Xerxes I: the king who invaded Greece

Xerxes I launched one of the largest invasions of the ancient world. He bridged the sea between Asia and Europe, cut a canal through a peninsula, forced the pass at Thermopylae and burned Athens. Yet the same campaign ended in disaster at Salamis, and the Greeks turned the king who had commanded the sea to be whipped into their image of proud tyranny humbled. Persian inscriptions show another Xerxes: a builder and a ruler of a vast empire for more than twenty years.¹

Early life and accession

Xerxes was born about 519 BC, the son of Darius I and of Atossa, a daughter of Cyrus the Great, and the first son born to Darius after he became king. His name, Xšaya-ṛšā in Old Persian, means, as the Encyclopaedia Iranica explains, roughly "ruling over heroes".²

Darius had an older son, Artabazanes, born before his accession. Herodotus tells how the two brothers disputed the succession and how Xerxes argued that he was the son of Cyrus's daughter; Britannica confirms that Darius chose him as heir over his elder brother, and reliefs at Persepolis show him standing behind his enthroned father. When Darius died in 486 BC, Xerxes was about 35 and had governed Babylonia for a dozen years.³

Revolts in Egypt and Babylonia

His first task was Egypt, which had rebelled at the end of his father's reign; in 484 BC he ravaged the Nile Delta and restored Persian rule. Babylonia rose next, under two pretenders in quick succession, Bel-shimanni and Shamash-eriba, and was subdued in turn.⁴

In a Persepolis inscription, known as the daiva inscription, he boasts of destroying a sanctuary of false gods in a rebellious land and worshipping Ahura Mazda there; Britannica notes that scholars still debate which land is meant.⁵

Preparing the invasion of Greece

Darius had left a quarrel with Greece unfinished after the defeat at Marathon in 490 BC. Both Herodotus and Britannica name Xerxes' cousin and brother-in-law Mardonius as the man who pressed him to take revenge. The preparations took about three years, from 484 to 481 BC; Herodotus says no expedition on such a scale had ever been mounted.⁶

Two works of engineering announced the king's power. To spare his fleet the voyage around Mount Athos, where a Persian fleet had been wrecked in 492 BC, he had a canal dug across the neck of the peninsula; in modern times a geophysical survey has traced its buried channel. And at the Hellespont his engineers built two bridges of ships from Abydos to the European shore.⁷

A storm broke the first bridges. Herodotus says Xerxes ordered the Hellespont to be given three hundred lashes and a pair of fetters thrown into it, with words calling it "thou bitter water"; Britannica repeats the story of the whipping. When the bridges were rebuilt, the army took seven days and seven nights to cross.⁸

How large was the host?

Herodotus counts 2,641,610 fighting men and, with the supply crews and camp followers, 5,283,220 people in all. Modern historians regard these totals as impossible and disagree among themselves: the Britannica article on Xerxes gives about 360,000 soldiers with 700 to 800 ships, while Livius.org gives about 220,000 soldiers, another 20,000 guarding the lines of communication and some 40,000 men on the ships.⁹

The march into Greece

At Doriscus in Thrace, Herodotus says, Xerxes counted and reviewed his whole army and fleet, and he gives a famous catalog of the forty-odd nations that marched in it and a fleet of 1,207 warships. Livius.org suggests the catalog may go back to a spies' report: Herodotus tells how Xerxes, catching three Greek spies at Sardis, had them shown the whole army and sent home, so that their report would frighten the Greeks into surrender.¹⁰

The trick partly worked. Heralds went ahead demanding earth and water, the tokens of submission, and the Thessalians and the Thebans gave them. To Athens and Sparta Xerxes sent no heralds, because years before those cities had thrown his father's envoys into a pit and a well. The exiled Spartan king Demaratus, who traveled with the king, warned him that the Spartans would fight whatever the odds; Xerxes laughed. The army reached Therma, modern Thessaloniki, in July.¹¹

Thermopylae and Athens, 480 BC

In the summer of 480 BC the army marched through Thrace, Macedonia and Thessaly. In mid-August, Britannica dates it, it broke through the Greek defense of the pass at Thermopylae, where Leonidas and his Spartans made their famous stand, while the fleets fought off Artemisium. Xerxes went on into Attica, which its people had abandoned, and burned Athens and the temples on the Acropolis; Britannica dates the sack to 21 September.¹²

Salamis and the retreat

The Greek fleet waited in the strait between Salamis and the mainland. Herodotus places Xerxes on a seat below Mount Aegaleos, watching the battle, with scribes noting the names of captains who did well. In the narrow water the smaller Greek fleet rammed his ships to pieces; Britannica dates the battle to 29 September 480 BC.¹³ › Battle of Salamis, 480 BC

Without a fleet to supply his army, Xerxes had to retreat. He crossed back into Asia and left Mardonius in Thessaly with part of the army. In August 479 BC Mardonius was killed near Plataea and the army of occupation withdrew; on the same day, Herodotus says, the Greeks also defeated the Persians at Mycale on the coast of Asia Minor and burned the ships beached there.¹⁴

Command style

Xerxes led from the center of a court, not from the front line. He traveled with his army, reviewed it, watched its battles from a throne and rewarded or punished commanders by what he saw. His strength was organization: troops levied from every satrapy, a fleet meant to supply the army, the canal and the bridges. Britannica argues that the size of the army did not help him, partly because of poor information about the terrain and partly because the threat united the Greeks.¹⁵

The Greek portrait of a vain and cruel despot comes from his enemies. Britannica calls him sensible and intelligent and notes that his character was later distorted in Greek legend, while describing him as easily swayed by his entourage.¹⁶

Later life and death

After 479 BC the war in the west went on for years, but Xerxes took little part in it. He turned to building. At Persepolis he finished his father's palace, raised the Gate of All Nations and his own palace, and began the great Hall of a Hundred Columns, which his son completed. Iranica notes that Persepolis, founded by Darius, was finished by Xerxes and Artaxerxes I according to Darius's ideas.¹⁷

His last years were marked by court intrigue. Herodotus tells a dark story from the end of the war: Xerxes fell in love with the wife of his brother Masistes and then with her daughter, Queen Amestris took a terrible revenge on Masistes' wife, and when Masistes fled to raise Bactria in revolt, the king's troops killed him and his sons on the road. Britannica, more briefly, says Xerxes disposed of his brother's entire family at the queen's demand, a pawn in the intrigues of his own palace.¹⁸

In 465 BC he was murdered in a palace plot, together with his eldest son, by members of his own court, among them the powerful minister Artabanus; Livius dates the murder to early August. Another son, Artaxerxes I, secured the throne.¹⁹

Legacy and memory

Modern historians, Britannica notes, see his failure in Greece as the beginning of the Achaemenid Empire's decline, and the Encyclopaedia Iranica agrees that with Xerxes the decay of the empire began. For the Greeks, from Herodotus on, he became the very image of the proud eastern king humbled by free men, an image that has shaped his memory ever since. His own inscriptions at Persepolis and Susa, listed by Livius, preserve the voice of a king who saw himself as ruler of many lands by the favor of Ahura Mazda.²⁰

The whole arc of Persia's wars, from Marathon to the empire's fall at Gaugamela, is traced in the greatest battles of the Persian Empire. Meet his father Darius the Great, or the other great commanders of the Persian Empire.