem almost otherworldly to these armies where, you know, guys just got together one day when needed for war. Imagine, you know, you have a spear and some armor that sits over, you know, your fireplace and as needed once or twice a year or maybe once every two years, you don the armor, you meet up with everybody in your neighborhood that you normally fight with and you go out there for the day and

and you try to beat the neighboring city-state on a, you know, nice, wonderfully labeled flat field of battle with some certain rules, probably. It's always been believed that these Greeks had rules, but, you know, not too many of us are going to use bows or anything like that, right? This is a man-on-man contest, right? In terms of weaponry, the Greek hoplite was a spearman, wielding a seven-, eight-, nine-foot-long, sometimes we even hear of longer, long spear. But that spear was only about an inch thick.

It had an iron spearhead and a bronze butt spike on the end. One historian said that was called the Lizarder, whatever that means. It sounds awful. The Lizarder. And that these troops would form up in very close formation, shoulder to shoulder, essentially, with their shield in front and their spears, you know, ahead of them. Now, this means that the spears for about three or four ranks behind the front rank were

protrude beyond the front of the formation so you have a pin cushion here usually the ones behind that would keep their spears up the hoplite formation is called a phalanx we now know as we didn't maybe 50 years ago or 60 years ago that the phalanx is a formation that has been used ever since very very ancient times mesopotamian cities were using it a long time ago but the greeks may have formed even closer than the norm it's debated and debatable

The one thing that these formations had a real problem with is any sort of difficult terrain. In fact, maybe even just a little uneven ground because if you were trying to stay shoulder to shoulder with the person next to you and in front of you and behind you, the last thing you want to do is run into, for example, some bushes. I mean, what does that do to your formation? Victor Davis Hanson's approach to thinking about how this phalanx fought would make it seem something like a very, very, very pointy, irresistible steamroller.

And usually they would put the best men in front and oftentimes the best men in the rear file too and put the least trustworthy, brave, experienced, what have you men in the middle of the formation because then there's really no way out. And many of the people who write about the Greek hoplite phalanx and how it fought will point out that it doesn't require a ton of weapons drill. You don't have to really learn how to do much in the way of

You know, the great warrior out there with swordplay or using the spear like a Shaolin monk. You know, I mean, it's not that kind of thing. You're more of a part of a machine in the phalanx. And the Greek authors and the modern day historians often say that what seems to be stressed in the sources is much more what we would call today physical fitness.

endurance, strength, that kind of thing. And it partially explains why you can have old people fighting in these phalanxes, why everyone doesn't have to be 25 like in today's military. Well, part of it is it's a militia, right? You're supposed to get a cross-section of the public, but also because in a formation like that,

older people aren't required to be so nimble the arthritis you know could be more controlled i mean you just sort of stay and do your job stand and die or you know conquer and move forward but all is a part of this mass working together in fact the older people added both experience and solidity i mean they had you know veteran status and they could help stiffen some of the younger newer soldiers in the formation

And some of this is believed by some people to try to explain maybe why these hoplites do so well when they face non-hoplites. I mean, why are they kicking ass? You know, who knows? Is it the armor? Well, other people have armor. Is it the long spears? Well, anybody could put long spears in the hands of their troops. What makes them do what they do? What makes samurai so good? What makes mounted knights so good? What makes Mongols so good? What makes Apaches so good?

Hanselman also has another idea about armor and such, and he points out that, well, why don't I let him explain how he sees the development of armor as different from everything we've always learned. Quote, As scholars have traditionally reconstructed the history of hoplite equipment, it follows in a perfect arc. Beginning in the late 8th century, we witness the gradual introduction of hoplite armor, culminating in the universal adoption of the full hoplite panoply in the middle of the 7th century.

then from the middle of the 6th century onwards parts of the panoply begin to be discarded until by the end of the 5th century we reach the rather lightly equipped hoplite already described this tidy picture needs some modification end quote and in his opinion the artwork is kind of you know biased in what it shows right the artist wants to show the biggest baddest guy with the coolest looking armor sometimes i'm paraphrasing here no offense to the historian

But his point is that, you know, when you actually look at archaeological finds and all this other stuff, it's probable that this was always a cost thing. And when you throw people of different wealth classes into a large body of people and tell them to wear their own stuff, this is sort of the hallmark of all of the

you know, city-states except Sparta, is you buy and bring your own kit, right? So everybody's kit's kind of different and personalized. And sometimes they all go down to the neighborhood market and they're selling helmets and they're all alike and we get five of the same kind. But if you put all these people together on battle day, it doesn't look very uniform.

And because of this, we're told there's even conspicuous display. You know, the rich guys come, you know, and drive up in the BMWs, right? And they have the horsehair crest that's triple and maybe ostrich feathers sticking out too. And the really cool bronze armor that's the latest, you know, the Nimbus 2000 kind of thing.

And the poor guy shows up in some leather jerkin or maybe some, you know, thing of linen. They used to think it went from the bronze armor then to the linen armor. It might have just always been a cost question. And the more wealthy the phalanx, you know, members were, the better the armor looked, you know. Well, while the experts may disagree or discuss quite a lot, we'll say, questions of what a hoplite was or how they exactly fought.

We can say with a pretty good level of certainty, can't we, that those are the kind of troops, regardless of what they are, that Athens is going to have to rely on if they are going to turn back this Persian amphibious assault we mentioned a little while ago that lands at a place called Marathon, about 25 or so miles outside of Athens.

There will be a lively debate in this wonderfully interesting democracy. And Athenian democracy in some ways reminds you a little of the early French Revolution in the sense that they're democratic about like all kinds of things, like they elect generals. And if you believe Herodotus, they elect multiple generals who then have to, you know, share commands somehow, maybe by, you know, today's my day, tomorrow's your day. I mean, in that sense, it's a kind of a radical democracy in all kinds of ways.

There will be a debate in the city about the best course of action in dealing with the Persians. Do you give in to the Persians? Is that the realism point of view? Do you fortify the city and stay here or do you go out and meet them? And eventually, in part led by a guy named Miltiades, we mentioned earlier, they will put together their hoplites and maybe their attendants. A lot of debate over how much the people that actually held the armor for the hoplites were

And then once the hoplites were ready to fight, what did those guys do? Did they pick up javelins and fight as light infantry? A lot of debate over that too. But Athens will put together 10 or 11,000 of these, uh,

citizen militia soldiers who maybe train every now and then as you know some sort of yearly event or whatnot and they certainly would have had experience fighting but men from different social classes men from different age brackets up to you know guys in their 40s certainly and prominent people there's a lot of prominent people who will forever afterwards remember that they fought in that phalanx that day and they will take off for marathon and

Given that famous order, something to the effect of to take food with them and march, to grab provisions and go. And so this citizen militia of Athens takes off. They're joined by 800 to 1,000 hoplites from the small city-state of Plataea. And then they go and put themselves in a blocking position.

that keep the Persians from breaking out of their little beachhead area and expanding out into the countryside. And then they sit and hunker down within sight of the Persian army. In this face-off, which goes on for a couple of days, I try to keep reminding myself of the intimidation factor, something that tends to diminish over time. But the Persians in this time period are like the heavyweight champions of the world, and they have a certain aura about them and Herodotus comments about this.

