Show 58 - Kings of Kings III
05:00:30 Share

Today's show is sponsored by Squarespace, the easiest way to create a beautiful website, blog, or online store. Go to squarespace.com and enter the offer code HARDCORE at checkout to get 10% off. I am a notoriously bad topic picker, and I traditionally pick something that I think I can do much more quickly than I can, and then when I get into the middle of it, I feel compelled to do the topic justice, and we end up traditionally with a very long series of shows.

Well, what you're about to hear is the equivalent of like a double album by a music band or something. We are essentially giving you parts three and four of what probably should have been, realistically speaking, a four-part series on the Achaemenid Persian Empire, with an obvious focus on their wars with the Greeks and the Macedonians.

If you missed parts one and two, you probably want to catch those before you catch this one. But there's so much military history in this one because I knew I'd be crucified if we didn't go into loving detail about what amounts to several of the best battles in ancient military history. So we do that.

And we give you what is probably twice the length of what a good hardcore history show should be. So savor it, let it last, and hopefully it doesn't become like one of those double albums I grew up with where you listen to it and you think, God, they could have cut half that thing and just put out one really good single album. The way I look at it, though, this is one of the great topics in all world history history.

And if anything, it probably merited more attention than I gave it. But as I told you, I'm a terrible topic picker, and I'm always trying to recover after I make my poor choice. So without further ado, part three, and really part four also, the final installment of our series on the great kings of the ancient Achaemenid Persian Empire, Kings of Kings, part three. December 7th. It's history. 1941.

A date which will live in infamy. The events. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Violiner.

Mr. Gorbachev has teared down this wall. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president's a crook. 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. Earlier, we had posed the question about whether or not absolute power corrupted absolutely and pointed out that in the kind of world that most of us come from, it's sort of taken as a given that you don't want to trust a person with absolute power because, well, look at history, right? But look at history. In the story of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, if you look at all the different kings, which is what we're doing,

There are a number of them that almost certainly had what amounted to absolute power and several of them, two at least, that didn't just not abuse it but seemed to almost be the prototype that you would want in an absolute monarch.

really two different kinds of prototypes too because the founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire Cyrus the Great was like the warrior king you know his version his empire's version of it kind of an Alexander the Great and probably the greatest conqueror before Alexander the Great so sort of one kind of ruler but prototype right King Arthur but then you know you get Darius a king or two later and Darius is like the gifted administrator a person who's a genius maybe at

And organization and structure and handling things, you know, from a cost to benefit ratio. I mean, the Greek writer said his own people called him a shopkeeper. Huckster is another name given sometimes, but basically a shopkeeper, as we said in the last part of the program.

you know if the shop is walmart you're not a shopkeeper you're a ceo and we said darius was like the ceo of persia corps because persia kind of seemed to almost have like a subcontractor relationship or a subsidiary you know a licensed subsidiary of persia corps where there are various satrapies and provinces nonetheless if absolute power corrupted absolutely one would think that you wouldn't have a cyrus the great or you wouldn't have a darius and they wouldn't have done so well so obviously there are exceptions to the rule but

But those kind of people don't come along every day in any society. I mean, oftentimes the great empires throughout history have managed to sustain themselves, you know, with occasional great leadership. I mean, how many great leaders, you know, must you have show up over a period of 150 or 200 years to keep the empire in good stead? I suppose it depends on the variables, right? The outgoing conditions. If things are pretty stable, you can have a Caligula, you can have a Nero, no problem. But if the barbarians have been smashing at the

you know borders of the empire now for 20 or 30 years you better have a diocletian or hadrian well the persian empire gets off to a really strong start with cyrus the great his son cambyses who was probably better than the sources described that weird maybe sort of magi king that lasted for five seconds and then darius the great who may have been handpicked by a bunch of other nobles when something weird happened to his predecessor to take over the gig based on competency because he was competent as heck

but then about four or five years after the battle of marathon which we just talked about when the persian amphibious landing force is expelled from europe by athenian with some platian help herodotus gives this passage where he says that darius is mad and now he will punish the greeks and he will maybe do it personally but this guy's in his 60s

and remember you know how they say 30 is the new 20 or whatever it is well back then you know 60 is the current 70 or older and he's in his 60s and he's been on the throne for more than 30 years competently and awesomely reorganizing the empire and making the structure so strong and interesting i mean he's a fabulous fabulous character and if you're greece you better not overlook what he can do to you when he leads the army in person which seems to be the plan but then he dies which was not part of the plan

what's more the army that he was putting together to go punish the greeks now which we're told involved like all of asia i mean the whole area of the near east is in an uproar putting troops together and mustering he's just going to squash the athenians and anybody who sides with them like a bunch of bugs but then you know he faces the big problem for most empires throughout history

there's really only two big problems that they face one is that something will swamp or destroy them from without an enemy force or another nation state or that you will collapse from within due to revolt and rebellion a lot of times the two of them work together the assyrians had to deal with this all the time the persians did too even though the persians are supposed to be sort of the kinder gentler near eastern ancient nation state

But remember, we're grading them on a curve, and the curve was set by a bunch of people who, if you revolted against them, they would cut your skin off you while you're still alive. And you can go to the British Museum today, stroll over to their ancient Assyria section, and you will see stone reliefs that the Assyrian government paid for and commissioned and, you know, said. You will include a picture of four of our soldiers skinning alive that person who was the governor of that city who rebelled against us.

For the benefit of anyone who views it who didn't happen to be there at the time for the next 3,000 years, you could see why all of these ancient empires were so draconian to rebels and traitors because that was such a huge threat to them. How do you keep people in line when you give them a city to go rule and then you take the army and go back home?

what's to keep them from just saying ha ha fooled you i'm going to side with the egyptians now or i'm going totally free or whatever well we will do the most horrific things to you if you do that it's funny too if you go to any pre-modern society and you want to see the nastiest things they can do to people they pull out the really awful executions and tortures when they're dealing with rebels and traitors you go back to you know england for example in the middle ages they had one

where the first thing that they would do to you is rip out your intestines and barbecue them in front of you now you are alive while all this is happening which makes this a three-dimensional experience you are feeling smelling seeing the whole nine yards and if they're doing this particular execution you know to the nth degree then they will hang you but they will cut you down and let you down before you die revive you do it a few more times

Then they will tie each of your limbs to a separate horse, and those four horses will pull your four limbs in four different directions. That is called being drawn and quartered, usually reserved for rebels and traitors.

the assyrians had all sorts of things that they did and collective punishment was the rule of the day so if you were entrusted with an assyrian city and your job was to keep it you know loyal and all that and you stabbed the king of assyria in the back he wasn't just going to cut your skin off you were going to get to watch people you loved die in front of you i mean there's a reason they call some of those punishments biblical because it's those eras right

i'm going to kill your family in front of you then i will blind you so that was the last thing you see wow it was a rough era right and the assyrians were amongst the roughest practitioners but they held together a big empire for a long time that way the persians have always been sort of portrayed as an attempt to see if you could get away with leniency what did we say knifing you with leniency

at least compared to the way the Assyrians ran the show, and see if that made people more willing to live under the rule, right? I mean, the Assyrian artwork was so horrific. Some of the experts think because they're trying to tell people, this is what will happen to you if you rebel or try to get out of the empire. If you look at the Persian stuff that has survived, there is no artwork like the Assyrian stuff. The Persians do not have any artwork or release or stone carving showing them torturing anyone, right?

They actually have Persian officials holding the hands of people that are recognizably foreign. You can date them. You can go, oh, look, they're holding the hand of a carry in there. Oh, they're holding a Pisidian's hand. Oh, that's one of the Sakha people. And that is by design. The Persian propaganda, as opposed to the Assyrian propaganda, is that the people who are in their empire like them, that they enjoy being in the empire, that it's mutually beneficial, that it's an empire by choice. We're not keeping you here. You want to be in the Persian empire. It's good for everybody.

As we said in the earlier show, the Persians would often sell that to, you know, nations before they went to war. Do we really have to do this? You know, listen, you join us and everybody will be better off. I mean, that's the way they sold the empire in terms of its propaganda. It's carved in stone propaganda. And they generally, compared to the curve of that era and that area, were generally pretty lenient unless, of course, you rebelled against them. We told that story in story it may be.

from herodotus describing what happened to the egyptians when the earlier persian king took over the egyptians and the egyptians had to be punished for mistreating some diplomats and herodotus says and this would be very persian to do that all the nobles were gathered you know the aristocracy of egypt not the poor people who had nothing to do with the decision making but those in the upper crust brought them in and then brought their children in in front of them and executed the boys two thousand of them including

you know the king of egypt's kid and sold an equal number of girls into slavery and we had wondered what that sounded like remember that's still a scene in my head what's the movie scene like that how do you recreate that for the film nonetheless that kind of collective punishment was not unusual at all which makes you wonder you know if if that's what faces you

let's just say you're the governor your name is ugbaru and you run a syrian city that's the persians have taken over and they've come and they've signed a bunch of documents with you and you maybe pricked your finger with blood and you put it at the bottom of the dot yes i will be loyal to the persian empire and then for some reason might have had a good reason who knows you rebel and the persians come back because what are the odds that that rebellious city is going to manage to avoid being recaptured

And then the Persians do something horrible to you and your family. I mean, just, you know, let your imagination run wild. The Persians had a punishment called the boats, for example, or sometimes called the ordeal of the boats, which is hideous. Top three, always on my top three worst execution methods of all time, along with also the death by a thousand cuts of the Chinese. That was a diabolical one.

I always think to myself, by the way, you know, with this Persian penalty, somebody had to come up with this. Somebody invented this. You wonder if they'd be proud to find Ellis, and 2,500 years later, we're still talking about it. But the method supposedly, again, this comes from Greek authors, so who knows, but the method was to get a couple of boats, like canoes or flat-bottomed boats or whatever, you know, small affairs, but that fit together. If you put one upside down on the other one, you have like a perfect little compartment. And they would stick the person to be executed in the bottom boat,

Then they would put the top boat on top of them, but they would leave the head, the hands and the feet out, according to these Greek authors. And then they would feed the person in the boat a lot of milk and honey and then smear it all over their face and then either leave them in the sun or set the boat adrift on a calm lake in the sun.

and sources differ on what was worse but apparently your face would get covered with insects attracted by the milk and honey but also of course you're stuck in that boat so you do what nature requires you to do and the worms and the bugs and everything basically eat you alive and according to the ancient greek author plutarch writing hundreds of years later by the way it took one guy 17 days to die that's horrific who came up with that idea

But if that's what you know faces you, if your city rebels, why on earth would you ever do that? So I think about our ancestors and I can't decide if they're just unbelievably badass.

Or if maybe, you know, our whole concept of what's horrible has been changed by softening times. I mean, you know, the countries that still execute people consider the penalty to be the deprivation of life, right? When you're executed in the United States, in a lot of states, they'll just put you to sleep. And you're being punished by losing the rest of the years that you otherwise would have had. In the ancient world or the Middle Ages...

death is not the punishment death is the byproduct the punishment is the pain you suffer on the way to dying just getting your head cut off in some of these places if you're a rebel is cheating justice so maybe we who put our executed criminals to sleep maybe to us the ordeal of the boats is unbelievable but maybe to the people at the time they would go hey you know i'll take it over being flayed alive grading everything on a curve right

nonetheless the whole reason that the greeks are fighting right that they get drawn into a war with persia to begin with has to do with revolts that happened in greek cities on the coast of modern day turkey the ionian revolts so you have that you think well you know but it must not happen too often no in the next few years right after the battle of marathon maybe and maybe even tied to the outcome i mean the persians get a setback at marathon and all of a sudden egypt revolts

And whereas the Greeks and that whole Greek world in Europe is like the fringes of the backwaters of nowhere, right? Egypt has been described by a bunch of historians as the crown jewel of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. And like their cultural equals in Babylonia, next to impossible to rule successfully.

the egyptians and the babylonians are notoriously difficult to govern and part of it is because these are populous societies these are urban societies with crowds and and i mean in egypt for example right after this era there will be lots of documentation about how if you don't pay enough attention to the general public on the ground they riot and they start burning and destroying stuff the mob in places like alexandria which doesn't exist yet of course but i mean legendary

Same thing with Babylonia. I mean, there's so many people in such a small area. You got to watch the crowd control a little bit. But also both those places have unbelievably high levels of cultural achievement and they're aware of their heritage. I mean, in Egypt and a lot of places you have to do nothing but look toward the horizon and see pyramids that are 2000 years old in this era.

I mean, they're almost as old to the Achaemenid Persians as the Achaemenid Persians are to us now. And if you're Egyptian, you're thinking to yourself, who are these barbarians who just appeared on the scene? Look what my ancestors were building in mythical times. I mean, can you imagine what a person in 490 BCE thought about something 2,000 years? Couldn't they even conceptualize something 2,000 years before that? I mean, I don't even think they could get their mind around the whole concept. But then what did they think the pyramids were?

both the babylonians and the egyptians had these very well-developed religious hierarchies with tons of different priesthoods and religions and they were very powerful and influential anytime you can speak for god that's some credibility you can use against anyone and so all these places difficult to control and when egypt rebels

Herodotus says that Darius essentially finds out about it right around the same time he finds out about what happened at Marathon in Greece. And here's the way the ancient screenwriter, showrunner,

Herodotus colorizing history really for the first time ever with personalities and dialogue and you know significant plot development this is what Herodotus writes about it and this comes from my Purvis edition and by the way Herodotus says Hellas when he means Greece or Athenians he writes quote

When the report of the Battle of Marathon reached Darius, son of Histaspis, who had already been thoroughly exasperated by the Athenians' attack on Sardis, he now reacted with a much more intense fury and became even more determined to make war on Hellas than he had been before. At once he began to issue commands.

and to send messengers throughout the cities of the Empire with instructions to each of them to provide a great deal more than they had provided previously, including horses, food, warships, and transport boats. The announcement of these orders threw Asia into commotion for three years, as the best men were enlisted to serve in the army and to make preparations for war against Hellas.

then in the fourth year the egyptians who had been enslaved by cambyses revolted from the persians which only increased darius's desire to go to war but now against both people end quote as we said though before he can do those things this ruler who had been in charge of the persian empire in an uber competent way for more than 30 years dies generally considered to be around 64 years old

And in keeping with the mysterious nature of the early Achaemenid Persian kings, history doesn't record how Darius died. That's pretty common, by the way. I mean, the founder of the empire, one of the greatest figures in all world history, Cyrus the Great? Nobody knows how he died. He might have died in bed. A natural death, of course. The traditional story is...

He was killed, his body found on the battlefield, the head chopped off and shoved into a wineskin filled with human blood by a vengeful, homicidal Central Asian queen. But you don't know, right? His son, Cambyses, the guy who gets the first, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely treatment on the part of the Greek writers, he could have stabbed himself with a sword tip accidentally and gotten gangrene and died. Or it could have been something more nefarious. You don't know.

The next Persian king is the one who was either Cyrus's other son, the heir to the throne, or some usurper, some magi from outside the royal line. We know how that one died because the person who killed him by hand bragged about it for the rest of his known days. That guy just died after ruling Persia for 36 years, and his name was Darius the Great.

Now, Darius, as a guy who came from outside the direct royal line himself, seemed to have done a pretty good job trying to make sure that the right son got the job and that it was all understood who was going to get it. Although the ancient authors sort of allude to some potential problems because these Persian kings, first of all, like a lot of ancient kings, don't just have one wife. They have several legitimate wives and then they often have a ton of concubines.

some of these Persian kings will have more than a hundred children. And that's, I always find that funny when they'll talk about, you know, often the Persian kings will put close family members in charge of important things. They had a lot of them. In this case, the, you know, potential pool of successors seem to have only included those of the legitimate wives. And then it seemed to boil down to two boys. The first one was Darius's oldest son,

The second one was Darius's oldest son born after he became king. This is something that's important, I guess. If you're worried about something to do with the mythical blue blood nature and the religious conception, I mean, you're a different guy after you become king and the child you sire after that point might have something different.

that the one you sired before you were king didn't have. I mean, this is kind of the way a logical debate on this subject goes. 2,500 years ago, at least, that's the way Herodotus sort of explains it. So the guy who gets the gig is the oldest son born after Darius becomes king. His name in Persian will sound something like Haseyersa.

remember of course that's an approximation i am multilingual in my ability to mispronounce names from many languages so bear that in mind of course he's known to history by a different name and he's probably the most well-known and famous king of the achaemenid persian dynasty he's known by the name of xerxes he also happens to be

the grandson of cyrus the great the founder of the empire this king arthur like figure remember darius the perhaps usurper himself was smart we said he kind of like married into henry ford's family but now he was running the ford auto company well this would be like henry ford's grandson darius was careful to marry cyrus the great's daughter when he became the leader of persia and

This kid's mom, this Xerxes' mom, is Cyrus the Great's daughter. He is, you know, the royal bloodline of this uber-competent guy, maybe chosen strictly on merit from a select pool of aristocrats, of course, Darius the Great.

and cyrus the great a mythical figure already in persian society we're told that they based their views on male handsomeness based on cyrus's sort of design whatever he looked like that's the uber man and anybody who's got that kind of nose and that kind of hair i mean the more like cyrus you look the more perfect you are so this is an amazing character so to be cyrus's grandson let's just say there's a lot of promise in this kid a lot of hype and high expectations how are you going to live up to that

Xerxes is also hindered historically speaking by the fact that the portrayal of him fits nicely into a couple of different narratives which are the way this story has always been told one involves the idea of decline the other involves the idea of a life cycle where decline is the last stage only recently have historians really thrown out or mostly thrown out this idea that there there's a life cycle of empires if you will

The idea that once upon a time you have people who are poor and their poverty makes them sort of tough and the toughness of their poverty and the values and the discipline and the Spartan lifestyle, you know, creates the kind of people who can conquer or amass territory to create an empire, which brings in lots of money and affluence. And then eventually, you know, you'll hit this sweet spot.

where you have the best mixture of the old rough-hewn discipline values that you had when you were poor, but also the cultural advancements and whatnot that come with some affluence and some leisure time and all that.

And then eventually, you know, the life cycle of empires culminates with the downhill slope, what Voltaire called the silk slippers, wooden shoes going upstairs, silk slippers going downstairs. You have the luxury and the affluence bringing on decadence and the decadence brings on softness and luxury and weakness. And then in this Hobbesian survival of the fittest kind of world, then you get taken over by the new poor people on the block who are tougher and more Spartan than you, who had the values your ancestors used to possess.

And Xerxes is often seen and often portrayed as the beginning of sort of the rich kid era of Persian kings. You know, the ones who didn't have to earn an empire, they grew up in it, right? I grew up as a king's son, and it's just a little different, right? Sure, they taught me how to ride, and I had to throw the spear, and they made me run five miles and do all these things that proved I was tough, but I'm still the rich kid's son, richest man in the world's son.

And the idea of Xerxes' failings are multitude of things, by the way. But the classic stereotype of Xerxes is he's a guy who couldn't stay out of the harem, loved the women, hung out in the harem all the time, and liked to drink his wine. So he's drinking a lot of wine, hanging out with a lot of chicks, and dissipating, as they would have said amongst the old boxing trainers. Dissipating. Weak. The beginning of the downhill slide in the Persian Empire.

The decline, if you will, begins, you know, Pierre Briand and others will all point out that, listen, the high watermark of the empire, if we're using the old line way of measuring this is, is it expanding in territory or is it contracting in territory? Well, the height of territorial expansion is right around the time Xerxes takes over.

And it never will be that big again by the time Xerxes leaves. So who do you blame for all that? Well, historically speaking, it's hard not to look for a culprit. Where does the buck stop in an absolute monarchy? Well, whether or not it's advisors or generals who are really calling the shots, the buck usually stops with the absolute monarch. In this case, that's Xerxes. Once again, the poor guy, deserved or not, gets stuck with the bill forever.

and blamed for being the first of the Persian kings to rule as the empire has crossed the peak of its performance and is beginning the downhill slide. The first of the king, to use Voltaire's analogy, to be heading down the stairs of civilizational height in silk slippers is traditionally Xerxes. His rehabilitation...

has been going on for almost well i was going to say 50 years with peter green in 1970 i remember reading that book but even before then i mean a.t olmstead right after the second world war was writing his history of the persians and xerxes was called a misunderstood and maligned figure but here's how green put it

in 1970 in a book that's pretty long in the tooth now when you realize how many things they've discovered about ancient persia but even back then trying to recapture xerxes's historical reputation from 2400 years of media where he'd become a stock character basically green writes quote

Our traditional picture of Xerxes is a caricature, put together from hostile and faintly contemptuous Greek propaganda. We see him as a small, blubbering, effeminate Oriental, a cowardly despot ruled by his women and his eunuchs, cruel in victory, spineless in defeat. Persian sources, no doubt he writes equally prejudiced in the opposite direction, reveal a very different man.

tall regal and handsome he stands in the persepolis reliefs and his proclamations have a ringing dignity which echoes down through the ages now he's quoting the proclamation by xerxes quote

A great God is Ahura Mazda, who created this earth, who created man, who created peace for man, and who made Xerxes king, one king of many, one lord of many. I am Xerxes the great king, king of kings, king of lands containing many men, king in this great earth far and wide, son of Darius the king, and Achaemenid,

A Persian, son of a Persian, an Arian, of Arian seed, when Darius my father passed away, by the will of Ahura Mazda, I became king. End quote.

you know it's easy to say that all this stuff you have from these greek writers for example is all movie making and it's all falsified i mean where did herodotus's dialogue come from after all do you think he was working from transcripts so i mean it's easy to say hey all that stuff should be thrown out because all these people in the story rather than being historical figures are more like characters but if you do that what do you replace it with pierre briant says that many times in his book if you get rid of herodotus because he's so inaccurate what do you replace him with

Then he pointed out that that's really the only time you appreciate the guy is when you lose him because you will after 479 BCE and then there's not even Herodotus anymore. So it's

It's part of what makes the job of historian fascinating to think of those people, the historians having to tease out the facts in the haystack of fiction, you know, that are these stories and these plays and whatnot to try to figure out, could this be true? Could that be true? And then can they check it somewhere else against some other evidence they may have?

I mean it's a detective story as we said in the earlier part of this tale. I mean take for example the fact that you begin to see some significant portrayals of women in this story in the Persian Empire which is great because as everyone knows women get the short end of the stick in so much historical writing. But you have to ask yourself as a detective don't you if you're a historian which I'm not.

is why all of a sudden do you see women when you didn't see as many of them before are they there because there's a legitimate reason to have them because there always is right we all understand it's half the population they're asserting some authority somewhere

Or are they there because the storyteller requires them as a tool to do something else? In this case, it's very easy to see how sometimes these Persian women who sometimes are shown as like dragon ladies, right? Murderously scary. I mean, on the level of Alexander the Great's mother Olympias, who is another wonderful character, but she's all real as far as they can tell. But I mean, these murderous dragon ladies, are they there because they really were these murderous dragon ladies? And that's what Persian court women were like.

or are they there because they play into the stereotype of the harem and the women beginning to dominate the men and these persian men are sitting there drinking and drunk and they don't even care what's going on and the women are needling them for their manliness why don't you invade greece why can't why can't you dare is sort of invaded greece one of the women herodotus has doing that though is somebody that there's nothing you could do to color her greatness any other color but magnificent

this is one of the greatest figures certainly maybe the greatest female figure in the history of the persian empire and only the barest facts of her are known but the barest facts by themselves are testimony to an amazing life and a person whose specialness shines through when all you really have are a few names and dates and facts her name was atossa or at least that's what the greeks called her and she was xerxes's mother

herodotus basically says the main reason xerxes was chosen over anyone else is because of the influence of that woman but that she would have that influence should surprise nobody listen to the facts that comprise this woman's life and look at how it shows a woman who was at like the sauron's eye level of the historical focus and vortex i mean

she's Cyrus the Great's daughter that's like being Napoleon's daughter Genghis Khan's daughter Julius Caesar's daughter I mean you name it and she's there when the Empire's being won and formed and or I mean that's the vortex of history in that part of the world I mean as we said he's probably the greatest conqueror in world history up to that point and this is his girl and she's there while it's happening she will then marry his successor Cyrus's successor her father's successor who happens to be her brother

cambyses now not only will she then be married to her brother but when cambyses dies remember we have that very weird situation where maybe cambyses his brother the legitimate heir takes over or maybe there's that coup and this magi guy seizes the throne either way whoever it is that gets on the throne next he marries atossa too so she either married her real brother again

Or she married the fake usurper whose blood shouldn't have contaminated her super royal blue blood at all, and the guy who maybe killed her brother. She then marries Darius the Great when he takes over. And remember, when he takes over, he either did so by killing the real heir to the throne, her brother, husband...

or the magi guy who seized the throne in which case he saved her from that you know low-level person who should never have been anywhere near the kingship no matter which of those stories are true that's an amazing life right there i look at it this way this is a woman who was either the daughter the mother or the wife of the first five kings of the achaemenid persian empire which by the way includes their greatest kings wouldn't surprise anyone if she had a little influence at court would it

And you can tell by reading about her, the little bits that seep through, that she's not like some shrinking violet prize or something that just gets passed around. You can tell that she's valuable for the world.

for what she knows that she's raised in this environment as i said you know when you're in the center of that vortex when all this history is being made i mean she she sounds like a political animal like someone who knows how to move the levers of power and influence and rule through husbands and sons and she's a fascinating character she's probably the most famous powerful character you know female character in a keman and persian empire history and

and the fact that so little is still known about her just shows you how much this era is still sort of covered in a gray mist with only the most bright and luminary characters you know dimly appearing from the other side but atossa is one of them atossa's son xerxes will sort of have the opposite problem of his mother whereas we have some facts and not enough color to flesh it out with her

With Xerxes, whatever facts you have are so overwhelmed by the color, it's difficult to figure out who the guy you're dealing with really is. Way back in the early 1960s, historians like A.R. Byrne pointed out that

There are some good qualities of Xerxes that even creep into the original sources, like Herodotus. Byrne wrote, quote, Xerxes lives in the Greek tradition as the arch-enemy, presented naturally in an unfavorable light. Herodotus, more generous to the enemy than later writers, alone presents him in the rounds.

his Xerxes has a Persian love of natural beauty he enjoys being unificent on a princely scale he can forgive surrendered enemies even those surrendered in atonement for a war crime he weeps for compassion over the mortality of mankind

but he is easily roused to rage by opposition. He is cruel when crossed, even to those lately favored. He is uncontrolled in lust and at heart a coward. It is a well-conceived literary portrait, the character of an Oriental prince, born of good stock, brought up to rule, but not to tolerate opposition or endure a setback. There may be much truth in it."

one of my favorite herodotus stories about xerxes is the one where he tells the spartan of the spartans trying to reconstruct their damaged karma i guess you could say for lack of a better word we told the story a while back that when the persians and the spartans first got together the persians sent them diplomats and they asked for earth and water which is the traditional token of submission and the spartans threw them in a well and said you can get your earth and water down there which of course kills them

But this is like a violation of the ancient world's version of international law. The gods frown upon treating diplomats like that. And supposedly the oracles start giving the Spartans all these bad,

pronouncements for a while and and they try to figure out okay how are we going to repair this karma for lack of a better word and basically they come up with this idea that if they send a couple of spartans to the king of the persians and he can do with them what he wants presumably he's going to kill them and we're going to even the score here

So the Spartans ask for volunteers and some older wealthy Spartans may be looking to find one last thing they can do for their duty to the state. Volunteer to go be the sacrificial victims who show up in Xerxes court and say they're there to repair the karma and pay the karmic bill for the death of the Persian diplomats. And Xerxes says, go home. He says, you think I'm going to violate international law?

