Xerxes I

Xerxes (Old Persian Xšayāršā), son of Darius I and of Atossa the daughter of Cyrus the Great, reigned as King of Kings from 486 to 465 BCE. He inherited from his father the largest and most orderly state the ancient Near East had known, and his reign is remembered, through the eyes of the Greeks who defeated his fleet, as the beginning of its decline: the king whose vast invasion of Greece failed, who scourged the sea in his fury, who could not grow the empire his father had made. Almost the whole of that image comes from the enemy, for no Persian narrative of the reign survives, and Xerxes's own monuments say nothing of Greece at all. This entry sets the Greek portrait against the king's own record and against the modern reassessment that has, in a generation of scholarship, dismantled the old story of a weak and decadent successor, while keeping honest about how little the sources let us finally settle.

The name

The Greek Xérxēs and Latin Xerxes render an Old Persian throne-name spelled x-š-y-a-r-š-a and to be read as the four-syllable Xšayāršā, a compound, as Rüdiger Schmitt sets it out in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, of the verbal stem xšaya- "ruling" and the noun ṛšan "hero, man," so that the whole means "ruling over heroes," close in formation to the Vedic kṣáyad-vīra of like sense. The Greek and Elamite forms (Xérxēs, Elam. /Kšeṛša/) both reflect a medially shortened variant that, Schmitt argues, must already have existed in spoken Old Iranian rather than being coined in Greek. The many other renderings (Babylonian, Aramaic, Egyptian) and the Biblical Aramaic Aḥašweroš, the "Ahasuerus" of the Book of Esther, all reach back to the same royal name; the identification of the Ahasuerus of Esther with Xerxes is secure on linguistic grounds, whatever the historicity of the book's tale.

The chosen heir

Xerxes was not Darius's eldest son, and his elevation turned on the meeting of the two royal lines in his person. Darius had sons by an earlier marriage, the eldest being Artobazanes, born before Darius came to the throne, to a daughter of the noble Gobryas; but Xerxes was the eldest of the sons born to Atossa, and Atossa was a daughter of Cyrus the founder. According to Herodotus a dispute over the succession was settled in Xerxes's favour on the argument that he was the first son born after Darius became king (born, in the Roman phrase, in the purple) and, decisively, that through his mother he carried the blood of Cyrus himself; the exiled Spartan king Demaratus, then at the Persian court, is said to have supplied the winning form of the argument, a Greek touch to be treated with caution. Herodotus fixes the true weight of the matter in a single line about the queen: "For Atossa was all-powerful" (7.3). Whatever the mechanics, Darius named Xerxes his successor before his death, and the throne so passed back into the line of Cyrus. That Xerxes had already served as viceroy of Babylon before his accession, and stood as the designated heir, tells against the later Greek portrait of an untried and pampered prince: he came to the crown a grown man of about thirty-five who had governed.

Accession and the suppression of Egypt and Babylon

Darius died in November 486, with a revolt in Egypt already ablaze and a second Greek campaign unlaunched, and the first business of the new reign was to hold the empire together. Egypt had risen in 486, its tribute and conscription burdens sharpened, the Greek sources suggest, by the news of Darius's check at Marathon and by his demands for a renewed war; Xerxes reduced it in 485, and where his father and Cyrus had ruled Egypt in the forms of a native pharaoh, Xerxes is generally held to have governed it more heavily, as a subdued province. Babylon then rose twice in the early years of the reign, under pretenders who briefly took the old royal title, and Xerxes broke both risings. Here too the reign marks a hardening: the ancient courtesy by which the Achaemenid styled himself "King of Babylon" faded from the royal titulary after Xerxes, and a persistent later tradition (hard to verify and probably coloured by Greek hostility) held that he carried off or melted down the golden cult-statue of Bēl-Marduk, the god whose hand the king had been required to grasp at the New Year. How much of this is fact and how much is the Greek habit of making Xerxes an enemy of every people's gods is genuinely uncertain; the political fact, the end of Babylon's special standing, is not.

