Darius the Great, Persian King of Kings
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He's one of the most famous and recognisable Persian kings of antiquity, an Achaemenid superstar. His tale is preserved in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus, the so-called father of history, but also in many inscriptions and archaeology from the Middle East. Darius' story stretches from India to Ukraine as the Great Steppe.

It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode we are covering the rise, reign and fall of one of the most extraordinary Persian kings, Darius I, Darius the Great, who ruled the superpower of his time, the Achaemenid Persian Empire, some 2,500 years ago.

Now when someone mentions Darius the Great, your mind might immediately go to the Persian Wars and the Battle of Marathon fought between Persia and Athens which happened during Darius's reign in 490 BC. But this is just one small part of Darius's huge story. His footprint on the Persian Empire is massive.

Joining me to talk through Darius's story is Reverend Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones from the University of Cardiff, a fan favourite guest of the ancients and a brilliant speaker. We recorded this episode in person and Lloyd, as always, well he did not disappoint. Sit back and enjoy as we delve into the fascinating story of Darius the Great. Lloyd, what a pleasure, always a pleasure. It is great to have you back on the podcast. Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to be here with you. And...

As we were saying just before starting recording, it seems every time we go to the next level with you, Lloyd, because today we are in the Spotify studio in London. It's very fancy. And I think for you, it's absolutely well-deserved because you have been a stalwart of the ancients over the past few years. Well, thank you very much. It really is great. I feel like a real grown-up now.

And I've been star-spotting already. I've seen people, really actors I love on the stairs. It's been brilliant. You have. But I said the feeling will be mutual because for an ancient Persia expert in Babylon and so on and so forth, you are right at the forefront. And of course, for the figure we're talking about today, one of the most exceptional figures

Achaemenid Persian kings, isn't he? Darius the Great, whose story seems to take him from Persia, but also India, Scythia, Greece. This story has got so much to it. I think he's the superstar of the Achaemenids, even more so perhaps than Cyrus the Great, you know. He deserves a movie, without a doubt. He needs to have his own movie because it's a great story, you know, of intrigue and obsession and kind of rise and fall scenario almost. But he certainly is one of the...

people from antiquity who speaks quite clearly to us because we've got remarkably quite a lot of his own words surviving which is really quite remarkable and even though we cannot take them at

at face value. Nonetheless, we still get quite a bit of him speaking, which is rare. Because how far back are we? We're talking like 2,500 years ago now, aren't we? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So from about 522, this is when he first comes to prominence. And from that era, really, we've got a huge inscription of his, a kind of, you know, out of the horse's mouth kind of thing, of his retelling of how he claimed the throne of Persia.

all of which you have to take with a pinch of salt. But I think it is incredible that we get this kind of first-person narrative, especially from a Persian king, because, you know, the Persians didn't write narrative histories at all. They had no tradition of it, like the Greeks did.

So suddenly to have this piece of historical first-person narrative out of the blue is remarkable. And we don't have it anywhere else. No other Persian king leaves us that kind of thing. And this is the so-called Behistun inscription, isn't it? The Behistun inscription, yeah. Behistun inscription. Yeah, which is carved on a mountainside...

Yeah, way, way up as well. I mean, like you wouldn't really see it if you were walking on the road below. But it was part of the trade route between Persia and Babylon. So it was a well-trodden path. And Darius kind of has his artists work about...

60 metres high on the rock, carving this huge, huge image of himself as kind of master of Persia, and then a trilingual inscription in Old Persian, in Akkadian, and in Elamite.

Essentially, each one says the same thing. This narrative of how he took hold of the Persian throne, brought order out of chaos, and attributes his whole reign and his success to the fact that he's been patronized, even created by the god Ahura Mazda, for the sole purpose of being Persia's king.

It's an amazing piece of PR. An old Persian, Elamite, Akkadian, those are three of the big languages in Mesopotamia. That's right. And they're all written in cuneiform script, but very different scripts. So like sort of Japanese, Chinese and Korean, same language base, but different.

articulated in different ways. So we have this inscription, and this kind of brings us nicely onto the types of sources we have, and also onto the rise to power of Darius. But before we go to that rise to power, so we have this inscription, what other types of sources do we have for Darius's life story? Apart from that, we have a lot of ahistorical royal inscriptions written in Old Persian, Akkadian, and again in Elamite.

We have a huge amount of Elamite cuneiform sources from Persepolis. These are the so-called Persepolis fortification texts. Oh, we've done an episode on that, right, at the beginning. Which I love so much. And these tell us about day-to-day living under Darius the Great around Persepolis. They tell us about his family and so forth. And then, of course, we're very reliant on the Greek.

for him as well. And as you know, I have a big problem with that. I'd much prefer to use the Persian version wherever we can. I'm not hostile to the Greek narratives, but we've always got to be super careful with them.