It's a little like your parents saying two wrongs don't make a right. That's kind of the way Xerxes is portrayed, which is a pretty cool way to be. Although there's perhaps a more intelligent way to look at it. Maybe Xerxes is thinking to himself, wait a minute. So they kill diplomats and get bad karma. And now they want me to do the same thing. No, thank you. I'd rather keep my karma untainted. Thank you very much. Go home to Sparta. So that's a good portrait of Xerxes. Cause as we said, otherwise he's mostly Voldemort or Darth Vader in this story, but,

Although part of the fun is he's like Darth Vader, who besides his black ominous getup happens to be wearing Voltaire's silk slippers at the same time. So it's a little bit of a softer version perhaps and maybe something a little bit more luxurious and wealthy and maybe just a hint of decadence more than the earlier kings who came before him.

least that's the way it's always portrayed i'm sure the egyptians would not have thought that the persians were any softer than they had been when xerxes takes the army his father was gathering to go punish the greeks and uses it against the egyptians who had recently revolted

The literary traditions have Xerxes being the first of the uncool Persian kings, because as we said, they had a reputation for sort of coming in there and saying, listen, you can keep doing business the way you want to, keep your religion, keep your way of doing things. There's a new boss in town, but we're very hands-off. All of a sudden, Xerxes, by the writings of the Greeks, starts to look like the jerk. Goes into Egypt and starts saying, no, no, no, no more of this. You don't get to do this your way anymore. We're going to up the taxes. We're going to take more people for building projects and everything.

the egyptians are mad but in a way you can kind of see the persians point of view if they've been lenient with the egyptians all this time and the egyptians are still a pain in the rear at what point does the pressure ratchet up to finally get tough on these people looking at it from the persian point of view maybe you would say to yourself listen we tried the lenient approach with these people time and time again and they keep rebelling or maybe the whole thing is made up and it's all greek propaganda and xerxes never did any of this

We do know he crushed the rebellion, though, and the Egyptians stayed good for a short period of time. The Judeans may also have revolted during this period. The Babylonians revolt twice. I mean, you think to yourself what revolting punishments are going to happen to all these people who revolt. You would think the revolts would be fewer and farther between, but they're not.

And it should be pointed out that this is just the stuff we know about in Persia's West, trying to divine the history of Persia is like trying to divine the history of the moon. There's a light side of the moon that you can see, and that's the side of Persia that faced Greece and that got written about extensively.

and that was near babylon and egypt and these other societies that kept good records and then there's the dark side of the moon which is everything to the east of persia which is a huge expanse of territory going up into modern-day afghanistan and pakistan and places like that that's almost completely invisible in terms of the historical record the persians may have had amazing battles and dealt with monstrous revolts over there we just don't know

but Xerxes crushes efficiently the revolts in these very important places in the Persian Empire, Egypt and Babylonia. My favorite story in Babylonia is perhaps what you might call the final solution to the Babylonian problem, but it's not what you might think. They found during archaeological digs, I guess, a receipt, maybe you could call it,

for a statue taken from babylon when the revolt is crushed by xerxes the statue is the famous statue of the babylonian god marduk supposed to be solid gold about 13 feet tall somewhere between 800 and 1300 pounds and this is the statue that anyone who wanted to be the ruler of babylonia had to grasp the hands that was called grasping the hands of marduk

very important religious ceremony when the persians took that statue and apparently melted it down they eliminated the ability of marduk to grasp anybody's hands ever again ha ha ha we got your god isn't that what we said in the last version of this tale the politics of dealing with the gods of local communities is fascinating a fascinating aspect to these early societies and now what were the babylonians going to do if they wanted a new local ruler

marduk's hands had been melted forever i suppose if you're babylonian that is a pretty big black mark next to xerxes name forever in your book isn't it why do you hate xerxes well he melted down my god oh understandable after crushing these revolts xerxes will turn his attention now to finishing a job his father began the job of conquering this troublesome people who inhabit the european mainland

A people that, after the Battle of Marathon, have had a good ten years to prepare for the return of the Persians. Remember, you might think of the Battle of Marathon as an Athenian or a Greek victory, but really all that they had done there is parry a Persian blow.

the persians second blow should have come a lot sooner but they had the death of a king who had been on the throne for 36 years that'll throw off your game a little bit then the succession then the crushing of multiple revolts now 10 years after the battle of marathon the persians are ready for blow number two and blow number two is going to make blow number one look like a tap the preparations for this next invasion will take years and will be visible to all the greeks could not have been surprised

some of the things that the persians were doing to smooth the way for the next time they showed up you know were hard to hide i mean for example the last time the persians were there they'd had problems crossing a peninsula around a certain mountain their fleet had been wrecked right at the tip of the point of the peninsula so this time they spent three or four years ahead of time digging a canal more than a mile long right through the the neck of the peninsula right at the base

won't even have to go around it next time ancient authors said two triremes could pass side by side in the canal and apparently they can find remnants of it today but that's the kind of thing that takes thousands and thousands of people and years and the greeks would have known

In addition, unlike the last assault, you know, which culminated at the Battle of Marathon, which was essentially an amphibious landing, you know, which is kind of cool for this period when you think about the capabilities. I mean, move an army by ship and landing and supporting them and all that, that's really cool. But this time they were going to go more the old-fashioned route, which leads a lot more historians, because there's no agreement on this, to think that the second time the Persians come around, this time led in person by Xerxes, the great king of kings,

that this time it's a full invasion this is not a punitive expedition this is not something to you know scare the locals all although historian pierre briand points out that this also would have been something that the new king xerxes would have used as a way to show the flag you know to all the peoples you march the army through their territory on the way to some other goal and it has the subsidiary effect of reminding the locals you know who their king is and dissuade any attempts to change that situation

nonetheless if they're going to invade by land this time so they can take what is reported to be the largest army that ever invaded anywhere in the world up until this time although let's remember these people did not know anything about the chinese so you know take that out of your equation who knows how those numbers would have stacked up nonetheless you can't move an army that big over the sea so you're going to move it over the land you're going to attack europe from asia there's only one problem is you've probably divined

there's water that separates europe from asia it's not very much i mean it's a strip but it's famous the dardanelles the greeks called it the helispont wide enough and with a strong enough current though to give anybody fits can't build a solid bridge wouldn't last got to figure out a way around the problem the persians start doing that too they begin to build floating bridges across at least two spots

that divide europe from asia i think the narrowest is like 1700 yards around there but i think there's one that's like two miles long the first bridge is destroyed by the current and a storm so xerxes has the men who built it the ones in charge beheaded we're then told in a wonderful piece of herodotus that that is a lot of color and that may have been true but who knows what the reasons we're told that xerxes orders the water itself to be punished for such activity

He has his men weighed into the water. This is from Herodotus, though. Take it with a grain of salt. This might have just been a great movie scene. Who knows? But he says that Xerxes has them whip the water with whips, brand the water with hot irons, throw in fetters, you know, like handcuffs into the water and scold the water all the time while doing it for essentially being naughty. This is what Herodotus writes that Xerxes did after finding out his first attempt at

to build the bridge had been thwarted by a storm. Herodotus says, quote, Xerxes was infuriated when he learned of this. He ordered that the Hellespont was to receive 300 lashes under the whip and that a pair of shackles was to be dropped into the sea. And I've also heard that he sent others to brand the Hellespont. In any case, he instructed his men to say barbarian and insolent things as they were striking the Hellespont. Now he's quoting what the men were saying as they whipped the water, quote,

"'Bitter water, your master is imposing this penalty upon you for wronging him, even though you had suffered no injustice from him. And King Xerxes will crush you, whether you like it or not. It is for just cause, after all, that no human offers you sacrifice. You are a turbid and briny river.'" And then Herodotus says, "'Thus he ordered that the sea was to be punished, and also that the supervisors of the bridge over the Hellespont were to be beheaded.'"

Now, if you're Herodotus, you just make Xerxes look like a bit of a nutjob there, don't you? And maybe he was. Absolute power corrupts absolutely sometimes, right? Xerxes may have thought that made a difference. On the other hand, I always try to think of these people as cynical just to see if there's a cynical answer for some of this stuff. And I mean, theoretically, look at how bad it looks for the King of Kings' bridge to be destroyed by something that would appear to be an act of God to the locals, who almost certainly turned out to watch everything.

maybe the way you pacify the rubes and you you know quell any worries that somehow maybe god's not happy with the king is to blame it on the water and punish it harshly maybe this was a public relations stunt to make the people know that the water was acting out of turn and it won't do it again

So Xerxes gets to work on the bridge again, and they end up building at least one, maybe two, across the water using boats. We're told what they do is they put these boats side by side by side with the bow facing the current, and then they lash them all together. So they rope boats, strings of boats together.

Then they lay planks across the boats, and then they put sides up, Herodotus says, to keep the animals from looking over the side and seeing the water and getting spooked. Then they put dirt down and pack it down, and all of a sudden you have a floating bridge, something that can handle the current because it can move up and down and be flexible. All of a sudden there's a bridge between Asia and Europe that a giant, nasty,

persian army can cross with all its cavalry and baggage and supplies and everything these are the kind of engineering feats that the persians and the entire part of the world whose heritage they were the inheritors of could do so well military engineering and the greeks were justifiably scared and then i say greeks but it's important to point out that the historians always emphasize there is no greece at this point

And there is no sense of national Greek consciousness. The people thought of things more in terms of the city-state they were from, which is why they had so many problems with each other. A lot of this story that we're telling you here was actually created after the fact. As part, some historians think of a literary creation of a past unity that may or may not have ever existed before.

but that this event, which is really to the ancient Greeks, the equivalent of like their second world war in terms of the interest and the fascination and how disruptive and important a thing it was and how people talked about it for long afterwards. Look how many books and movies and everything we still sell on that event. This in part explains, you know, why it's so exaggerated and there's so much myth built on top of it and it's so hard to

tweeze the little facts from the fiction and then throw on all the western civilization stuff that's come you know long after that and becomes hard to discern what really happened but you can certainly tell that the greeks are not foolish and they can see odds and when they're not even really greeks but in this case athenians on one hand or spartans on the other hand or thebans or argives or corinthians in other words they're

The Persian Empire against Greece is no contest. The Persian Empire against some Greek city-states is less than no contest. In fact, even seeing this in the traditional sense of Greeks against Persians is

is probably not accurate. Archaeologist Warwick Ball, who's trying, you know, against all odds because of the sources, to look at this more from a Persian point of view, would point out that in the end, you will have more Greeks fighting on the side of the great king of kings of Persia than with his brethren, the Greeks supposedly fighting for Greek freedom. So things may be a lot more complicated than thousands of years of historical history.

tweaking make it appear to be today one of my favorite parts of the story though happens now when the greeks do what people in this era did when you're worried about something and you need advice they went to the gods and the greeks go to the most famous of all the oracles in this part of the world delphi to speak to the representative of apollo who kind of channels the voice of the god through herself

It's one of the fascinating parts of this era in human history. I think when we were talking about Babylonia earlier on, we talked about magic eight balls and Ouija boards and how weird it was to almost have that side of the metaphysical be so connected to things like policy decisions. Should we invade this country or not? You know, shake the magic eight ball. Sources say yes. I mean, ask again later.

outlook is positive i mean you know it's crazy sort of to the modern mind but once again there are multiple ways of viewing it some of them much more cynical that could suggest that some of this stuff was only metaphysical to maybe the rank and file on the ground maybe the sophisticated people were working this organization

oracle angle a totally different way for example the kings of persia traditionally gave lots of good stuff to all the oracles they didn't play any favorites and they covered all their bases why take any chances and the oracle at delphi channeling the voice of the god of apollo was friends with the persians because the persians were friends with the god apollo and they've proved it many times in material ways

the oracle of delphi was usually pro-persian in this case the athenians go to basically say okay we know the great king's coming back and we're trying to work together to figure out some ideas and you know maybe we should have a navy maybe we should have an army maybe we should work with the spartans i mean let's ask a little advice and they go to the pithia and they go in this temple and there's a there's a woman there

And supposedly they are matronly. They're like 50 years old because once they used to be like teen virgins and it didn't work out too well. So they just dress these 50 year old women like teens, put them on dresses.

a tripod that was in a cauldron maybe they don't know exactly but one of the accounts says that this cauldron had like little air holes in the bottom so that the fumes from a crack in the earth that they were placed over could seep up through the cauldron and into their nostrils and allow them to channel the god this is a fascinating thing you could go into oracles forever and

I love Diodorus Siculus' account of how they even found this. This was a crack in the earth, he says, and a sheep from a shepherd fell into the crack, and the shepherd went in to look for the sheep, and all of a sudden, you know, he could see the past, and he could see the future, and he was... Well, it's wild stuff, and historians and scientists ever since have been trying to figure out, assuming it's true...

what the heck made this woman the pithia she was called and it was associated with snakes by the way so that makes it more exotic and interesting and weird um you know what she was on what she was taken was she chewing laurel leaves or oleander leaves or something or was there something to this idea of a crack in the earth that she sat over and the fumes did it to her we're told the hair stood on end the skin changed color they spoke in tongues suspiciously sometimes you couldn't understand a word they said and they had these handlers you

you know who kind of interpreted oh here's what she's saying and then sometimes even with the you know interpretation you had to go back to you know your city and it was like reading a fortune cookie and you had to sort of debate what that said that's really helpful they you know would have to do that a lot where they go okay here's what she said well what the heck does that mean i think it means this well of course you would you want to do that anyway well i think it means that well of course you would that's your point of view so i mean it goes like that sometimes in this case when the athenians basically say you know what do we do about the persians who are coming back

the oracle gives one of its most fire and brimstone and scary pronouncements i've ever read her giving or unless you want to say it's apollo him giving the oracle says quote

Why sit so idle, you poor wretched men? To the ends of the land you should flee. Leave your homes, leave the heights of your circular fortress, for neither the head nor the body remains in its place, nor the feet underneath, nor the hands, nor the middle is left as it was, but now all is obscure. For casting it down is fire, and Ares so sharp on the heels of a Syrian chariot,

And he will destroy many cities with towers, and not yours alone. And into the devouring fire he will give the temples of eternal gods, which now drip with sweat and shake in their fear, as blood gushes darkly from the top of their roofs, foreseeing the force of compelling disaster. Now step out of this shrine and shroud over your heart with the evils to come.

They had gone to the god Apollo to ask what they should do in the face of this Persian invasion when the god Apollo in no uncertain terms told them to run for their lives. As you might imagine, the Athenians are horrified by that response. And imagine if you really took this seriously, how horrified you'd be by it. Somebody just prophesied your doom.

but they're encouraged to go back sort of try to get another sort of maybe like a follow-up question in in a roundabout way and they're given one of those cryptic fortune cookie type responses which they take back to Athens and everybody starts to argue over the bottom line though is that it results in Athens deciding to build a navy which kind of comes at the expense of Athens deciding to support an army it was sort of an either-or proposition and

but Athens will be known forever afterwards as a great naval power. This is where they develop that power really for the first time. And they do it to, you know, take on the great King or at least give them some ability to cope at sea. Because not only does the great King have a massive army, so we're told that,

he has a massive fleet as well this time it's a battle fleet as opposed to maybe an amphibious landing fleet and supply fleet although some historians think it supplied the army while the army was marching no one knows how big the army was and nobody knows how big the fleet was Herodotus as one of the many exaggerators will claim that when all the people and their servants and everyone else is added up Xerxes's army is more than five million men and his fleet has more than you know a thousand ships

As we said earlier, everybody knows those numbers are wrong, but nobody knows what numbers are right. And everyone has a way of arguing it. But even if we play with relatively low ball numbers and just say 50,000 soldiers, 50,000 people is your average size college football stadium, isn't it? A pretty good size college football stadium. Xerxes' army will be on the road for a long time. Imagine trying to keep 50,000 people alive.

in a stadium marching you know hundreds and hundreds of miles alive and well and ready to fight at a distant location and imagine trying to do that 2500 years ago syracuse army will cross the hellespont over the bridge of boats herodotus says it took seven days for the whole army to cross he runs down famously it takes pages of herodotus he runs down every

contingent in the army and he says 46 nations took part there's a reason they call the persian king the king of kings because he ruled over a bunch of peoples who still had their own kings they just answered to the persian king their kings were sometimes called satraps and the persian king could you know put them on or take them off at will

herodotus says that they all showed up in their traditional local garb ready to fight in their traditional ways right the assyrians the last great military empire this region would have eventually turned them all into assyrians they would look like roman legionaries they'd be uniform and they would all fight the same way the persians let these units fight at whatever they were good at if you had a

and they were nasty if you met him in the forest and the hill country well you bring them along and when you have somebody up in the hills giving you trouble you send the thracians to go deal with them right i have some apache scouts i keep them in case i'm fighting apaches herodotus goes down this list and what strikes you when you read it and he goes into what they're armed with and what their clothing looked like and what their facial features and ethnic features looked like is that xerxes is bringing peoples from three different continents with him to attack greece

from europe asia and africa he's got sub-saharan african troops who are dressed he says in leopard and lion skins with antelope horn spears painting half their body white with chalk the other half red and carrying six foot tall cane bows that supposedly only they could pull back because they were so strong but with stone-tipped arrows

And he goes down the list of all these exotic peoples. And historians have been wondering ever since, you know, what this means. Did these people all get out there and fight? Is it symbolic instead and meant to convince people all along the way? You know, Greece and everybody along the way, look at the majesty of the great king. Look at all these exotic peoples he has. It's like a giant Persian zoo. And all these peoples are the animals and the great king is the zookeeper. And they're all in their most, you know, colorful feathers. And look at my army is in bloom. Maybe it's like that.

Some historians have suggested all those people could be hostages for the good behavior of the rest of the empire, right? How many revolts have they been dealing with? And you're going to take this enormous army and the king of kings and take them to Europe? Doesn't that encourage everyone to revolt? Well, what if you have two or three thousand, you know, of the sons of the nobility of all those places with you on campaign? Is that sort of a guarantee of good behavior? So that's been theorized.

But the core of the army is Persian and related peoples, the ones who won the empire, the ones who hold the empire, the very dangerous group that Xerxes has around him. So he may have all these subject peoples, but the peoples that are going to bear the brunt of this thing are desperately good fighters, even though history in the Greek times has portrayed them as sort of

ants driven along by the lash and nothing more than the slaves of the silk slipper wearing darth vader this indeterminate number of people will gather all through 481 bce in what's now modern day turkey in the spring of 480 bce they will cross from asia into europe and begin if you're looking at a map to go around a body of water and now descend on greece from above from the north

perhaps it is a sign of exactly how disunited the greeks are that with the persian preparations that advanced and the persian army bearing down on them the greeks still have a hard time you know crafting together any sort of unified approach to dealing with the persian threat in fact you know if you tell this story the old-fashioned way there's a lot of politics going on right now as the greeks try to form this alliance system and what cities are going to stay out what cities are going to go in

eventually only about 10 will join the anti-persian alliance but you can understand why look at how these city-states would have to bury their even recent differences with each other take argos for instance who had just fought a war with sparta where they lost 6 000 people now they're going to join an alliance that's going to be generaled by a spartan general it's tough

A lot of states, Argos included, will remain neutral against the Persians and a lot of states will join the Persians, especially in the north. And you can't blame them because the north is where the Persians are. A lot easier to flip the Persians the bird from down south, you know, where Sparta is. A little different if you're up in Thessaly with the Persians. Persian diplomacy was always that much more effective when it happened to have the army there with it, especially if it was all decked out in a lot of feathers and war paint and very exotic looking from three continents.

this royal army is like a loaded gun cocked and pointed down you know towards the mainland greeks and they know it sometime around this time period the athenians begin evacuating athens a lot of it by sea and herodotus you know makes it seem like a desperate effort to get the women and the children and the elderly and the slaves off the mainland and off to these islands where they can hopefully be safe because the

understanding is is if the persians break into central greece which is you know part of where athens is thebes places like that too athens is doomed remember the oracle kind of said they needed to run well they're taking it seriously they know that

they're on the Persians naughty list they're probably the number one naughtiest Greek state in the eyes of the Persians and if the Persians get into central Greece there's nothing that will stop them from moving right on Athens so the Greeks send a force to block the Persians now we get into areas now that are much argued by the experts and I am not qualified to even have a favorite position amongst them

but the problem sort of stems from herodotus you know you rely on this guy because you don't have anyone else and when it comes to color and drama and story he's awesome but when it comes to real military details that you can reconstruct and make sense out of afterwards not so awesome he's heavily criticized for this and that and the other thing and so everything has to sort of be taken with a grain of salt he may not have even really understood well some of the military realities here

His ability to write, though, what probably amounts to some of the... This guy is the guy who wrote the oldest surviving, you know, battle scenes of the sort that we would know in literature and entertainment and movies and everything else ever since. I mean, Herodotus' history is just chock full of battle scenes by a screenwriter, you know, or from that approach. The one he has for Thermopylae is part of the reason Thermopylae has become

the greatest military last stand in history. I mean, think about how many of those there must have been throughout the entire length and breadth of human affairs. There must have been thousands and thousands of great last stand stories, but if no one survived to write the account of them, you know, they're like that proverbial tree falling in the forest, right? Does it make a sound if no one's there to hear it? And you also have to get it, by the way, from a sympathetic point of view. What's going to be the Battle of Thermopylae

It's going to sound very different if it's a Persian oral historian describing it to his audience than if Herodotus is describing it to a Greek one. The moment where the great king, including in his entourage an exiled Spartan king, arrive in front of the hot gates, the blocking position that the Greeks have taken up on land, Thermopylae. And if you're writing the Persian history of this, you basically say that

within a week the great king forced this position outflanked turned this position that was the strongest in greece while at the same time killing the spartan king a bunch of his elite soldiers you know a thousand or more other greeks and a bunch of other greeks ran away you can add to that that your fleet fought a greek blocking fleet at a place called artemisium we're told on like the same day

both sides were roughly handled is the way historians like to put it roughly handled is a great term but the greeks ran away now they may have gone down to athens because athens at this point is evacuating this is part of what also brings home the stakes of all this and it makes us sympathetic forever with the greek cause on so many levels because all the story elements are in their favor

i mean when you're when you've got refugees and women and children and old people jumping onto ships to flee to offshore islands because they will die or be enslaved or something if they stay hard not to have some sympathy when the story is about you know a six foot five inch tall giant about to you know beat up a four foot tall man again our natural sympathies tend to go to the underdog

throw in the fact that to a lot of us the greeks are the home team for western civilization as we said earlier and there are a lot of reasons to not see this story the way the majority of people during this time period not on the greek side would have which is that the greeks made what would have seemed like a relatively feeble effort to stop the great king at the pass of thermopylae and the great king brushed them aside

herodotus and the ancient sources say he suffered 20 000 dead doing it which would you know be something that the greeks would say well look look at the out of proportion casualties that the spartans and their allies caused yes but if we're buying herodotus's numbers now remember he puts the persians at over five million men do the math that means that they turned the strongest defensive position in greece killed a spartan king his guard basically and a bunch of other greeks

at the cost of less than half a percent of his total force most military commanders would take that any day once the persians are through thermopylae they're into central greece and now the loaded weapon is right up against the head of places like athens and thebes and central greece now that story is much much better as you might expect if you're listening to herodotus tell it

because we just told you know the equivalent of the story of the alamo from the mexican side which is we got a little delayed at the alamo they killed a bunch of our guys no big deal boom we killed every last one of them we moved on from the greek point of view this is an inspirational account and it starts we're told to be inspirational from the get-go meaning it had an effect on the war effort but then it's been one of those things that have inspired people ever since

herodotus says he's learned the name of all 300 spartans who fell at the battle if you could have gone back and told those people we'd still be talking about them 2500 years later i wonder what their reaction would be nonetheless we would be remiss if we suggested that there had only been 300 spartans at this battle when the persians show up and are blocked at thermopylae there are thousands of greeks on the other side of the pass now here's the thing to understand this pass

doesn't look the same today you go look at it now and it doesn't look that imposing but if you go look at the recreations that people have mocked up about where the water used to be which is receded you basically have a narrow strip of beach between the mountains and the water in some places the ancient author said it was so narrow you could hardly fit a horse-drawn cart through it but normally was like a hundred yards i saw one mock-up suggesting in any case the point that makes it useful is

is it nullifies so many of the persians advantages if there really are more persians they can't really use those numbers can they they can't get around the greeks and in a past like that the main persian advantage their cavalry can't get around the greeks either you can basically have a solid line of armed and armored men stretching from the mountains to the sea

it's a solid body of troops there's nothing you can do but go straight at it and going straight at it is what the greeks were best at and what the persians were beginning to prove that at least when facing greeks they weren't best at now if you have a long memory you will recognize that we have now come full circle to where we actually began this tale