The invasion of Greece

The event that fixed Xerxes in Western memory was the great expedition of 480–479 BCE, the largest the empire ever mounted and the reckoning with Greece that his father had left unfinished. Herodotus makes the decision itself a study in the Persian habit of conquest, putting into the king's mouth the argument that to cease expanding is to cease being Persian: "Never yet, as our old men assure me, has our race reposed itself, since the time when Cyrus overcame Astyages, and so we Persians wrested the sceptre from the Medes" (7.8). Against the war the king's uncle Artabanus is made to warn him in the accents of Greek tragedy, that it is the great who draw down ruin: "Seest thou how God with his lightning smites always the bigger animals, and will not suffer them to wax insolent, while those of a lesser bulk chafe him not?" (7.10). The march was prepared on a colossal scale: a canal cut through the isthmus of Mount Athos where an earlier fleet had wrecked, and a double bridge of boats flung across the Hellespont to carry the army from Asia into Europe. When a storm broke the first bridge, Herodotus reports the act that became the very emblem of the king's impiety: "When Xerxes heard of it he was full of wrath, and straightway gave orders that the Hellespont should receive three hundred lashes, and that a pair of fetters should be cast into it" (7.35). Reviewing the host at Abydos before the crossing, the same king who lashed the sea is shown weeping at the thought of its passing: "Then Xerxes pronounced himself a happy man, and after that he fell to weeping" (7.45), splendour and the knowledge of its brevity in one breath, the tragic key on which the whole Greek account is pitched.

The campaign's course is the best-known military narrative of antiquity. A Spartan-led stand at the pass of Thermopylae was overwhelmed after the position was turned, though not before it cost the king dearly enough that Herodotus has him leap from his seat in fear three times as he watched; Athens was taken and its temples on the Acropolis burned. Then, in the narrows off the island of Salamis, the Greek ships broke the larger Persian fleet while Xerxes watched from a throne set up on the shore: "Each did his utmost through fear of Xerxes," Herodotus writes of his sailors, "for each thought that the king's eye was upon himself" (8.86). The one captain who had counselled against fighting in the strait, Artemisia of Halicarnassus, drew from the king as his line broke the bitter line the tradition kept: "My men have behaved like women, my women like men" (8.88). Xerxes withdrew to Asia with much of the army, leaving his general Mardonius to hold Greece over the winter; the next year Mardonius was beaten and killed at Plataea, and a Persian force was destroyed at Mycale across the sea. The bid to hold Greece was over. The empire endured, vast as before, but its western edge was henceforth a frontier of wars, not of subjects.

The Greek image: Aeschylus and Herodotus

The invasion made Xerxes the archetype of the barbarian tyrant for the whole Western tradition, and it did so through two sources of extraordinary richness and equally extraordinary bias. The earliest is Aeschylus's tragedy The Persians, staged at Athens in 472 BCE, only eight years after Salamis, by a poet who had himself fought in the war; it is the oldest complete play to survive, and it stages the defeat from the Persian side: the court at Susa, the queen mother, the ghost of the dead Darius rising to rebuke his son, Xerxes returning in rags. Its power is that it makes the enemy tragic rather than merely monstrous; its theme is the hybris of a mortal who would master the gods, and it fastens that theme onto the bridging of the Hellespont, the sea yoked like a beast of burden. Darius's shade names the sin: Xerxes "conceived the hope that he could by shackles, as if it were a slave, restrain the current of the sacred Hellespont... Mortal though he was, he thought in his folly that he would gain the mastery over all the gods, aye even over Poseidon" (Persians 745–750). The chorus turns the king's own name into the refrain of grief: "Xerxes led forth (woe!), Xerxes laid low (woe!), Xerxes disposed all things imprudently with his sea-faring barques" (548–553).