So, for instance, you know, in Herodotus, who gives Darius centre stage, perhaps more than any other Greek writer. And Darius is obviously something of a hero for Herodotus. Herodotus kind of likes him begrudgingly. There's this scene, for instance, where Herodotus has Darius sitting down for dinner and every time he sits down to eat,

He calls a servant over and this servant is charged with one task. And the task is saying to him, sire, remember the Athenians. And, you know, it's only a Greek who could write that because I can tell you now the Athenians were the last thing on Darius's mind. He had much, much bigger fish to fry. That's very interesting. And we'll get to that interaction between Darius and the Greeks as we go on.

Let's talk about his background and his rise to power, because him becoming king of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, I mean, the empire is still at its early stages at the time, isn't it? So this is a new thing. And his rise, it's far from easy from what I've heard. We're only into the second generation of Persian kings. There had been Cyrus the Great, who was the founder of the empire, of course, and then his son...

Cambyses II, who added considerably to his father's empire with the conquest of Egypt, which was a huge, huge success. And just to clarify, so Cambyses I, these are kings who proceeded, I'm guessing, their people before the empire became an empire, right?

But in the imperial period, we've got Cyrus II, we've got Cambyses II, and Cyrus' younger son, Bardia as well, who certainly became king on the death of Cambyses. So we have three royal figures from the same line. They come from the line of an individual called Tishpish, who was the first of these kind of

Persian kings within the kind of like a local khan I suppose you know a big man in the area so therefore we call them the Tispites that's the you know the Taispites is the way that we should really refer to them

Darius was not one of that family at all. He came from a very different Persian tribe. These were all tribal peoples at this period. He rose to power, first of all, as probably an arms bearer in the court of Cyrus the Great when he was a very young man. And by the time he got into his 20s, he was serving Cambyses as a spear bearer.

These are probably honorific court titles. I don't think they're military titles necessarily. So it's like saying something like, you know, master of the wardrobe or something like that, something to do with the inner court. So he was certainly moving within the inner sanctum of these Persian kings. But he came from a family whose, well, we know his father was still alive at the time. His name was Hystapses.

He was a real mover and shaker among the Khans. He was a very powerful man, made several sort of alliances with other Khans from different tribes through marriage and so forth. At the time of his accession to the throne, Darius was actually married to the daughter of another Khan called Gobrias, a huge, huge figure in the court of Cyrus the Great. So we should think of these sort of Khanate families as this kind of necropole,

of intermarriages and political maneuvering, you know, trying to outdo each other. We also know that Darius's grandfather was still alive at this time, and his name was Asharma. And these are names which Darius puts on his Bissetun inscription. I'll come back to that in a little while. What seems to have happened is that while Cambyses was away in Egypt, and he was there for three or four years having quelled Egypt,

That meant that really Persia was without the apparent presence of a king. And it seems that Cambyses' younger brother, Bardia, made a bid for the throne, a successful bid as well, because we have Babylonian documents which actually date the beginning of the reign of King Bardia. So there's an alternative king who's set up in Persia. At the news of this, it seems that Cambyses hurried with his army back from Egypt and

But when he got to Syria, he dies.

Now, there's lots of different stories about this. Some say that he was poisoned already in Persia, but double poisoned again. There's a story in Herodotus where Cambyses tried to climb on his horse and his dagger went into his thigh and it turned gangrenous and he died that way. We don't know. It's very, very strange. But what we find is that by the time Darius reaches Persia, now that his master is dead...

We're into the reign of this guy called Bardia, who is a son of Cyrus the Great. He puts a major foot wrong when he decides to tax and take land away from these great Khans. So that doesn't do him much good with them. The next thing we kind of hear is that seven of these great Khans come together in a plot to overthrow Bardia.

One of which is Darius. So he's involved. He's one of the gang of seven, as I like to call it. And we know that there's a battle at a place called Saqiavathish, which is in the north of Iran, in Media.

Bardia manages to flee that battle with his life, but the Gang of Seven hunt him down. And in his palace, they actually break into his bedchamber, where he's lying in bed with one of his concubines, a Babylonian concubine, and he tries to defend himself by smashing furniture and taking the leg of a chair to defend himself. Anyway, the poor man is hacked to pieces, and that is the end of the Tyspid line. So, of course, the...

Then the question becomes, well, who's going to be king of Persia now? And everybody looks to Darius, of course. Just to clarify, in that preceding battle, it's not the Gang of Seven having superhuman powers and it's just seven against an army. I'm guessing because there are seven powerful warlords. Exactly. They have people who they can muster. And their armies are before. Absolutely. Yes, yes.