He says that these Athenians camped out there are the first to endure, he says, quote, the sight of the Medes clothing and the men wearing it. He calls the Persians Medes. He calls the Greeks Hellenes. And he says, quote, in fact, until then, even to hear the name Medes spoken would strike terror into Hellenes, end quote.

so there's a intimidation factor here there's also a you know tactical reality that the greeks understand the persians have cavalry and cavalry is something that the greek way of fighting without extra troops around can't deal with i mean if you're in a formation where the number one thing you have to do is stand shoulder to shoulder with the guys around you and not break formation because then you're doomed how do you deal with cavalry that you can't catch

They can ride up to you in small squadrons and pelt you with javelins. And then as you move out to deal with them, you know, run away. And if you chase them, you break your formation and then you're meat for that same cavalry, right? That can come in there now that you're all disordered and take you apart. The Greeks also don't have archers. The one thing that might keep that cavalry at arm's length, right? It's a way to respond at least at the tactical level. They don't have that either, but the Persians do lots of them.

So that'll keep you camped out for a while wondering what to do. The other reason that historians think it's a logical thing to wonder about that the Athenians are waiting for here are for Spartans. They sent a runner to Sparta, remember, as opposed to a championship chariot driver or horseman. We don't understand why, but he made it in record time, so who's going to argue? And then this

person tells the Spartans you know you can't let this greatest city of all Greece get wiped out and taken by barbarians and the Spartans say yeah yeah yeah we'll be there but we're in the middle of a religious festival right now can't make it right this second but as soon as the moon gets into this proper phase we're there and so the Athenians are waiting there for the Spartans and you know

hopefully nothing happens before then historians wonder why the persians are waiting also and many theories center around the idea that they're waiting for you know the coup d'etat to occur in athens right for the people there to you know the the realism party which uh the war party would call the collaborator party the medizers just waiting for those guys to get the upper hand and those same historians think maybe those guys are waiting for the persians to defeat the athenian army and

and then throw open the gates. Everybody kind of wants to hedge their bets, right? That's natural. But if Athens' gates are thrown open, the Persians could just get back in their ships, maybe leave a covering force on the beach, and sail around to Athens and go take it while the army that should be defending Athens is still waiting for the Spartans at Marathon. And truthfully, this is an enormously compelling story, and always has been, if you look at it from the Greek side.

And, you know, as much as I'm trying to look at this from the Persian side, you know, I'm only human and I'm a fan of history. And, you know, if you forget all that, you know, fun we were having with the nonsense of the home team of Western civilization, there's still a compelling angle that a totally neutral screenwriter would want to exploit here. Forget Herodotus, who's, you know, Greek anyway, writing for a Greek audience. I mean, if you're a neutral, if you're a Persian screenwriter, you might turn this story into a great movie because it's

I mean, these Athenians have no chance. They're not just the underdogs, but the stakes are everything. If the Persians lose here, and what are the odds of that? They almost never lose. No big deal to them. If the Athenians lose, well, there's two ways of looking at it, the macro and the micro. The micro is if the Athenians lose, they get sold into slavery. You know, the males probably all die. A lot of people die. It's going to be horrible, and they will pay for all they've done to Persia.

But on the macro, Athens hasn't reached its civilizational high point yet, as historians might place it. You know, the part of Athens that makes it so influential on the rest of world history, the reason we still think of it as different now, they really haven't come to that point yet. They're on the way. I mean, democracy has started and all these things, but the high water mark is still a ways away. If they get wiped out before that happens...

Well, there's a lot of ways you could play that what-if game, right? So on the macro level, we all have a stake in maybe Athens surviving a little bit longer at least. But there's almost no chance of that. Right now, the Persian numbers are unknown as always. The ancient sources put them as high as 500,000 Persians there on the beach somehow being fed and everything. Well, that's crazy. I've seen numbers as low as 8,000 or 9,000, which would make the Greeks outnumber them. That seems unlikely too.

Historians usually think there was about a three to one outnumbering. That's a pretty safe number to throw in there. Also, the range 25,000 to 50,000 men seems pretty normal to run into. There's debate over whether or not the whole army was there on the beach or whether or not some of them were still embarked on ships going elsewhere, doing other things. No one knows.

But not only do you have this intimidating army, which Herodotus specifically mentions the intimidation factor of Persians there on the beach, but they probably outnumber you and they might outnumber you three to one. And you don't even have the Spartans with you. And you don't have any cavalry. You don't have any archers. So not only is this like a David and Goliath struggle, but it's like you go up to David and say, and by the way, give me that sling and that rock too and anything else you might be carrying and take your shoes off and do this barefoot. How many things can be against these Athenians? It's

Something that adds to the compelling nature of the story. The odds are just incredible and then they keep getting worse. Earlier we talked about history as a crime scene and how often historians have to go in there and, you know, be the investigators. There have been so many different interpretations on this battle of marathon that is about to happen here and you'd expect that there would be a lot of interest. After all, this battle is often infused with almost mythical levels of importance.

I think it was John Stuart Mill who said that the Battle of Marathon was a more significant event in British history than the Battle of Hastings was. But what's kind of crazy is for such an important event, we know so little about it for sure. And it leaves a lot of room for the experts to sit there and disagree because there's a ton of things that have to be pieced together. Number one on the list is how the heck does it even happen?

According to Herodotus, who's the, you know, one of the closest earliest sources about 70, 75 years later, he says there's a disagreement amongst the commanders, these democratically elected generals of whom Miltiades is one. And Herodotus says Miltiades and four other generals want to attack and five other generals on the other side don't want to attack. Boom. And even split.

So he says Miltiades then goes to the war archon who's there, who can break the deadlock, and Miltiades gives him a whole bunch of arguments why he should. The only one that has any bearing on why all of a sudden the Athenians should go on the offensive instead of waiting for the Spartans, right? I mean, you would think they would wait. Miltiades doesn't want to wait, and he says that the people in Athens...

you know, are liable to turn against them, to, you know, go over to the collaboration side, to medize if they don't do something, the rot will get worse, according to one of my translations. That's how he puts it. So the longer we sit here, the more the chances are that the tide will turn and the wrong party will get a hold of Athens and they'll open the gates and all of this will be for naught. So we can't wait for the Spartans.

A later tradition, a very late tradition, probably an unreliable tradition, suggests there was a turncoat, a spy on the Persian side who told the Greeks that the Persian cavalry was gone. The horsemen are away. It's an old line.