Herodotus, writing a generation later, gives the fuller narrative and the same moralising shape. His Xerxes is vain, impulsive, and cruel, driven by pride to a war the wise counsel him against; his army numbers, famously, over a million and a half fighting men, figures modern scholars universally reject, logistical analysis yielding estimates of perhaps 120,000 to 300,000, the exaggeration serving to magnify the miracle of Greek deliverance. The Greek sources are, in short, a hostile tradition of superb quality: eyewitness in Aeschylus's case, superbly informed in Herodotus's, and yet shaped throughout by the need to read the Persian defeat as the punishment of overreaching pride and the vindication of Greek freedom. The historian's difficulty is that we have almost nothing to set against them from the Persian side, and what little we have (the king's own inscriptions) shows a wholly different Xerxes: not the raging tyrant of the theatre but a ruler scrupulously maintaining the rhetorical traditions his father had fixed. The two portraits are not simply compatible, and the honest course is to hold them apart rather than to blend them into a single face.

The building at Persepolis

Against the Greek record of a destroyer stands the monumental record of a builder, for it was under Xerxes that Darius's new dynastic capital at Persepolis (Old Persian Pārsa) reached its greatest splendour. Darius had begun the terrace about 518 and raised the Apadana, the great audience hall; Xerxes finished the Apadana and added the works that give the site much of its character: above all the monumental Gate of All Nations, its portals flanked by colossal human-headed winged bulls in the Assyrian manner, through which envoys of the subject peoples passed to the royal presence, and the vast Throne Hall or Hall of a Hundred Columns, the largest of the halls. Over the Gate of All Nations he set an inscription in which the heir names his whole descent at the threshold of his father's city: "I am Xerxes, the great king, king of kings, king of the lands of many tongues, son of Darius the king, an Achaemenid, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan seed" (XPa). The architecture is an argument as much as a shelter (the forest of slender columns, the reliefs of the tribute-bearing nations climbing the Apadana stairs, the deliberate theatre of an audience), and it declares in stone the same imperial idea the Greek war-narrative never glimpses: a king at the still centre of a world of ordered peoples. Xerxes's building is not the act of a decadent; it is the completion of the grandest architectural programme of the ancient world.

The daiva inscription and religious policy

The most striking of Xerxes's own texts is the trilingual proclamation found at Persepolis and known as the daiva inscription (XPh), which gives the sharpest statement of royal religion any Achaemenid left, and which has generated more debate than any other. In it the king declares that he suppressed the worship of the daivas (the false gods that the Iranian tradition set against the Wise Lord) and established the worship of Ahura Mazdā and Arta in their place: "Afterwards, by the grace of Ahuramazda I destroyed that sanctuary of demons, and I proclaimed: 'The demons shall not be worshipped!'" and "Where formerly the demons were worshipped, there I worshipped Ahuramazda and Arta reverently." The inscription closes, like his father's, by binding right worship to well-being in this life and the next: "Thou who shalt come hereafter: have respect for the law the Wise Lord has established, and worship him and arta, and thou shalt be happy in life, and blessed in death" (XPh).

What this records is genuinely uncertain, and the compendium keeps it open. On one reading it reflects a real cultic purge (an orthodox hardening of Achaemenid religion, Xerxes suppressing some non-Mazdā-worshipping shrine, perhaps Babylonian, perhaps Elamite), and it is often read alongside the cooling toward Babylon's gods and the tradition of the seized Marduk statue as evidence that the famous Achaemenid "tolerance" of Cyrus and Darius began, under Xerxes, to close. On another reading the text is a theological reframing, in the safe and general vocabulary of the Lie and the demons, of the king's sack of a Greek sanctuary, the burning of the Athenian Acropolis in 480. The crucial difficulty is that the inscription nowhere names the shrine it says was thrown down, and scholars have variously placed it in Babylonia, Greece, Egypt, or nowhere in particular, reading it as a formulaic assertion of piety rather than the record of a specific act. Set against the daiva text is other evidence (the king who completed the works of many nations at Persepolis, whose administration at Persepolis still issued rations to the priests of foreign cults) that the old pragmatism did not simply end. Whether Xerxes was a zealot who narrowed his father's open hand, or a wholly conventional Achaemenid whose one famous proclamation the Greeks and their heirs have made to carry more than it says, cannot be settled on the present evidence. His father's religion he plainly kept: like Darius he grounds his kingship in the Wise Lord, and his creed, cut on his own tomb-model inscriptions and copied from his father's, is Darius's almost word for word.