So the Gang of Seven just sounds kind of almost like an Avengers kind of thing. Yeah, they're the heads of these great families with their warriors. So yes, so that's the end of the Tyspid line, really. I do think, though, you know, given that this plan must have been some months in the making, it's absolutely...

I think that at some point Darius and the other six conspirators must have thought about the outcome and okay, who's going to take over when Bardia is dead? You know, if that's the aim is to get rid of him, well, who's going to take over then?

because Darius slips into that role very easily. Is it quite a smooth succession or accession after they've removed... Initially, initially it is. And I think that's because Darius probably has the backing of the priests, the magi. We have this strange story that emerges in several of the Greek sources, in Ctesias and Herodotus especially, where Darius is a claimed king because...

His horse neighs the first at a ceremony which takes place at the dawn. Now, this might sound like a bit of Greek super invention, you know, that Darius has kind of got this horse and there's supposed to be a competition. Whoever's horse neighs the first when the sun comes up, then he will become king. I think what that is masking is a real Persian facet of their faith, and that is what we would call hypomancy.

which is oracles through horses. The horse was probably the most important animal in the Persian world. They were, don't forget, nomads originally. They were horsemen, they were cowboys, essentially. And the horse had a particularly important religious function for the Persians. The horse was sacrificed, for instance. But the stallion in particular was believed to have had the ability to communicate with the dead.

So it was a kind of liminal being. So I think that what we have in Ctesias and in Herodotus is a kind of mangled Greek

folk tale, if you like, of perhaps a historical event where Darius's rulership, his mandate of heaven, was confirmed by hypomancy. I think that's what's going on there. Whether that was kind of underhandedly played, you know, whether there were tricks played by Darius or anything like that, we can't be certain at all. But I think that's what's underpinning this. And it suggests to me that all of this had been worked out

beforehand anyway. So Darius becomes the king and what he does is something which is obvious to all ancient Near Eastern rulers. He takes as wife...

every available female of the Tyspid family. Every one. Every one of them. So he's already got at least one wife and three sons by Gobrys, his daughter. But now he takes the daughters of Cyrus the Great as wives. He takes the wives of Bardia...

Bardiya's daughter, Cambyses' wives. He takes them all into his harem. And this basically is the kind of stamping his authority on the bodies of the royal women themselves, because, of course, they are the bloodline of Cyrus. And so, therefore, by claiming them, he's also claiming the throne as well. And through them,

The propagation, therefore, of Cyrus's line can continue. They can mix blood now. So it's legitimising his rule as well in their eyes. Precisely. And this legitimisation is something that clearly was disturbing Darius in the opening years, maybe the opening decade even of his reign, because the one thing the Bissatun inscription really tells us a lot about is how across the whole of the empire...

Rebellion after rebellion broke out. And for two years, Darius was putting down resistance to his people.

Well, regicide, double regicide, perhaps, you know. Did he kill Cambyses as well? We don't know. But certainly the regicide of Bardia. So in Babylon, in Scythia, in Parthia, constantly these areas were breaking away. And either he himself was going to put them down or he was sending out representatives, part of the Gang of Seven, to do that work for him. And it was only really after four years that you can say that he had...

established enough authority to properly call himself the king of Persia. This is when the Bissetun inscription is finally finished. You know, the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed at that point. And it's very interesting in the opening section of that inscription how he rewrites history. So what he says in Darius's version is that Bardiya, the brother of Cambyses,

had actually been killed by Cambyses himself before Cambyses went to Egypt, because Cambyses was always suspicious of Bardia, okay? So the king's brother is already dead. But while Cambyses was away in Egypt, there arose a priest, a magus, called Gaumata,

who just happened to be the spitting image, the doppelganger of Bardiya and passed himself off to the court as the king's brother, as Bardiya. Everybody knew this, Darius says in his inscription, but everybody was fearful of him, so he couldn't do anything.

And then Darius says, only I had the courage to do something about it. And I slew that Gaumata, that magus who pretended to be Bardia. You know, if you tell a lie, make it a big one, right? And this is what Darius does here. He boldly creates this character, an imposter, a doppelganger of the original king. And you see it again and again in history to kind of...

wipe their slate clean of potential regicide, is to create these far-fetched stories. Oh, completely. It's a slightly different, but let's say the Ptolemies a bit later and that link with Nectonebo and Alexander. Absolutely. It's creating those fictional stories later to try and link them into that line. And then what Darius does with that, to go a step further, he creates for himself a fictionalised ancestry as well. So at one point in the inscription, he said...