The reason that that comes up is because nobody can figure out how the biggest thing that the Greeks were worried about, the Persian cavalry, how it's not going to play any important role at all, no mentionable role in what's about to happen. Given the fact that Herodotus emphasizes that they had specially built horse transports made to convey the horses and that Marathon was specifically chosen because it would be good for cavalry, where the heck are the horses located?

when all of a sudden miltiades is able to convince the war archon to support an aggressive attack against the persian lines i should also point out that there are other historians who think that what probably happened here is that the persians decided to attack and the greeks you know put on their armor got already formed up and met them another line of thinking is that the persians finally decided to move

You know, that's okay. Nothing's happening here. Let's get on our ships and we'll sail to Athens and, you know, we'll wave to this army as we leave them on the beach and then we'll beat them back to their home city. It doesn't matter what happened. Apparently, the Greeks moved out. According to Herodotus, they lined up their troops in a way so that they could match the Persian line, which supposedly outnumbered them.

and so in order to match the length of the opposite side they had to make their ranks thinner Herodotus says that on the wings they were normal depth which most historians think was about eight ranks deep but he says that they were only a few ranks deep in the center a lot of historians think that's more like four ranks deep so they're taking a chance here they'll avoid getting outflanked on the left or the right

By matching the length of the Persian line, but they're taking a chance by going awful shallow in the center. The center is where the Persians put their best troops. According to Herodotus, the Persians are caught off guard by an army of more than 10,000 spearmen charging them at a run. He writes, quote,

after the troops were in position and the sacrifices had proven favorable when the athenians were let loose and allowed to advance they charged at a run toward the barbarians the space between the two armies was about a mile and the persians who saw the athenians advancing toward them on the double prepared to meet their attack

They assumed that the Athenians were seized by some utterly self-destructive madness, as they observed how few the Athenians were in number and how they were charging toward them with neither cavalry nor archers in support. So the barbarians suspected that the Athenians had gone mad." Historians have been tearing apart Herodotus' account of events ever since, but in many ways,

You know, we can't expect him to give us the sort of details that we need to envision what's really going on here. But I mean, 100 years ago, Hans Delbruck was saying there's no way those hoplites ran a mile in armor and then got to the Persian lines where they then had to exert themselves fighting. Impossible. So the many, many books and papers written out there about what actually happened at Marathon will disagree about all the specifics.

And of course, what everyone would love is a little bit more detail from Herodotus. I mean, he sets this great story up and then he doesn't tell us anything about the archery or the cavalry or what happened. I mean, there's just, you're left to piece it together. It does appear that there was some running involved because the battle would become known as a battle where these hoplites ran into contact. Victor Davis Hanson says, you know, over the years to follow, veterans of this battle could tell others that they fought there simply by saying, we ran.

And everyone would know what that meant. And it makes sense to do a lot of historians, because if you're going to run into one of the great bow fire armies in history, we said earlier, like a machine gun of archery fire, you don't want to sort of move into contact by taking your time, right? You want to get to the line so you can start to fight and not suck up any more arrows than you have to on the way in. So it makes sense.

Like almost all the ancient writers, Herodotus is just vague on all the details we would want. There's a lot of writing about why this is, and there seem to be two general reasons. One, the ancient authors thought it maybe not up to the style that they liked to go into the gory details we wonder about in terms of the blood and the guts and everything and how it was visually for the senses like a horror movie.

but also so many of the physical elements the physics of the battlefield like we talked about earlier that we'd like to understand better was known to them and their audience of mostly people who would have occasionally have fought in battles like this so it would be known to them too here's the way you know hans van wees sort of points out this well-understood problem we have with the sources not telling us things that's obvious to them but that baffle us quote

Exactly how hoplites fought their fearsome battles is not immediately clear from ancient descriptions. All the most explicit evidence relates to the heavy infantry employed by the Macedonian and Hellenistic kingdoms from Philip II and Alexander the Great onwards, rather than to the heavy infantry of the Greek city-states.

Archaic and classical Greek authors assumed that their audiences were familiar with the experience of combat, and apart from recording the occasional striking detail, described battle only in the most general terms. Armies advance, fight, and, in quotation marks, push until one side, in quotation marks, breaks and runs, end quote.

So it's sort of left to modern day historians to sort of fill in the gaps a little bit. And one of the best accounts, if you're going to do this movie, you're going to turn Herodotus' story into a movie. You want a guy like historian Tom Holland to do the, you know, modern day screenplay because it's cinematic. He turns it into one of these charge of the light brigade type stories, which it kind of is. So he's sticking to the

spirit of the event and he has the this phalanx you know advancing into combat and all of a sudden the storm of arrows starts he's got the countdown they're at 150 yards they're at 100 yards they're at 50 yards you know all the way getting closer and closer and then he writes quote

those of the enemy directly in their path had already begun scrabbling to erect wicker defenses as they realized to their horror that the wall of shields and iron-tipped spears far from providing easy pickings for their bowmen as they at first imagined was not going to be halted

A hundred yards, fifty, twenty, ten. Then, as the Athenians' war cry, a terrifying eulogization, rose even above the thundering of their feet upon the dry earth. The cacophony of clattering metal and the screams of the panic-stricken enemy, the phalanx crunched into the Persian lines. The impact was devastating, he writes.

The Athenians had honed their style of warfare and combat with other phalanxes, wooden shields smashing against wooden shields, iron spear tips clattering against breastplates of bronze. Now, though, in these first terrible seconds of collision, there was nothing but a pulverizing crash of metal into flesh and bone, then a rolling of the Athenian tide over men wearing, at most, quilted jerkins for protection, and armed, perhaps, with nothing more than bows or slings.

The hoplite's ash spears, rather than shivering as invariably happened when one phalanx crashed into another, could instead stab and stab again, and those of the enemy who avoided their fearful jabbing might easily be crushed to death beneath the sheer weight of the advancing men of bronze. End quote. The account by Herodotus leaves out almost all the stuff you'd want to know about. I mean, his official account of the battle, this most famous of...

you know military charges against all odds like i said sort of like a charge of the light brigade kind of thing he says quote they fought in the battle at marathon for a long time the barbarians prevailed in the center of the line where the persians themselves and the sakha were deployed and as the barbarians were winning here they broke through the line of the hellenes and chased them inland

But at the same time, the Athenians and Plataeans were prevailing on the wings. In their victory there, they allowed the barbarian troops that they had routed to flee, and then drawing both their wings together, they fought those enemy troops who had broken through the center. And in this encounter, too, the Athenians were victorious. And as the Persians fled, the Athenians pursued them and cut them down until they reached the sea, where they called for fire and started to seize the ships."

One of the things that's crazy about Herodotus as a screenwriter, if that's what we're going to see him as, is here he's trying to please an audience of Greeks, including Greek veterans, and he goes into loving paragraph after paragraph detail, you know, over something like Darius and his six hit team assassins going after the false Bardia. And yet for one of the greatest battles in world history, even recognized at that time as being a huge deal,

He gives us like three paragraphs from start to finish. And in those three paragraphs, he takes some time off with some digressions. And the one real solid thing you would think you could count on in terms of a fact turns out to be wrong, almost assuredly. This is a perfect example why so many of the historians of this period have to be like crime scene investigators and how little they have to go on and how they all

ingeniously do things like mine the plays and the drama being performed in the Greek theater, for example, during this era, right? Popular entertainment. Because the playwrights who were writing these plays were oftentimes veterans, sometimes veterans of these very conflicts we're talking about. And the audience members were too.

