Legendary historian Will Durant has described the subject of this episode as “One of the great adventures in human history”. In the first part of this two-part series, we meet the main characters of our tale, when a band of over 10,000 Greek mercenaries agree to serve under the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger in a fratricidal civil war against Cyrus’ brother, King Artaxerxes II. This episode will also include a brief history of the Persian empire, tattooed, head-hunting + marijuana-consuming + sweat lodge-partaking tribal peoples, plagues, a cameo by Socrates, Machiavellian political games, the great battle of Cunaxa, and a eunuch worthy of Game of Thrones.
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