TIL when his first attempt to bridge the Hellespont strait ended in failure, "Xerxes the Great" ordered the Hellespont (the strait itself) whipped three hundred times, and had fetters thrown into the water in retaliation.

Holy fuck, thank you! Tbh with you, I've already gone out of my way to look up what the dude was talking about.

Literally my entire motivation for posting this came after reading about the actual historical battle that the movie 300 was based on and then reading a little bit about Xerxes on Wikipedia and seeing the tidbit mentioned on his page. Was not expecting to get into a huge debate about the validity of a specific historian but I guess I'm glad I did. Learned a lot about how our first conceptions of recorded history came to be and the complicated case of Herodotus and his tendency to record history in an almost fairytale fashion, with his recollections of size of Babylon being particularly egregious.

I was just honestly baffled at the amount of people on here unwilling to have a nuanced discussion that takes into account that not everyone is on the autism spectrum like I am and might not be willing to dedicate most of their afternoon to learn this random shit. So providing sources is helpful and I was honestly waiting for just one kind soul to provide the source. Thank you, kind user. You have restored my faith in people if not by just a little bit :)

/r/todayilearned Thread Parent Link - en.wikipedia.org