The story of, you know, how in my mind's eye I see all these Spartan troops as a manifestation of Clint Eastwood somehow. And Herodotus has Xerxes and his advisor, who happens to be an exiled king of Sparta himself. That's a pretty good advisor if you're looking at Spartans. Going over the finer points of what Xerxes' spy has just reported to him.

the spy said he went and looked at the pass and saw these long-haired warriors combing their hair and doing body weight exercises and xerxes turns to the spartan king says these people this small group of people they're not going to try to contest the pass are they and that's when the spartan king goes yes they are you can kill me if i'm a liar this dramatic tale about the resistance of these greeks dying for any number of themes that have been heaped upon this event since

fidelity to the state loyalty to their comrades sacrifice for the greater good freedom of your people i mean just on and on and on the themes are heaped upon one another again why why it's so difficult to see this from the persian point of view because from the persian point of view none of these themes are here the heroism of davy crockett means nothing to santa anna's mexicans right

remember it's plutarch 450 years later or thereabouts who says that the response that leonidas king of the spartans remember they always have two of them this one maybe you could call the spare the sacrificial lamb he's a descendant of heracles supposedly who is a descendant of zeus so this is a spartan king who's got zeus's blood in his veins no big deal but supposedly according to plutarch

the persians are from the typical persian deal you guys join us we make you the kings of greece you have more than you ever had before you profit we profit it's all good just lay down your arms and the answer the wonderful answer you see it emblazoned on caps today because a lot of different causes including second amendment firearms causes here in the united states adopted the phrase it's molan labe translated a hundred different ways but come and take them

is a standard one that's accepted come and take them lay down your arms come and take them maybe we could add come and take them from our cold dead hands but if you're looking at this from the persian point of view that's exactly what they do they kill clint eastwood and the other clint eastwoods and all the other greeks who aren't clint eastwood and they pry the weapons from your cold dead hands and they move on

and if you're a clint eastwood defender back in a greek city state you go yes but they killed 10 persians for every one they lost and if you're the persian king you go so what i have lots more that side of the persian intimidating qualities has not really been brought out here who cares i will spend 20 lives to take you down how's it feel i mean it's

If you look at it the right way, this is brutally intimidating. And since historians can't agree on what the Greek strategy was, they can't really determine how big of a deal Thermopylae was in terms of a disaster. But since a lot of historians think it might have been an attempt to block the Persians and keep them out of the rest of Greece on land, and there was, as we said, a corresponding blocking force at sea too at Cape Artemisium,

if that force was intended to halt the persians like these historians think so that the supplies could begin to run out and the persian army could starve and go straggling back to persia like napoleon straggling out of russia that's a good strategy by the way but if that's the strategy how else but as a horrible failure do you judge the inability to hold that most defensive position in all of greece for a week really only two or three days of actual fighting

if we're honest with ourselves the greeks get blown out at thermopylae and if herodotus is being honest with us the persians took the unusual step of decapitating you know the descendant of heracles and sticking his head on a stick as they marched out of the mountain passes and into central greece

And you can almost hear the background, you know, Empire music and the heavy breathing of Darth Vader as, you know, he walks through the pass while rides on his chariot. Those silk slippers don't handle the rocks in the road very well, you know. Herodotus' version of the fight at Thermopylae, which would have been heard by Greek audience members within living memory of those events, is somewhat more colorful, detailed, and

more heroic certainly i mean in the in herodotus's tale and it may be true the greeks are holding their own in fact they're beating the persians every time the persians attack the past they're beaten back by greek forces it's only because some traitor shows up and betrays the greek cause for gold persians are always getting people to betray their people for gold imagine that

and the traitor shows you know the forces of king xerxes a secret path behind the greek defenses xerxes sends troops behind to the greek rear and in one of the versions of this leonidas is able to get the other greeks to head back in safety you know to their cities to fight another day and sort of defends the retreat to the last man he becomes the rear guard it's another version of this story

if you don't buy into the idea that this was an attempt to halt the persians until their supplies ran out then maybe you buy into the theory that this is a delaying action in which case the death of these spartans achieve something they let the rest of the greeks get away this is the second world war's dunkirk evacuation in ancient greece and a spartan king and 300 of his men and a bunch of other greeks are the ones who cover the retreat for the rest of the greek army and that may be true

As one historian pointed out, if the Persian cavalry get to the other side of the mountains and there's a whole bunch of Greek hoplites for miles in front of them retreating, they're going to have a field day spearing those people in the back. So could have saved a lot of lives here. Herodotus' account, of course, is much more colorful.

he has the persian king setting up a throne maybe you could call it his mobile throne and he sets it up where he can watch what's going on he supposedly like to watch all these encounters on land or sea even sort of grading you know with a scribe there uh the phoenicians get a demerit for their performance in today's battle mark that down i mean it's that kind of thing and herodotus says he's sending in unit after unit to fight the greeks and they all get beaten back

that their short spears can't cope with the greeks and that finally the king decides to send in his guard unit the immortals but his immortals run into more than their match when they run into spartans and if what herodotus says is true anyone who's ever been out on a field trying to do maneuvers with other human beings and having all work together can understand what a feat this would be and what an advantage in combat this would be if spartans could really behave on the battlefield the way herodotus has them behaving

After the Medes and the Kissians get destroyed or badly handled by trying to assault the Greeks in the past, here's what Herodotus' colorful account of the next step turns out to be while Xerxes the Great King watches. Quote,

Since the Medes were suffering extremely rough treatment, they now withdrew, and the Persians, under the command of Hadarnes, whom the king called the Immortals, came forth to take their place. There was every expectation that they at least would prevail, but when they joined battle with the Hellenes, the Greeks, they fared no better than the Medes, and indeed they suffered the very same setbacks.

The fighting continued to take place in a confined space, with the Persians using shorter spears than those of the Hellenes, and unable to derive any advantage from their superior numbers. The Lacedaemonians, meaning the Spartans, fought remarkably well, proving that they were experts in battle who were fighting among men who were not.

especially whenever they would turn their backs and feign flight altogether, and the barbarians, seeing this, would pursue them. With much clatter and shouting, the Lacedaemonians would allow the barbarians to catch up with them and then suddenly turn around to face them, at which point they would slay countless numbers of them.

Of the Spartans themselves, however, only a few fell there. Finally, the Persians retreated, since despite all their efforts to attack by regiments or by any other means, they could not gain any ground in the pass. It is said that during these assaults, the king, who was watching, leapt up from his throne three times in fear for his army. Thus ended the contest that day, and on the next the barbarians did no better."

that's a feel for how herodotus portrays this and he he goes through all the details i mean eventually leonidas will be killed and there will be a fight or a scrum over his body to retrieve it and eventually you know the spartans will retreat up to a point where there's a wall and they will be down to fighting with their bare hands and their teeth herodotus says and it's this gripping account and it's hard to look at it from the persian side because

and see anything but the bad guys in the story if it's the cowboys and the indians they're the indians in the 1950s right they're the zulus i mean you know fill in the gap in these kind of stories there's always these defenders sitting there fighting doom dodds doing it for some greater cause and a whole bunch of ants that are swarming over their position in this story as herodotus tells it the persians are the ants

but the bottom line is no matter how heroic it was in the summer of 480 the answer in central greece and they're burning athens this is the real net result of losing the battle of thermopylae is that the persians break into the open country of central greece many of these cities had already gone over to the persians a bunch of other ones do too

Big cities, too. Important places like Thebes are on the Persian side now, and all these cities will now provide troops to his army to use for the rest of this campaign. It's starting to look like the war is over, isn't it? This is a mop-up effort, isn't it? The cities that don't cooperate with the Persians are destroyed. Plataea is destroyed. Plataea is the city that fought ten years before this time against this king of kings' father with the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon. Long memories on the Persian side. Boom. Gone.

thespia which had just lost a bunch of thespian hoplites with the spartans at thermopylae destroyed and athens burned all the homes the acropolis the few people who had not evacuated with the rest of the population were killed and we're told xerxes sends a message back to his capital in asia which he left three months previously remember over that bridge of boats essentially telling his people that when it comes to these athenians mission accomplished

Now, something happens here in this story that will totally change the complexion of everything. But it's hard to figure out exactly how it happens or which stories are true or what have you. All you can say with any sort of true accuracy is that the Persians will get involved in a naval battle with the combined navies of the Greeks who are fighting them.

They may have been tricked into this encounter. A bunch of historians think that it's the major mistake Xerxes makes in this whole campaign because he didn't even need to fight a naval battle. You could talk for hours about what will become the Battle of Salamis. And historians argue about whether or not it's one of the most important battles of all time. Others will say that this Battle of Plataea, which we're going to get to, is instead the most important. So it's a tomato-tomato thing amongst the historians here. But

The Battle of Salamis involves a character and how much this character actually corresponds to the historical figure named Themistocles is anyone's guess. But the character is fantastic. And he's, you know, after the Second World War, I read some histories that were suggesting that after the Second World War, this entire Greek Persian story is cast in sort of a Second World War analogy. And in that version of things, Themistocles is Churchill.

but what that doesn't capture is that there's such a wonderfully clever tricky roguish lovable does the right thing in the wrong i mean he's han solo rather than winston churchill if we're going to stick with our star wars analogy so xerxes is darth vader themistocles is han solo and he's trying to get in herodotus's story anyway the greeks to to pull together because this is one of the reasons you know the war is almost over because all these greeks are ready to go their own way look out for their own interests right

all the greeks below something called the isthmus of corinth which is another one of these natural choke points in the geography they're all trying to build a wall across that and defend themselves which is great if you live south of that like sparta and corinth and argos do not so good if you live north of it like athens does because the persians are already there so this is when there's a lot of

very wonderfully roguish bargaining going on where themistocles is using the athenian fleet as a bargaining chip basically saying half of your fleet is us if you don't do more to help us we're leaving and then where will you be at the mercy of the persian fleet

and there will be wonderful jousting going on you know my favorite comeback line to his is when the admiral from corinth points out that you don't even have any standing to be having this conversation this is for people about the fate of city states and you don't have one anymore meaning athens is gone it's a great line but traditionally in the herodotus version of this story our wonderful han solo lovable rogue who tricks you into doing the right thing supposedly tricks the greeks into fighting

the battle of salamis and if that's true think of how wild that is and then according to herodotus admits to it tells him afterwards that's right you're surrounded and i did it so guess what we're fighting ha ha ha if you go look at a map this is one of those battles go look at a satellite image where it's it's obvious what happens just by looking at the geography you don't have to figure out too much because there's a

an island off the mainland of Greece, and then there's a body of water, but quite small, between the island and the mainland. That's where the Greek fleet is. But there's an entrance to that strait of water on one side and an exit on the other. The Mysticles says, tells somebody eventually afterwards, I sent my slave over to King Xerxes to say that the Greeks are all getting ready to pack up and go home. If you attack now, they're dead meat.

so xerxes surrounded the greeks right blocked the channel that they would use for their retreat and then came at them frontally and themistocles in herodotus takes credit for this you didn't want to fight but now we're surrounded and you're going to get killed so you might as well resist anyway and we're going to win and they did that's a pretty great story and they were writing popular entertainment about it less than 10 years afterwards

When Herodotus was still a preteen, earlier Greek filmmakers or screenwriters were winning awards for their portrayals of the Persians at places like the Battle of Salamis. Aeschylus, who's one of the all-time greats, was a veteran of the Battle of Marathon and may have been a veteran of the Battle of Salamis II, therefore maybe an eyewitness, certainly a

performing his plays for an audience of veterans and eyewitnesses many times to athenians who in 472 and right around there when aeschylus was doing this were still at war with the great king so it's very interesting the way this whole thing is portrayed but you know aeschylus has this story by the way of themistocles

you know sending a false message to the king of the persians saying that the greeks are ready to leave too so when herodotus is a preteen that story is already being performed on stage so who knows interesting character interesting thing for history to turn on winston churchill slips a message to hitler they're all going to be gone you can invade britain tomorrow no one will be home if you look at that satellite map of the battlefield if you will where this battle occurred

and you think of hundreds and hundreds of ships on each side in that little teeny area, you don't have to be a genius to imagine what happens. And playwrights like Aeschylus mention it, but so does everyone else. It's a place where it's very easy for the ships to all sort of become fouled and disorganized together.

The Persians come in apparently expecting a bunch of disorganized and ready to leave Greeks, and instead the Greeks are formed up, which is interesting if you think about some of these complicated maneuvers these ancient fleets are supposed to have performed. It must have taken hours and hours of preparation to make sure everyone was lined up just the way you wanted. This is a fascinating period of naval history. Not necessarily my strong suit, by the way, but the big ships on both sides were called triremes.

about 40 yards or 40 meters long, 170 to 200 rowers on board. And whereas this thing had a sail for normal travel or as an oar-aided method for normal travel, apparently in warfare they didn't use it. So this is a human-powered machine. And because of the, we're told, 400, 300, 500-pound bronze beak on

at the prow of the ship a ram that it's like a giant human powered missile aimed at other ships and so they would ram each other in this era they would shear they would they would go by really closely and shear the oars off one side which you can only imagine what that must have done to the poor oars people

And a lot of times they would try to turn it into a seaborne version of a land battle and sort of get these ships all together and use the marines that were on board, essentially your soldiers, to fight a land battle on board these wooden ships.

that's themistocles's plan and we're told see that the persian fleet is superior not just in numbers but in oarsmen they have better rowers they have guys with a lot more experience because they took over established fleets remember they sort of they have sort of a subcontractor or a wholly owned subsidiary sort of approach to some of these empires like you know these cities that are phoenician and have such great seafaring traditions the phoenicians may have been the greatest seafaring peoples of all time but

so when the persians get control of these areas they essentially say okay you're working for us now you just keep running that great fleet we like everything about it but we're going to tell it where to go and what to do the greeks who've just established their fleet recently still getting up to speed in terms of okay this is the proper way you you do this maneuver at sea i mean not just that developing the muscles you kind of forget that element of it how long could these people you know when you're fighting a battle continue to pull the oars before they're just exhausted

And what if one side's better at that than the other? Why did you win? They're in better shape. They've been pulling oars for 20 years. They've got muscles that these Athenians haven't even developed yet. Who knows? Besides Phoenicians, the Persians are using Egyptian fleets. They're using Ionian Greek fleets. It's a bad situation when you're outnumbered and outskilled.

but apparently themistocles and his council of strategists have have recognized that if you could pull this giant persian fleet into that little narrow area you could turn it into a land battle and they were confident that a land battle would go better for them and it did as you might imagine from such a confined space where you have hundreds and hundreds of ships they got very disorganized very quickly and that's sort of the mental image you have in his play persians or the persians

Aeschylus has a messenger speaking by the way to that wonderful Persian queen who's directly related or connected to the first five Persian kings Atassa daughter of Cyrus the great she's sort of the main character this messenger that tells her what happens at Salamis is another one and then I love when they go and they conjure up the ghost of Darius and

Sort of like Obi-Wan Kenobi or Marlon Brando, Superman's dad, some hologram who comes up to say, what's going on now? Oh, what did my son do? Oh, he's an idiot. It's going to be bad. There's a prophet. I mean, it's wonderful. But this Persian messenger gives an account of the Battle of Salamis as seen from the Persian point of view.

of course with words put into his mouth by a Greek playwright, a Greek playwright who may also have fought in that battle, therefore you're kind of getting an eyewitness account in a weird sort of dramatic way, and this would certainly have been performed for people who had fought in that battle, so can't fudge too much without the audience catching on.

nonetheless this persian character describes you know the onset of the greek fleet showing up nicely ordered and organized the trumpets blaring he says that on the persian side they can hear this really loud voice but what he really means is he can hear the war cry of all the greeks you know yelling in unison and then he describes an apocalyptic scene and when you think of the hundreds and hundreds of ships on both sides in these narrow waters you

It's not hard to imagine a relatively apocalyptic scene. What color is the ocean at this point, right? The Persian messenger, maybe using adjectives from the mind of a man who actually saw the Battle of Salamis, says, quote,

Then the trumpet shriek blazed, threw everything over there a signal. Instantly their oars struck salt. We heard the rhythmic rattle slap. It seemed no time till they all stood in sight. We saw them sharp. First the right wing, close drawn, strictly ordered, let out. And next we saw the whole fleet bearing down. We heard a huge voice.

"'Sons of Greece, go! Free fatherland! Free children! Wives! Shrines of our fathers' gods! Tombs where our forefathers lie! Fight for all we have! Now!' Then on our side shouts in Persian rose to a crest. "'We didn't hold back!'

That instant, ship rammed bronze-clad beak on ship. It was a Greek ship started the attack, shearing off a whole Phoenician stern. Each captain steered his craft straight on one other. At first the wave of Persia's fleet rolled firm, but next, as our ships jammed into the narrows and no one could help any other and our own bronze teeth bit into our own strakes, whole ore banks shattered.

Then the Greek ships, seizing their chance, swept in, circling, and struck and overturned our hulls, and salt water vanished before our eyes. Shipwrecks filled it, and drifting corpses. Shores and reefs filled up with our dead, and every able ship under Persia's command broke order, scrambling to escape.

We might have been tuna or netted fish, for they kept on spearing and gutting us with splintered oars and bits of wreckage, while moaning and screams drowned out the sea noise till the night's black face closed it all in. Losses by thousands, even if I told the catalogue for ten full days I could not complete it for you. But this is sure. Never before in one day have so many thousands died."

Nobody knows how many people died at the Battle of Salamis. Nobody even makes a halfway serious guess about it, in fact. Nobody knows how many ships fought there. Nobody knows how many ships were lost. All you can figure is somehow the Persians probably were defeated because you could see what happened afterwards. When I was a kid growing up studying this stuff, it was always portrayed as this shattering defeat. Unexpected, shattering defeat of the Persian Navy that completely changed the complexion of the war.

more modern day historians of course are questioning this isn't that the sub theme of this whole story led by guys like george cockwell and jf lazenby i mean they'll question whether or not salamis was anywhere near as big of a defeat as it's portrayed i do love the story we won't get into it but once again there's another herodotus story that themistocles tries to send the great king another message to cleverly get him to do something else he shouldn't do i mean this han solo thing just

is continual and one of the historians i was reading says you know you can't decide whether the guy is wily sort of like clever and wily or is he treasonous or some combination of the two and apparently it makes it sound like the greeks couldn't always decide the traditional portrayal of xerxes has him sort of running back to modern day turkey hoping to get back there before the greeks destroy the bridge of boats and trap him in europe

whether or not that's true again anyone's guess lots of argument there are some halfway decent accounts of why maybe this whole thing makes total sense and it has to do with a change in persian policy the policy is going to be force a land battle remember up until this point the greeks really hadn't won a land battle against these guys in a straight up fair fight i mean the battle of marathon had been one of these things where maybe the greeks attacked while the persians were getting back on their ships to leave not very representative

all of the various clint eastwoods had been molan lobbied at thermopylae so maybe a straight-on fight with the persian army would settle this thing once and for all one of the arguments herodotus has the persians making to the king is listen we didn't get defeated at the battle of salamis those phoenicians ionian greeks and egyptians did the persians are still undefeated in the field against these greeks in a straight-up fight so let's have a straight-up fight

When Xerxes moves off to what's now modern-day Turkey and Asia Minor, he will leave an army behind him. You know, if he's the lord of the ants with all these millions of insects that just swamp over, you know, the small number of Greeks, well, then our Silk Slipper, Darth Vader, lord of the ants, left some ants behind to finish eating Greece.

under the general mardonius who was a relative of xerxes remember that this is kind of an incestuous maybe even literally sort of a persian elite that's all married with each other and related to each other and in this case the guy is mardonius who also has a history because 10 years before mardonius was one of the generals who invaded greece the first time with xerxes his dad right and he'll give mardonius an indeterminate number of ants remember all the numbers from the ancient sources are wildly inflated

so if there's millions and millions of persians and he divides this you have merely hundreds and hundreds of thousands now but really most historians seem to be pretty comfortable with anything in the 40 to 60 000 range although this varies

but Herodotus says that Mardonius was basically allowed to pick the cream of the army so you know away go all the bright feathers and exotic colors and stone-tipped arrows and antelope horn things and you know you keep the immortals and the guard cavalry and the troops who are you know Persian related and oh yes let's not forget the Scythian Central Asian horse archer types and with you know 50,000 or so of those guys you should be able to take the Greeks out Mardonius is going to pursue a kind of a waiting strategy and

you know, to get the Greeks to fight. Going to find a nice piece of ground that's just perfect for the way the Persians fight and wait for the Greeks to come to them. And if they don't, he's going to damage things until they do. Most notably, Athens. We're told that after the Battle of Salamis, eventually the Athenians who had been evacuated from Athens to save their lives, returned to their home city, start rebuilding things again.

Well, when the campaigning season resumes after the winter, and we're in 479 BCE now, the Persians from the north of Greece simply swoop down, take Athens again.

basically the attitude is we're just going to keep destroying things that are important to you until you'll come out and fight i remember a line and i'm going to butcher it now but somebody once said you know the only way to stop 50 or 60 000 people working in concert anywhere is with an equally powerful force and the persians are controlling the whole part of greece where thebes is and everything north of it thebes being good cavalry country by the way and traditionally as usual the greek states are fighting amongst themselves

And once again, according to Herodotus, it involves whether or not the southern Greeks want to go north of that wall that they've built at the choke point, at the Isthmus of Corinth, which looks like a pretty good defensive position. The problem is some of the major Greek states are north of it, where the Persians are. The Greeks who are south of that wall, once again having this debate about do we really want to go north of the wall? The wall is such a great defensive thing. We're going to stay south of the wall. And the Athenians who are north of the wall on the Persian side of things are

having to do crazy bargaining and threatening and using the fleet as a bargaining chip and once again themistically he's playing the hand solo role at one point you know pulling the big takeaway and maybe even saying we will go and side with the persians if you don't come up here and fight and we'll take the fleet and let them use our fleet against you

if herodotus is to be believed themistocles and the athenians several times or even offered that standard persian deal it'll be good for you it'll be good for us just join the empire right the the deal according to themistocles because he's telling the other greeks look at what the persians are offering us is you can have your city i think he said you can have the government of your choice which is the typical persian offer as long as you're loyal to the king and pay your taxes they don't care if you have a democracy or monarchy or whatever as long as you're quiet

And Themistocles, through Herodotus, has them saying also, and why don't you choose one of the territories around you? Which one would you like the best? And we'll throw that in, too. Great for everyone, right? We all gain. So even at this time, through the biased sources, you're hearing the Persians trying to make a deal. Must we really fight about this? I don't care how much harm you've given us. We'll give you your city and more land than you ever had. I mean, it's the same deal they're supposed to have offered the Spartans at Thermopylae.

They may not all be true all the time, but you don't get this many mentions of it in history unless it kind of was the policy. The Assyrians, the previous major empire coming from that part of the world, would probably not have offered you a deal of this kind at any time. Certainly not this late in the game with this many casualties already suffered and this many dead people, you know, to have to atone for.

And in this case, eventually Themistocles, and maybe it's part of his genius by hook or by crook, has by 479 BCE an army of combined Greek hoplites from a number of different city-states heading on up toward the area where Thebes is to have it out with the spider who's sitting up in the web up there just waiting for him. There will be Spartan hoplites there, there will be Athenian hoplites there, and the eventual encounter will happen there.

In a kind of a symbolic place, when you think about it, it will happen at Plataea. Plataea was the city, the little teeny city that helped the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon kick the Persians out the first time. Plataea was the little city that when the Persians arrived in this latest encounter, didn't submit to them, so was destroyed. So this is where the battle is going to happen. And the parameters for this encounter are,

have been in large part determined by the needs and the capabilities of the persian cavalry i mean we're in the strategic place we are because this is the good cavalry country in greece that's where the persians want to fight but the actual battlefield will be chosen by where the greeks decide to stand and they choose a spot where they're you know better protected from that cavalry they appear from the mountains through the mountain passes marching up from the south and

and when they run into the persians they do so from a position high atop these hills and the persians are camped on the plain below which stretches out in the distance it's wonderful cavalry country they are behind a river they have a camp built so they've got a pretty good defensive position they'd love to have the greeks advance on them the greeks have picked out a pretty strong defensive position of their own up in the hills and they'd like the persians to come up to them

thus begins the pre-battle jockeying for position and advantage and there's a lot of it and it goes on for days and you know once again it's a good time to remind you that you're getting the dan carlin version of this story because this is so argued about amongst historians who are recreating as best they can you know where things happened and so much has changed since and

you know i'm just going to stake out sort of a broad view of this for clarity reasons and understand that there's a ton of disagreement about everything basically though what happens is the greeks try to stay in the high ground and lure the persians up there and the persians try to skirmish with the greeks and get them to either break apart go home or come down to fight them and all through the narrative we have herodotus

the ancient screenwriter, the colorizer. And this is his crowning glory moment. He writes his whole history to talk about, you know, these events. And this is the climactic battle. It's also my favorite battle in the entire history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.

Because in color, in Herodotan living color, 2,500 years dead, but you know what I mean, we have really the only colorized story of the Persian army at its height fighting. I love this army. After this period, it will change and not be the same. And before this period, you really don't have any, you know, feel for how it operated. In this battle, you get to see this army move and fight bravely.