And so if they make a joke about the, you know, rich guy who shows up at the phalanx with the super nice clothes and the triple horsehair crest with the ostrich feathers and the Nimbus 2000 armor...

and then by the end of the battle, you know, it's all brown below the waist because he defecated on himself out of fear and the audience laughs, it's kind of because those things may have happened. The audience is probably sitting there going, I know a guy just like that, right? Which is why it played well. And the historians can go, aha, we can piece together that piece of information into the puzzle of what it was like

to fight these kind of battles. Listen, full disclosure here, there's a small chance that I've told you this entire tale so that I'd have a reason to talk about my fascination with ancient combat. I'm fascinated with all combat, actually, because they all, you know, all combat experiences tend to score pretty highly on my list of extremes of human experience. And as I said earlier, I'm fascinated by that. But the different eras of

Each come with their own particularly horrifying variables. And there are certain elements of warfare that are unchanged since the Stone Age. But there's a ton that's different too, right? What you face in, say, the Battle of Verdun or the Battle of the Somme or something in the First World War is a very different experience from what the ancient soldier faced, obviously. In a warfare sense, it's a little like the difference between a hundred-yard dash, you know, and a, if you'll pardon the pun, marathon.

Ancient warfare is sprinting. Modern 20th century, you know, long war warfare, that's, those are long, hard distance runs. The challenges to the frontline soldier are different too. It's like the worst game ever of would you rather. Would you rather be a, you know, soldier in the trenches in the First World War or would you rather be an ancient Persian warrior at the Battle of Marathon? Take your choice.

The challenges and the stress on your psyche is different, isn't it, in those two kinds of situations? You think of the modern soldier and there's a drip, drip, drip, constant pressure, if you think about it, on the psyche of men who will serve, you know, a week or two or longer on the front lines, in the trenches, under fire, you know, 24-7 risk of death day after day that beats on you in a certain way. The ancient warriors facing a different task.

Their lives are relatively fine most of the time outside of battle day. But on battle day, the stress, the intensity, and the fear is extreme. And so they don't get a drip, drip, drip on their psyche. They get a tidal wave, you know, on their psyche that hits over the space of a couple of hours. Equally horrific challenge, but different. And when I think about myself, and I think this is our modern bias, by the way. I think we all have it, though. But in terms of my modern bias as to what I'm going to pick, I'm going to pick the First World War.

which I have described several of the battles of as reminding me of Mordor. But the First World War, as unimaginable as some of it is, is something I can conceptualize. I think we're conditioned to understand better things closer to our own time, and the way they fought in the First World War is something, you know, we grew up understanding, right? Sit there and use the machine guns, sit there and be under fire. I mean, it's all a part of our understanding of essentially modern warfare.

and what people go through and soldiers we know and all that ancient warfare is much more exotic and therefore perhaps scary and it's only exotic because of the time difference because they were doing this kind of warfare you know from stone age times up until a couple hundred years ago but for modern people watching it it looks horrifically similar to watching jack the ripper at work it is butchery in the pure sense of the word

And it's close up. You're looking into the eyes of the people you're killing. Maybe I'm just a modern wimp, but it's a lot easier for me to shoot from across a nice little intervening distance at somebody moving towards me whose face I can just barely make out than it is to sit there and hear the grunts and the groans and the last breath out of their mouth. And I think most people feel that way.

One soldier quoted in one of the books I read had said that when, you know, when you're close up and you can hear them, it's a bitch. Well, in ancient warfare, most of the time, once the aero fire was done with, it was a bitch. Here's what historian Hans Van Wies writes concerning the differences in what a soldier in the modern 20th century great wars, for example, might have faced and what the ancient warriors on the battlefield at Marathon faced.

He writes, quote, The trauma of ancient Greek battle was different from the experiences which leave so many modern soldiers shell-shocked or debilitated by post-traumatic stress disorder. Greek soldiers, he writes, rarely came close to suffering the extremes of physical deprivation associated with trench or jungle warfare.

and never saw their friends blown to pieces. On the other hand, hoplites suffered the devastating experience, almost unknown in modern warfare, dominated as it is by long-range fighting with guns, artillery, and bombs, of standing at no more than an arm's length from the enemy and laying into one man after another with spear, sword, and ultimately bare hands and teeth." See, this is where ancient combat...

becomes like my little laboratory for observing us you know and what's innate in us versus what's a you know an effect of our culture on our development i mean think about yourself for a second i think you like me can imagine yourself firing a rifle at some enemy can you really imagine yourself under almost any conditions on a battlefield

You know, holding one end of the spear as you drive the other end into the chest or face of another human being. And then, by the way, you're not done. You have to go then to the next human being and do something like that again or hope you can. Or if that doesn't work and you're down to your other weapon, you know, slicing them or stabbing them with a sword face to face while they try to do the same to you.

I mean, some of you can, I understand that we have all kinds of people, but I mean, for the majority of you out there, is this something you could realistically imagine yourself doing under almost any circumstance? And I ask that because remember, most of the people in these Greek city-states with, you know, Sparta accepted, are regular people. I mean, these are not professional warriors. These are commercial people. These are bakers. These are farmers. These are even, you know, the politicians of Athens would be out there even.

I mean, these people are going back to their jobs the day after the battle. I can't help but think about us in the same situation. I mean, if the great simulation player in the sky... I can't help but think about my Nick Bostrom simulation theory at a time like this. If he changes the preference on his game to one that no longer allows us to have any weapons that were invented after the year 1300, could we go back to fighting the way they fought back then? I mean, could we create...

a city-state phalanx maybe the los angeles phalanx train it up for a little while send it back in time to take on the average city-state's phalanx in ancient greek times and have them not defecate and run away as soon as the spears of the enemy came close i mean i'm wondering if you could even train one of our military units up that way forget the people of los angeles they may be a

But I mean, if you could train a military unit of ours for a year and send them back, I bet you they'd be better than the Greek phalanx at maneuvering and drill and all that kind of stuff. I bet they'd have that down. It's the rubber meets the road moment, though, that counts when they have to face the spears headlong of a citizen phalanx of bakers and potters and farmers who've done this before from a culture that understands it. Do you think our even military unit would stand there when the spears start moving?

jabbing in each other's faces and not run away. And here's the question that really gets me thinking. If you won't stand there because we just don't do that, it's not our culture. You know, we don't have what they have anymore. How long would it take to get it back? If you decided, you know, the great simulator in the sky just took guns away. We have to fight like this if we're going to defend ourselves. How long would it take?

How long does it take for the culture to rebuild the ability to do a skill that has not been necessary for a very long time? And the thing is, is you wouldn't think it would be so difficult theoretically. But it turns out that over the last several hundred years, as people have shot at each other more on the battlefields, it's become harder and harder to actually, you know, walk up to somebody else and stick them with a pointy object. There's been quite a bit written about this.

