Xerxes I

Xerxes I was King of Kings of the Achaemenid Empire, the Persian state that stretched from the Aegean to the Indus, from 486 BCE until his murder in 465 BCE. In the West he is remembered for his invasion of Greece in 480 BCE, which won the battle of Thermopylae and burned Athens but was turned back at Salamis and Plataea. In Persia itself he was a builder and administrator who held the empire together after major revolts, and his twenty-year reign left it intact for his successors.

Most of what is known about Xerxes comes from Greek writers, above all Herodotus, whose Histories, written a generation later, tell the story of the war from the side of the victors. Herodotus is a careful and often fair-minded writer, but his Xerxes is also a literary figure, a proud king punished by the gods. Persian evidence is thinner: royal inscriptions, Babylonian documents and the administrative tablets of Persepolis. Modern historians try to balance the two, and many details of the Greek accounts, including the size of Xerxes' army, are treated with caution.

Xerxes was born around 518 BCE, the son of Darius the Great and Atossa, a daughter of Cyrus the Great, the empire's founder. He was not Darius's eldest son, but his mother's descent from Cyrus seems to have counted in his favour, and Darius named him heir over his older half-brother Artobazanes. As crown prince he seems to have spent time in Babylon, where a residence was built for him, though the evidence for an official governorship there is thin. He became king when Darius died in late 486 BCE, the transfer of power passing off smoothly, which was not always the case in the Achaemenid family.

Xerxes inherited trouble. Egypt had risen in revolt shortly before Darius's death, and the new king led the army to restore control, which he did by early 484 BCE, appointing his brother Achaemenes as satrap. Babylonia then rebelled twice, first in 484 under a leader called Bel-shimanni and again around 482 under Shamash-eriba, who held Babylon until a long siege ended the revolt. The exact dates and causes, possibly heavy taxation, are debated. Greek writers later claimed that Xerxes punished the city by wrecking its temples and carrying off the golden statue of its god Marduk. Many modern historians doubt this, but it is clear that he reorganised the province into smaller units and dropped the title King of Babylon from his name.

Darius had sent an expedition to punish Athens and Eretria for helping the Ionian Greeks in their revolt against Persia, and it had been defeated at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. Xerxes took up the plan on a much larger scale. Preparations took several years: supply depots were built along the road through Thrace, a canal was cut through the isthmus of the Athos peninsula so the fleet could avoid the storms that had wrecked an earlier Persian fleet there, and two bridges of boats were laid across the Hellespont. Herodotus tells how a storm destroyed the first bridges and the king ordered the strait to be whipped as punishment; the story may be true or a Greek embellishment.

In the spring of 480 BCE the army marched from Sardis into Europe. Herodotus put its strength at well over a million fighting men, a number no historian accepts; modern estimates vary widely but are usually far lower, in the tens of thousands or low hundreds of thousands. Many northern Greek states, including Thessaly and Thebes, submitted. At the pass of Thermopylae a small Greek force under the Spartan king Leonidas held the Persians for several days until they were outflanked by a mountain path and the rearguard was destroyed. At the same time the fleets fought an indecisive battle off Artemisium. Xerxes then entered Athens, which most of its people had evacuated, and burned the city and the temples of the Acropolis, a destruction still visible in the archaeological record.

The war turned at sea. In September 480 BCE, in the narrow straits between Salamis and the mainland, the Greek fleet, led by the Athenian Themistocles, defeated the larger Persian navy while Xerxes watched from the shore. With the season ending and his supply lines and bridges exposed, he returned to Asia with much of the army, leaving his general Mardonius to continue the campaign. In 479 BCE Mardonius was defeated and killed at Plataea, and a Greek force destroyed the remains of the Persian fleet at Mycale on the coast of Asia Minor. The Greco-Persian Wars continued for decades, but Persia never again invaded mainland Greece.

The defeat was a serious blow to prestige but cost Persia little territory, and the empire remained the largest power of its day. Xerxes spent much of his remaining reign at the royal centres of Persepolis and Susa. At Persepolis he completed buildings begun by his father, including the great audience hall known as the Apadana, and added his own, among them the Gate of All Nations, a palace of his own, and the start of the Hall of a Hundred Columns. His inscriptions present him, like Darius, as the chosen king of the god Ahuramazda, central to the religion later called Zoroastrianism. One, known as the daiva inscription, records the destruction of a sanctuary of false gods somewhere in the empire, but where and when is unknown, and it is not evidence of general religious persecution.

In August 465 BCE Xerxes was murdered in a palace plot led by Artabanus, the commander of the royal guard. Accounts differ on the details, and his eldest son Darius was also killed, either before or after the king. Another son, Artaxerxes I, then killed Artabanus and took the throne.

Greek tradition made Xerxes the model of the arrogant eastern despot, a picture that shaped European views for centuries and lives on in modern popular culture. The Ahasuerus of the biblical Book of Esther is usually identified with him, though the story is not regarded as historical. Historians today see a capable ruler of a vast, diverse empire whose failure in Greece was a setback rather than a catastrophe. A century and a half later, when Alexander the Great burned Persepolis in 330 BCE, he presented it as revenge for the burning of Athens. The empire Xerxes ruled is part of the story told on the History of Iran page.