I am the ninth king of my line. Nine of us were kings before, he says. Well, there's no evidence for it at all, okay? And then he says, nine we are, and my ancestor was Achaemenes, Achaemenish in Persian. So we are the Achaemenesia, we are the Achaemenids, he says.

Now, then he gives his genealogy and he says, my father is Hystapses, true. My grandfather is Asharma, true. My great-grandfather was Tishpish. Interesting. Because that is the name, of course, of the ancestor of...

Cyrus the Great. But then he says, we can go back further, my founder of my dynasty was Achaemenes. Now, this is a name that Cyrus the Great never uses. He knows of no Achaemenes. So either

At best, Darius was an offshoot of the Tisped family, but well removed from the Tispeds. Or he created a common ancestor for them. And at Cyrus's palace at Pasargadae, we can actually see evidence of this happening because we've got an old Persian inscription in which it says, I am Cyrus, an Achaemenid. And of course...

Cyrus didn't know these Achaemenids at all. And this could only have been an inscription that was actually put up by Darius himself. And I didn't realise that either, because normally Achaemenid Persian Empire founder, you think, Cyrus, but actually the name Achaemenid, it actually only comes in with Darius I. So we're quite lazy, really, you know, in labelling the Persian Empire the Achaemenid Empire, because it's actually the Taispid and Achaemenid Empires. Right.

Well, that's a good myth bust there. Thank you very much, Lloyd. I mean, let's keep moving on, but keep on Darius's portrayal. We've covered that inscription in quite a lot of detail now. But I'd like to ask, how does Darius, after his consolidation disposition, putting down these rebellions, linking, creating this family line, how does he want to portray himself on art?

Well, he is the first Persian king to be depicted in art. We have no depictions of Cyrus or Cambyses or Bardia. So really, he is starting the language of official imperial art, if you like.

At Bissetun and at Persepolis, he is represented, usually always, in fact, wearing a court robe, this sort of long garment, sitting on a throne or else in a sort of state of victory. On the Bissetun relief, for instance, he wears this magnificent long beard, beautifully curled. His hair is coiffured. He wears this court robe. He holds his bow in one hand. His right hand salutes the god Ahura Mazda, and with his foot,

He stands on the belly of a rebellious king whom he's put down as well, Gaumata in this particular case. So he can portray himself in two ways in the art. That is as the kind of ultimate courtier, but also as the ultimate warrior as well.

But it's really in his inscriptions that we get more of a picture of who this man really was. We have a very fulsome and quite verbose inscription from his tomb. So this was built at Naqsh-e Rustam, which is just about five miles from Persepolis. There's a larger necropolis for the Achaemenid kings there. And on the facade of his tomb...

He tells us quite a lot about himself. So he says, for instance, as a spearman, I am a good spearman. As a bowman, I am a good bowman. As a horseman, I am a good horseman. So first of all, there's this idea that he is prolific in war and good at war as well. And that's part, of course, of any ancient Near Eastern king's challenge, really, is to be, first and foremost, a warrior.

But then he goes on to say, really, really quite interesting, he addresses the reader of the tomb inscription and he says, Oh man, it's...

if you want to know the kind of man I am, look at these sculptures to begin with. And we look at them and we see him sort of being upheld by figures from across the whole of the empire. And then he says, know what kind of man I am. I am not a man who quickly reacts to anything, whether good or bad. And he says, I deliberate in my mind before I act on anything.

which is really fantastic. So he says, I do not judge a man whether he is right or wrong until I have heard the evidence. And this says a great deal about him, I think. Well, not a lawgiver, but a person overseeing justice. Yeah, and I think that's the other thing, of course, which is really important for any Near Eastern king. You're supposed to be a lawmaker, right?

and the upholder of law as well. And we really see this happening in Darius's lifetime because suddenly in the sources, both Old Persian, but more interestingly, I think, in Greek, in Hebrew, in the Old Testament, and in Babylonian sources, we get the word data being used. And data is the Old Persian word for law.

And this is never translated into local languages. So if you read, you know, the book of Esther in Hebrew, there's this Persian loanword, data, which talks about the king's law. And you really do get the feeling with Darius that he was a law upholder. He liked the idea of the establishment of a world order. And it was the king's law that was important.

So we see this, for instance, when I wrote my book, Persians, I had a great time doing some archival work on a man called Gimitu, who was a Babylonian crook.

I mean, he was a real dodgy dealer. He had his fingers in every pie in Babylon and was getting away with all sorts of corruption all the time. But he meets his match in Darius the Great. When Darius ascends to the throne, Gimilu suddenly disappears from the evidence. And that's because he's finally convicted of crimes, you know? So you get a feeling that Darius was...