There's a lot of disagreement, too, about how the Greeks fought in this battle. In the last discussion we had on this, I mentioned, you know, some of the historians like Hans Van Wies who suggest that the idea that we've always had about how the Greeks fought during this period is misplaced and that they don't fight that way till after this period. And the one we're into now is sort of like, you know, while they're in transition from an old style that, you know, they would have recognized in Homer's Iliad, you

to the style that will come to be known in the future after this period the rigid phalanx style where everybody stays in their ranks under penalty and you know you move as a body because there's so many stories here if they're more than stories where people will spring forward from the ranks and do stuff or move backwards fluidly back toward their own lines which is much more like the fighting from the heroic greek era of homer's time

it would sure explain a lot if van weiss is right about this because herodotus describes this all the time and he begins to lay out you know what will become his version of like a saving private ryan type battle scene and it's worth pointing out that this is like the first battle scene stuff that we have that will set the stage for all the the movies and plays and books and everything afterwards

He starts by pointing out that the Greeks and the Persians are trying to, you know, maneuver each other out of position. And he talks about the skirmishing that's going on. At one point, the Persian commander Mardonius sends cavalry to go up into the hills and try to mess with the Greeks. You don't know what for. And the historians all disagree. A lot of things, though. Sometimes a general does something just to see what will happen. Right. How will they respond if I go up there and shoot them?

maybe they'll start dying in large numbers which would be good or maybe their morale will suffer which would also be good or maybe they'll just leave which would be good too they can't catch my cavalry see not only does the persian cavalry basically dominate this field because they're the best cavalry in asia which is cavalry country but the greeks have no cavalry at all the only cavalry in greece really worth its salt are in places like thebes and thessaly up in the north

And they're on the Persian side. So there are Greek cavalrymen in this battle. They're just fighting on the Persian side. At one point, Herodotus starts the narrative and the Greek line, which has been put together, sometimes, you know, sounding like a bunch of petulant four-year-olds arguing about who gets to stand on this part of the line. And no, we get to stand on this part of the line. And it's crazy how...

You know, we have to remember, and historians like Lazenby never tire of reminding us that accepting the Spartans, these Greeks are militia troops. They're farmers for the most part. They fight sometimes, and a lot of these guys would have had battle experience, but when they're not fighting, they're not fighting. They're back on the farm. They're living their lives. They are militia.

what's more their militia from their own city-states and they consider themselves essentially to be of that city-state as opposed to this larger concept of a greek idea and so when the spartans start giving them orders they're likely to be a lot of grumbling and at one point the group of greeks they're called megarians who end up on the flank in this greek formation up in the hills is being hammered by the persian cavalry that is shooting them full of arrows and they don't want to be hammered anymore and

and they send a message to the high command essentially saying if you don't remove us we're leaving this is the way herodotus describes you know how really the the fighting begins to shape up here and he talks about the greeks he mentions them as helenes and he talks about how the persian commander mardonius can't get these greeks out of the hills and he writes quote

"'Since the Hellenes refused to come down onto the plain, "'Mardonius sent against them his entire corps of cavalry, "'under the command of Mastisios, whom the Hellenes call Macistios, "'and who was very prominent among the Persians. "'He rode a Nicaean horse with a golden bit, "'and adorned by many other kinds of beautiful ornaments. "'The horsemen rode out against the Hellenes and charged them by regiment, "'one after another, doing significant harm to them "'and insulting them as they did by calling them women.'

end quote i remember peter green had a footnote where he said one wonders if they had asked a greek in their own army what the word for woman was so that the enemy could understand the taunt so then herodotus says you know that the megarians are the ones getting hammered and by the way as we said earlier the way that these persian cavalry seem to have fought is a lot like huns and mongols and scythians and all these people that you know attack you in little teeny packets of horse archers

hoping to break your formation up if you attack them to try to get back at them they just sort of drift away from you and your formation breaks up and then they can turn on you and cut you apart piecemeal if you don't you just have to sort of sit there and take the arrows until you lose so many people you're in trouble or until your morale breaks and you think no more of this maybe a combination of the two affected the megarians who were being skirmished by this

persian general of the cavalry masticios and herodotus writes quote now just by chance the megarians happened to be deployed in the most vulnerable position of the entire battlefield and it was they who received the brunt of the cavalry's assaults because they were so hard pressed by these attacks the megarians sent a herald to the generals of the hellenes who conveyed this message to them quote he's

He's quoting the message now. The Megarians have this to tell you. We who are your allies cannot continue to confront the cavalry of the Persians alone in this position that we have occupied from the beginning. So far we are resisting by tenacity and valor, though we are hard pressed. But now you should know that we shall abandon this post if you do not send others to replace us there. End quote.

So you can already see that, yes, yes, yes, the Spartan is the commander in chief, but all of these city state units are basically keeping their own freedom to make choices to themselves. We're not going to stand here and get killed for all of you. We've taken enough casualties. It's somebody else's turn now, Mr. Spartan.

So what Herodotus says now, we have to be careful because historians for a long time now have been wondering if there's some favoritism for the Athenians in the upcoming parts of this story, because all of a sudden Herodotus starts to favor the Athenians quite a bit. He even makes the Clint Eastwood Spartans look a little wimpy next to them at one point saying, well, maybe you guys should fight the Persians. I mean, you've fought them before 10 years ago. We don't even know them.

we can fight the thebans who are fighting with the uh persians we've beaten them many times i mean so you have to be careful it's apparently the megarians ask for help and the only people that say yeah we'll go over there and help them are some athenians who also have the only archers in the whole greek army so the athenians some of them and these archers go over to the flank where the megarians are hard pressed and now you get a feel for how chaotic it is there

You know, Herodotus is colorizing is really good. He's able to give you a sense now of the danger and the panic and the dust and the chaos. Go look at a video, a modern video of a riot somewhere that gets really out of hand. Look at the chaotic element of it where the point of contact between the two sides is.

So Herodotus says these Athenians with their archers decide to go help the Megarians on the flank, and he says, quote, These were the men who undertook this task, and they stationed themselves at Erythrae in front of the other Hellenes who were there, taking along their archers for support. The battle they fought there went on for some time, until it ended in the following way. As the cavalry was attacking by regiments, the horse of Mestesios—remember, he's the Persian general of the cavalry—

which stood out in front of the rest, was pierced in its ribs by an arrow, and in pain the horse reared up on its hind legs and threw Mestesios to the ground. As soon as he fell, the Athenians attacked him. They took his horse and killed Mestesios as he was struggling to defend himself, but at first they were unable to kill him because of the way he was armed.

End quote. You get a real feeling there...

of this guy struggling for his life i mean he comes a little too close to the greek lines you know his source throws him when he gets hit by an arrow you fall down in this relatively heavy armor that might have hurt him when he hit the ground and a bunch of athenians sprint towards you as you try to ward them all off and they're jabbing your chest as hard as they can but they can't see the fish scale style armor because you've got it under your tunic and then eventually someone realizes it and stabs you through the eye

We're told that the unit that he was commanding didn't realize that they'd lost him right away. Herodotus says, quote, The rest of the cavalry was at first ignorant of all this, because as they had turned around and were riding away in retreat, no one had seen how he fell from his horse and subsequently died fighting. But they immediately missed him after they stopped, for no one was there to command them. Once they realized what had happened, they cried out and rallied one another and then charged back to retrieve the corpse. End quote.

So apparently what happened is this Persian cavalry that was attacking, you know, in little dribs and drabs, as soon as they realized they'd lost their general, were told form into a solid unit and charge the flank to go get the body back. And then a giant conflict erupts over the body, which is crazy. But you see this a lot in ancient warfare. I mean, no one likes to lose a body of anybody, obviously.

But in this period, first of all, when you lose these officers, it's traumatic sometimes. I mean, it's never good. But in ancient warfare, sometimes the best plan you could have is kill the officer or kill the king. Whole armies have been known to disintegrate if you kill the leader.

in this case if you buy what herodotus is saying he really gives the impression that these units were kind of left blind unable to know what to do without their commander so go get the body seems to be the default position how many people are you willing to lose to recover a cadaver apparently a lot the greeks and the persians fight quite a while over this body the greeks end up with the body and they go and put it on display for morale purposes of course herodotus writes quote

The Hellenes gained much courage from the fact that they had stood up to the attack of the cavalry and had repelled it. The first thing they did was to place the corpse on a wagon and have it drawn past the army's various units in their assigned positions. They displayed it in this way because the body of Mesticios was worth seeing for its size and its beauty, and the men left their ranks in order to see it. End quote. Again, you get a real feel for the ancient...

you know way of doing things right well then we're told that after this happens the greeks decide to advance a little closer into the persians come down you know from the real hills into the foothills and see if maybe something else doesn't begin to happen everybody's trying to you know see if you can get the other guy to attack in a position of weakness

This, again, though, is where the Persian cavalry comes in. It begins to go around the Greek flanks. It begins to go after the water supplies in the rear. It begins to go behind them and start to attack some of the supply columns that are coming through the mountain passes behind the Greek position. Both sides are probably pressed.

you know by a lot of needs i mean depending on which historians you believe the persians may only have a few days worth of food here before they have to retreat but we don't know they also have friendly greek cities right behind them the greeks who should have tons of food are now having it intercepted by persian cavalry in their rear so who knows you know what the actual needs to attack were

But after the Greeks advanced farther down toward the foothills, we're told that they get into some trouble and need to change their position, sort of retreat to a more defensible place where the water supply was better defended or whatnot. And this is where things get wiggy, because how the heck does infantry retreat with invisible range of the enemy?

well the greeks decide to do it by night which makes some sense if you think about it and they also decide to do it apparently in stages you don't want to give it away right to the persians that were moving so the greeks begin withdrawing backward to a more defensible position this is how the story is always portrayed but by morning time when light comes up and you can see what's going on on the hills above you the persians see that some of the greeks have gone away some of the greeks are in the process of still leaving and some of them are still there

but the entire battle line is disrupted. Now, if you're looking at this from the Persian point of view, and you've been in this face-off with the Greeks for almost two weeks in the hot July sun, and you've been doing damage to each other through skirmishing and cutting off detachments and all kinds of other things, and you're receiving reports of dissension in the ranks and quarreling amongst the Greeks...

Herodotus emphasizes a lot of this even the Spartans on the day of the you know change in location or arguing should we stay or should we go and different people on different sides I mean the Greeks look like they're a mess and some historians think that's what the Persians were expecting that eventually the pressure of all this would dissolve a rather ad hoc and not altogether solid coalition of Greek states some of whom disliked others and

What this means on the battlefield, though, is nearly two weeks of tactical constipation are over in the space of a morning, and everything starts moving again. The Persian commander Mardonius is said to have ordered his Persian troops, including his own guard cavalry, maybe a thousand strong, across the river at double speed to catch these fleeing Greeks.

herodotus then says that all of the subject peoples as soon as they see the general and the persian troops you know on the double moving forward across the river they put up their standards and follow along herodotus is shouting jostling maintaining no sort of formation or discipline at all and why they're running away we're chasing

it's a little like the animal kingdom feel when you have two you know predators facing off at one another and swiping the air and growling and everything if one of them turns around and moves in the opposite direction there's almost this primeval need to chase on the part of the other animal that's what this feels like a little bit although what would the proper response be in a cold sober situation if you saw the enemy moving off broken in front of you pursue right that's what the persians do

Now, I can't help once again looking at this like Herodotus' movie, and it's sort of a buddy film here, and he's got three groups of Greeks. The Greeks have split into three separate columns and are moving in three separate directions. One of the Greek groups, the one in the middle, is sort of made up of all of the, you know, minor city-states, you might say. These are the ones that Herodotus is not focusing much on the story. They're the extras, if you will, the bit players.

But the other two columns that are retreating in different directions or repositioning themselves, if you want to put it that way, are the two stars in this Herodotus buddy picture, if you will. You know, one in my mind is a little Michael Canish. I'm sorry, a lot of analogies and metaphors today. I can't help it, though. But but if Athens is the guy with the sense of humor and the fun guy and the clever guy and he speaks real well and little Michael Canish at a younger age.

And the Spartans are Clint Eastwood, as we've said, and the two of them together, the slick sly, you know, all the girls love him, clever Michael Caine mixed with Clint Eastwood who gets him out of trouble with the, you know, the magnum at the last minute. Run silent, run deep. And it's an interesting sort of buddy film. And as we said, Herodotus may be a little bit biased towards the Athenians at this point.

But he says that when the Spartans realize that they're the principal target of the Persian pursuit, that the king wants them. They send a message to the Athenians basically saying, listen, if the whole Persian army were after you, we'd come and help you or something like that. We know you'll come and help us. You're the great defenders of Greece. And Herodotus says the Athenians says, yes, let's go save the Spartans. And they're on their way, but they're intercepted by other Greeks.

Thebans, people who are fighting for the great king. Thebes is probably the great Greek state that sided with the great king. Argos is another and the leaders of Thessaly also. But the Theban hoplites are great. If you're making a top three list of great hoplites in Greek history, there's only three city states that are on it and they switch places all the time.

Sparta, Athens, and Thebes. And sometimes Thebes is number one. And the Athenians get waylaid before they can come to the aid of the Spartans who are facing the Persians themselves when the Theban phalanx smashes into them. They will conduct their own private battle now. And that's what this battle of Plataea turns into. Separate battles.

The main one, though, the one that gets the lion's share of the screen time is when you have the, you know, climactic battle between the Spartans and the Persian part of a Persian army, the Corps, including the General Mardonius there on his horse fighting in the combat. For a military history nut like yours, truly, it's awesome.

And when you read about how it works, once again, I mean, let me just show you one of the things that blow my mind. And you can take whichever side you think is more likely in terms of your interpretation. And it doesn't matter. It's still amazingly cool, whichever side you pick.

When the Spartans form up, you know, realize there's going to be a fight here and they're ready for this combat. They begin to hold religious sacrifices somewhere near the battle line. Right. We're already going into who the hell knows how these troops formed up in a sense of was there an open space in the middle where the priest could come with the sacrificial animal and do the deed.

Or did that happen behind the battle line? And was it relatively safe, you know, in places on the battle line? Anyway, we're told that throughout this entire almost two weeks, both sides are sacrificing and looking at the entrails of animals and basically doing their magic eight ball tests all the time. Is this a good day to cross the river and attack? Sources say no. Herodotus says the reason that both sides sat there for so long is that both sides were both getting attacked.

Omens that said, listen, the side that will win this battle is the one that stays on the defensive. Doesn't advance first, right?

So we're told that the Spartans are back here, not just consulting the magic eight ball for big decisions, right? When you go to the Oracle of Delphi and you say, should we attack the people of Argos? That's a big strategic decision. But the minor tactical ones too, quickly kill that goat and see if we can charge the Persians that are a hundred yards in front of us right now. What? Still can't charge them? Okay, we'll sit here. This is what Herodotus says happens.

It's fascinating to speculate whether these leaders who are engaging in maybe what you could call a prophecy hunt here by slaughtering animals and asking for an interpretation, please. What do the signs say? I mean, do they buy into that themselves? Or is this just a wonderfully clever manipulation of things like religious beliefs?

you know, to help them do something that's very terrestrial in nature. And historians have disagreed about this forever. I mean, you go back a hundred years and they're very logical, very, you know, you almost expect a monocle in his eye. Hans Delbruck says, of course they knew what they were doing, these leaders. They were manipulating the rubes. But there's a lot of other modern day historians, for example, that say, look at all the evidence here.

other major things that these people refuse to do if the signs seem to be against it so it might be a little bit you know letting our modern lenses look at this and and color the way we see things maybe these really pious Greeks and the Spartans are often considered to be very pious maybe they really weren't using this as a tool to achieve aims maybe they were really waiting until the entrails said it was okay and

We're told that the Persians come running up, you know, and you have to think thousands and thousands and thousands of these guys running up the front ranks carrying wicker shields. This is the modern interpretation of what Herodotus says, by the way, I should add that the front rank had these almost man high sized, but not very heavy because they're made of wicker shields that they would the front ranks would would.

form a line and when you put these things on the ground they almost formed like a wall all the way up and down the line and behind them thousands and thousands of archers were running up and getting into like close formation these weren't archers that ran and you know and pecked and ran around and and acted like skirmishers these were guys who got into basically kind of close order and lined up behind these shields and started fighting

reigning there's no other way to put it arrows down on the greeks remember there's two things that this persian army really does well the cavalry which we've talked about at length and the archery the volume of persian archery is as high as any army in history i mean they basically if you if you have them in your head images of what the battle of ashen core looked like with the english long bows raining arrows down on the french this is that and more

And we're told that the Greeks, meaning the Spartans, and they're with some other Greeks that are working with them and are kind of friendly with them called the Tegeans. And we're told that the Spartans and the Tegeans are just standing there taking this arrow fire, which is we had talked about earlier. If you do the math, we are potentially talking about, you know, high hundreds of thousands, maybe into the millions of arrows in a very short period of time.

What does it take to get people to stand under that kind of arrow fire, leaving maybe, what would you say, a hundred yard? Who knows? No man's land in between. When you're armed with the kind of weapons that are really only useful if you get right up next to somebody. Takes a lot of discipline, doesn't it? The Spartans are sitting here waiting for the entrals to read right. We're told that they're...

friends these tigeans in a formation one would guess right next to them can't wait any longer i'm not going to put up with the casualties stoically any longer and

When we started this story, we talked about the Spartans as Clint Eastwood, but Clint Eastwood playing Batman. Well, these Tijians play the role of Robin in this story. They can't wait. They lose their temper, it's sort of portrayed that, and they charge toward this line of Persians. The guy is holding the shields up and rank after rank of archer behind them, pouring arrow fire into them, and they charge down there. They're going to get slaughtered, aren't they? Robin's going to die.

But all of a sudden, Herodotus, in a moment of drama, has the Spartan leader, Pausanias, raising his hands to the heaven, calling on a local deity or a close-by shrine or something like that. Please give us the good signs. Boom, they kill the goat. Signs are great. Go! And the Spartans charge down at the Persian line, following the Jejeans. Here's the way the screenwriter, in his own words from the De Selengor translation, puts it. Quote,

Once more, as they were about to engage with Mardonius and his men, they, meaning the Spartans, performed the ritual of sacrifice. The omens were not favorable, and meanwhile many of their men were killed, and many more wounded, for the Persians had made a barricade of their wicker shields, and from the protection of it were shooting arrows in such numbers that the Spartan troops were in serious distress. This...

Added to the unfavorable results of the sacrifice, at last caused Pausanias to turn his eyes to the temple of Hera and to call upon the goddess for her aid, praying her not to allow the Greeks to be robbed of their hope of victory. Then, while the words were still upon his lips, the sacrificial victims promised success. At this, the Spartans too, at last, moved forward against the enemy, who stopped shooting their arrows and prepared to meet them face to face."

now what this meant is that the persians are putting aside the weapon that they're best at and pulling out hand-to-hand weapons where they're at a disadvantage not just that it seems and this becomes a recurring theme that you will hear about forever afterwards it seems that the missile weapons of the persians were singularly ineffective against the greek hoplites that archery fire and

doesn't seem to do very well against close order troops with big shields who are armored and it's a bit of a mystery because herodotus keeps saying that they're suffering but when he gives the casualty numbers at the end of the battle the greeks have suffered very few casualties

historians like richard gabriel you know have been involved in test studies where they try to figure out you know they do mathematical calculations and test studies and penetration surveys and all kinds of things to try to figure out you know how effective things like archery fire would have been and he says against greek hoplites in close formation not very effective because the arrows won't penetrate the armor or the shield you know for the most part they're looking for little teeny gaps and there aren't very many of those

The Greek playwrights and the contemporaries during this period will continually refer to the victory of the spear over the bow. But they easily could have talked about, you know, the advantage of the armor too. And they did. Herodotus mentions that. And think about, you know, something as subtle, you know, because there are no weapons involved, as having an NFL game and mandating that one team can't wear helmets or shoulder pads in this game.

What do you think it's going to look like at the end of the game if one team gets to have helmets and shoulder pads and the other doesn't? How many people die? Are there deaths in this game? You begin to see the difference, you know, in advantage. And from a distance, when the Persians are shooting at you, which is their style, no big deal. Once the Spartans close that...

That no man's land between them. Very big deal indeed. And this is the sort of moment and I've said this, I think, since I began talking about history. This is one of those moments that just fascinates me where I stand there and I try to figure out.

you're a persian you're in this line you've been shooting at these people for a long time and now they run at you in a giant block of men let's just play with a nice round number and say ten thousand but it seems to have been more than that and peter green says the spartan line was three quarters of a mile long so a line of men maybe eight ranks deep with ten foot or so spears you know seven to twelve foot spears

charges at you and they're basically shoulder to shoulder and you stand there by the time of like the napoleonic wars and the u.s civil war and stuff almost nobody will stand there during a bayonet attack i mean it's one of the big big you know hidden things about the period and they the real historians will say nowadays that the evidence seems to show that no one stood around for a bayonet attack nobody nobody would face cold steel yeah but in this period facing cold steel is what it's all about

And even then, a lot of people didn't. There are a lot of stories about whole, you know, almost whole armies running away sometimes before contact. Think about what's involved, too, and think about, you know, what you have to have happen to make it all work. Just because you're brave and just because your friends are brave standing around you, what happens if the 10,000 Spartans, you know, with their 10-foot spears like a giant pin cushion start charging at you?

and half the people around you run away. What's the other half do? It's why the Greeks thought that the god of fear, Phobos, ruled the battlefield. We said that before. Because panic could take over at any time, like a herd creature. As the Spartans charge you, how do you stand there and accept the charge? Especially if you're not at least armed similarly. You're going to pull out your little short sword. You're not going to have any armor if you're the standard Persian infantry behind the front line. Not going to have any helmet.

Maybe a quilted jerk, and if you're lucky, you're going to get steamrolled. The front rank of these formations, as we talked about earlier, the current line of thinking, is that this is a block of men, maybe ten ranks deep. But it's the first rank that actually is kind of equipped in a way that might allow them to give a good account of themselves in hand-to-hand combat. Although those big shields they're carrying are wicker.

shows you the kind of warfare the persians usually engage in they're hoping to keep their formation safe from missile fire but the greeks are coming at you with a big old heavy spearhead you know with a impetus that a charge provides behind it although the spartans sometimes advance nice and cool into combat so who knows

And once that front rank is dead, the Spartans have broken into a formation that is not prepared for this kind of fighting at all. It's one NFL team with helmets and pads and, oh yeah, big old spears facing another NFL team with no helmets, no pads, and short swords. Nevertheless, if you read between the lines, and if you're trying to look at this from the Persian perspective, you have to. Herodotus suggests that these Persians, as he said, were not inferior in courage. They were not inferior in...

in valor and let's remember they're fighting not just greeks they're fighting spartans and they're not just fighting you know as we said some spartans they're fighting sparta this is the military strength of the city state of sparta and these persians are not inferior herodotus says in valor but he says that they lack armor he basically says they're not equipped for this kind of fighting but you get a sense of the desperation the other greek states are petrified of spartans

And now the Persians are finding out why.

when the spartan formation smashes into the persians remember these spears which are only about two inches wide so if they're 10 feet long and two inches wide you can see how likely they are to break and all the greek sources talk about breaking spears all the time even if you go into a nice soft human body with your spear trying to get it out of that body is likely to break the spear so the spears are gone very quickly but here's how herodotus describes the moment of impact from the decelincore translation quote

first there was a struggle at the barricade of shields then the barricade down there was a bitter and protracted fight hand to hand close by the temple of demeter for the persians would lay hold of the spartan spears and break them in courage and strength they were as good as their adversaries

but they were deficient in armor, untrained, and greatly inferior in skill. Sometimes singly, sometimes in groups of ten men, perhaps fewer, perhaps more, they fell upon the Spartan line and were cut down. They pressed hardest, he writes, at the point where Mardonius, the general, fought in person, riding his white charger and surrounded by his thousand Persian troops, the flower of the army.

While Mardonius was alive, they continued to resist and to defend themselves and struck down many of the Lacedaemonians. But after his death and the destruction of his personal guard, the finest of the Persian troops, the remainder yielded to the Lacedaemonians and took to flight. The chief cause of their discomfiture was their lack of armor, fighting without it against heavily armed infantry. End quote. Truthfully, if you read that,

Maybe from the Persian point of view, you see that the Persians stood up to the Spartans, desperately breaking their spears with their bare hands. I mean, what would you do? What's your move if the 10,000 or 15,000 hoplites bear down on you? You going to do some jiu-jitsu move or something? Okay, as soon as the spear comes forward, I'm going to break it. I mean, you don't even have that opportunity. You're facing death.

15 spearheads i mean this is a giant pin cushion coming at you how do you you know what's your plan i don't even know how you begin to process okay what am i going to do now they're 10 feet away okay what am i going to do now they're five feet away i mean there's going to be a countdown in your head and you can see how the pressure would have built you know it's like the torpedo coming at the ship and they go you know 60 yards away 50 yards away 40 yards away boom um

Human beings are amazing that anybody could stand up to that. And what's interesting is Herodotus said the Persians didn't just stand up to it. They were putting up with the death and destruction and the slaughter and the unequal odds of the lack of armor and everything until their general was killed. Mardonius is fighting right out there in the thick of things. And as we said earlier, there's something about these ancient battles where both

you know that there's something expected about that so i mean he's he's not there because he's a he's a war lover otherwise he'd be back you know working on the maps in the back room it doesn't work like that in this period they're often out front and when they die it's often catastrophic in this case the story traditionally is although it comes from a long time afterwards that a spartan in the formation you know while the combat is going on lazenby describes it as what must be

He says incomprehensible chaos and picks up a rock and throws it at Mardonius and cracks his skull and kills him. And, you know, I've been thinking about this. If you think about a formation of men like that,

How close could anybody get without tons of stuff being thrown at them? I mean, very soon there must have been every rock that was nearby, every stick, anything that could have been picked up and thrown at the enemy must have been gone. In this case, it's not so hard to imagine, you know, tons of stuff being thrown if Mardonius came too close to the Spartan lines. And it sounds like he was fighting in the thick of things.

So he meets his end and we're told that his thousand-man cavalry bodyguard, as Herodotus calls it, the flower of the army, is wiped out to a man. All that together collapses the morale of the Persian troops fighting the Spartans when they begin to rout.

"'Now the rest of the army, remember, these are people who might not have chosen to be there if they had any choice, but they're not Persians, they're subject peoples of the Persians. What's more, there are also people who were defeated by these Persians who are now running, and the people who defeated them are coming your way. What would you do?' They turned around and ran too, headed back to the safety of their fortified camp on the other side of the river.'

