106: Persian Successions

A king is murdered, a throne becomes a prize, and the world’s biggest empire has to prove it can still hold together. We pull away from the Peloponnesian War just long enough to track the Persian succession shocks that set the stage for Persia’s return to Greek politics, starting with the assassination of Xerxes and the hard-won rise of Artaxerxes I. Along the way, we sort Babylonian cuneiform…