Herodotus claimed Darius won the Persian throne with a groom's horse trick
According to Herodotus, six Persian nobles agreed that whoever's horse neighed first at sunrise would be king. Darius's groom Oebares made sure his master's stallion caught the scent of a favourite mare at the right moment. Thunder and lightning followed, the others knelt, and a statue supposedly credited the win to the horse's cleverness and the groom's ingenuity.
Darius's own version, carved into a cliff on Mount Behistun, is more solemn. It says Cambyses II secretly killed his brother Bardiya, that a Magian named Gaumata then posed as Bardiya and seized power in 522 BC, and that in September of that year Darius and six fellow nobles killed the impostor. Many historians regard this as a cover story: Darius probably overthrew the real Bardiya and invented a shared ancestor, Achaemenes, to link himself to Cyrus the Great, whose family he did not actually belong to.
Herodotus even stages a debate among the seven conspirators about how to govern. Otanes argued for rule by the people, Megabyzus for a council of nobles, and Darius for a single monarch, who he said would rule wisely and keep plans secret from enemies. He won over four of the seven. Before all this, Darius had served as spear-bearer to Cambyses on the Egyptian campaign; his father was governor of Bactria, and recently found texts suggest his mother was Irdabama, a wealthy landowner of Elamite descent.
Revolts erupted almost everywhere after he took power, from Elam and Babylonia to Persis, Media and Egypt, and he suppressed them all. He then reorganised the empire into provinces under governors, introduced a uniform coinage and standard weights and measures, improved the roads and made Aramaic an official language alongside Old Persian. His name means he who holds firm the good.
Under Darius, who reigned from 522 BC until his death in 486 BC, the Achaemenid Empire reached its greatest size, stretching from the Balkans and Egypt to the Indus Valley. Greeks remembered him for his punitive expedition against Athens and Eretria. His three-language Behistun inscription later became the key to deciphering cuneiform.
Source: Darius the Great