The harem, the intrigue, and the murder

Of the last years of the reign the sources tell little, and what they tell is court melodrama drawn largely from Greek writers with a taste for the lurid: Herodotus's ninth book and, later, the sensational Ctesias. Xerxes's queen was Amestris, a daughter of a Persian nobleman (not, whatever the Book of Esther makes of the reign, a Jewish queen named Esther); Herodotus gives her a name for cruelty, and tells a dark tale of the king's passion for the wife and then the daughter of his brother Masistes, of Amestris's savage revenge and Masistes's attempted revolt and death, a story of the court turned in upon itself that, true or embellished, marks the reign's late mood in the tradition. Xerxes was assassinated in 465, killed in his bedchamber in a palace conspiracy in which the commander of the guard, Artabanus, was the moving hand, together with a eunuch of the chamber; the king's son and eventual successor, Artaxerxes, was turned against another brother charged with the murder, and himself took the throne as Darius's grandson in the third generation. The sources for the assassination are late and Greek (Ctesias, Diodorus, Justin), and the details vary, but the fact and the year are secure, and with them the two great reigns close: Darius who built the empire, and Xerxes who could not enlarge it, but held it.

The decline narrative and its reassessment

The traditional verdict on Xerxes, inherited whole from the Greeks, is that of a decline: after the founder Cyrus, the conqueror Cambyses, and the great organiser Darius, a fourth king who inherited everything and lost the initiative: vain, cruel, impious, undone at Salamis, sunk thereafter into the intrigues of the harem, the first of the soft successors on whom the long Achaemenid decadence is conventionally blamed. This narrative has been substantially dismantled by modern scholarship. The rejection of Herodotus's army figures alone recasts Salamis from a cosmic collision into a serious but limited reverse on the empire's furthest frontier, one that cost Persia its western ambitions but nothing of its heartland; the failure to conquer Greece looks less like the ruin of an empire than the natural limit of its reach, a frontier where the logistics of the ancient world defeated even the largest army it could field. The monumental record (the completion of Persepolis, the maintenance of the whole administrative machine his father built, evidenced in the Persepolis tablets that run on through his reign) shows a state functioning in good order for two decades after 479. And the very sharpness of the contrast between the Greek Xerxes and the Xerxes of the inscriptions is now read less as two views of one flawed man than as a warning about the sources: the tyrant of the theatre is a construction of the enemy, and the careful, traditional king of the royal texts has at least an equal claim to be believed. The modern reassessment does not make Xerxes into a great king to rank with his father; it makes the confident old verdict of decadence look like what it largely is: the victors' story, told at the expense of a king who left almost no story of his own.

Reputation and legacy

Xerxes's after-image in the West was fixed by the Greek victory and never revised there: the archetypal Great King of tragedy and history alike, the type of the barbarian despot whose pride is broken by free men, the name that Aeschylus made a byword for overreaching, the king who whipped the sea. In the Persian and later Iranian tradition the figure is far dimmer, for the reasons that dim every Achaemenid there: the loss of the native narrative, the eclipse of the dynasty's memory after Alexander. What survives most durably of him is neither the war nor the intrigue but the stone: the Gate of All Nations still standing on the terrace at Persepolis, the daiva inscription with its hard, clear claim of the one true worship, the titulary over the gate that names him son of Darius, an Aryan of Aryan seed. Between the raging tyrant of the Greek theatre and the pious builder of the royal inscriptions the sources leave a figure we cannot finally resolve, which is, in the end, the truest thing that can be said of a king whose empire wrote no history of him, and whose enemies wrote all of it.