Obsessed with bureaucracy. There is no doubt about that whatsoever. I mean, he really loved red tape, but also he loved good order as well. That also comes over in his inscriptions as well. So...

He was a pious man, I think, a genuinely pious man. His great god was Ahura Mazda. Ahura Mazda, yeah. And that means the wise lord. He's the chief deity of the Zoroastrian faith today. He's a fire god? A fire god, yeah. Actually, he's a creator god. He's a great creator god. His name means the wise lord, so he is the god of wisdom, of justice, all of these kind of things.

The Persians believed in a real kind of like yin and yang principle. The creation of the world by Ahura Mazda was created out of arta, which means truth, loyalty, upwardness.

Whereas the world was always in a kind of a battle with a dark force called Drauga, which is the lie, the truth and the lie. These are the things that the kind of Persian thought oscillated between. And in his inscriptions, both at Biceton and at Persepolis and Susa,

Darius will say things like, I am a follower of Arta. I do not lie, even though, you know, the Byzantine inscription is full of, you know, he really does. But this idea of truth and order, Arta, is important to him. And that's because, of course, you know, in antiquity, and especially in Persian antiquity, you couldn't

distinguish between a secular and religious world. They are all together. So therefore, being faithful and loyal to the king is also having faith in Ahura Mazda as well. But if you break away from that idea, then immediately you are a liar. You are a Drauga follower. You are following the dark path.

And in his inscription, Darius actually says, you man, you must choose which path you follow. You must choose either Arta or Drauga, but that is down to you. And it's the one hint we have from any old Persian text that there's a kind of possible heaven and hell there.

as well. You know, you've got to choose the path that you're going to go on and there will be repercussions for this in the end as well. So he's, you know, he's the only one of our Persian kings who gives us any hint of this kind of thing. After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal is a podcast that delves into the dark side of history. Expect murder and conspiracy, ghosts and witches.

I'm Anthony Delaney. And I'm Maddy Pelling. We're historians and the hosts of After Dark from History Hit, where every Monday and Thursday we enter the shadows of the past. Discover the secrets of the darker side of history on After Dark from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

Whoa, easy there. Yeah.

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Did he see himself almost as Ahura Mazda's representative on earth? Yeah. Maybe not a god himself. No, I think that's right. No Persian king ever thought of themselves as a god. The Greeks, when they speak of the Persians, they often say that he's esotheos, godlike. And many Greeks believed that the Persians saw themselves as gods, but they didn't.

But what certainly Darius and his successors has was kind of divine viceregal powers on earth, you know. He was there to do it. And it's really interesting, you know, even Darius's name itself. And I believe, like all of the names we've got, Xerxes, Attic Xerxes, and so forth, these are regnal names. These are throne names. They're not what they're born with because they're all too loaded. They all mean for something, you know. So Darius's name in Old Persian is Daravayush, Daravayush.

And it means upholding the firm or upholding the good. Okay, so even that choice of his name is there. And it's interesting, this cognate, Dara, Dara, to hold...

is in his inscriptions all the time, I upheld the empire, I hold the empire together, I hold the values of Ahura Mazda up all the time, you know. It's constantly that he's re-echoing his own name in the very act of holding the empire together.

When he wants to show how ruthless he can be, and he can be a ruthless warrior king, then the verb in the Bistitun inscription and others changes to the verb grab, which is exactly the same as we have, to grab, to seize, to hold, something like that. So he says, you know, I went into such and such a land and I saw...

seized them there. So you go from holding to seizing, which has a very different connotation, doesn't it? So he's playing out his ideology in his own name, even, which I find fascinating. It's very, very interesting. And I'm glad we could explore that in detail. We'll see if we can get to the Persian wars at the end, because that feels near the end of his story, isn't it? And there's still so much to cover. So we'll see how far we get. I mean, Darius is worthy. We could almost kind of do rise and then fall. Absolutely. We'll get to it. But Lloyd,

You mentioned in passing as we were chatting, because I'd like to focus more on his, within the empire itself before talking about foreign expansion of the empire and so on and so forth. You mentioned in passing places like Susa and Persepolis, which leads me to a big kind of question regarding the reforming of the lands under his control, under Persian control. Because does he do some big restructuring of the Persian empire once he's consolidated his position?

In that he adds to the empire, certainly. So, for instance, the most significant thing that he does is to add the north of India, the Punjab, to the empire.

And that brings in an enormous amount of wealth, of course. All the goods of India then flood into Persia too. And he has an aborted attempt to try to bring Scythia under his control as well, as well as Greece, of course, which was small fry, believe me, as far as the Persians were concerned. But what he does within the empire itself is kind of interesting. He is the one who really consolidates the tax system more than anything else.