It seems to be both particularly feared, as one might expect, but also particularly abhorrent to the people who have to do the skewering. And I've read elsewhere this is one of the things that makes some of the famed military units out there, like the British Gurkhas, for example, that are known for hand-to-hand combat, you know, more particularly intimidating because unlike most people, they're generally okay with the idea of coming to close grips. Most people would rather, you know, stay away.

Because obviously it's nasty stuff. In his book on killing, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman says that it is the proximity to the victim that determines, you know, how resistant to killing people tend to be. And that by the time you get to like bayonet range, he says, the resistance on the part of human beings, both on the receiving end and the giving end of the bayonet is intense. But what happens when you're talking about a period in warfare where

where that's not an unusual event as it is in modern warfare. It's the way you do business. It's how you fight. We stick people with pointy things or they stick us with theirs. Welcome to war for, well, most of human history from the Stone Age until a couple hundred years ago. Nowadays, it's the nastiest thing most soldiers contemplate. Grossman, along with a lot of other historians, goes on to point out how most historians think

That the idea that there was ever bayonet fighting, you know, bayonets, those those long knives on the ends of rifles that people used for a long time. I mean, the American Revolution, we had them, the Napoleonic Wars, the U.S. Civil War, the First World War. They still use bayonets or have them for militaries today. But it seems like almost never is anyone killed by one.

and the dirty little secret apparently according to Grossman and others is that one side always runs before having to get stuck by the other and usually according to Grossman the side that didn't have to stick the other side is kind of glad they didn't have to either

He says when two bayonet lines came together historically, he said, quote, very often neither side can bring itself to close with the enemy's bayonets. The advance falters and the two parties begin to fire at one another from ridiculously short ranges, end quote. He then quotes some other stories that say when soldiers would come in bayonet range with other soldiers, somehow they just managed to turn their guns around and were often using the butts of their rifles as clubbing instruments instead.

He said, quote, We can understand then that the average soldier has an intense resistance towards bayonetting his fellow man and that this act is surpassed only by the resistance to being bayoneted. The horror of being bayoneted is intense. End quote. Well, of course it is. So he said that modern people don't want to stick a knife into anybody else and that they don't want a knife stuck into them. Makes perfect sense.

But nowadays you can avoid that in most cases. This is the goal of ancient battle, the very thing he says modern people would most like to avoid. You know, Grossman is quoting veterans who are saying that the worst thing that they ever dealt with was the kind of thing that Greek and Persian soldiers dealt with in every battle.

What's missing, of course, from this whole question is something from the Persian side to try to get an idea of what it was like for a Persian soldier fighting in the ranks. After all, we try to look at this a little bit more than, well, at least normal from the Persian side of things, but there aren't any accounts, you know, for individual soldiers in the ranks or generals or anything from the Persian side that has come down to us that would give us the equivalent of what the Greeks do, which is a tiny little window, one more little tile in the mosaic window

helping the historical investigators to recreate a little bit about what this combat must have been like. It's sort of historically ironic that what little you can divine about what this must have been like for the Persians, you get from the Greek sources, often talking about hoplites who fought differently than their opponents. You have to weed out things that are specifically part of the Greek hoplite experience. That wouldn't apply to Persia and say something like that.

and then notice the other things maybe we would call them the physics of the battlefield that would be present for anybody in a pre-gunpowder battle whether we're talking about the wounds or the fear persians have to deal with that on their side as much as the greeks have to deal with it on theirs but we may only have the greeks version of the events in order to extrapolate what the persian experience must have been like you know we've mentioned the idea a couple of times of a creeping incontinence and then turning and running away

Because in these ancient battles, fear is the key component. In fact, one could make a case that the main thing that a general wants to figure out how to do in a battle plan is how to create the biggest chance that you're going to scare the other side.

I mean, if you think about people as kind of like spooked animals, have you ever seen a horse herd when they get scared and all of a sudden the fear spreads from the initial point of contact to the little rattlesnake that scared them or whatever? And, you know, sort of moves like a shockwave through the whole herd.

That's what people facing danger would choose to do if allowed to do whatever came naturally, right? We see danger, we go in the other direction. Part of what military discipline has been aiming to do pretty much since ancient Sumeria or before is to keep people from giving in to that natural urge, right? That self-defense preservation urge, an evolutionary advantage, certainly, right?

And the reason fear is a bigger, more acute problem on an ancient battlefield than a modern one has to do with the size. When you have an occasion where units panic and run, break, rout, whatever term you want to use, in the big modern wars, that is a small cancer in a big organism.

And it can usually be isolated and cauterized relatively easily without the entire Enterprise along a giant line being too badly affected. But in the constrained space of these ancient battlefields, panic was contagious. And you don't know how many people it takes to run before, you know, everybody does. Nonetheless, when people start to run...

It's almost as though the little thin piece of your intellect that is keeping you where you're supposed to be due to all military discipline and everything else snaps. And you've heard that saying, last one is a rotten egg. On the ancient battlefield, last one is dead would be a better phrase because when a rout happens...

the people most likely to stand and try to you know stick it out are the ones who are the most brave the least likely to give in the ones that don't want to be cowards and shirkers and who aren't going to run away but they're also the last to get away and the ones who get speared in the back first during the pursuit where the majority of casualties are dished out by the way that's where you die on an ancient battle historian richard gabriel says quote in every army there is a mob waiting to escape and its motivation is fear the

the real killer on the ancient battlefield was fear men in combat have their instinctive flight or fight responses held in delicate balance by a thin string of intellect continued stress increases the probability that someone within the ranks will lose his nerve and run sometimes the actions of a single soldier are sufficient to forge the onset of panic in an entire unit

Once the integrity of the formation began to erode, the ancient soldier was at very great risk of death or injury, end quote. And so everybody's kind of, you know, trying to stand their ground without wanting to be the last guy to get away if things go badly. So, you know, everything's sort of held by such a narrow strand of discipline. The Greeks used to talk about the god Phobos.

and that's from the you know the root of the same word that gave us phobia meaning fear or the god pan the root of the word panic who could sometimes come into these ancient battlefields and sweep through them and like a herd of horses you know just spook everybody i mean if you saw someone get around your flank on an ancient battlefield you might run you might spook and if you do the unit next to you might spook also if you see a friendly unit route you might spook and run

And if a bunch of people in your unit start getting torn to pieces in a bloody carnage right near you, you might decide to turn and run too. Or your psyche might decide to eliminate all choice from the matter and terror, blind terror might just take over.

And fear is actually, you know, something that is exploitable and that's paid attention to. I mean, you feel like there's almost a connection to the animal kingdom when you're talking about warfare in the era where you came to grips with your adversary or nearly so.