While all this is going on, the Athenians in a hard fought battle beat the Thebans, the allies of the Persians, send them back to Thebes. They go running back to Thebes. The Greek army led by the Spartans, but eventually joined by the Athenians surround this fortified camp and eventually break in and massacre the Persians in there.

herodotus and the other sources basically say that once the walls were basically torn down the people inside resigned themselves to dying and they it sounds like they just put up almost no resistance up at that point which is interesting in terms of human psychology too if you're in that situation what's the right move you know your your adversaries have you surrounded they've beaten you in the battle you're stuck in that stockade and then when they break in

you plan to sell your life dearly take out as many of the enemies you can do you just try to figure out the easiest way to get this death over with so that it's not horrific or do you you know entertain fantasies of capture and maybe i'll live through this think of how many people in human history have been in that situation before the battle of platia was such a

monumental affair in terms of size it had to be so much bigger than anything that the greeks could conceive of i mean their battles and fighting was on a much smaller scale than this that the carnage must have been unbelievable and no one knows how many persians were killed because nobody knows how many persians even fought at the battle don't know the numbers that fought it's hard to determine casualties

traditionally the persians are portrayed as losing the majority of their men in the fighting then losing most of the rest in the slaughter at the fortification and then losing some more on the way home to some thracian tribesmen that ambush them and then finally these starving tattered remnants go stumbling into the provincial capital at sardis like napoleon's grand army leaving russia

the low ball numbers for the persian forces at platia were and they sound ridiculously low to my unqualified um eyes but but 10 to 12 000 men of course the high numbers are herodotus is 300 000 men if there really are 300 000 men well then hundreds of thousands of persian corpses littered the battlefield it seems unlikely but the estimate range goes anywhere from like 50 000 to 120 000 somewhere in there is probably a good number

On the Greek side, it's the largest army they've ever put together. It involves multiple city-states, 50,000 to 80,000 men is the range that people throw out there. Now, the problem you have with these numbers, just so you know, and it screws up the casualties too, is that you have people who are camp servants and helots and slaves, people whose job it is to carry the soldiers' stuff and cook his food and that kind of thing.

but on the day of the battle oftentimes especially in desperate situations they're handed a spear you know and someone will say go find someone to stick that into does that all of a sudden make you a fighting man do you get to count now in the overall numbers did they count when herodotus and others give casualty numbers for the greeks they seem ridiculously low but some historians have pointed out that they might not have been counting some of those other people remember herodotus said there were seven helots for every spartan

that's tens of thousands of people that maybe nobody decided to count when it came time to adding up the important people who died in this battle now what's more there will be another battle that will happen traditionally happens at the exact same time platia is going on probably happened a little bit afterwards probably but you know maybe even a little bit before they don't know but they do think it was around the same time it's called the battle of miccoli and basically what happens is the remnants of the greek fleet

that were victorious at the battle of salamis go find the remnants of the persian fleet that lost the battle of salamis and they're going to have this naval battle but the persians won't come out and fight so the greeks disembark they have a land battle instead and the persians are defeated again if you actually read the rundown of it it sounds very much like the battle of platia all over again the hoplites charging tearing down the wall of wicker shields and absolutely ripping apart the

lightly armored archers in the middle of these archer blocks and the cavalry once again mysteriously missing the persians fighting very well until the officer dies basically it acts as sort of a last kick in the rear end platia throws the persians out of european greece and the battle of mickely kicks him in the rear end on the way out it's an exclamation point basically saying and don't come back

one thing it certainly does though is answer the question that the battle of marathon you know 10 years before this period did not

which is the question of the tactical superiority of the Greeks in these battles. And we pointed out earlier that, you know, most of the time history is a bunch of giant forces and things that involve very high-level stuff, either decisions or trends, but sometimes they can boil down to things that seem like they should be minor, tactical, battlefield superiority questions. And sometimes people will think, well, you know, really? But then you say, listen, how big of a deal was it

in the age of discovery that one side had firearms and the other didn't or machine guns or artillery i mean there are times when one side superiority on the day of the battle or the year of the war determines how everything else goes these two encounters platia and mickley show that the persians can't handle the greeks for some reason

At least not in these situations. And historians ever since have been trying to answer the question, you know, in this great giant upset in history. Without a doubt, the greatest event in European-related military history up until this time, right, and maybe for a long time afterwards, how did the Greeks do it? Why did they win? How did the Persians lose?

And there are several theories on this and it's wonderful to watch the historians put forward their debating points on why they think it's one or the other. And it's very possible it could be several of them working together. I'll go over like four. And some of these theories started with the Greeks themselves and still have their adherence today. The first one is one of those, the spear versus the bow. The idea that the Greeks had and a lot of historians still today believe

that you look at the equipment difference herodotus writes about it too one side had armor the other didn't one side had these long spears the other didn't one side had you know heavy shields the other really didn't the greeks also sort of had a subtext to this sometimes it wasn't just that one side had spears and the other had bows but the different kinds of men are created you know when you're an archer versus when you are a close combat infantryman right

and that when it came time to an actual clash of spears, the Greeks were melee fighters, and the Persians really weren't, certainly not to the degree the Greeks were. The Greeks can't win without doing that. The Persians can. You get a different mentality, or so some people will claim. People who disagree with this theory will point out quite rightly that the problem is, if you want to say it's equipment...

Why can't you just make these people when you see how dominant they are? If the Persians look at Greek hoplites and say, wow, they're really effective, why don't they just go make their own? Because you can't, for some reason, just put a Greek helmet and Greek armor and a Greek spear and a Greek shield on a Persian soldier and have them fight like European Greeks. This is a huge question I've always had in my mind. Why? It's been tried all through history. There's famously imitation legionaries during the Imperial Roman period who

you know when rome is dominating the entire world of the mediterranean at that point it's only natural you know somebody would say listen i want what they've got go make me some of those and they grab a roman centurion you know pay them some money they equip their troops like romans they train them like romans but they don't fight like romans why not maybe the same reason today that

Some of the great militaries will go give their stuff and training to other countries' militaries, and yet when they have to fight, they've got the good stuff, they've got the top training, but they don't fight the same. Why? We've talked in the past about this really hard to quantify and very scary in terms of kind of moves into areas where you could get into ethnocentrism and bigotry, but it gets into the question of toughness.

How do you quantify toughness, too? How do you research it? Some people had reputations for being extra nasty in warfare, and part of it was just reputational, right? Intimidating. Herodotus has the Persian general at one point when he doesn't think the Spartans are performing particularly scary. He turns to the other Greek guy and goes, maybe you're just afraid of them because they're only good compared to you. Something like that.

But there are people all throughout history whose neighbors were terrified of them because of what they could do. The question is why? Why could they do what they did? Apaches, Zulus, Greeks in this period. Some of the original sources will have them say, you know, everyone knows that Greeks are great fighters. What's a great fighter? How do you make a great fighter? What's that a combination of and how much of it is something internal?

And what about societies like the Spartan one, which is supposedly one where the cultural carrots and sticks are all designed to make somebody, you know, more that way, tough, a better fighter, whatever. It's a very weird thing to get your mind around, isn't it? Toughness or whatever word is a better word for what makes one side a great warrior and the other not. Now, some historians will say that this is a cultural question.

Some cultures have a military tradition designed around physical contact with the enemy, right? The Greek culture is designed to have a military encounter. You know, you get to historians like Victor Davis Hanson, who is not without controversy, but he'll call it a Western way of war. This decisive battle where you walk right up and slug the other guy in the mouth. And the good part about it is at the end, somebody wins and somebody loses.

But then there's the East, which has a different military tradition. Much more Sun Tzu and Kung Fu and we're going to look for open flanks and get around you. We're going to wear you down with missile fire. We're going to attack your supply lines. We're going to guerrilla warfare you and we're going to shoot you from a distance with, you know, missile weapons. Wear you down.

And what that means is the Persians could win against the Greeks on the battlefield as long as they never come in contact with them. Because until they do, they're fighting to their strengths. The Greeks can't win without coming into contact with the Persians. But the minute they do...

they're armored for it they're equipped for it they're trained for it they may be hardened by generations of people who promote the very things it takes to win in a hand-to-hand encounter in other words these greeks may have a culture of melee and once melee fighting happens they're in their element but then there's much less controversial and weird and hard to quantify reasons that are thrown out for why the persians may have lost also and the occam's razor one is poor decisions

Poor decisions at every level from the king deciding to do things, you know, let's go to war here to the tactical battlefield spur of the moment ones made by the general on site and everything in between. Some historians like J.F. Lazenby run down stories.

you know all the ways in which the persians had this thing won it was over i mean the morning you wake up at the battle of platia and all those greeks are moving off in other directions and their lines broken and they're running away it's done right at lazenby makes it sound like how do you blow that but they did a historian that comes right after this period he's one of the biggies and one of the greats thucydides thucydides he basically says and i'm paraphrasing here the barbarians blew it they had it

So poor decisions is often thrown out there as a reason that the Persians fell victim to one of the great military upsets in all time. Now, the next possible theory, though, is one that could explain some of the poor decisions. Some of the modern guys, Cockwell's a good example. He'll talk about supply. Brianne does, too. The question of trying to supply an army over these distances, this must have been the edge of the range of Persian power projection.

Trying to keep an army of tens of thousands of people fed, supplied, you know, all their equipment being repaired and everything that it takes for more than a year? Difficult to do. Herodotus tells a story of a king who happens to be a direct ancestor of Alexander the Great, who supposedly comes to the Greeks before the Battle of Plataea and says the Persians only have three days of food left.

if anything like that were true think about how that would impact the decisions by the persian generals they might have thought listen the best thing to do here is to wait if you only have three days left of food you can't wait so maybe you do something that otherwise would have been considered a poor decision unless the people who were judging you knew you know what the supply constraints working on you might have been supply is an extremely likely thing it certainly impacted every level of the campaign

finally there's a school of thought and this one goes all the way back to ancient greece too and still has its adherence and a lot of people think certainly even if it wasn't the main reason it played a role in it what about the idea that the greeks just wanted it more to use a sports phrase i mean the persians are sitting here trying to add a relatively small and poor territory to their already ginormous empire and

how motivated are you they're professionals i mean you know the king rewards people who do well i mean there's a whole lot of good reasons and carrots and sticks operating on them to perform well but the greeks are fighting for their lives and their freedom and to keep their families potentially from being enslaved although you know the persians are pretty nice people to have to live under if you have to live under someone else nonetheless a lot of people don't want to do that

And if freedom, you know, or at least the right to be ruled by your own people is important to you, you probably feel more strongly about it than adding this poor little territory on the fringes of the known world to your already ginormous empire. So the idea that the Greeks were fighting for more certainly rings true when you look at a lot of other conflicts throughout history where one side seemingly should steamroll the other and they don't.

There are lots of other reasons. I mean, tactics is even thrown out there. And maybe, as we said, it's a conjunction of several of these things working together. The bottom line, though, is that

You know, when I was growing up, there was a long tradition, and 40 years ago, the histories that were written of portraying these victories as shattering victories. And Persian history is having this watershed moment in the year 479, right? Before 479, they're on the rise. After 479, they're on the decline. 479 is like the year they're at the top of the ladder, right? The wooden shoes are going up the ladder, the silk slippers coming down, and they're at the top of the ladder in 479, right before the fall.

In the Greek narrative now, you know, you're going to see the Greeks go on the counteroffensive and take the war to Persia, go to what's now Turkey and the islands in the Aegean and raise the flag of revolt and free all these Greek people from Persian control. Here's the thing, though. This war is only over if the Persians want it to be. I mean, they have to kind of say, OK, we're not going to fight anymore because they're

the greeks have a problem that the persians didn't have we said how amazing it was that the persians could feed and supply these armies over these long distances well as an example of how amazing it is the greeks can't do that they can't go and you know launch an attack and send an athenian army into mesopotamia and feed it i mean they just can't do that so the ability to destroy the persian empire militarily is not in the greeks hands now what they can do theoretically is

is start a rolling chain of revolts maybe that acts like a line of dominoes and begins to get the persian empire to sort of you know shake itself apart like an earthquake and there are revolts that happen there are several historians i read that think that it's logical to assume that persian losses against the greeks you know encouraged places like babylon and egypt and all the usual suspects to revolt

And that would have been something that the Persian king and the generals and everybody, that would have concerned them greatly. Stuff on the peripheries, it's a little bit more like nibbling. And here's the thing, you know, if you look at it over the long haul, you could make a case that, and we're trying to look at this from the Persian viewpoint, that the Persians will end up winning this whole thing. That to declare victory now is a little like declaring victory today.

you know in the second world war in 1942 and just going home i mean sure the persians lost these battles because of these tactical advantages of the greeks so what are they going to do they're going to come back and fight differently and when you look at persian strategy here you can really see some of the advantages that the persians have that the greeks don't the greeks had tactical advantages on the battlefield the persians have advantages at a much higher level

They might not be able to raise any infantry that could compete with Greek hoplites head-on, but they have a much more powerful and versatile weapon at their disposal. Gold. And lots of it. And maybe you can't make your own hoplites out of your own people, but you sure can hire the originals.

and the greeks begin to play a large role in the persian military and what's more this is really an explosion in hellenism where we begin to see the mixture at a much higher rate it had always been going on but of greeks into persia and persian things into greece because you get these mercenaries that will serve and then come home the other thing the persians do with this gold is they begin to encourage the greeks to kill each other two things now go away in this story that will change the story greatly

the first thing that goes away is greek cooperation you know the terrible threat of darth vader right in greece had encouraged a bunch of city states that weren't that friendly with each other to drop their antagonisms and work together when darth vader leaves the antagonisms come right back most famously between sparta and athens this begins to be something that persian gold will figure out a way to exploit and encourage

persians might not be able to kill greeks on the battlefield very effectively if platia and mickley were any you know laboratory test but they sure do a good job of killing each other and persian gold can encourage that the other thing that goes away at this point in the story and you could argue he's the most important person in the story is our storyteller this is where herodotus's history ends his movie's over and you miss him terribly because

earlier we'd said historian pierre briant had said something to the effect of you know herodotus gets all this criticism for not being more factually accurate and yet he's all you have and you'll really miss him when he's gone and now he is and this person that we have used to help colorize this story since the very beginning when he's gone a lot of the color goes with him and we are left with some of the old ways of putting a story together it's the opposite of the wizard of oz that went from black and white to color in the middle of the picture we've had color the whole way and all of a sudden we've

It goes back to black and white without Herodotus. Now, when you're talking about the ancient past, black and white generally means the sort of things that archaeologists can find, whether you're talking about carvings or artwork or tombs or records or letters or what have you.

But there was always something missing from the equation when that was all you had. The sort of things that you realize once Herodotus appears on the scene and you get this other side of history, this one where you really get these human parts and dialogue and themes and drama. And when he's gone, you miss it.

and you're left with wholly inadequate replacements which make you appreciate herodotus even more and they fall into a couple of broad categories one category i like to call the hard to believes theseus falls into this category theseus was a greek doctor worked for the persian kings lived in persia went to the dinner parties had persian friends says he saw the persian historical records himself should be the best of the best in terms of helping us understand the

You know, the workings, the inner workings and Persia's point of view of things. In my copy of Theseus, which is the Lloyd Llewellyn Jones and James Robson version, those two write the prologue. And this is what they say about Theseus' history. Quote,

His history of Persia was completed at a time when the Greeks were fascinated by Persia and seems, on one level, to cater to a contemporary Greek interest in Persian wealth and opulence, powerful Persian women, the institution of the harem, kings and queens, eunuchs and secret plots, end quote.

That's why perhaps a lot of the rest of the history of the accumulated Persian Empire looks like that because the people telling you the story are giving you the story that way. But in all fairness to that guy, that's the level he was having contact with the Persian Empire. That's the level he saw it. And if Herodotus is giving you a geopolitically focused history, you know, a film on the epic grand scale, a guy like Theseus is giving you more of a John Cassavetes film, right?

and it's all going on in one room and it's black and white and dark and everybody's drinking a lot of wine and then confessing you know what they really want to do to each other its history is seen through a very different lens now both of these guys who wrote the tcs book i'm reading they both want to make the case that they think this is a legitimate attempt by tcs to write a persian history from the inside nonetheless this is a guy you know let's be honest he makes it hard to believe he'll write a story for example about how

The events that led up to the Persians taking over Egypt originally, a couple kings before this time, happened because the king of Persia heard that Egyptian women were the best at having sex in the world. So he wanted one and yada, yada, yada, ipso facto. And all of a sudden, you know, the Persians have taken over Egypt. So you have to take this stuff with a grain of salt, right? But sometimes this is all you're left with. Now, different category of people than the hard to believes, right?

are the people who are writing about a completely different subject and they just happen to as part of their story include some facts that are relevant to yours one of the best historians of the ancient world a guy who starts writing right after herodotus thucydides or thucydides

he's one of those guys he's writing a story about the greeks fighting with each other but there's you know sidebar information about the persians occasionally so the historians go in there and they grab every little nugget they can and they they try to put it and assemble it as part of the jigsaw puzzle and he's considered a really good historian so that's each one of those little facts he throws out there's like gold there's just not very much of them because he's not really writing about persia the final category also includes some great historical writers

It's those who are writing from a long time later. Take Plutarch, for example, but there's a bunch of other ones. He's writing from five to six hundred years after the Persian Wars. And, you know, I tend to forget that because you think, oh, you know, ancient Greek writer. Yes, but he's writing in the second century C.E. of the modern era. And he's writing about events happening in the fifth century B.C.E. It's as far enough in his past. It's farther in his past.

than the Europeans discovering the Americas is in ours. How much did a person in the ancient world, somebody that we would consider having lived a very, very, very long time ago, how much did he know about his ancient past? I marveled that they knew anything.

and that there was somewhere this guy could go to read primary sources which is why historians pay attention to these people they said well you know he was working from the original work of blah blah blah blah really that original work is still available how many times has that scroll been recopied over the eras how fascinating is that that these ancient people had an ancient history of their own and some method of preserving and transmitting it it's wild to me

Nonetheless, 500 or 600 years is a long time for a story to get legends built up around it or myths. Or shall we use all those wonderful words from academia we've been throwing out? Motifs, tropes, stereotypes. But you know, even the motifs and the stereotypes and the literary conventions of those days can tell you something different.

about the events if the person who's writing them is close enough to them one of the great things about herodotus is he comes a generation after the events he's writing about he interviews people who were there or who have some close you know connection time wise to them

And so when he gives you some sort of theme for the story, whether or not the theme is true, the way he uses it is one thing, but it tells you something about the people living in that era and the way they portrayed or thought about or remembered these events. Herodotus ends his movie, if you will, with a little story, and the story is about Herodotus

the guy the legendary king arthur type figure who founds the persian empire and the story is about the persians coming to him early on and basically saying now that we've won this great empire we should move from the poor country that we come from to one of these more luxurious areas with you know good food and wine and you know in other words we're moving up in the world let's trade up to a bigger you know house and property

Then Cyrus gives him a moral lesson and the way this is intended to be conveyed is that the story that Herodotus just told you shows you how they went from an empire who revered these kind of values to one that had forgotten them and paid the price he just related to you. He says in response to the proposal by his people that they trade up to some better property. Herodotus ends his movie with this paragraph, quote,

Cyrus did not think much of this suggestion. He replied that they might act upon it if they pleased, but added the warning that if they did so, they must prepare themselves to rule no longer, but to be ruled by others.

soft countries he said breed soft men it is not the property of any one soil to produce fine fruits and good soldiers too the persians had to admit herodotus writes that this was true and that cyrus was wiser than they so they left him and chose rather to live in a rugged land and rule than to cultivate rich plains and be subject to others end quote

well by the time Herodotus wrote that the Persians lived and occupied some very rich plains indeed and the theme of a growing Persian decadence starts with Xerxes and becomes one of the most dominant parts of the entire narrative and not just decadence but also decline one of the weirdest metrics I think that's ever developed but it's natural to see how in that ironic is

is this idea that you could trace the rise and fall of civilizations to how they're doing in terms of territorial acquisition and retention. Is the Roman Empire rising? Well, are they still conquering territory and expanding? If so, then they're rising. The minute that they stop expanding and start to contract, they're falling. They're in decline. Of course, that ignores the empires that, like a stock market, expand and contract based on their fortunes. I'm thinking of China or the Byzantines, for example.

Nonetheless, the Persians in that sense do sort of follow the Roman Empire model. They expand like the blob in the science fiction movie that we talked about earlier to a certain point. And once they stop, it's all about trying to hold on to what you have in the old, especially 19th century way of viewing things. That's a sign of an empire in decline.

you know the idea that this decadence and decline have reached a point where we no longer have the wooden shoes ascending the staircase we're well into the silk slippers going down you know i thought about that for a minute and contrasted it to this idea that you know we should be judging empires on territorial acquisition if you were living in some time period in ancient persia would you rather live in the wooden shoes era or the silk slippers era

Because it seems to me we probably live in the, some version anyway, the silk slippers era in our own civilizational life cycle, I would say. And if I asked you if you wanted to go back to one of the wooden shoes era where things were more Spartan and the food was more

simple and the you know rules may be more strict i see two ends of the spectrum either like viking like it could be one level of the wooden shoes era where you're so tough that you're just you know it's like a darwinian nightmare day-to-day existence or or like something like the spartans or the puritans where life is just one long you know effort in spartan denial but it you know creates tough people not so much fun maybe to live that life especially if you were born and raised in a silk slipper era like i think we probably were

The funny part about the Persian Empire's history coming up is we're going to be talking about an empire that is traditionally thought to be on the downhill slope. But if you live there, other than some inflation and some high prices, maybe it might not have been a very bad time. In fact, there might have been a decent amount of peace and stability in some of these places, which is why some of these kings who are coming up are kind of boring. And you can run through a 30 or 40 year reign, you know, pretty quickly.

ironically the first of these kings to suffer from sort of the darkness that intrudes on the narrative when herodotus is gone is the star antagonist of his movie right the darth vader character xerxes the star xerxes will outlive the end of herodotus's movie by darn near 15 years if you believe the ancient greek sources like the playwrights and stuff they often portray him as sort of like the broken man broken by the defeat in greece you know never quite the same

There's a lot of building projects. The archaeologists will say, well, he sure was doing a lot of building afterwards. He may have conquered or his generals may have conquered more territory in the east, not really well known. It's pretty certain that the Persians were told a completely different story about the Greek situation than the Greeks would have known about. Briant and Dandemiev both quote a much later account by an ancient historian named Dio Chrysostom.

And Briant says, quote, the official Persian version of the events is probably close to what D.O. Chrysostom reports much later. He's talking about how the Persians probably spun, you know, the war that just ended in Greece. And this dovetails all the way back to the way we began this conversation earlier.

you know much much earlier when we talked about how would the assyrians or the babylonians have written about you know the last stand of the spartans at thermopylae well this is an ancient historian dio chrysostom kind of giving what pierre briand thinks might have been the spin that the persian people were told and maybe the story that after a while xerxes told himself the ancient historian writes quote

During his expedition in Greece, Xerxes achieved victory over the Lacedaemonians at Thermopylae and killed King Leonidas there. Then he took and laid waste to Athens, of which he sold into slavery all the inhabitants who had not succeeded in escaping. And after these successes, he imposed tribute on the Greeks and returned to Asia."

That sounds like a guy, if that's true, that's basically saying, mission accomplished, never mind all that revolutionary activity those Athenians and their little alliance are stirring up on my coastline. Also, both of the principal opponents of Xerxes in those Greek battles, Themistocles, our Han Solo character,

And Pausanias, the Spartan commander at Plataea, both of them will end up either taking Persian gold or in Persian employ or imitating Persians or marrying Persians. Xerxes probably got to see Pausanias go all Persian.

Which was something they did. The Persians were great cultural imperialists, too. You came from a backwater of ancient Greece like Pausanias did, ate that horrible Spartan gruel, and then go over and see how they're dressed, fed, wined and dined. And the sophisticated Persian women, a lot of people went all Persian. Pausanias was one of them.

the mysticles either showed up in the court of xerxes or right after xerxes his son takes over either way kind of a victory for the dad when your chief opponent shows up there and kind of goes can i play on your team now so from the persian point of view i mean you might have been able to say listen this you know look we win it's all about how you spin it sometimes right nonetheless xerxes historical reputation has had to live with

You know, the way he's been portrayed for so long, the first of the jerk kings, I think we called him. You know, someone who was less lenient than his forebears, who had sort of a laid-back policy of tolerance and whatnot. Probably not true, historians say, but good luck changing that image. Also, often portrayed as the first of sort of the silver spoon generation of Persian kings, the ones, you know, raised as rich kids, rich,

and not quite of the same metal as their forebears that's kind of what the end of the herodotus movie implies here's the way m a den demiev describes sort of the image that's come down to us of xerxes quote

In the works of other Greek authors, Xerxes is depicted as being surrounded by stupid eunuchs. Plato wrote that Xerxes was excessively spoiled in his youth, and that starting with him, the Persian kings were great in name only, but not in reality.

contemporary historians often regard Xerxes in accordance with Greek writers as a man of weak character and a toy in the hands of his eunuchs the official Persian sources he writes however depict Xerxes as a wise statesman and a tried warrior end quote this idea of Xerxes being the first of the Persian kings to sort of inaugurate the decadence and decline era in Persian history is long-standing

common until the 1950s at least and a lot of books even quite a bit of time after that will durant who i of course love but writing in 1935 when there was a different view of these things you know kept the same sort of an idea going in an extremely satisfying from a storyteller an old-time historian standpoint he writes quote

The empire of Darius lasted hardly a century. The moral as well as the physical backbone of Persia was broken by Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea. The emperors exchanged Mars for Venus, and the nation descended into corruption and apathy. The decline of Persia anticipated almost in detail the decline of Rome. Immorality and degeneration among the people accompanied violence and negligence on the throne.