So every part of the empire was obliged to pay a taxation to the central authorities. The Persians were never vulgar enough to call it tax. They always called it tribute or a gift, actually, a bhaji in Old Persian, you know, to give a gift to the king. And Herodotus, I think quite accurately in this point, kind of outlines what different areas of the empire were obliged to pay tax.

But it's kind of interesting that Persia itself, so the heartland, was not taxed at all. So tax rebate for all Persians, which is kind of interesting. But the other thing he did, of course, was to build the road system. Yes, and this is like the Royal Road and stuff like that, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean, honestly, the Persian road system, it was...

I don't think even the Romans had it as good as the Persians because they really mastered communications across their empire. I think that's what made the empire last so long and how it could be so big as well because the empire was crisscrossed with...

with well-maintained, efficient road systems, with regular service stations, if you like, where travellers could go into essentially the equivalent of caravanserais, to change horses, to rest, to be fed. The other thing they did as well was to employ a single universal language for bureaucracy, and that was the language of Aramaic.

So Aramaic had been around for a good 400, 500 years in the Assyrian Empire. But they make this the official language of all bureaucracy across the empire. So whether you were a scribe sitting in Sardis in Turkey or Memphis in Egypt or Kandahar in Afghanistan, you could read and write documents from any corner of the empire.

And I think that's brilliant with the road system as well. And we do find at Persepolis these tablets which tell us things like, oh, a woman travelled from Susa in southwest Iran to Kandahar and she stopped at this place, this place and this place and she was refuelled and, you know, she cashed in various chits and got beer and barley and she had an interpreter with her. People really did traverse Kandahar.

this enormous empire. And that really is down to Darius. That's his brilliance as a bureaucrat, you know. He made this a workable empire. It's also so interesting because I remember not too long ago we did an interview with Amanda Poddeny on the Bronze Age Brotherhood of Kings and how back then, like a thousand years before when we're talking now, maybe a bit less than that, but the diplomatic lingua franca was Akkadian. Akkadian, that's right. And now...

here, it's almost a kind of a revival of that, but instead of Akkadian, it's Aramaic. And Aramaic is so much better, really, because it's a cursive language. You know, you can write it on anything. So you can write it on a broken bit of pottery, you can write it on papyrus, you can write it on leather or bone, because basically it's an ink

language, you know, it's not an inscribed language. So that made it really doable for places that don't work on clay or places that didn't work on papyrus. Everybody can join in. So, and we have quite a lot of Aramaic documentation still surviving. Thanks for listening to The Ancients. You can get all History Hit podcasts ad-free, early access and bonus episodes, along with hundreds of original history documentaries by subscribing. Head over to historyhit.com slash subscribe.

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Should we be imagining big cobbled roads? Initially. And in fact, at Sardis, which I was at only a couple of months ago, we can see still the beginning of the Royal Road. Which was actually still in operation under the Romans. And that lasted for about five miles outside of Sardis. And then it turns into a kind of open, well-trodden track. You know, that's what we should be thinking. But the genius is these sort of service stations every few hundred miles.

Herodotus knew about them, and he was just blown away by the speed with which couriers could travel across the empire. So it's estimated that a courier could travel from Sardis in Turkey to Susa in western Iran in about, it's estimated, something like 15 days. So, you know, just a fortnight, and that's regularly changing horses. It was also the...

The inspiration for the Pony Express. But also the fact that, you know, this isn't just all flat terrain. You've got the Taurus Mountains. Absolutely, and then the Zagros Foothills. All of this as well, absolutely. No, it's really stunning. It's an incredible feat. I'll tell you what, I mean, one last thing on that is interesting, is, you know, all of this kind of infrastructure build under Darius, and I think Persepolis is a bit... Persepolis and Susa, they both have a huge, huge amount of infrastructure. Huge infrastructure built by Darius. But also something in my notes was,

and coinage. Does he also do a lot of change there too? That's interesting. He is very aware of the Western use of coinage. So the Western satrapies. It's like Croesus and Lydia. Lydia and all of this kind of thing. They have, of course, you know, a situation where they have coinage.

Darius doesn't enforce that across the whole of the empire. So there's no evidence of coinage in Bactria, in the Eastern Empire, for instance. But he allows it to go on in the West. And in fact, in some of his inscriptional evidence that we found at Persepolis, beautiful gold and silver tablets buried there.

in the corners of the Apadana, his great throne room, which he built specifically for himself, we actually find gold and silver sigloy and darics stamped with his image on them. But it wasn't circulated everywhere. But interestingly, you know, gold darics and silver sigloy, representing the great king, were found in abundance in Athens.

