Episode 8 - The Persian Wars

<p>Episode 8 -  The Persian Wars</p><p><br></p><p>Hi, my name is Clayton Mills.  Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world. </p><p><br></p><p>Welcome to Episode 8 -  The Persian Wars.  We’re talking today about the ancient wars between Greece and Persia.  I’ve mentioned that Greece has had an important impact on the western world, but did you know that ancient Greece was almost wiped out?  A couple of times?  Greece was a small country, but they tangled with the biggest empire of their time:  The Persians.  The battles between these two countries will become legendary, and will give us a couple of the best quotes of all time.  Also, Pheidippides!  And his famous last words.  Lots of good quotes in this episode.  </p><p><br></p><p>We’ve mentioned the days of the Mycenaeans, and the Greek dark ages, and how the beginning of the end of the Greek dark ages was when Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, which was sometime around 800 BC.  </p><p><br></p><p>Now we’re getting to the real beginning of recorded history, and from this point on, we can almost always date what one culture says is going on against the records of other cultures.  In other words, we’re finally at the point where we have a unified timeline, and we can fit events to very specific dates on the timeline.  Before this, we always had to say ‘sometime around 800 BC,’ but after this, we’re getting to the point where we can say ‘on September 27th, 480 BC, this happened.’  That’s the date, by the way, of the Battle of Salamis, which was the Ancient Greek version of the Battle of Midway.  Well, with less dive-bombers. </p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>So, around 550 BC (ok, I’m still using ‘around’ in a few places).  Around 550 BC, the Persians, who were a tribe from what is now Iran, began to expand.  They conquered the Medes, who had been the biggest kingdom in the region, and then continued to expand.  Their king was Darius, and he b