Who was Darius the Great?

He was Darius I (reigned 522 to 486 BC), the Persian king who reorganised the Achaemenid Empire and brought it to its greatest extent, and who launched the first Persian invasion of Greece.

What is Darius the Great famous for?

For organising the empire into satrapies with roads and coinage, extending it from the Indus to Europe, and for the first invasion of Greece, defeated at Marathon in 490 BC.

The provinces into which Darius divided the empire, each governed by a satrap answerable to the king, a system that let Persia rule a vast and varied realm.

Did Darius the Great fight at Marathon?

No. In 490 BC Darius sent an army under his generals against Greece; it was the Athenians who defeated it at Marathon. Darius himself did not command in the field there.

What is the Behistun inscription?

A monumental inscription Darius had carved on a cliff, in three languages, proclaiming how he took the throne and put down the revolts against him; it later helped scholars decipher cuneiform.

How did Darius the Great die?

He died in 486 BC while preparing a second invasion of Greece, which was carried out after his death by his son Xerxes.

Darius the Great: the organiser of an empire

Darius the Great was less a conqueror than a builder of empire. Seizing a throne in crisis, he crushed the revolts that threatened to tear Persia apart, then reorganised the largest state on earth into a machine of provinces, roads and coinage that would endure for two centuries¹. It was Darius, too, who first sent a Persian army against Greece, and met defeat at Marathon.

Seizing the throne

When Cambyses II died in 522 BC, the empire fell into crisis¹. Darius, a distant member of the royal house, took the throne amid a storm of revolts² and spent his first years putting them down. He justified his rule in the great Behistun inscription, carved high on a cliff for all time.

A drawing of the Behistun relief of Darius the Great — Darius the Great, from the Behistun relief. Public domain.

He was the organiser who turned conquests into a lasting empire.

The organiser of empire

Darius reshaped the empire into provinces called satrapies, each under a governor answerable to the king³. He standardised taxation, built the famous Royal Road for couriers and armies, dug a canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea⁴, and issued the gold coin, the daric, that carried Persian power in trade. Under him the empire reached from the Indus to the edge of Europe⁵, its greatest extent.

Map of the Achaemenid Empire from Egypt and Thrace to the Indus with numbered satrapies — The Achaemenid Empire around 500 BC, divided into the satrapies Darius organised. Modern map compiled from the atlases of Kiepert and Shepherd and Herodotus's list of satrapies. Cattette, CC BY 4.0

The first invasion of Greece

When the Greek cities of Asia Minor revolted with help from Athens⁶, Darius resolved to punish the mainland Greeks. In 490 BC the army he sent was defeated⁶ by the Athenians at Marathon, a shock on the empire's far western edge, though a small one against the scale of Darius's realm.

Old printed map of the bay and plain of Marathon with the Greek line, the Persian camp and the great marsh — The plain of Marathon with the Greek and Persian positions in 490 BC, from an 1897 edition of Herodotus in Canon Rawlinson's translation. Public domain

The measure of the king

Darius died in 486 BC while preparing a second, larger invasion⁶ of Greece, a task he left to his son Xerxes. He is remembered less for his battles than as the administrator who brought the Persian Empire to its height.

Photograph of a cross-shaped tomb facade carved into a sandstone cliff — The rock-cut tomb of Darius I at Naqsh-e Rustam, its facade carved with a relief of the king above a columned portico. Blondinrikard Fröberg, CC BY 2.0

Meet his son Xerxes I, or explore the other great commanders of the Persian Empire.

Sources and notes

Numbered notes in the text point to the works below.

Encyclopaedia Iranica, “DARIUS iii. Darius I the Great” ↩ a b
Darius I, Behistun (Bisotun) inscription, Old Persian text, columns I to IV: Darius's account of his accession in 522 BC and the suppression of the revolts that followed. ↩
Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (trans. Peter T. Daniels) (Eisenbrauns, 2002). ↩
Amélie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (Routledge, 2007). ↩
Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Darius I” ↩
Herodotus, Histories, Book 3, 61 to 88 (the Magian usurper and the accession of Darius); Book 5, 97 to 105 (Athenian help for the Ionian Revolt); Book 6, 94 to 117 (the expedition of 490 BC and Marathon); Book 7, 1 to 4 (preparations for a new invasion and the death of Darius). ↩ a b c
World History Encyclopedia, “Darius the Great, Encyclopedia of World History”
Wikipedia, “Darius the Great”