So the Athenians knew about the bona fide vision of what a Persian king thought of himself. And he's always shown on these coins with spear in one hand and a bow and arrow in the other hand. So he presents himself as a warrior king to them.

Interesting. Let's move west, though, and examine why and how Darius starts to target and look at those places right on the western periphery of the Persian Empire in Europe and the steppe. You mentioned in passing, we should also mention, of course, his campaign, well,

of the Persian Empire into India and it's the Indus Valley area, isn't it? That's right, that's right. And incredibly rich, must bring in a lot of wealth to the Persian Empire. So he's done that part of India. Amazing. Then looks west. I mean, Scythia, first of all, so Ukraine, Russia, north of the Black Sea. This feels very, very far away. Why does he look there? Yeah.

You know, these border areas for the Persians, like the Assyrians and the Babylonians before them, have always kind of got this lure. There's something about, you know, there's gold in them, there are hills kind of mentality to the whole thing. Darius was annoyed because Scythians were kind of doing cattle raids there.

across the borderlands, you know, into Persian territory. And he decided, you know, he wanted to put an end to that and see what goods he could bring back. Now, we only really hear about the Scythian campaign from Herodotus, so we have to be very, very careful here. But I am prepared to believe Herodotus' account that really it wasn't, you know,

Darius's lack of preparation or the weakness of the Persian army that failed in the conquest of the Scythians, it was actually the weather. As Napoleon and Hitler found out, in turn, they went in and the winters overtook them and they had to come back to Iran with their tails between their legs. Greece was another thing altogether. And here we have to be super, super careful because, of course, the way in which...

stories of Battle of Marathon and all that goes around it are written, is so heavily loaded with Athenian propaganda that we have to tread with great caution through all of this. I really do not think that Marathon and the other interactions, the rebellion that erupted allegedly in Ionia... It's the Ionian revolt which starts it, yeah. ...were as big a thing

for Darius as they were for the Athenians and other Greek speakers. This was essentially a skirmishes in the far outposts of empire. And I'm always reminded of a poem that Robert Graves, the great classicist and author, wrote in 1942. He was actually working at the time in the Ministry of Propaganda

for the British. And he was so fed up of propaganda and seeing what he can do, he wrote a poem called The Persian Version, which is, you know, what basically I live by. And he says, as far as the Persians were concerned, the truth-loving Persians were concerned...

Marathon was nothing more than a mishap that happened on a border somewhere and that the Greeks have taken this and they've made it into a national event. They've mythologized it.

This is what Graves writes in his poem. And I think he hits the nail absolutely on the head. I mean, and just some context so we all know crystal clear. So you mentioned the Ionian revolt. So Ionia is in western Turkey. And the story goes that 10 years or so, isn't it, before the invasion, past the marathon, Athens and all that, that there is a group of Greeks who revolt. That's right. The Athenians and the Eritreans and other city aid. That's right. I aided them.

And then Darius sends in the troops, quells the revolt, essentially. From that moment on, you know, all Persia dominates the area. You know, that's the rhetoric. And in fact, you know, there's something to be said for that. I'm not dismissing that.

In fact, we have this really telling little fragment of a poem written around about 500 BCE, a Greek poem which says something like, if you have a stranger coming to your house on a winter night...

It's really lovely to sit around the fire and eat chickpeas together and talk. And you should ask him questions like, who's your father? What age were you when the Persians came? And I think, you know, there is something in the Greek psyche which was about the crushing of the Greek cities of Asia Minor. Suddenly this juggernaut from the east comes

was there and it did enormous damage to the Greek psyche. But what we have to be very careful of is this idea that we have this juggernaut of Darius's army, you know, coming to Marathon and then being defeated by plucky little Athenians and driving the Persians away. I don't think it ever really played out in that way. Because it's quite interesting, I mean, the fleet which is assembled is...

Darius directly there, he's given it over to... And that once again suggests something, doesn't it? Yes, absolutely. So a small expeditionary force sails across the Aegean. They sack the Greek city-state of Eritrea, which is on Euboea, so not to be mistaken with Eritrea as a country in Africa. That's right.

So good success early on. Then they land north of Athens, Bastl of Marathon. And once again, this Persian army, it's not the massive army that you'll get with Xerxes later. Small task force. A mercenary task force. Mercenary task force. The Athenians win the Bastl of Marathon and it's still a significant... As you see, it becomes...

