for the man who would join the Red Sea to the Mediterranean by gouging out a canal, and who would institute a universal currency to encourage trade across the known world, to collapse the small, wet gap between continents must have seemed like child’s play – an act that has accumulated legendary proportions but that was, for the most powerful ruler on earth, practicable. And so it is that the textual life-story of Istanbul begins with a bridge. Herodotus’ description of Dareios’ massive, mile-long pontoon, one of the Emperor’s eye-wateringly audacious projects, writes Byzantion into history.
