is well known among Greek historians beginning with Herodotus and appears to derive ultimately from the Persian sources on which Herodotus based his account (1.95).59 While Herodotus is the first writer whom we know to have written this succession of empires, it is not inconceivable that Daniel may have picked up this idea elsewhere, even perhaps from the same original Persian sources as Herodotus. Still, the fact that Daniel completes the sequence with a fourth kingdom—that of Greece—indicates that