Size makes a massive... It becomes a legend in its own lifetime, you know? But for Darius, as you say, as we're doing this podcast episode about Darius, for him, this is just... It was a nothing. The irritant for Darius would have been that it momentarily took away his attention from India. If...

the skirmishes on the western border hadn't happened at that time, I think he could have pushed deeper into India, probably have conquered most of the continent. But he had to withdraw some of his troops to get over to the west. But what we've got in an empire the size of Persia's, and don't forget now, we're going from the deserts of North Africa down the Nile into Ethiopia, up into almost the Crimea, right the way across into Pakistan and Afghanistan. I mean, this is vast. And those borderlands are...

are always creaking. You know, there's always something going on there. And, of course, that's where any empire is at its weakest. And what we should remember about the Western part, you know, where the Greeks are, is, you know, this was central to their world, but absolutely it's the periphery of Darius's world and of very little interest to him, really.

And the way we're doing this podcast, as I say, because we're doing it through the perspective of Darius himself, it's important to get that point across. Of course, for the Athenians, it's everything because that is the centre of their world. And it's almost a moment, you know, when they begin to identify as Greeks. I mean, that Greece is born.

really, from Marathon and then from, of course, the attacks of Darius' son Xerxes as well. This is when we get the first idea of being a Hellenic people together in all of this. We should always remember, of course, that not all Greeks were in this together. The Boeotians, for instance, the Argyres, were never part of this coalition of Greeks. They were always pro-Persia, as was Macedon, of course, in this period as well. But for the Athenians, the myth...

start here as it were and it's a you know it's a very effective myth we've been living with it for 2500 years you had to get mastodon in there didn't you get very excited about that um anyway but that was a episode for another day as well however following these events around 490 bc he doesn't last much longer and what do we know about the end of darius's life

Very little indeed. And it's a great sadness because our sources kind of filter out, really. The Greeks have no real knowledge of what goes on after he returns to

home to Persia. The inscriptions are all ahistorical at this point. We have this one from Xerxes, as I said, saying Darius appointed me as his son because I was the greatest after him. But otherwise, he kind of slips out of history very quietly. He was certainly buried in his tomb at

Naqsh-e Rustam. And now we know, because we have evidence, Old Persian and Elamite evidence, that a funerary cult was celebrated for him for many, many decades after his death. So did he become a god after his death, do you think? Not a god, but I think that the Persians worshipped the spirit of the ancestors, and therefore the spirit of the king as an ancestor was particularly important. We already know that Cambyses II had a cult

for himself. But now we have definite evidence emerging from Babylon of a cult for Darius the Great as well. And we also know that statues of the king were set up after his death to which cult was performed as well. And this is all in contradiction to what Herodotus tells us, you know, about Persian religion, that they had no statues, they had no temples. But

Yes, they do. They have all of these things. This is Herodotus' attempt to make Persia a real topsy-turvy land, you know, that they don't do anything sane over there. But in fact, you know, we can break all of that down. So we now know definitely that there was this wonderful...

and a long-lasting cult of ancestry for Darius, and well worthy of it as well. And his legacy overall, has it been a largely positive legacy down through the ages? Yes, I think so. I think of all the Persian kings, and don't forget, most people approach...

the Persian kings through the Greek sources. He comes across, together with Cyrus the Great, as the moderate, the thinker, which is part of his real Persian legacy, I think, as well. That's how he would have wanted to have been seen. And, of course, Darius is set against...

the craziness of Cambyses in the Greek tradition, and of course the worst excesses of all Persian kings in Xerxes. So in a way, Darius is created in that style.

to balance out the insanity of all other Persian kings, really. You know, he is almost like Persia could have been this. It could have been a moderate society ruled by a kind despot. But rather, you know, Xerxes comes along and he dismantles the whole thing. Screws it all up. Screws it all up. Poor Xerxes, yeah, but he gets a bad rate. But I think, yes, on the whole, Darius comes down in history as a good guy. I think he was the ultimate manipulator myself.

But I love the man. I think he's fabulous. Master of fake news. You know, kind of many similarities, isn't it? Absolutely. This has been absolutely fantastic. You've written countless books over the years. However, the book probably most...

associated with the chat we've done today about Persia, it is called? It's called Persians, the Age of the Great Kings, and it's published by Wildfire Books and Basic Books. And I'm guessing there are more books coming out very soon? There are indeed. So at the moment, I'm just finishing off a book on ancient Babylon.

I'm just starting to write a new book on the harem in the ancient world. Wow. Lloyd, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. You're very welcome. Thank you.

Well, there you go. There was Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones returning to the ancients to talk through the rise, reign and fall of Darius I, Darius the Great. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for listening to it. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour.

And don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe. As a special gift, you can also get 50% off your first three months when you use code ANCIENTS at checkout. That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.

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