The Persians, like the Medes before them, passed from Stoicism to Epicureanism in a few generations. Eating became the principal occupation of the aristocracy. These men, who had once made it a rule to eat but once a day, now interpreted the rule to allow them one meal, prolonged from noon to night. They stocked their larders with a thousand delicacies, and they often served entire animals to their guests.

They stuffed themselves with rich, rare meats and spent their genius upon new sauces and desserts. A corrupt and corrupting multitude of menials filled the houses of the wealthy, while drunkenness became the common vice of every class. Cyrus and Darius created Persia. Xerxes inherited it. His successors destroyed it."

As a history fan, that's a wonderfully satisfying piece of storytelling right there. And there are two things that are wonderful about it. One, it seems to teach you some wonderful cosmic lesson, doesn't it? About the decay of societies based on civilizational standards and all this. And that's satisfying. It's a real world, you know, lesson in wisdom, acquired wisdom from the past. The other thing that's wonderful is the surety of it, the certitude of

It's a very satisfying piece of writing. Compare that to something like Pierre Briand's giant tome on Persia, where so much of it, especially in the period we're coming up to, is comparing this ancient author to this ancient author and basically finding problems with both of what they say. The wonderful irony of this period in history we're in now, where everything is so much more documented and careful and scientific, is we know less than we ever did.

instead of illuminating a ton of things that were dark although there's been quite a bit of that a ton of what modern history has done is debunk what we thought we knew in the past

This dovetails right with the way, you know, we mentioned it earlier, Pierre Briand started his whole book, which is this, you know, if you have a thousand pages or more of stuff talking about this is how it was, and you start your entire book off with a phrase that says, quote, you must believe ancient history even if it's not true, end quote. That's because the basic structure is real. The details are completely unknown.

And the idea going all the way from ancient Greek times to the 1950s at least that you can see and hear part of a recurring pattern of civilizations declining and falling because their people start eating richer food and concentrate their genius on sauces instead of weapons or whatever the implication is there. That's fascinating too because everybody understands how ridiculous it is to blame something like an entire culture's fall on the fact that their people are getting slovenly, that they're slouching towards disaster.

At the same time, one could perhaps be convinced that something like that has some sort of role in the grand scheme of things. But try quantifying it. You know, try diagramming the toxic stew that brings down the Roman Empire and deciding exactly what percentage of responsibility you attribute to the fact that their women are a lot less virtuous than they were back when the empire was rising. Do you see what I'm saying? It's possible that that plays a role. But when you read these histories, it isn't playing a role. It is playing the role.

And you look back on it now and you just say, OK, something like that is patently ridiculous. And even if once or twice in history, something like that can be said to be, listen, in this case, that really is what it was. To use it as some sort of general rule that applies to the rise and fall of civilizations throughout history is ridiculous.

and everybody knows it now but it's colored the way this story's been told and so so much about the way it's colored now is trying to look through the weeds that have grown up over 2 500 years including such things as well xerxes was hanging out in the harem and drinking too much wine and you know that's what happened a victim of harem intrigues which brings us to the other problem with all this is wouldn't it be great if we could just as i said earlier write all this off and say it's all bs

harem intrigues is a wonderful example traditionally xerxes is assassinated in keeping with the rest of this history of persia we don't know how and you have multiple different accounts the traditional overview they'll say is it's a victim of harem intrigues with all these women fighting amongst each other and the rivals and and the quest for power and the eunuchs and all this stuff and as we said earlier when you get these sources from people like tcs he may be a little gossipy

So maybe the whole history of Persia comes down to a Princess Di, you know, Prince Charles sort of love triangle deal.

But historian Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, who's the one sort of putting this Theseus translation that I have together, he writes a very good defense of the idea of harem intrigues that sort of gives a pretty darn good historical justification for something that a lot of historians say, this is just a motif. There's no such thing as all this. This is a Greek idea, romantic idea of a harem with all the sex and the drinking. And it's like a Greek fantasy.

But here's what Llewellyn Jones has to say about this. And what this does when he defends this idea is once more make us realize that when it comes to the history of the ancient Persian Empire and a lot of this ancient stuff, we don't know anything for sure practically. You can make a case or an argument for multiple interpretations of most things. Llewellyn Jones writes, quote, So what then do we make of Theseus' vignettes of powerful queens and eunuchs?

It is clear that the royal women of Achaemenid Persia did not live in Perda, nor did they inhabit an orientalist world of sultry sensuality, but they did form part of a strict hierarchical court structure that moved in close proximity to the king. As a component of his harem, they followed the peripatetic lifestyle of the great king.

The royal women's importance lay in their allegiance to the maintenance of dynastic power. The Achaemenid dynasty was, after all, essentially a centrally run family business, and at the heart of the operation lay the harem, the king's domestic inner circle of women, offspring, siblings, and slaves. Theseus' stories of female power and agency, he writes, always operate around the safeguarding of the throne and the preservation of personal power,

Stories of sexual shenanigans, the stuff of Orientalist dreams, are kept to a minimum. And even when they do appear, they serve a bigger picture. Royal women fought over rank and position and privilege. And when eunuchs overreach their allotted positions and aim for the throne, the queens act swiftly and punish them. For the women, men, and eunuch slaves of the royal family, prestige and access to power lay in their proximity to the king.

He then says, quote,

absolute monarchies are open to a particular form of political tension which usually focuses on the royal family and on the noble families that surround the king within such institutions women of the dynastic family often rise to positions of political agency not through any formal route to power but by other less qualifiable means cross-cultural and cross-temporal comparisons with other court societies reveal this to be the truth end quote

In other words, what Llewellyn Jones just did there was take one of the things historians today are most comfortable with blaming on Greek stereotypes and makes a darn good historical scientific defense of it. And what does that do? Just muddies the waters even more. This is my excuse now for moving through several of the succeeding kings quickly.

When I decided to deal with each Persian king in succession as my structural framework for this story, I knew I was going to be front-loading events because there's so much known and so much written about the first several kings that created the empire. And then most people tend, based on the evidence, to scream through the succeeding kings. And part of the reason why is these succeeding kings don't have as much to do with the Greeks on a regular basis, so there's less written about them.

But you'll get whole reigns like Artaxerxes I. He reigns for like four decades and he's a person that normally you see a few events of his life put on a timeline. Listen to the way that same Will Durant writing in 1935 in a paragraph or two sums up the rest of the history of the kings of Persia after Xerxes' time. Quote,

Only the records of Rome after Tiberius could rival in bloodiness the royal annals of Persia. The murderer of Xerxes was murdered by Artaxerxes I, who after a long reign was succeeded by Xerxes II, who was murdered a few weeks later by his half-brother Sogdianus, who was murdered six months later by Darius II, who suppressed the revolt of Teretochmes by having him slain, his wife cut into pieces,

and his mother, brothers, and sisters buried alive. Darius II was followed by his son, Artaxerxes II, who at the Battle of Cunaxa had to fight to the death his own brother, the younger Cyrus, when the youth tried to seize the royal power. Artaxerxes II enjoyed a long reign, killed his son Darius for conspiracy, and died of a broken heart on finding that another son, Ocus, was planning to assassinate him.

"'Ocus ruled for twenty years, and was poisoned by his general, Bagoas. This iron-livered warwick placed Arsus, son of Ocus, on the throne, assassinated Arsus's brothers to make Arsus secure, then assassinated Arsus and his infant children, and gave the scepter to Cotomanus, a safely effeminate friend.'"

In other words, the highlight of most of the reigns of the rest of the kings of Persia seem to be the remarkable, bloody, horrific, incestual, assassination-laden way they died. But it's worth pointing out that of all those ends that Will Durant just gave you, almost none of them can be confirmed.

These are traditions and you have to decide that you're going to buy the sources and sometimes the sources differ. For example, take the death of the anti-hero in the Herodotus production, Xerxes. The sources that are out there have different stories. Theseus is the one that's usually cited and in the Theseus version, Xerxes is assassinated by his bodyguard, which could be a kind of a bodyguard or a general or a counselor or a vizier. The position is interesting.

This bodyguard person is working with a eunuch. You know, what else is new? And the two of them are supposed to kill Xerxes. Now, later, a fragment of Theseus actually talks about how Xerxes died, but it says that he died in the most shameful way a man can die, by having his throat cut while he sleeps by his son,

And then the story gets interesting. This is when Theseus has the two conspirators, the bodyguard and the eunuch, going to one of Xerxes' sons, you know, these are going to be the people who inherit the throne, which maybe the bodyguard wants, and telling the son that his brother's the one who killed his father. Yeah, your dad's dead, and guess who did it? Your older brother. So that kid, we're told, goes to his brother's house and accuses him of killing their father.

The older brother says, I didn't kill dad. The younger brother doesn't believe him and kills him. And then, see how the, I mean, they're wild and they could be true, but you don't know. Then the conspirators try to get rid of this other son so that maybe the throne's clear for them. Who knows? And the son figures it out or is told. So he turns the tables and he kills the bodyguard and the eunuch. And the eunuch supposedly by that wonderful torture method of the boats.

And that king becomes Artaxerxes I. Now, Artaxerxes I is a wonderful example of how the rest of this story is going to go until the very last king of the Persian Empire, or maybe the second to last, depending on how you chronicle that. But that's that here's a guy who will rule from 465 B.C. to 424 B.C. It's an enormous reign. Four decades plus, right? Yet if you look at Artaxerxes I's life,

it's like a few bullet points on a timeline that's how all the rest of these kings are going to be too up until the last one or two it's tempting to say maybe that's just because there wasn't a whole lot to record maybe art of xerxes the first is a great manager maybe like you know darius was a great ceo of persia core and he's so great that you know the the steady hand on the wheel keeps there from being these enormous flare-ups of things that make great historical stories

although probably it's more connected to the fact that you know he was working other parts of the persian empire remember there's an entire persian empire on the other side of the persian capital that the greeks know very little about it's like the dark side of the moon to them but there's a lot going on there and a lot of the more modern historians point out that that's probably the more important part of the empire to the persians themselves

So who knows what Artaxerxes is doing? He's famous, though, in the Greek story for being the guy who codifies a practice that the Persians were already doing, but sort of makes it the foreign policy of Persia when dealing with the Greeks. Artaxerxes is the one who decides to make it the policy of Persia to use diplomacy as a weapon.

And this is something I think a lot of modern day people forget that diplomacy is really good at. We think of it as wimpy sometimes or at best defensive. A lot of the great civilizations in history were fabulous at using diplomacy like a sword where you could go in and really deconstruct your adversaries using it.

The Persians were so skilled at this that some of the modern historians I was reading, you know, they can't help but say, why didn't the Persians do this from the very beginning? They didn't need to fight any of those battles that we just recounted to you. They could have just done this because look how effective it was. In the 490s and the 480s, Persia is fighting and mostly losing land and sea battles against these Greek city-states. A hundred years later, the Persians have essentially emasculated them.

by paying for them to emasculate each other.

And they're so Machiavellian about it that when one side seems to be doing too well, they'll fund the other side. And the other side will continually change. Sometimes the Persians are funding the Spartans to bring down Athenian power. But then, for example, there'll be a time where the Spartans will invade modern-day Turkey and Asia Minor and look like they're maybe even thinking about marching on Persian cities so the Persians funnel a bunch of gold back to Greece and have Spartan enemies attack them.

historian chester star said that essentially the persian empire was like the puppet masters of greece by the end of this time and they had managed to do that simply by using money to prolong and deepen the natural disagreements that greeks had always had with each other and at the same time provide the means to continue fighting until everyone was exhausted at one point in the peloponnesian war for example one of these wars that were spawned you know indirectly it

in part by persian gold the spartans will lose a fleet to the athenians or most of one and feel like they have to maybe drop out of the war so the persians will buy them another fleet they don't even have to go to the great king sometimes one of the satraps in the local area will pay for it yeah sure no problem i'll buy a new fleet just keep fighting now artaxerxes is one of these kings who may have brokered the actual official maybe end of the war peace agreement in

449 but even that is argued about by historians who wonder if there ever was one and if the terms that have come down to us were real so who knows but artaxerxes is supposed to have died again we don't know how he died either but he's supposed to have had a good death just you know sort of in bed or natural or what have you then he's the one who has three of his sons sort of declare together that they're going to be king and that doesn't turn out well one of them will be killed supposedly drunkenly after 45 days of being proclaimed king

another one will manage a little longer until eventually he gets killed by again close relative these are all brothers the last brother will take the name darius or darius the second he'll rule from 423 bce to 404 bce he has one of the coolest wildest wickedest wives in the world she will be

Well, it depends on how you're looking at it. One of the top worst mother-in-laws of all time, or best, you know, from my standpoint, loving the story. She's one of the best. She and Alexander the Great's mom. You wouldn't want to have them as your mother-in-law, but gosh, the stories that come out of it are wonderful. Just so happens, of course, that just to make matters more Persian and interesting and fun and ancient, Darius II's wife was his sister.

Their kid is Artaxerxes II, who's famous because he has a civil war with his little brother, known as Cyrus the Younger. Cyrus the Younger, as these Persians all through this period do, hires a ton of Greek mercenaries to fight for him, one of whom is a guy named Xenophon, who happens to write and whose work has come down to us, so it's famous. Cyrus the Younger, led by his Greek mercenaries, triumphed at the Battle of Cunaxa,

well to a certain point as a matter of fact xenophon says that the persians run away before they even cross spears with his greeks who pursue them a long distance and it was all going to be one except cyrus the younger the rebel king they were fighting for manages to get himself killed in the battle and that pretty much ends that you can't really you know fight your brother for the throne if you don't survive the battle so the story that xenophon tells is famous in western literature

These Greek soldiers, between 10 and 13,000 of them, have to manage to get out of the Persian Empire all the way back to Greek-run territory and do so with a Persian army essentially chasing them and harassing them the whole way. The long story short of this whole thing is they manage it.

and this has all sorts of overtones including this idea of how vulnerable the persian empire must be if they can't wipe out 10 to 13 000 hoplites you know in their own territory unsupported and of course my favorite story in xenophon and i recount it all the time is the moment where he and his troops camp out near these giant ghost cities and he doesn't know who built them and they're bigger than anything that greece would have had at the time and he asked the locals and they don't know they think maybe the medes

And of course we all know that he's camping out near the ruins of the great Assyrian cities, maybe an Assyrian capital from two or three hundred years before. The Persians are the ones who inherited that old world and they ruled it for a while. And they made the transition from that black and white era to the fully colorized era of Xenophon. And we know he's in the fully colorized era because we're reading his stuff, aren't we? The Persians are the bridge. They sort of explain how he got from the very, very old world to

to merely the very old world when xenophon asks who built these cities that are disintegrating around him he's looking back to his ancient past and it seems to stun him as i've said there's got to be a very weird feeling when you look back on something that is clearly from a long time ago and in some way looks bigger or better than

than what you currently have we don't have that experience right when we look back at the past it looks primitive imagine coming from one of those time periods maybe you're living in fifth century europe somewhere and you look at things that were built at the height of the roman empire you sit there and go

How did they build that and how sophisticated must they have been? Remember, human civilizational progress has only been straight up for about the last 500 or so years since the Renaissance. Before that time, it was more like a stock market. And sometimes you had your high watermarks and sometimes you went down from your highs.

xenophones era is coming up to the highs of the very heights of the previous era it won't be long before they are building cities greater and grander than the one disintegrating around xenophon but when he looks at it he's looking at something that hasn't quite been replicated yet in the world he comes from it's got to be an interesting feeling wouldn't you think right there well if something that great and grand can fall it could happen to any of us and it will happen to xenophones people

And shortly afterwards, to the kings of Persia too. But once again, after we lose Xenophon in terms of, you know, his story about his retreat from Persia ends, we don't hear a whole lot about Artaxerxes II, but he rules for 46 years. Does that show you how the sources just kind of completely overshadow everything?

the reigns of these later kings how do you rule 46 years and there's not much that happens this one incident that happened over one year that one greek writer wrote about is huge the rest of the guy's reign practically unknown he's supposed to have had hundreds of wives hundreds of kids one of whom will become the next king in the year 425 bce and this king traditionally is sort of the one that takes an already bloody history of the persian royal family and takes it off into caligula ville

He's known as Artaxerxes III. There were a lot of people that could have gotten the job too, but one of the brothers had been murdered, another one committed suicide, another one was executed. And when Artaxerxes III comes to the throne, he's taking no chances and he starts killing most of the royal family.

and if you say something like well he killed his brothers that sounds terrible when you realize art of xerxes the third had more than 150 brothers probably you start you start to realize what wiping out the royal family might mean when the you know guy who sired you had 350 wives nonetheless art of xerxes the third comes to power at a time where greek warfare is changing

and once again it's very tempting to get down to the tactical level and say that there are little teeny tweaks on the battlefield that will end up involving themselves in contests the end result of which will change the course of history in this case the persians and the greeks over the last century or so have managed to weaken each other greatly the persians have funded athenians fighting spartans fighting thebans in any strange combination

And in the year 371, in a famous battle called Leuctra, the Thebans begin the process of demolishing Spartan military power. And within 10 years, they'll have another one of these battles that does it. And so many Spartans die. Sparta is never the same.

Many different innovations in Greek warfare were displayed in these battles, and it's often seen as a step towards a higher level of military sophistication for the Greek states, often tied to prolonged contact with sophisticated militaries like the Persians, right? It rubs off on you.

The Thebans especially are different in Greece because they are the one major Greek city-state that has always had cavalry and a good cavalry tradition. They come from cavalry country. And they use this cavalry in these battles against the Spartans, and they use it well.

They also incorporate some light troops. Interesting tactics, too, and something that's been growing in importance, especially amongst Thebans. The Thebans had always kind of liked to fight in greater depth than the hoplites from other Greek city-states, but they just go to maximizing that during the reign of their last couple of military leaders. And at the Battle of Leuctra, the Theban hoplites are fighting 50 ranks deep,

And they smash into a formation of Spartan hoplites that is lined up 12 ranks deep. Now, they had only recently gone to 12 ranks, too. It used to be less than that. So you run a formation of people, a block of men that's 50 ranks deep into one that's 12 ranks deep. What happens?

Not just that, but the Thebans, amongst other Greek city-states, have begun to have professional military units. Greek warfare was always such an amateurish affair and always was taught that way when I was younger. But it's now understood that a lot of these city-states now had totally professional units that were maybe like the tip of the spear for the rest of their army, which was still farmers and artisans and those kind of people. In the case of the Thebans, they had one called the Sacred Band.

300 professional soldiers maybe maybe homosexual lovers too that's always been thrown in there as something involved in the interesting you know greek city-state milieu nonetheless the spartans great advantage over the other greeks and the persians too all the time was that they were the only professional warriors in greece but not anymore

So some of the things that always made Spartans extra special are less unique by this time period. So you throw a force led by 300 professional Thebans, backed by a phalanx that's 50 shields deep, that instead of going after the weak part of the Spartan line, goes after the best Spartan troops and crushes, as the Theban general Epaminondas says, the head of the serpent, and you ruin Sparta.

There is somebody observing this military revolution in Greece. A hostage. A hostage from a country that for a long time was holding on by the skin of its teeth to survival and sometimes not even that. His name was Philip. He will be the greatest military leader and the most dangerous man that Europe produces up until his life is over. And he is learning...

how to fight in the new style by watching the Thebans do it while he's a hostage in Thebes. He will then go back to his own country and based on a lot of what he learned while observing Theban military innovations, build the most nasty military the world had ever seen. The army that Philip built was one that took all sorts of influences from Athens and Thebes and

and took Macedonia's natural strengths and combined them. Macedonia has great feudal cavalry, aristocratic cavalry. Think of them as knights, and maybe that's not too far wrong. The Greek sources portray the Macedonian infantry as being like a barbarian rabble before Philip. Philip turns them into the kind of soldiery he would have seen at Thebes, people who stood at

shoulder to shoulder carrying very long spears and philip lengthened them quite a bit so now they had the longest spears anywhere and he made their formation 16 ranks deep created an entirely new troop type and formation on the battlefield the phalangite

With this forming his battle line, he used the cavalry on the wings as a strike force. He incorporated archers and light troops with it to make it flexible. He drilled them relentlessly and he used them almost every year of his reign to fight somebody. He was an amazingly clever, treacherous, interesting, fantastic guy that the old histories always portray as a drunken barbarian who liked boys but liked women better.

a kind of Greek-ish Viking character, if you will. And by the time he's in his mid-40s, the physical effects of his lifestyle are apparent. He's lost an eye. He's broken collarbones. He maybe fractured his hands and they maybe didn't grow back right. That's not for sure.

and his leg is dragging behind him the result of either being speared behind the knee maybe or having it crushed by a barbarian club but philip's physicality on the battlefield

You know, was clearly represented in his body. The Macedonians had a sort of a Homeric kind of ethos that the southern Greeks had kind of outgrown by this time. They're they're more like Achilles and Homer's heroes. The ancient Greeks down south have become much more cultured and philosophical and religious.

In a sense, you know, if you want to get back to that idea of the silk slipper and the wooden shoes life cycle thing, now it's the Greeks who've been corrupted by softness and luxury, and the contact with the Persians all this time didn't help, and now the people with the wooden shoes are the ones who have some of the barbarian virtues of strength and ruthlessness, and, well, that's...

the macedonians maybe so from the old historian silk slipper syndrome approach the macedonians are just the next in line more of the modern histories portray philip as a much more cultured person you know i've often portrayed the dynamics of the macedonian royal family as akin to a mafia crime family but add a lot of alcohol and some homosexuality but you also have to add aristotle and people like that

Philip was absolutely committed, it seems, to upgrading the culture level of his court. And when Greek contemporaries met him, they talked about a person who was thoroughly Greek, a great speaker and charming and clever. And he's a fascinating individual. And, you know, it would be hard to imagine Macedonia going from nothing to great power without him at the Battle of Chaeronea.

He will defeat utterly an alliance of Thebans and Athenians to, as the old saying goes, end the independence of the Greek city-states. His son Alexander, leading the cavalry charge that destroys the Theban sacred band to a man. In one famous story, after one of these battles, Philip is portrayed as limping around the battlefield amongst the gore and corpses, drunkenly,

perhaps making fun of the nickname that they gave him down in the south the cultured silk slipper regions of greece now where they called him philip the barbarian you may ask where the spartans are during this time period now that philip has essentially conquered although he put greece into a league and made it look like we're all here because we want to be and i'm going to call it the warsaw pact i mean something like that but sparta was left out

And one of the best stories of the Spartans, and I may have mentioned this earlier, comes out of the note that supposedly Philip sends to the Spartans. And this, by the way, has been told multiple ways and translated a ton of different ways, but the general gist of it is, quote, You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army on your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city. End quote.

and the reply from sparta just said if well most historians i've read seem to think it wouldn't even be much of a contest between macedonia at this period in sparta sparta is way past her prime and macedonia has way more people and a larger economic base and everything but the macedonians kept their hands off sparta for what it's worth all this time it seems clear as philip consolidates greece

that he's planning on invading Persia. Philip has a wonderful siege train. He's great at taking cities. He's got good logistics. He's learned very well how to fight and keep armies in the field for long periods of time. He doesn't have a bunch of amateur farmers in his army. He has a professional military force that he can keep in the field. He's taken over gold mines. He's got tons of money. If Persia really was that rickety old house that

some Greeks at the time and some historians afterwards kind of portray it as, all of a sudden something comes along that can blow it down. By the year 336 BCE, Philip has established a bridgehead on Asian soil just over the Bosphorus, the Hellespont. He has an army of 10,000 men there under a Macedonian general. The stage is set. And then while walking into an arena,

along a column showing the greek gods including a statue of himself amongst them supposedly walking without his normal bodyguard to show as a propaganda tool supposedly this is all the tradition to the other greeks that he is a ruler of greece

You know, by consensus, he's a benevolent guy. He's not some heavy-handed tyrant that maintains his control by military force. I don't need bodyguards. I'm loved. And he walks out there alone, and you have to imagine one-eyed Philip with his terrible leg limping,

A garland around his head, supposedly a crowd cheering. Alexander the Great in attendance with his wonderful mother Olympias, who hates her husband supposedly. And someone from the bodyguard runs up to the king and slams a knife between his ribs. The assassination is like a Kennedy assassination in this time period. Who done it and why?

The assassin runs off to some waiting horses, but is killed by other members of the bodyguard before he can get there. Alexander the Great's mother, supposedly, there's a lot of slander that goes on in history, so take this with a grain of salt, puts...

emotional remembrances on the assassin's grave so people have always wondered about alexander because that's who gets the job next so if we go back to our game of clue from the earlier part of the story alexander's the guy who really benefits from this assassination but think about it so do the persians a little persian gold in the right pocket to get rid of an extraordinary man especially after that extraordinary man has just landed 10 000 men on your coastline

Who knows who killed Philip II, but if you're one of the higher-ups in Persia, you probably have to go give an extra-large sacrifice at the religious temple, because things just seem to have turned out your way. Alexander is supposed to have thought the Persians behind his father's murder, but if it was the case that they were, kind of looks like a good move if you're looking at this like you're playing some sort of a strategy game, right? If you're confronted with...

an extraordinary individual and they're causing you a ton of problems what's the easiest way to fix that problem maybe just get rid of the extraordinary individual how many times in history has that happened and not just amongst these warlord types who've made a lot of enemies and you'd expect them to have people willing to stick a knife in their ribs but even amongst people at the other end of the violence spectrum look at a martin luther king or gandhi both of whom were assassinated both extraordinary people and both

huge destabilizers they caused a lot of people a lot of problems and if you're an ordinary person sometimes dealing with extraordinary people is difficult but you can always get rid of them of course you're playing the odds aren't you when you do that the idea is how often do you get extraordinary individuals if i get rid of philip ii this extraordinary european certainly i will end up with someone not as good as he is and if the persians were behind the assassination it would only mirror

what persians saw happening in their own royal family i mean this was a period where assassinations always a possibility really took center stage the famous harem intrigues as we said i mean artaxerxes the third the contemporary of philip this guy we mentioned earlier was the one who supposedly took the royal family to caligula ville this real nasty ruler he's going to meet his end the same way philip does he's not going to be stabbed

he's famously going to be poisoned by one of the great poisoners of the ancient world now there are some cuneiform tablets that seem to suggest that artaxerxes the third may have died a natural death and lord knows he was supposedly in his mid-80s so that's not out of the question but the ancient sources place his death at the hands of his vizier his counselor maybe his general the greeks always call them eunuchs whether they were or were not castrated is unknown

This guy's name is Beguus, though, and he's famous. The king that he poisons, supposedly, is this one that we were talking about earlier that is vicious enough so you think of him almost like an Assyrian king rather than a more tolerant, lenient Persian king. But when you look at his accomplishments, he looks like...

the restorer of the persian empire i mean through a long and absolutely arduous career he is smashing revolts reconquering lost territory and however rickety it may be internally on paper by the time this guy dies he has restored persia to somewhat of its former luster at least if you look at a map it's a remarkable achievement this late in the game

It's like an athlete deciding they're going to compete in the Olympics like they did when they were 20, when they're 50, and they get into great shape and they look pretty good. They just, you know, hopefully it's not too hot. But the fun for me, if you're a fan of Persia as I am, is throughout this time period, you're setting up an encounter, an encounter between two extraordinary men, Philip II in Macedonia, about to lead the Greek invasion of Persia, probably, certainly after Persia.

artaxerxes the third dies but maybe even before and artaxerxes the third obviously competent as hell going to resist him for the heavyweight championship of the ancient world right who will win the representatives of the very very old world persia or the representatives of the merely very old world greece and then assassination removes both of these extraordinary men within two years of each other and the problem if you're looking at this as a giant championship match is

is that we get the stand-ins for both the people we just lost. In one corner, we have a guy named Darius III, a person that the poisoner, Begous, after killing a lot of other people and having a little two-year puppet king in the interim, puts on the throne. Maybe mediocre, maybe worse than mediocre in terms of replacement. In the other corner, replacing Philip II, Alexander the Great.

