In 486 BC, King Xerxes ascended the Persian throne, inheriting its vast and glittering world empire. But his ambition didn’t stop there - he sought revenge on Greece.In this episode of The Ancients, the culmination of our two-part series on the Persian Wars, Tristan Hughes is joined once again by Dr. Roel Konijnendijk and Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones to explore Xerxes' massive invasion. From the assembling of his colossal army to the legendary battles of Thermopylae and Salamis featured in the accounts of Herodotus, discover the earth-shattering conclusion to the largest invasion ancient Greece had ever faced.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Chapter 1: What led to Xerxes' rise to power?
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Hallo ihr Mäuse, wir sind Janni und Alina vom Podcast Wine Wednesday.
Und wir spielen am 12.06. im Kino am Olympiasee. Sagt man am Olympiasee? Oder im Olympiasee? Ja.
Nee, wir sind, nee, du paddeln wieder drin rum oder was?
Oh, das wäre geil, so eine Tretbootshow. Und wir spielen am 12.06. am Kino im Olympiasee.
Hahaha.
Und wir spielen am 12.06. im Kino am Olympiasee in Zusammenarbeit mit unserem Partner Backmarket eine Live-Show, unser allererstes Open Air.
Das Geile ist, wir dürfen auf der Bühne an euch Zuschauer und Zuschauerinnen ein 800 Euro Voucher für Backmarket verlosen. Es lohnt sich also nicht nur wegen unseren schönen Gesichtern zu kommen.
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Chapter 7: What were the key battles in the Persian Wars?
He is just doing that because he thinks it's right for a Spartan to not leave the position that he is assigned. And that is something that comes back again and again in narratives of Spartan warfare. If somebody tells you to stand somewhere, you don't move from that place. And Leonidas is thinking very much in those terms. He's saying, like, I was told to defend the Passa Thermopylae.
I'm just going to do it, even if it's hopeless, even if there's no point. And so that's what he does, which is why he makes his final stand together with a couple of other Greek communities who decide also to hold that line.
It's quite remarkable that his death serves both his legend, but also I think for Xerxes at the time, it would have been mission accomplished as well, because for Xerxes, the killing of a rebel king one of these followers of Drauga, was absolutely what he needed.
And it's sad that we don't have any written record of the Persian version of this, but I've no doubt that the propaganda would have traveled far and very fast as well. Ahura Mazda had triumphed again through Xerxes, and now the world was in a better shape than it had been a couple of days ago because one of those liar kings has also disappeared. It must have been an incredible...
Yeah, I mean, the Spartans essentially threw away their lives for no good purpose and gave him this huge propaganda coup, right? They gave him this opportunity to say, oh, I killed their king, I destroyed their army, rather than just sort of chasing it off to fight another day.
Precisely. And we know from the Byzantine inscription of Xerxes' father Darius that the annihilation of rebel kings is what you're after. You don't keep them imprisoned at all. You lop off the head. So this is all done for him, really, and it's a great victory.
Yeah. And the excuse has always been twofold. I think the justification in modern scholarship and modern ways of telling this story, firstly, that they inflicted a lot of losses on the Persians.
But there is a very difficult bit of evidence behind that, which is the story in Herodotus that he got people from the fleet to come and look at all the dead on the battlefield, to kind of survey the battlefield. Again, this idea of coming to see it for yourself and look at all the dead that are scattered here, all these dead Spartans.
But in order to make that a proper story and something that would work for him in terms of motivating his troops, he hid most of his own dead. So supposedly he left 1,000 Persian dead as a credible figure and then hid the other 19,000 in a mass grave. We can imagine that this is true. This is something that Xerxes wants to do.
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