In the same way some of those animals will get up on their hind legs or stand up tall or their neck will bulge out to make them look bigger. It's a psychological thing, right? It's an intimidation move, maybe you could call it. I mean, part of the reason these Greeks have these giant crests on their helmet, same reason those Napoleonic troops would get those really...

you know tall grenadier caps too it makes you look taller gives you that little bit of extra intimidation imposing factor on an opponent that at least in greek times you might come face to face with and that's when something like a little extra intimidation factor could be the difference between life or death

In fact, some units were considered to be and some peoples and armies were considered to be extra intimidating. There are stories about whole units running before combat, sometimes running after they see the lambdas on the Spartan shields so that they knew, oh, the people in front of us are Spartans. Some people didn't wait around to see how that was going to turn out.

And so to be intimidating was just one extra thing that helped the Spartans when they actually came to battle. And there were bunches of units and types of troops that had those sorts of intimidating reputations that sort of preceded them. To be intimidating is something that can actually give you an edge in hand-to-hand combat. And, you know, even that term hand-to-hand combat is,

I mean, it sounds almost nice, doesn't it? Like a helping hand, when in reality I keep trying to remind myself that we are talking about what if it happened in a civilian sort of context today would be a face-to-face brutal murder.

There's a lot of footage you can watch of modern conflicts in many places where you'll see someone get killed and they'll be manning a gun somewhere or moving somewhere and all of a sudden you'll hear a crack sometime from a distance where no one's looking and someone will fall down and it'll be this horrifying experience for all concerned who are there. But it's this shock. It's over in two seconds and you don't even, I mean, the terror is sort of after the fact.

It's a whole different thing when you get a chance to march up and see your fate, you know, as it marches towards you. And, you know, knowing that one of you is not getting out here alive and you both might die. And as you're getting closer to people, summing up, you know, which person out of that crowd of people you're running towards, you're going to aim towards and, you know, what might be aiming towards you. I mean, the thoughts that run through the head that challenge you in different ways in these ancient battles, you again just wonder how people did this.

Historians often use the book, the Iliad, the stories of Homer as a tool to understand kind of how these weapons, you know, what kind of wounds that they inflicted and how people reacted and whatnot, because the weapons are the same, even if maybe how they used them was different.

And it's terrifying stuff. It's one horrific, you know, outcome after another. The spear goes through the eye hole and the brain oozes down the shaft. I mean, it's stuff like that. Horrible things. Lots of people get hit in the groin and it's awful. And you turn around and you start to realize, you know, maybe the reason that these ancient playwrights and these authors didn't get into the gory details, you know, about all these battles that we want to hear because we can't imagine it might be because the people in their audience might have been trying to forget some of it.

But it's absolutely terrifying. Warfare is terrifying anyway, but having to face this kind of conflict... And, you know, you need to remember, at least in terms of the Greek phalanx...

A lot of times the people fighting right next to you are relatives and friends and loved ones and local politicians and the butcher and the baker and the people that you know. And that's great in terms of stiffening you and helping you resolve and fostering sort of a camaraderie from people, you know, who aren't training together all the time. You have the camaraderie naturally because you're related and you know each other and you grew up together and what have you. But when those people start dying, you know,

It's the double-edged sword of that effect. And all of a sudden, you and the ranks trying to keep it together and not run are watching, you know, your loved ones and people you know get speared in the face and having the brain run through the eye hole down the shaft of the spear. Is there... I mean, it's just... It's terrifying on a vis... You don't even know how people control themselves. Forget about having any sort of conscious sense of fear. The Greeks were terrified, too, although people have been, let's just say, very...

respectful of the power of combat forever but stories abound besides the you know involuntary loss of you know the incontinence shall we say of the of the rankers you know there's stories of trembling in the ranks there's stories of teeth chattering that was so loud and widespread i think it was supposed to have drowned out the sound of a speaker people understood what they faced and there was involuntary responses to that that are just human

How did these soldiers deal with this fear? Well, how would you deal with it? How have soldiers dealt with it forever? There have been widespread conversations, shall we say, amongst historians for a very long time over how much you should or should not assume the presence of alcohol in a lot of these battles or other drugs.

There are all kinds of problems trying to figure this out. I mean, for example, in a lot of these cultures, they drank a lot anyway. How do you separate what was the normal wine ration for a breakfast for some of these soldiers, you know, from the extra amount they drank because they were going to, you know, face a wall of spears that they had to run into head on that day? Again, hard to figure. One historian when asked to theorize about the likelihood of hoplites going into battle drunk said,

He said that the likelihood was that they were almost drunk. So take that for what it's worth, but, you know, who would be surprised? And, you know, one part of me wonders how people gear themselves up to do this, but the other part of me wonders how they live with it afterwards. I mean, do things haunt their dreams? How would you react if you killed someone by hand? What if you killed eight people with a knife over your lifetime? Would that change you? How would that change you?

Would you still be normal? What is normal? I mean, what if you'd done this in the service of your country, killed eight people with a knife? You're a hero. Are you unaffected? And if you're affected, how are you affected? And if that's not normal, especially in our society today, and that person is unusual, you know, when compared to the normal, you know, rank and file of the population, they have an unusual experience.

What about the ancient world where in some of these places you could reasonably expect a decent percentage of the people in these societies to have killed people in hand-to-hand combat, sometimes multiple people? So in other words, what might be very abnormal in this society to be a person who's killed multiple people with an edged weapon might be a relatively normal experience in some of these other places. How does that change the society?

I mean, when people could say, my husband did that, my dad did that, my grandfather did that and killed 16 people, actually. And I hope my son will grow up someday and do that, too. I mean, when that's, you know, the carrots and sticks and the expectation levels in society, how does that alter the equation? And this whole question about culture and environment and nature, nurture, I guess you could say it even goes back to really manifests when you when you read some of the debates between the experts on.

on whether or not these ancient peoples suffered from what we would call today post-traumatic stress disorder because of their involvement in this kind of murderous conflict. Historian Richard Gabriel suggests that there must have been thousands of psychological casualties after these terrible ancient battles, but there's a whole school of thought that suggests that that's not true.

And by the way, it's been wonderful to see the addition to the traditional historians and classicists who've been dealing with this kind of question forever. Neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, biochemists, and people who, you know, focus so much on how the brain functions. Because some of this stuff that these people go through can be impacted by the way they were raised. But some of this stuff is just how your brain is wired. Hard to figure out where one ends and the other begins. And the debate is fantastic.

For example, if we went back in our little mythical encounter between the Los Angeles phalanx and the city-state of Thebes, do you think if you could go interview the survivors of the Los Angeles phalanx 40 years later that we'd be expecting some psychological PTSD hangover-type casualties, some effects? I imagine we would all expect there to be some, let's just say, haunting memories at the very least.

The question over whether the ancients actually suffered from this, though, is interesting. And as you might imagine, you know, historians and others comb through the original material. In fact, at the Battle of Marathon, Herodotus says there is a case that modern day researchers often point to as an example of, you know, PTSD. Herodotus says there's a story of a soldier who went blind at the battle, but who was totally uninjured.