Now, this is a show about the Persian Empire, but Alexander the Great is the instrument of its death. There are some modern historians who like to think of Alexander as really the last king of Persia, but he's the guy who will eventually burn down the royal palace. To me, that's where it ends, and Alexander's the guy who will end it.

he's a historical arsonist in my book and that's a term i use for these people who come into history periodically and sort of burn down the dead wood of an old world so a new one can crop up it's a very simplistic historical approach but you see these people all throughout history alexander's the prototypical example it's almost like they do what they have to do you know they play their role on the on the historical world stage and then they die once their job is over

and alexander falls into one of two categories these historical arsonists seem to fall into there's the self-made men guys like jengis khan who create the instrument first and then go out and kill people with it that's what alexander the great's father philip was right he was sort of a historical arsonist in his own way especially if he'd been allowed to continue his career a self-made guy

alexander the great falls into the other category of historical arsonist similar to a guy like frederick the great where he's born and the father has sort of set the historical table for him built the instrument to go conquer the world with right created the weapon and then hands it to the son who doesn't have to spend years of his life creating the conditions for his greatness he can just go out and hit the ground running

It would be tempting to suggest that Alexander had it made and anybody would have been able to do what he did given what he inherited. But here is the thing. Think about the uniqueness to this guy. And first of all, understand he's probably the most propagandized figure in the ancient world, especially if you remove religious figures from the equation.

He is the Elvis Presley of ancient history. He's the king. There is so much stuff built around him. I mean, as one historian says, the jungle of Alexander myth out there, and it's been going forever. We have all the same problems with him that we have with the Persian sources, but add to that immense propagandizing and cult-like hero worship. There were even historians who suggest that Alexander's

Life story and the sources have been purged and culled and clipped over the years to maintain a sort of an image for all sorts of domestic purposes at the time, you know, a little Stalinist, a little North Korea like. The point is getting to the real guy here is next to impossible. There were at least 20 people.

contemporary accounts of alexander's stuff written including stuff from his generals all that stuff is gone warwick ball in an absolutely shattering sentence points out that the only actual contemporary thing that exists from alexander's time talking about alexander is a one sentence dedication on a temple everything else is derivative which is typical for ancient history but it does blow your mind when you think of how much stuff there was at one time

nonetheless there are a few things you can say about this guy that are mind-blowing right away he's not just the son of the most interesting man in european history probably up until this point certainly the most powerful geopolitical figure he's also the son of the most interesting female his mother's fascinating and once again like all women in ancient history she gets a combination of rooked

and propagandized so who knows the truth about this woman the rumors are she's a melossian witch who sleeps with snakes and is an acolyte of dionysus the god of wine she comes from a people that the macedonians who the greeks think are barbarians the macedonians think these people are barbarians she's a melossian

The Melossians were a powerful tribe that lived in the wilds of the ancient kingdom of Epirus, which is located south of the modern-day country of Albania, for what it's worth. What you can say about her, though, is this is a woman who was so formidable that the greatest figure in European geopolitical history, Philip II, could not handle her. Not only that, apparently he couldn't just kill her either.

She also proved after Philip was gone that Philip's generals and Alexander's generals after Alexander couldn't deal with her either. She continually outmaneuvered them, murdered them, killed people that got in her way. I mean, protected the interests of her son. She was...

formidable as hell and that's alexander's mother think of the dna in this guy so makes one part greatest man in european geopolitical history with one part most impressive female in european history the melossian witch and snake loving follower of dionysus have that dna diamond polished by the greatest tutors of the age including aristotle set the template design for the guy's life

As one cribbed from Homer and the Iliad, Aristotle supposedly annotated a copy for Alexander who slept with it under his pillow while on campaign. Teach him that he is the descendant of legendary gods and heroes on both sides of his family, Achilles on his mom's side, Heracles and Zeus on his dad's, and then hand him the keys to the ancient world's equivalent of the 1940s German Wehrmacht.

And he's 20 years old. I have to keep reminding myself of that. And even though the world has changed a lot and 20 years old then might have been the new 30, if you will, you're still 20 years old. I know guys who are afraid of giving their 20-year-old sons the keys to the sports car because of what they might do. Alexander has the most dangerous military in the world gassed up and ready to go.

earlier in this story we said that from the greek point of view when darius the great and xerxes are invading greece that they play the role of darth vader to the greeks but from the persian point of view this story darth vader is played by alexander the great or as warwick ball suggests the iranian people's thought of him the demon king there are a

When Alexander the Great takes over from his father, a bunch of Greek city-states decide it's a good time to rebel. After all, what are the odds this 20-year-old kid is going to be able to do to us what his extraordinary father did? The answer turned out to be pretty darn good. Alexander spends the initial part of his reign, the first year and a half, two years or what have you,

proving to people that he is a chip off the old block and he can use this army as well as the old man could and in addition to pounding a bunch of barbarian tribes that decide to get uppity on his borders he destroys thebes and it is so brutal i've read several historians to say what alexander did to thebes was worse than anything the persians did to greek cities when they were occupying greece 150 plus years before but it sends the message and greece is once again cowed

And as we said earlier, you know, they're a little like the Warsaw Pact in this deal. They get to go fight this war against Persia and they get to provide troops whether or not they want to. And there's a lot of doubt as to how excited these Greek forces that will accompany Alexander on his crusade are. I've read a couple of historians. I think they might have been

little more than glorified hostages to keep their people down on the farm while alexander and the main army are gone you know don't rebel against me i have 15 000 of your citizens with me something like that in 334 bce alexander crosses from europe to asia it's a big deal at the time he brings we're told historians and geographers and all kinds of people with him

people to chronicle you know his events a modern press corps and propaganda corps is the way it's often portrayed and then it's screwed up the sources ever since i mean it's hard enough to divine fact from fiction and history without having people that are deliberately trying to pull the wool over your eyes for in a short-term military effect but alexander's propaganda was fantastic problem is you can't tell when you're reading something that's propaganda and something that's true just like all this other source trouble we have alexander is supposed to have

from the water as he crossed from Europe to Asia that short little span of liquid thrown a spear off of his boat landing on the beach claiming all of Asia by right of conquest historian Pierre Briant says that this is a novel position for the Persian leadership to find themselves in because while Persia had had all sorts of revolts over its history and certainly tribal barbarian incursions all over the place

and trouble along the frontier and military breakaway situations and interference from foreign powers they had never had anyone that had both the stated intention of taking over the whole thing toppling the government and just assuming control and also the means to make that a reality until they run into alexander now

What Alexander's attempting to do here is much more than an ancient battle. He's launching a full-scale ancient war. An ancient war is involved two things. One is field battles, usually. Those are the big battles where everything can be decided in an afternoon. It is between the field battles that the dirty, grimy, day-to-day horror of the ongoing, like slow-moving lava...

of a campaign goes taking walled cities for example is famously slow and grinding so there will be field battles along with a bunch of grinding attritional siege type horror all in between alexander's first field battle will happen when he is confronted soon after crossing over into asia by the local persian forces

One of our main sources for these events says that the king of Persia had been given conflicting advice by different counselors on what to do about this Alexander problem on their frontier. There was a famous Greek general working for the king, a guy named Memnon of Rhodes, and supposedly Memnon, recognizing that this was the ancient world's equivalent of the 1940s German Wehrmacht, told the king, stay away from that. Don't engage that.

burn the crops destroy everything starve that army after all there are a lot of historians who think that supply problems may have doomed the persian invasion of greece 150 years ago turn about his fair play cut off that army and make it straggle home in defeat and this time the people from europe can be like napoleon soldiers straggling home from russia

As you might imagine, though, the governors, the satraps of those places whose farms and everything would have had to have been burned, were not enthused by that idea. Cast aspersions on Memnon's Greek heritage, maybe suggesting that he was working for the other side, maybe sympathy-wise. Questioned his manhood, sort of, and basically said, you know, we don't run from people. We're the Persian Empire. And so the local forces show up to confront Memnon.

force and here's the thing at this point for the for the persians this is not that unusual a deal they have been dealing with problems caused by those greekish peoples for almost 200 years this is the fringes of their empire heck they even lose battles to these people it happens it's not life or death whatever happens here as the sources continually point out alexander gets no luxuries here he cannot lose one battle he's in a situation where if he loses he goes home

the persians on the other hand are on their home they can afford to lose some especially this first one which is sort of a throwaway battle to them they lose no big deal it was just the local forces if they win you know macedonian problem solved without the king even having to show up wonderful right you take that gamble every day of the week i think now something happens in the story at this point that is noticeable

And that is that all of a sudden, the color that has been missing since our screenwriter Herodotus left the scene returns in glorious technicolor. And it looks like a 1950s Hollywood sword and sandals movie. It's jam-packed with action. It's wonderful stuff. It's worth asking, though, how we know any of it 2,300 years later. Well, we're using as a source another one of these ancient Greek writers,

who was writing in the roman empire 400 years later and so you're tempted to say why pay attention to any of this stuff it's just coming out of this guy's mind we had pointed out earlier that all the contemporary accounts from alexander's time period and because these were huge events a lot of people wrote about them you know my time with alex you know 10 000 weeks on the bestseller list but those things are gone now so we don't have any of those

But Roman-era writers like Arian, the Greek writer whose account is the best account of Alexander's military campaigns, he did have access to that stuff.

He says he wrote from three main sources. The number one source was one of Alexander's best friends, one of his companions, one of his seven important bodyguards, a guy who was so close to him he may have been a half-brother. And after Alexander's life was over, this guy tore off a chunk of his empire and started a dynasty centered in Egypt that ruled for 300 years. Not a bad primary source, right? Even if you're getting it second-hand.

also one of alexander's admirals and one of his combat engineers and arian basically says he took almost a scientific approach to it and compared the sources to each other it's about the best you're going to get right so arian's the main guy arian says that at the granicus river alexander's forces ran into the persian defenders and that they numbered about 20 000 cavalry and about 20 000 infantry modern historians think those numbers are high

but alexander's numbers are pretty darn well close so for the first time in a long time maybe we have reasonable numbers for at least one side alexander's force is supposed to have had between 30 and 35 000 infantrymen and about 5 000 maybe a little more than 5 000 cavalrymen so even having one number to fill in for a letter in the algebraic historical equation helps all these battles that are coming up in this campaign are argued about endlessly

the exact locations are not even known so take everything with a grain of salt the one thing you can say though is that what's about to happen here it's easy to see how this all contributes to the myth of alexander and one wonders although i haven't heard anybody say this wasn't true if any of this was true it's theoretically possible that this is all made up about alexander that he wanted to be portrayed in homeric terms and so you know he's superman in all the sources

Seems very unlikely, though. He seems more on the other end of the spectrum, which is somebody who really enjoyed this. Somebody who would have considered it a bad thing to have for any reason missed out on the killing. He wasn't just leading his men because it was his duty. If any of this stuff is true about Alexander, he got a kick out of it. And the stuff he did is frightful.

And I don't mean in a sense of giving frightful orders like go kill all those civilians from that city we just captured. I mean, on a personal level, what he did was frightful. And you can't judge these people in modern cultural terms because everybody around him was doing similar frightful things. That's how you fought, right?

What's more, the society was built on encouraging the carrots and sticks that made such activities cast in a light of heroism or warriorhood or defending your people or what have you. In other words, it was completely supported by the culture. Alexander was increasing his glory, fame, honor, and all those other things,

You know, with all these killings and having them recorded in Homeric terms was the sort of stuff he wanted to read about himself because it was the sort of stuff he read about his own heroes. Go read the Iliad. It's frightful. When you read the accounts Arian provides of Alexander's conduct in hand-to-hand combat at the Battle of the Granicus, it sounds very similar.

And once again, I have to say I'm fascinated and everybody is totally confused about how ancient combat worked. And when you read the sources, it's so hard to get past, you know, are these literary devices where they have people talking to each other in combat or were there ways that could actually happen in the din of battle? Arian's account of Alexander fighting at the Granicus has that kind of stuff going on.

in addition as we said earlier in ancient warfare the officers and the commanders are very important and they're right there in harm's way in the larger battles the commanders might themselves be the head of state what happens if you take them out alexander is the head of state at this battle and he will be fighting in the front ranks and according to arian

the persians mass a bunch of troops together and just sort of from their side of the battlefield follow alexander as he moves in his bright magnificent armor and with the trappings you could always tell where these people were because they wanted their own troops to know and there's essentially a unit of persian cavalry following alexander across the battlefield from the other side waiting for him to make his move and their job is going to be to take him out he's the head of the snake as far as they're concerned he's darth vader

he's darth vader and the death star and the emperor all rolled into one kill him and maybe everybody goes home alexander's response to that according to arian and pretty much everyone else you've ever heard from is to charge into the thick of the mess we had mentioned earlier when we were talking about the persian army from 150 years ago that it would change over time and wouldn't you expect there to be some evolution

One of the criticisms historians a long time ago and all the way up to the time when I was a kid were making about the Persians were here they got beat in all these battles against the Greeks and they didn't really even change in any appreciably positive way. But modern historians said, yes, they did. And it was right under your nose as you're always talking about things like scythe chariots and all these other things. Well, what do you think those are?

their attempts to come to grips with their weakness and the Greeks' advantage. In this case, how do you break up those formations of heavy infantry that fight shoulder to shoulder with those long spears? They are a pain. The Persians hired a lot of those Greek mercenary hoplites to fill the gap for them. There's 10,000 to 20,000 of them at this battle. They also tried to figure out stratagems and ways to break up that Greek formation because once those spearmen were no longer huddled shoulder to shoulder, they were vulnerable as heck.

that's why this is called the battle of the river granicus because the persian forces were on the other side of a river and on the far side of the river was a steep bank and on top of that awaited a very long line of persian cavalry we're told

the thought process seems to be and it seems pretty sound you know from where we're looking at it that you're going to have to cross if you are the macedonian foot soldiers that give the persians historically such a hard time a body of water not that deep but you cross this body of water and you scramble up to the other side there's no way you're still maintaining your shoulder-to-shoulder cohesion anymore

and you have cavalry awaiting you at the top of the rise to charge down on you that sounds like a pretty good plan if you're looking at it from the persian point of view for some reason they seem to have stationed their infantry too far back to take any part in the battle i read somewhere i think it was like a mile back i mean it's a it's a big distance nonetheless looks like a pretty good plan on paper if we're reading it correctly

now the other thing that has changed over 150 years apparently this is all very debated but but it's it's starting to become apparent that cavalry has changed in 150 years since the earlier greek war with the persians back then if you recall the persians used to attack with missile weapons by squadron and sort of try to wear you down and they would attack you in hand-to-hand combat if you were light troops and scattered or if you ran and were scattered but they weren't going to slam into your formation probably

150 years later that's exactly what alexander's crack heavy cavalry does and that's what the heavy cavalry units on the persian side do too if you study cavalry evolution there's a long train of thought going back to the idea that this all started in central asia with all those horse tribes that were always innovating and spread by the time alexander is attacking the persian empire it has spread indeed and there is melee cavalry on both sides

And unlike the Greek wars of 150 years ago, where the Persian cavalry really had no counterparts on the other side, here, Persian and Macedonian cavalry often face off against each other. Often these battles are going to involve infantry in the center. That's where Alexander always placed his phalanx, this giant block of human beings that took up the main battle line, and then cavalry on the wings where it could do something. It's often opposed by Persian cavalry on the other side. And a lot of these battles...

involve the persian and macedonian cavalry fighting it out in almost knightly fashion and that's what happens with alexander the front of this infantry starts to advance toward the persians alexander gets a sort of a faint underway where he's able to get the persians to move in a different direction then he slams into them in a cavalry battle in shoes where he almost dies

here's the way historian j.e linden i thought he did a wonderful job synthesizing the aryan here's the way from the aryan he describes what it's like for alexander the great the head of state and darth vader in the persians eyes in this battle he sounds like the guy who he thinks is his ancestor achilles doesn't he quote

Alexander led his Macedonian cavalry through the riverbed and directly at the position of the satraps and the Persian grandees on the other side. When the two lines struck, Alexander broke his lance in the fighting. He cried to a groom for another, but the groom's own lance was broken and he was defending himself bravely with the broken stump.

"'Ask somebody else!' he shouted. When another of his retinue finally surrendered his lance to the king, Alexander spied Mithridates, a son-in-law of Darius the Great King, advancing. Riding out from his guard, the Macedonian drove his lance straight through the Persian's face, flinging him to the ground.'

Now, Rosakis, another Persian, brother of the satrap of Lydia, struck Alexander on the head with a sword. The blow wrecked the king's helmet, yet the helmet saved the king.

Clearing Mithridates' gore off his lance, Alexander took Rosaches in the chest, piercing his cuirass and hurling him to the ground as well. From the melee behind the king, the satrap Spithridates swung back to deliver a great blow to avenge his fallen brother. But Alexander's companion Cletus was there first with his own sword, and clove off at the shoulder the arm upraised to fell the king.

It was from this point in the fighting, this cascade of arterial blood, that panic began to spread among the Persians until it carried them fleeing from the field. End quote.

That's a famous story in Alexander's life. As he's in the midst of the fighting, a Persian from behind is about to strike him, maybe take his head off. And as his arm is upraised to bring the blow down on Alexander's head, his friend Cletus shears off the Persian's arm, you know, weapon in hand. Think about all that's going on in the midst of that, though. How much of that is a good story and how much of it's really what happened? It's hard to know.

well it's hard to know and it's also hard to know if things really went that way some historians believe that there may have been a reverse initially at this battle but that alexander's propaganda which could not afford any suggestions of reverses you know covered up but nonetheless one way or another it seems that at some point alexander's forces drive the persian cavalry off and

the greek hoplite infantry and the rest of the infantry was too far away to impact in the battle alexander ends up butchering a bunch of them and then selling the rest of slaves and the battle of the granicus is over but remember this was something that involved local forces on the scene once the persians see this now it's time to get serious we're going to call in a royal army and that's a pain in the rear remember the persians treated their empire a little like a company with subcontractors and

Their army had a royal corps, sort of, that they could bring to a mustering spot, and then they would call from whatever districts they needed forces from, in this case, most of them, to come and bring troops to the same location, you know, bring your local forces, and we'll pull them all together, and then we'll have this huge force to deal with Alexander.

so the call comes out and the persian king is going to take the field himself and meanwhile alexander goes and does the stuff that you do you know between field battles he takes the submission of local people you know in the area that are saying i always hated the king i'm glad you're here and i'm going to be your friend and can i stay in charge of this region i've always run i'm really good at it i've got it down to a science so there's a lot of that and there's also the people who resist and hide behind the walls and alexander has to break those places down and he's not nice usually when he does

Alexander comes up with a novel strategy to sort of eliminate the threat from the Persian fleet he doesn't have a fleet that can fight the Persian fleet so he just goes around and starts taking all the cities along the coastline so that there won't be any place for the fleet to you know seek a port I mean he just takes all the ports not a bad strategy either

meanwhile while alexander's consolidating his conquest and running his port strategy the persians are funneling money to all the states in greece that want to break away from macedonia ironically a bunch of them places that 150 years ago were fighting for their lives and freedom against these very persians and while all this is going on the king of kings in persia is mustering the royal army which which must have taken a long time

it's a vast empire just getting from one place to another with a lot of troops is not easy so they mustered them i believe it was in babylon and then they head up towards modern day turkey in the fall of 333 bce to give you an idea of how rare this is although i think they had fought some major battles in egypt not that long ago historian pierre briant says that the people in that part of the persian empire in turkey had not seen a royal army in 150 years since xerxes's time

So the Persians don't often have to bring out the big guns. The fact that the king is there with the army now is a sign that they're taking Alexander the Great seriously. Our ancient Greek writer Arian says the Persian king is leading 600,000 men through Syria and up toward Turkey to confront Alexander. That's pretty darn serious. It's also pretty darn incredible.

As always with the Persian numbers, historians know they're incredible. They just can't agree on what is credible. Alexander's probably got about 40,000 guys with him. The low numbers you hear for the Persians are equal to Alexander. Most often, though, the numbers you get for the Persians are twice as large or two and a half times as large. Generally, it's thought that Alexander is significantly outnumbered in this battle, and that's not hard to believe considering that you are in the Persian heartland.

But I always have to remind myself, and again, this is the value of a historian from 100 years ago like Hans Delbruck from Germany, but Delbruck reminds us and uses historical examples to point out that just because you have a lot of people in a place doesn't mean those people are soldiers.

And we always have this concept that every human being out there is a potential person you could throw into the ranks. And as Delbrook points out, no, in these societies, you have people who are warriors and people who make pottery and things like that or farm. And sometimes they can be militias. But he points out if the Persian army were a lot smaller than you thought an empire that size should produce, there are historical analogies all over the place for why that might be.

nonetheless however large this army is that the persian king of kings is leading personally it somehow manages to get behind alexander the great's army cuts off his line of retreat blocks his supply

And, you know, if you believe the historians, Arthur Farrell says Alexander must have been shocked to find this out. How did that happen? And historians, you know, argue over whether or not this was deliberate and a master stroke by the Persian generals or was it sort of an accident and they kind of found themselves. Oh, guess what? I'm on Alexander's supply line.

this fact though is why if you look at the battle that's about to happen it looks like the map needs to be turned upside down the armies appear to be on the wrong side but that's because the positions got reversed and that's why alexander's coming north and the persians are going south and they meet in this coastal plain so you have the ocean on one side one flank is guarded by the sea and you have the mountains two maybe two and a half miles in the other direction so you've got this coastal plain that turns out to be your battlefield

there will be critiques from the ancients about the persian decision to fight at this spot because they will say that at two miles or maybe a little bit longer it's not a wide enough plane for the persians to really take advantage of their superior numbers they're constrained they were hemmed in by the hills on one side and the sea on the other but remember these are the same people that thought there were 600 000 persians there maybe so maybe a little distorted view of how it really was

for me though when you look at what's about to happen you're seeing in my opinion but a lot of people feel this way alexander's real acid test the first time maybe you could make a good case that he's not living off his dad's fumes and that everything he'd done so far

was something that a lot of people probably could have done having been handed what alexander was handed i mean my goodness you could have had a puppet king with those generals of phillips you know his dads if they didn't kill you they're murderous wild guys i mean you know you wouldn't survive in that setting what do we call it a mafia crime family type dynamic nonetheless um you know those guys could have run this whole thing probably on autopilot this to me

is a battle where you see alexander stand out as something really special and there are people who will say that even after this battle it still could have been autopilot that's how good this army was and that's how good the command structure was i mean it's really it's really quite a step up and yet in this battle as the duke of wellington supposedly said a

about waterloo this battle is going to be a near-run thing which you don't normally associate with alexander who's got this sort of godlike quality in part something fanned maybe by his own publicists and media staff where you don't even think he comes close to losing but in this battle it's a near-run thing

both sides will line up on opposite sides of a small stream and the stream gives you a little cover to deploy because you know one of the little known fun parts about ancient battle really even up to napoleonic times and later is that it takes a long time to deploy think about how many people you're talking about and they all have to be in specific positions so both sides take hours at this

And in a place like ancient Greece, in a lot of cultures, actually, they had all these sort of cultural gentleman's agreements, I guess you could call them, where we'd say things like, nobody attacks anybody else until everybody's ready, right? And then we'll say go and we go at it. Vikings did that. Ancient Greeks did that. But when you're fighting cross-culturally, all those gentleman's agreements go out the window. So both sides are on opposite sides of this stream. They're all using light infantry and cavalry to keep the other side from messing with them too much while they get their soldiers in just the right spots.

We're told there's last minute moves of units from one side to the other and countering this and countering that. And basically, the Persians line up a whole bunch of cavalry on their right flank and their plan, according to, you know, this is argued about, too. But Arthur Farrell, he's a good military historian to follow. And he goes with a general agreement that the Persians are trying to do a hammer and anvil tactic. And so is Alexander. They're just doing it on opposite sides of the battlefield.

