The Persian Empire: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘What was the Persian view of the Battle of marathon? Did they think it was a big deal? I suppose, within that question is the idea. You know, the Greco Persian Wars or the Persian Wars mattered hugely to the Greeks. Did they matter as much as the Persians?’
[Women] within the heartland of Persia itself, is their almost complete absence from the iconographic record, so you can look in vain for an image of a woman on the walls of Persepolis, for instance. They simply are not there. In fact, there's only one female thing at Persepolis. And that's the image of a lioness. And she's only there because she's got her cubs with her too. What does this mean? It doesn't mean that women were not agents in their own right, did not have power, did not have status. What I do think it suggests is that women lived in or occupied a kind of, it was a kind of harem mentality. And what I mean by harem mentality is not you know that they were sequestered away and lived their lives in pleasure on scattered cushions and stroking Persian kittens. It's not about that. It's a bit of this idea of public visibility. Today, I think we are so obsessed with the idea that, that to be known to be powerful, you have to be visible. In antiquity, for women, there was no honor in visibility. Maintaining your invisibility, your sort of sense of purdah from the public sphere is where your power and your status actually sits. To bring you back to the Book of Esther, for instance, you know, the very thing that kicks off the story of Esther, is when the king, the Persian king, Xerxes demands that his wife Vashti, comes out from the harem and shows herself her beauty to the drunken men at his banquet. Now, what the biblical author is really telling us there is this is unacceptable behavior on the part of the king, and the part of the ministers of his court who want to look at this woman, they are dishonouring her by doing that’"
‘No. No, absolutely not. They really didn't, though, you know, the Persians are not really going to record defeat in their inscriptions anyway, okay? So we're not going to expect to see the lamentations about you know, coming home with your legs between your legs any more than you find in Roman sources or Egyptian sources for that matter, okay, it doesn't work like that. But it would be very wrong to think that the Persians thought so highly of these, what are after all, border skirmishes. Marathon in particular is nothing more than a border skirmish. And I think if Darius had hung around long enough, he probably could have taken Greece there and then. But Darius wanted to move his men away from Greece because he had far bigger fish to fry. And that was India. He needed to, to capture India... Without the sort of thorn in the side of Arese [sp?], at that point, India could have fallen completely, the whole subcontinent possibly to Persian control, but the forces were dissipated.
Now when it comes to the the campaigns of Xerxes, there is a something of a different agenda, of course, because here we do have a king who's leading his armies into war, as was typical for Achaemenid monarchs. That's what they were supposed to do, anyway. So while he failed to cap, *something* failed to capture the whole of Greece, if you think about the the achievements that he had, they were quite remarkable. So, first of all, of course, we must acknowledge that not all Greek city states were anti Persian, and many of them marched at the side of Xerxes. When he gets to Thermopylae, it's mission accomplished, he kills a Spartan King. Now for a king to kill a King, I mean, that's ideal. Okay, that's what that's what it's all about. He marches on Athens and burns it to the ground, mission accomplished. Okay, so then it goes wrong in in the sea battles, and one land battle afterwards, and Xerxes decides to go home, but he decides to leave.
Mainly because, again, there's a bigger problem in the Empire. And that's a revolt in Babylon. Babylon is always a fractious city. And so Xerxes needs to put more of his attention there. But I don't think it was ever the kind of loss that the Greeks wanted it to be. So for instance, Aeschylus in his great play, Persians, Persai, 472 BCE, of course, has Xerxes returning to Susa in rags, you know, pale and wane and mourning for his losses, presented as the most hubristic of kings. I don't think that ever happened. And I think we can maybe draw our attention back to a very famous passage in Herodotus where Darius the Great supposedly instructed one of his table servants, that he was to whisper in Darius’s ear every night before dinner, Sire, remember the Athenians. Now it's really only an Athenian or at least an Athenian lover, who could possibly have written that because I don't think Athens was on Darius or Xerxes’ minds very often at all...
I do not think [the Greeks] were greater soldiers and the Persians. You know, where's the evidence for, for a Greek Empire of the size of the Persians?… [they had] many Greeks fighting in a Greek style so we can't say that there's an easy answer to this, to that. There was no Persian style of fighting or Persian arms and then Greek arms… one thing I want to stress about the bigger picture of how Persia is presented from Greece, right, the way through to modern historiography, is this whole idea of a rise and fall scenario. You know, already by Plato's time Plato was talking about the glory days when Xerxes and Darius were there. And then there was this slide into depravity. Harem intrigues and orgiastic kings were, of course, of course they lost control because the Persians were no longer men, well, this kind of thing is still being trucked out in in popular history writings, even today, there was no decline in the Persian Empire...
Now, we know from really dealing with indigenous sources from Iran, from different parts of the Empire, including from Bactria, that is modern day Pakistan and Afghanistan, where Alexander went, after the destruction of Persepolis. Now we know that the Empire was in a very fine state of being, and that Alexander inherited an empire, which was strong and vibrant and working, in terms of the economy, in terms of communications, and we know that because Alexander didn't change a thing. Everything that was, was up and running under Darius the Third, he continued...