The story is that he saw a warrior, a huge warrior with a huge beard coming to strike him. And instead, the warrior struck the man next to him and the sight instantly disappeared from this man and he never got it back. And a lot of, as I said, modern day researchers point to that as an example of what in the First World War, the Second World War, they might have called hysterical blindness. One of these guys I was reading called it a convergence disorder or something like that. It's above my pay grade, you understand.

But the point was, as they suggested, in 20th century combat, it would not be an unexpected thing to have happen. Anthropologist Alan Young, for example, says that what we call PTSD today is not timeless or uniform. He says that the idea of traumatic memory is, quote, man-made, end quote, something that originated in 19th century thought.

And he says, quote, before that time, there is unhappiness, despair and disturbing recollections, but no traumatic memory in the sense that we know it today. In short, the person who quotes him that I'm reading from says it's a culturally conditioned response to trauma, end quote.

The person who I'm quoting from, though, is historian Lawrence Trittle, who is suggesting that due to neuroscience now becoming involved, it's starting to look more and more like the responses that modern day soldiers have to some of their combat experiences is timeless and timeless.

has a sort of a universal soldier, they call it, aspect to it. The kind of thing where modern day soldiers would be able to commiserate with these hoplites or these Persians at Marathon and talk about some similar things maybe. I've read some other interesting things that suggest that the Greeks, for example, maybe the Persians too, wouldn't have had any bad thoughts about the people they killed. They wouldn't have been haunted by ghosts and stuff like that because all the societal carrots and sticks reward that.

They would have been notches on the sword belt. The family honor would have gone up. No societies really discourage the killing of enemies to the people or the state or your local district or what have you. So there would have been a ton of support for the idea that great things had been done, things worth bragging about as opposed to fretting about.

At the same time, anybody's liable to go through these experiences that just haunt your nightmares and you wake up in cold sweats from later, right? Forget about you killing somebody else. How about you narrowly being killed yourself or watching your buddy have that spear shoved through his face or whatever it might be, the panic of the moment. Isn't it just human to expect that that might come and find you later in your dreams or elsewhere? Or does your culture insulate you somehow from that too?

One article I read suggested maybe a case could be made that enough of these societies where enough of those people had experienced incidents like that could be called a traumatized society. And does that explain things that it would go through and did? I mean, does it take a traumatized society to fight in one of these battles that would traumatize us today because they're insulated from it? I don't know the answer to any of these things, but I find them all fascinating. And I find that the laboratory evidence,

that helps us to do experiments with these kinds of questions is ancient battle. So it opens up the door. I told you, I'm totally fascinated by what this can tell us about people and culture and stuff like that. And when we think about cultural differences for a minute, let's remember what, you know, as many of you will always point out to me, what these people grew up watching, what their lives were like.

I mean, these are people that in a lot of these eras enjoyed going to executions for the entertainment value. All right. So let's remember that a little bit. Victor Davis Hanson tells a story in trying to give us an idea about how terrifyingly horrible the battlefields were the day after the battle was over in any of these ancient battles.

And he says that sightseers would go to the battles, that sometimes the rulers who had won these battles would actually, you know, ferry the sightseers over and sometimes couldn't even keep up with the demand. These people that wanted to walk, not for looting purposes, just for entertainment value. Now, let me say something here. I know we're a sick bunch. And I know that if you put this stuff up on YouTube, a lot of you out there would go and watch it.

Many of you out there would click on the website video that showed you one of these battlefields afterwards, you know, which is really indicative of how nasty these battles are because, you know, unlike modern warfare, this all happens in a confined space and it is the confined space that creates the uniquely horrific slaughterhouse that is an ancient battlefield, which by the way, is a historically extinct thing, right?

Nobody will ever see this again, and nobody has seen it for like 400 years. This kind of slaughter in a combined space. Would you go on the tour? I've said I want to be in that hot air balloon, which, by the way, I read in another book someone else said, so I've obviously ripped it off unconsciously. But I've often said I want to be up there in the hot air balloon, looking down and answering all of my questions about how did this formation that had no drill actually move on the battlefield, totally forgetting that going on 100 feet below me is absolute madness.

People absolutely scared out of their minds, cutting each other up. I mean, madness. And there's no way I'm going on the foot tour afterwards. You know, I had somebody I knew once who said that, you know, you could kind of say that modern warfare is like a bunch of jumbo jets crashing over a relatively wide area.

And the bodies are often burned or torn up, and that's considered to be an extra bad thing. If you're in the First World War, it's the torn up bodies are destabilizing to your mind. It's awful. And the smell is like, you know, of explosives or fuel. But if you go to an ancient battlefield, it looks a lot more like a bunch of individual murders, thousands of them.

you know, Xenophon wrote and basically made it sound like you could kind of walk the battlefield and recreate what you were seeing. This guy stabbed that guy. These two people killed each other, but both died. I mean, you're watching a lot of different individual stories when you walk those battlefields and you're getting your shoes extremely dirty. Victor Davis Hanson reconstructs, you know, what one of these fields must have looked like. And remember, he's talking about the onlookers who would go afterwards to experience what it was like at one of these battlefields.

battlefields the day afterwards by the way heronitus says like 6400 persians died at marathon and about 200 greeks which shows you how one-sided ancient battle could be if those numbers are correct imagine going to the battlefield the day after that here's how hansen describes the reality of this historically extinct thing that must have been very familiar to you know human beings for tens of thousands of years he writes quote

besides the sheer concentration of bodies the most common sight to these onlookers would have been the quantity of spilled blood and gore in some of the larger battles between hoplites delion luctra and platea thousands of corpses lay with huge gaping wounds from the spear and sword

"'Since the flesh was never incinerated, as it came to be in modern battles, "'by the explosion of bomb and shell, "'and because the entry and exit wounds created by double-edged iron spearheads "'tends to be larger than those caused by small arms fire, "'the bodies would have drained much of their bodily fluids upon the ground. "'Walking among the pile of corpses entailed treading everywhere "'over stained earth and pools of blood.'

Polybius says that after Zama, the battlefield was so thick with bloody corpses that it was nearly impossible to advance over the ground, which suggests that many had attempted to do just that. In his famous description of Koronea, Xenophon recalls that the very earth had turned red, a phrase that was probably no exaggeration. And in Sicily, at the final slaughter of the Athenians in 413, the bodies of the dead lay piled on top of each other in the water, their spilled blood turning the very current red.

Plutarch recorded a similar picture after the death of some 25,000 Macedonian pikemen at Pidna. The entire plain there, he says, was filled with corpses, and the river Leukos ran red with their blood. Again, this seems likely. If each of the fallen men lost a mere third of his six quarts of blood, either during the final moments of death or after the corpse lay in the dust, there could have been more than 10,000 gallons to soak the field."

10,000 gallons of blood soaking a field that's 10 or 20 football fields long. To me, simply walking that field the next day would be one of the extremes of human experience. I can't imagine being one of the people who had to create that mess. Or, to be honest, anyone who had to try to clean it up.