So Alexander's going to lead a charge on his right flank and try to crush the Persian left flank and then sweep around and go attack the Persian middle from behind. And the Persians are going to try to do the exact same thing on the opposite side of the battlefield where they've masked almost all their cavalry. Now, I can't help but think that's

how much of a morale boost it has to be to your average persian soldier there you may be facing this demon king guy this darth vader character but all you have to do is look down your own battle line and 100 200 300 yards down the line you see the sacred chariot of persia's king of kings drawn by the sacred white horses and surrounded by the royal guard

Now this guy is not quite a god king like a pharaoh or something, but he's about one tiny half step below that. You have to feel pretty confident if you're on the Persian side and you look and the king of kings is right there.

you know we said earlier alexander the great is macedonia's head of state fighting in hand-to-hand combat in these battles this is the first time that the head of state from macedonia faces on the opposite side of the battlefield 100 200 yards away at the start the head of state of the empire he's trying to take down

And I love that. I mean, that reminds me of that video when I was a kid. Genesis did one where during the Cold War, they had Ronald Reagan and the head of the Soviet Union fighting hand to hand in a cage or in the mud or something.

I tried to come up with like a modern analogy and they're all so ridiculous, but they're still fun. I mean, imagine the second world war where you're fighting this way. And on one side of the battlefield is Winston Churchill and the British forces. And they look across no man's land, a hundred, 200 yards across the field. And they are surrounded by, you know, maybe the mounted SS lifeguard is Adolf Hitler. And you can see them on the other side. And again,

depending on you know how you conduct yourselves if you want to you can go get them this is once again where alexander looks very homeric in the sense that he almost it comes through on the sources he wants to make this personal and i'm not sure the king of persia does not wanting to weigh in on the controversy of all the arguments over how these battles may have gone i'll let arthur farrell the military historian i'll let him do it

After saying that the Persians were using a hammer and anvil strategy, he goes on to say that Alexander is too. He says, quote, Ironically, Alexander's plan was essentially the same as his opponents. And we can see clearly in this battle how the traditions of ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Macedonian warfare had been fused.

Alexander hoped to break through Darius's left center in a cavalry charge and to wheel around against the rear of the Persian center in an identical hammer and anvil operation. As Alexander neared the Persian position, he forced his army to advance at a slow pace, just as the Persians had done against Cyrus at Cunaxa. Finally, when the Macedonians were well within bow shot, probably at about a distance of a hundred yards...

Alexander ordered an attack on the double. With contingents of cavalry on his right, supported by infantry close behind, he charged the river at a gallop. Persian skirmishers in front of their line probably fell back in panic, creating confusion in the main infantry line on the Persian left center, and Alexander smashed through."

this battle is often portrayed as sort of a race against time because alexander is blowing away the opponents that he and his cavalry are facing in front of them the problem is he's having problems in all the other sectors of the battlefield in the center he's having problems against the greek mercenaries hired by the persians and his left flank is in real trouble because that's where the persian version

of the hammer and anvil tactics are hammering they put all their cavalry on their right flank and now the poor macedonian cavalry really greek and the saline cavalry on their left flank is trying to hold their own without collapsing so alexander has to manage to finish this battle from the you know distant position he has on one flank before his center and his left flank collapses

the sources say alexander in keeping with the original plan swings his cavalry to his left and begins attacking the rear of the persian line but is he going to be able to win the battle there before his own army collapses and then traditionally we're told he spots the alternative one way to destroy an ancient army is to destroy the ancient army another way to destroy the ancient army is simply to kill the commander

Doesn't always work, of course, but if the commander's the head of state and a near god-king, chances are better than normal. Traditionally, Alexander spies his counterpart not that far away and in true Homeric fashion makes right for him with a few hundred of his closest companions. Historian Peter Green picks up the narrative, quote,

The moment he located the great King's chariot, Alexander charged straight for it. And every Macedonian warrior that day shared his ambition. The defense was equally heroic. Darius certainly knew how to command loyalty among the Iranian barons. Oh,

Osothres, his brother, leading the royal household cavalry, fought desperately to protect him. Dying men and horses lay piled in wild confusion. Alexander received a wound in the thigh from Darius himself, or so it was claimed. If this is true, it shows how close he came to attaining his objective.

The horses of Darius's chariot, covered with wounds and terrified by the corpses lying all about them, plunged and reared, half-bizerk. For a moment there was a real danger that they might carry the great king headlong through Alexander's lines. Darius, abandoning royal protocol in this emergency, grabbed the reins with his own hands. A second, lighter chariot was somehow found and brought up. Darius, seeing himself in imminent danger of capture, scrambled into it, and

and fled the field end quote the king of kings of persia got in his chariot and in front of all these men whose morale was so heartened by the fact their near god king was there with them sharing the risks and not afraid of the demon king this darth vader that guy was running away as fast as he could go

Kind of makes you think that all of the wondrous effect, the magic power of having the god-king near god-king there, just sort of boomerangs at a time like this, doesn't it? Would have been better had the king not even been there at all than to see him turn tail and flee his army, which had been fighting pretty darn well, maybe winning the center, certainly winning, you know, the Persian right flank against the Macedonians, other cavalry wing,

it disintegrates not an unusual thing in an ancient battle by the way as we told you officers are important generals are really important if your general is your head of state as well

Well, if they run away or die, it's not unusual for the army to sort of melt away. In this case, we're told, you know, again, if you buy the ancient numbers, hundreds of thousands of people begin a choking, panicked retreat where the bodies become so thick, Alexander supposedly, in pursuit of the Persian king of kings, can cross rivers on the piles of corpses.

Nonetheless, that's one of the key battles in ancient history, because no matter what happens next, this is not a fluke anymore. Alexander is in the process of toppling the Persian Empire, and the mood, historically speaking, seems to change. Now we start getting correspondence, we're told, between the king of kings of Persia and this Macedonian warlord, who all of a sudden controls a nice chunk of what was, up until a few months ago, the Persian Empire.

Very different tone between these two men now. What's more, some of Alexander's generals, people he inherited from his father, are starting to think that what they've conquered to this point looks pretty good. And maybe you might want to walk away from the gambling table at Las Vegas at this point with what you've won rather than gamble anymore, you know, and overreach. But they're not Alexander, and he is a fact-teller.

he continually likes to point out to them. Traditionally, it's at this point in the story where the Persians begin to offer Alexander deals. He's supposed to get letters or envoys, the ancient sources say, from the Persian king, basically offering him territory and other things in exchange for deciding you've had enough.

I think a little piece inside me died when I read Pierre Briand's very modern history, and he suggested that all these traditional accounts, which all the historians I grew up reading took as gospel,

are almost certainly nothing but macedonian propaganda from the time period as i said earlier you know it's hard enough to try to figure out what's going on with the normal source problems you add the macedonian propaganda and it's very confusing and unfortunately for us some of the best stuff then is stuff that briand would have us believe is a direct fabrication for more real world purposes nonetheless you know you can actually tell quite a bit about other things by the propaganda

And in this case, you know, what we're used to and, you know, I still wish is actually like the official, you know, from the desk of Alexander the Great type communication between Alexander and Darius is instead a piece of propaganda where the Macedonians are trying to give you a feel for a certain relationship. And the relationship is this new one, at least in the eyes of King Alexander, as he calls himself in this propagandistic note. And the king of kings of the ancient and grand Persian empire, who he refers to merely as Darius,

darius this is from arian who remember supposedly had a source who was there with alexander and who describes a response to an official note he's supposed to have gotten remember again maybe all propaganda from the king of kings of persia saying you know give me back my family which alexander seized as booty after isis they were there what are you doing bringing your family to the battlefield but the king of kings did and alexander snatched them up

so he wants his family back and he's going to make a deal and he proposes a deal to alexander who says you want your family back you want your wife back your kids back arian has the rest of the note back to darius saying quote come to me therefore as you would come to the lord of the continent of asia should you fear to suffer any indignity at my hands then send some of your friends and i will give them the proper guarantees

Come then, and ask me for your mother, your wife, and your children, and anything else that you please, for you shall have them, and whatever besides you can persuade me to give you. And in future, let any communication you wish to make with me be addressed to the King of all Asia. Do

End quote.

oh how can you not want that to be true right there's another correspondence that's supposed to have happened right before the big climactic battle we're leading up to where another deal is supposed to be offered to alexander one that basically gives them you know everything beyond their wildest dreams if they'll just call the war off at that point and alexander's general parmenio who's a leftover from his more conservative dad is supposed to have said that's a

and then this great legendary mythical figure alexander is supposed to have replied i would take it too if i were parmenio boom right i dropped the mic moment right there but the minute you start getting correspondence like this you know any king would know you got to go get another army and so while alexander deals with a bunch of sieges including a terrible one at a phoenician city called tyre

the king of persia puts together an army mostly based around peoples from his eastern territories and he's got wild nasty warrior people most of them mounted most of them archers many of them armored from his eastern territories he's putting all that together and then in 331 bce we're told alexander's sort of making towards babylon that's something the persians can't have happen because that's the financial capital i mean it's got all sorts of importance

so the persian king takes this new army of his which is supposed to be extremely numerous and extremely cavalry heavy finds a spot that alexander is going to go through although there's some tense moments as to where alexander is actually going to go but eventually they find this battlefield we're told that the king actually levels this battlefield to make sure all the little pieces of brush are cleared away so it's a nice flat place where all of his troops can really operate well and

you know in a sort of a wonderfully ironic sort of bookend to this whole piece here's this climactic battle where the representatives what have we said of the very very old world of ancient assyria and the glory of ancient mesopotamia take on the newcomers here the guy who's going to murder that old world and where does it happen right near the ruins of the glorious assyrian capital of nineveh

where xenophon you know saw his ghost city that we talked about the statue of liberty you know half submerged in the surf moment seems a perfect spot to decide who's going to take all the marbles here we're told that the persian army and the hellenic league which is alexander and the greeks and the macedonians that they camp

between four and seven miles from each other in the traditional story which is part of the fun is that alexander had his troops eat and sleep well and the persians were so afraid of a night attack that they kept their people at battle stations all night so that by the time the battle happens they're all tired the ancient sources say alexander intercepts letters from the persians to his own troops

inciting them to try to assassinate alexander so as we said earlier if you're confronted with these disruptive extraordinary people you know what do you do to level the playing field well maybe you just kill them so maybe they were out to do that or maybe that's more macedonian propaganda it's on the first day of october 331 bce traditionally that these armies deploy against each other the persian army is huge of course

You would expect nothing less from the ancient sources, but this time they've outdone themselves. Arian, who, remember, supposedly has a direct line to a guy who was there and would have known, says the Persians had a million infantry lined up on this field. A million. And 40,000 cavalry. Hans Delbruck, a hundred years ago, wrote, if you had 12,000 cavalry there, they would be impossible to manage. Nonetheless, once again, we have no idea what the real numbers are. Alexander...

is supposed to have had 47 000 men that's a pretty specific number 7 000 of those cavalry it's probably safe to assume he was out number two three to one maybe the sources say that the persian army is so numerous that its battle line is much much longer than alexander's and overlaps it by a huge amount and stretches off into the distance it may have been almost three miles long

and so alexander to account for this just sort of plans for having people available to deal with being surrounded if that happens he angles both his flanks sort of backwards so that if somebody does attack from the side they're actually facing in the right direction he stations some troops behind the main battle line with orders to go get anybody that gets around us and then otherwise he sets up in pretty much standard macedonian

template style he and the companion cavalry on the right flank to act as the lightning bolt hammer

poor parmenio and the rest of the cavalry on the left flank with orders to hold off the enemy attack until alexander can win the whole thing and then the anvil this giant mass of human beings in the middle 16 ranks deep maybe an 18 foot pike and stretching themselves you know over a distance of like a half mile or more i mean it's crazy to think about what a wonderful platform of maneuver that is

How do you deal with that if you're the Persians? Isn't this the common standard problem they've had all along against this heavy Greek Macedonian style infantry? Well, remember at the Battle of the Granicus, they use terrain features, the river and the high bank to break up the cohesion of these troops. But on this flat plain, you kind of have to bring your own causes of disorder.

and the persians in contrast to what historians when i was growing up used to say that they didn't learn anything and they could never do any better than hire greeks to fight greeks they did have things to break up the greek formations and they brought them to this battle where they were needed the first of these things that's fascinating from a historical standpoint because it's probably the first time greeks ever saw this ever and must have been the number one talked about item as these macedonian soldiers looked across the battlefield and saw for the first time

elephants indian elephants traditionally about 15 of them that must have been something to talk to your neighbor about in the ranks as you waited to come into contact and later evidence would show that elephants are a wonderful tool against a macedonian army because they're good against both the hammer and the anvil elements against the charging heavy cavalry elephants are fantastic cavalry usually won't come near them

if they ever do get caught by the elephants it's awful for the cavalry but against the densely packed phalanx they could be murderous you would think they would be easy to kill but later evidence shows not so easy and you get four or five of those things stomping around an intentionally created crowd of people standing shoulder to shoulder and it could be very ugly indeed if you follow up with formed troops to take advantage of that carnage that's not a bad strategy

But while breaking up these close order troops is definitely a part of the Persian strategy, it doesn't look like the elephants were what they were relying upon to do it. Instead they have something right out of like a Mad Max film or one of those 1950s Ben-Hur movies. They have scythed chariots and they have like 200 of them stationed all along their front lines.

I've always thought this was an interesting weapon, but nobody knows what they looked like. Everybody tries to recreate a visual image of it from the literary sources, and everyone's take is a little different. If you imagine some combination of heavy chariot with cutting blades, you're starting to get there, though.

An image I usually run into has the equivalent of about three foot long swords, one each sticking out from the end of the wheels of the chariot and then either something projecting forward from the cab of the chariot like a spear or blades or blades facing downward underneath the cab. So it's like a giant human lawnmower. There were stories there.

earlier in history two or three of these things had attacked a greek phalanx that was forming up and created a ton of carnage and then persian cavalry swooped in to take advantage of the chaos and disorder and destroyed the formation so you can see how the persians are thinking i mean if two or three scythe chariots were able to do that you know 10 20 30 40 50 years ago what might 200 of them along our front lines do it's not a bad idea is it

certainly shows that they were thinking outside the box a little bit contrary to the historical you know take on the subject when i was growing up and then they had their army essentially deployed in two long lines each line composed of several ranks of troops the front line was almost entirely cavalry the line behind it mostly infantry and seemingly slightly useless infantry almost like cannon fodder that's the traditional view anyway

and in the midst of it all in the center the traditional place in his sacred chariot again surrounded by his royal guard again is the great king of kings of persia darius the third still able apparently to command the loyalty of enough people to raise an army this big and get it here despite the events of two years ago and as i look at this persian army on this field i

i think to myself you know not a bad setup i'd take that army if you told me i had to fight one side or the other but you know and i'm absolutely using 2020 hindsight here although i wonder what alexander the great was thinking if you're looking at that army and trying to figure out where its weak point is what if you thought that the weak point might be sitting in the sacred chariot what if that army's weak point

is the psychology of its quasi-divine ruler. Maybe it's a sign that Alexander thinks that this is a dangerous army and that it is deployed well, that he doesn't just charge into some spot he thinks he can break through. That would be standard operating procedure if he saw such a spot. In this case, he goes to his typical plan B, which is to use tactical maneuvering on the battlefield to see if he can create that spot.

If you've got a fully armored and protected enemy, can you get them to raise up their arm and expose the vulnerable underbelly? As soon as Alexander sees that vulnerable spot, he will launch himself like a rapier into the vitals of the enemy's vulnerable underbelly, as he always does.

In this battle, that's what a lot of the early maneuvers are about. Alexander starts moving his army, we're told, kind of forward, but to the right. To the right would take Alexander's army into rough ground. Rough ground is where those chariots couldn't operate. I mean, the king had had that land in front of his chariots leveled for a reason. He can't let Alexander move the battlefield. So he sends out cavalry that had been in his front rank,

to stop alexander and to go around his flank and you get this cavalry battle on the right flank that develops with both sides feeding more troops into it but this is working for alexander because he's planned to have cavalry to feed into that whereas the persians are taking theirs from their front line denuding a part of their front line and at a certain point alexander with the exquisite timing that he's known for decides that they've denuded enough so that that's a weak spot

and once again you know you have to imagine darth vader or in this case the demon king at the head of his troops charging in a wedge so it's like that guy and then two guys behind them and then four guys behind them i mean he's the tip of the spear literally and the head of state charges into the gap which is on the left center of the persian line which is right near the royal guard and darius the third

in the last battle you sort of had the impression from the sources and the way it was written that maybe alexander had never intended to go after the king that he got into the back of the ranks and it became the quickest way to achieve his goals in this battle you get the impression that that was the goal maybe he decided that this guy was skittish or that he flinches because alexander goes at him in homeric fashion again

And this is where you get into the idea of this guy maybe being the weak link in the armor at this point. What would one of his predecessors have done in the situation that's about to occur? Because the situation that's about to occur is that this guy is going to relive one of the scariest moments of his life right now. Darius III has almost certainly, wouldn't you imagine, he's a human being, seen this in his dreams before, right?

alexander and these murderous macedonians smashing into the guard that's around him which is like a human wall of people and beginning to cut and hack and stab their way person by person yard by yard towards him as he watches in his chariot there is a

fragment of a mosaic that they found in pompeii which is a copy of what was thought to be a near contemporary original it's famous and it probably shows the scene from the battle of issus but it's the same scene we're seeing a replay of

must have seemed like a replay to the king of persia too and in that scene you see alexander on his horse stabbing one of the royal guardsmen in front of the persian chariot and the king of persia with eyes as big as saucers it's like the moment before he takes off at the battle of issus and i have to say as i've been trying to look at this from the persian side the whole way through i have a lot of sympathy

for where darius the third is right now remember this guy wasn't really born and bred to be a king he's obviously brave remember he's a guy who killed the rebel leader or the barbarian leader in single combat but this is a guy who gets criticized for doing something i would think all but the most extraordinary of people would do because for the second time in a row

He is going to look at Alexander and the cutting machine getting nearer to him as he watches his kinsmen slaughtered in front of him, and he's going to turn around and run. Even a guy who will fight and kill a person with edged weapons mano a mano might be forgiven, you would think, when instead of facing a single individual, he's facing a crowd of mounted killers who are going to roll over him like a wave.

How many people would stand there in the chariot and wait patiently as they cut their way towards you, especially if you'd already been through this once before? This had to be the biggest nightmare this guy had had for the last two years, and here it is, deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say. It got me wondering once again about the ability of a single person to impact history.

As we all know, it's usually all kinds of things working together and pinging off each other and giant trends and forces and things like that. But we talked about how extraordinary individuals can sort of sometimes push the envelope and make the difference and ping the meteor off in a different direction and change the impetus and all those kind of things. But what's the opposite of an extraordinary person? What if you get somebody in a position that is less than what you could normally expect to have in key ways?

now in systems based on clong your way to the top you know theoretical merit-based systems you see this less of the time but sometimes in inherited systems or systems like this remember this guy got his job from a supposed poisoner who put him into the royal position because he thought he could control him what if that guy is just an ordinary person for the most part who ends up in this extraordinary role

well sometimes you can get away with it after all most monarchies have all sorts of safeguards and things in place to keep some less than talented monarch from destroying the whole thing right won't let him make a stupid military decision that's why you you have all those generals and advisors but in certain key ways there are no safeguards for what one single below what you could have hoped for individual the opposite of extraordinary what they could do to you

Sometimes history comes down to trends and forces and big stuff like that. And sometimes it comes down to one guy deciding to run away for the second straight time. It's worth pointing out that at the moment, the king of Persia does the unforgivable again and

Things aren't going that badly for the Persians. I would say they're losing, but they still have a shot, just like they still had a shot at the Battle of Issus when the king turned tail and ran. Once he turns tail and run, the chances of pulling out that upset go way, way down.

and while we hear nothing about the elephants in this battle from the sources and while the ferocious looking scythed chariots turn out to be easily countered by the macedonians the persian cavalry is living up to the hype fully and they have alexander in a good deal of difficulty

The sources say that even as Alexander is right on the heels of the Persian king pursuing him, that he gets a message that his left flank, where poor Parmenio is, as usual, fighting off huge numbers of people and holding his own but starting to fall apart, Alexander has to stop the pursuit and come and help.

The Persians have also broken through the middle of the formation in a couple of places where gaps appeared. So it is far from a steamroll on Alexander's part. He has to come back and help. And there's some tough fighting in one area. And the bottom line is that for the moment, the person who has the crown that Alexander wants has gotten away.

But the bottom line is he'll never be able to raise another field army like this to contest the empire. Alexander may not have the crown, but for all intents and purposes, even as the mopping up of that battle are going on, this guy is the king of Persia. Amidst some untold numbers of corpses that continue to pile up,

as the fugitives from this battle are continually run down by pursuing cavalry for what must have been days it's a holocaust to the persian side and alexander will spend

literally years quelling all of the hot spots in the Persian Empire that rise up against him even with all of the wonderful propaganda that's come down to us about Alexander being welcomed with flowers and roses and petals put in front of him and all these kinds of things if you've got a murderous European warlord coming to your town you'd be wise to do that too that doesn't mean he wasn't better thought of in some cases than the Persians although a lot of the recent history suggest that

that persian rule was more popular than alexander's rule there is a wonderful little sort of karmic justice in this whole thing if you look at it from the persian point of view and the chinese did this all the time with conquerors

But when you are the great cultural power of your day, as the Persians were, they were the inheritors of this culture, and the Greeks were the rustic outsiders, the Macedonians even more so, over time Alexander would become more and more Persianized.

dressing like them, requiring his own people to act more like them in terms of treating him more like a Persian king. There are a lot of historians that consider that the last king of kings in Persia is the guy who just destroyed the Persian army at the Battle of Gaugamela, and who, in my mind, puts an exclamation point on this story where

when he eventually rides all the way to the eastern parts of the empire and captures the great city of Persepolis and proceeds to burn the royal palace down either intentionally as a symbol of payback for all those wars with Xerxes and Darius for more than a century ago or as some traditions reported in sort of a drunken mistake

One famous source suggests that Alexander was told that he should not burn down his own stuff. Quite the realization. All of a sudden, the demon king has gone native. Alexander's conquest put European dynasts in charge of these ancient civilizations that had never been under the European heel before and ruled them in some cases for centuries.

When the locals and the natives eventually get native dynasties back and get control of their own societies, there will be precious little of that pre-Alexandrian world that hadn't been bleached out left. Alexander is always considered to be the end of an era, and in Western tradition it's considered to be a good thing. He's spreading Hellenism, you know, to all these parts of the planet that didn't have it, and creating this wonderful mix that will explode into fantastic culture. But that's the way it is.

The Conqueror would see it, probably not the way it would be seen by the conquered. Archaeologist Warwick Ball is one of a bunch of experts who point out that much of what Alexander gets historical credit for actually should be attributed to the empire he brought down. Ball quotes historian J.M. Roberts talking about the Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great,

A couple hundred years before Alexander the Great, and he says about it, quote, "'Right across the old world, Persia suddenly pulled peoples into a common experience. Indians, Medes, Babylonians, Lydians, Greeks, Jews, Phoenicians, Egyptians were for the first time all administered by one empire, whose eclecticism showed how far civilization had already come.'

the idea of distinct units of history in the near east was over the base of a future world civilization was in the making end quote what's always so strange about hearing this line that alexander spread hellenism is it makes it sound like he's bringing enlightenment to a bunch of primitive natives when in fact the better analogy here for ancient persia is the roman empire

and the better analogy for alexander is not the bringer of light but something much more akin to a visigoth or attila the hun the empire that alexander is destroying is the greatest the world had ever seen and the way it's often portrayed in history and the story and the stereotypes and the motif and the home team cheering for western civilization

is that he was somehow enforcing a law of the jungle that made sense he's the lion taking out the you know sick antelope from the herd it's nature's way it strengthens everything i mean if you get into the wooden shoes and silk slippers the persian empire at this point is like the roman empire at the end too they have silk slippers for their silk slippers

but let's not forget who was wearing the silk slippers last and who found out he really liked them as we said alexander really went all persian maybe the last persian king of kings never mind that he may have killed darius the third that never stopped a persian from being king of kings but while he may be a king of kings and while he may actually fit the motif that xerxes is supposed to have fit absolute power corrupting alexander

absolutely helped along by a terminal case of alcoholism probably his successors would see no such need to put on a persian or local facade they will later but initially this is a bunch of europeans openly ruling these areas that have never been ruled by europeans before and warwick ball says the next 75 years is going to be one of the darkest eras ever

in terms of what life must have been like for the locals, for the people in West Asia, up until the time of the Mongol conquests. Thank goodness they at least got a little Hellenism as part of the deal. Life's all about trade-offs, right? And don't forget, even if it is not true, you need to believe in ancient history. I'm on record as saying that I think most of you ought to have a website.

and if you look at what's standing in your way let me suggest that squarespace might be the answer to your problems squarespace of course the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or portfolio or online store because you get a free store with it simple and easy with a beautiful design you can drag and drop content

responsive design oh yeah and then there's the eight dollars a month if you sign up for the whole year with them you get a free domain name at those kinds of prices the risk to reward ratio completely tips in the favor of you should give this a try if you've ever thought about having a website i'll tell you what i like about it too and it's a weird thing to like perhaps as the number one thing but if you've had my personal experience you might understand and maybe you have but

I spent years going to those websites that are nothing but website templates, looking for ones I liked for my website. I would go through thousands of them. And this is the amazing thing. I'd go through thousands and never find one that I really liked. And I'd see very few that looked as professional as the stuff I was seeing out there by big companies and outlets. Squarespace has a similar attitude towards their templates that I have toward this show, which is quality over quantity. They don't have a lot of choices.

for your templates because they spent their time making really good ones. Go check them out and see if that's not one of the better ideas to come around in a long time. Maybe counterintuitive in this era of choice, but I've found that it works for me. I kind of like how it's working for Squarespace. You can start a trial with no credit card required. And when you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use the offer code HARDCORE and get 10% off your first purchase. What are you waiting for?

My grandmother used to say, give fate an opportunity to intervene. The website's a great way to do that. Squarespace. Built it beautiful.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter. The address is at Hardcore History. Want to help the podcast? Just buy your Amazon.com products through the Amazon search window on DanCarlin.com and it won't cost you a penny more. And it helps these guys out because they are nice young fellas. 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.