Xerxes (the Greek spelling of his name), was the king of the Persian Empire from 486 to 465 BCE. He is remembered in western scholarship for his defeat by combined Greek forces during his invasion of Greece in 480 and 479 BCE. A quick look at his 20-year reign, however, tells us that his rule must have amounted to more than that. Unfortunately, the best surviving source for him remains Herodotus, the Greek historian from Halicarnassus, who wrote the history of the Persian Wars (from the Greek perspective). Xerxes is, therefore, the villain of the story, full of hubris (because of his eventual defeat) and reduced almost to a caricature of a bad ruler. Other contemporary, near-contemporary and later Greek writers (such as the dramatist Aeschylus in his play The Persians and the philosopher Plato) add to this picture.
“Xerxes is the villain of Herodotus’ story, full of hubris and reduced to a caricature of a bad ruler”
Yet Xerxes reigned for 15 years after his defeat in Greece and his rule was uninterrupted, so his loss, while momentous for the Greeks, was relatively unimportant in the context of the enormous Persian Empire. Xerxes still ruled over a vast region that stretched from India in the east to Europe in the west, from Egypt in the south to Azerbaijan in the north. Despite his defeat in Greece, he was a strong ruler who quashed revolts in Egypt and Babylon that had already started when he took the throne in 486 BCE. These had begun in the last years of Darius I and Xerxes put down both efficiently. The empire was, nonetheless, relatively stable under his tenure. He was also responsible for the construction (or at least the completion) of immense building complexes in both Susa and Persepolis.
BORN TO RULE
Xerxes was the fourth (or fifth) king of the Achaemenid Dynasty, the son of Darius I, the Great, and Atossa, the daughter of