The mess at Marathon afterwards could not have been tidied up too quickly because one of the things, of course, being very different men than yours truly, that we are told that the Spartans wanted to do as soon as the moon's phase, you know, turned correct and they were able to show up too late to fight in the battle, but apparently not too late to see the bodies and they wanted to go look at the dead Persians in the battlefield. Yeah.

Probably wouldn't mind seeing a good execution or two on the way. Different times, you know. The aftermath of the Battle of Marathon is frustrating from a military history standpoint because didn't we say earlier that this is an occasion where tactical weapons systems actually impact history all the way up to the really big trends and forces level? But there's not enough information about how this battle went the way it did for you to discern anything, right?

I mean, you want to know how the cavalry is going to face off against the hoplites and how that, you know, weird weapon system anomaly is going to play out. But Herodotus doesn't even mention the cavalry, which is why everyone wonders where it is. Then you wonder about the archery and is the machine gun archery just going to mow these hoplites down? Herodotus doesn't mention anything about the archery either. The only thing he mentions with any certitude is...

is he said that the victorious wings of the Greek army turned around and surrounded, you know, the Persian center. In other words, a double envelopment, which I can't find historians who think, yes, that's likely. In a period where Greeks were better trained and better drilled in the Hellenistic era, you still rarely could have a single envelopment. But historians suggest that

It's a little strange to think that these citizen hoplites from Athens were able to achieve a double one, especially planning to and then carrying it out. So the one thing Herodotus tells you turns out to not be true. Historians, you know, will play with ideas like, well, the Greeks were victorious because they had a lot more to fight for, which is certainly true.

But it's all speculation and it doesn't tell you anything and you feel like you waited, you know, through a whole thing for a cliffhanger episode and then the cliffhanger episode of the show you're watching has a cliffhanger episode at the end. It's a heavyweight fight that ends on a foul. Although let's not take anything away from the Greek victory. It's huge. It saves Athens, right? And the Athenians will take such pride in their victory at Marathon that they will continually be reminding Greeks of it for a very long time.

famous playwrights will have it put on their you know the equivalent of their tombstone instead of any reference to their you know work in the theater i want you to know i fought at marathon the medes know it that kind of thing so it becomes a part of mythology and not just greek mythology but as we said at the beginning you know western traditional mythology ever since but from the persian point of view

You know, Marathon may have even just been a single setback on an expedition that had tons of positives. Pierre Briand suggests that this whole affair was a punitive expedition. You know, we burned Eritrea. We had most of the area submit earth and water to the great king. So before we left, those places weren't beholden to us. Now they are.

so you have one setback at marathon troops we can easily replace money we have more than we need and by the way they don't really look like a beaten army when they leave marathon we're told that the battle of marathon ends when the persians get on their ships and leave but where do they go they don't go home like tail between their legs straggling hoping that they're not chased down you know and run down to the ground they go to athens

They take another stab at getting into the city. Heck, the army's not there. We just lost to the army, so why not sail around, take advantage of our extra mobility, and capture Athens while they're gone? And again, you know, rumors of fifth columnists inside the city saying, now, now, now, and shields flashing on the top of mountainsides. You know, who knows?

Then you have another part of this story which is famous again from the Greek point of view where the troops at Marathon go the 25 miles on foot at high speed, faster than you could even expect. And by the time the Persian fleet pulls into the harbor at Athens, they see the army they just lost to waiting there for them. So now they compare the profit and loss column and especially if Briand and others are right and this is more of a punitive expedition, it's already achieved the major goals. So now they go home.

"'And while the Greeks, and especially the Athenians, "'are justifiably proud of defeating the Persians at Marathon, "'and they should be, I mean, what were the odds of that? "'You can't help but think that what's happened here now "'is that they've managed to go from a gnat "'that was a minor annoyance on a dragon or a giant "'and they were absentmindedly swatting at them with their hand "'to something that bit hard enough to get their full attention.'

and find themselves now in the crosshairs of a man who's not just the king of kings, but he's been on the throne for more than 30 years. He is uber-confident. His people, according to Herodotus, you know, think of him as a shopkeeper or a huckster. We thought of him more like a CEO. He reminds me of like a Steve Jobs-type character, somebody whose whole sort of being is infused in the corporate structure of

I mean, after 30 years of rule, the Persian Empire has Darius all over it. And now he decides that he's going to lead a bigger, better prepared expedition to Greece himself. If you want something done right, sometimes you just have to do it personally. If you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar, Dan and Ben would love to have it. A buck a show. It's all we ask.

Go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show. Can you have drama without the dramatist? It's something I keep asking myself as I look ahead to the next part of this story. Because if you believe the ancient sources, they always make it sound as though the mainland Greeks, like the Athenians and the Spartans, really had little or no contact with the Persian Empire until the period that we just talked about. But once that period happens...

The Greeks and the Persians, you can just see their fates become like unbreakably linked with each other. And it influences this story dramatically because the dramatic people who are writing about it take the dry facts that you might be able to glean from the Babylonian records, for example, the cuneiform tablets, and make them live. They re-inject the color into the situation. If you talk about big political type things like I tend to do in these shows, I'm

Those are dramatized by people like Herodotus. The Persian Empire is doing things in other corners of their empire, things that you can sometimes find out about or glean from things like Babylonian cuneiform tablets, but that doesn't mean they're dramatic, and sometimes there's very little to talk about other than to say, we can tell that the Persians were operating in the northeast of their empire during these years.

If Herodotus or a Greek tells that story, there's probably a love affair involved or some wonderful oracle has spoken or somebody's doing some stuff that he's getting some karmic payback for. So even though we want to look at this story more from the Persian side than is normal, we're going to be hamstrung like everyone else and we are going to have to. And, you know, let's be honest, it's hard to not lovingly embrace some of these Persian and Greek kabuki dances that they do with each other.

We'll try to look at it from the Persian side as much as we can. But as always, you're getting the Dan Carlin version of this story. And I find, you know, just like a filmmaker would be, give me as much latitude, please, as you'd give Oliver Stone to take the parts of the story out that just blow my mind and string them together. I always figure you can get the traditional telling of this story from some more credible source than yours truly. But you can't get my incredible telling of this story from any credible source.

I don't know if that's a compliment or not, but in the next episode of this program, we're going to start out pretty darn soon at the beginning with war. And it's one of the most famous wars ever. And it's going to be followed by some similar conflicts after that. If this little intertwined destiny between the Greek and the Persian peoples is a little like, I was thinking it's a little like a man and a woman that just can't stay away from each other, but they had this poisonous relationship.

And maybe at some point the man representing the Persian Empire, who's the CEO, who could have any woman he wants, he doesn't need all of this drama, he goes back and finally breaks away and the toxic relationship has ended and then somehow, someway, the Greek Spitfire woman shows up with a new abusive boyfriend who punches him in the nose. Oh, did I just give the rest of the show away? Well, probably in the next episode, but I have learned to make no promises. That and a whole bunch more as we continue this journey.

Maybe Endless Saga with Kings of Kings Part 3