Xerxes (in old Persian, Khshayarsa), a king of the Achaemenid dynasty, reigned from 519 to 465 BCE. He strengthened his empire by crushing rebellions in the Persian provinces. When his father, Darius I, died in 486, Xerxes inherited both the Persian Empire and his father’s aim of defeating the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta.
Succession
As a younger son of King Darius, Xerxes was not first in line to the throne. However, his mother, Atossa, was the daughter of Cyrus the Great and as such had much influence at the Persian court. Atossa made sure that Xerxes was named heir.
The Invasion of Greece
In 482 BCE Xerxes began to gather together an army and navy that was probably the largest force assembled by any ruler up to that time. The Greek historian Herodotus reported that Xerxes had an army of 1,700,000 men and a fleet of 1,207 triremes, but these figures were almost certainly exaggerated. Nevertheless, it took seven days for the Persian army to cross the wooden bridges that Xerxes had ordered his engineers to build over the Hellespont—the narrow stretch of water that separates Asia Minor (then part of the Persian Empire) from the Greek territories.
At first Xerxes was all conquering. His fleet won a victory at Artemisium, and his army slaughtered the small Spartan army at the Pass of Thermopylae. Xerxes took the deserted city of Athens and set fire to it and in doing so destroyed many of its fine temples. However, his battle fleet was destroyed in the narrow straits of Salamis in September 480, and his army was defeated at Plataea the following year.
Iron Fist
Xerxes seems to have been a tougher ruler than other Persian kings of the Achaemenid dynasty (generally dated from the start of Cyrus’s reign in 550 to the defeat of Darius III by Alexander the Great in 330). During the early years of his reign, Xerxes put down rebellions in Babylon and Egypt; both lost their special status as kingdoms and became merely satrapies, or districts. The golden statue of Marduk was removed from Babylon, and the two statues of Darius at Heliopolis in Egypt were moved to Xerxes’ capital at Susa. Xerxes tried to force his subjects to worship only the Persian god Ahura Mazda, although many scholars believe that this order was not strictly enforced.
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IN 490 BCE THE ATHENIANS AND THEIR PLATAEAN ALLIES DEFEATED DARIUS AT THE BATTLE OF MARATHON. XERXES WAS DETERMINED TO AVENGE HIS FATHER BY CONQUERING GREECE: I will march an army through Europe into Greece and punish the Athenians for the outrage they committed upon my father…. Darius himself was preparing for war against the Greeks but death prevented him from carrying out his purpose…. I will not rest until I have taken Athens and burned it to the ground in revenge for the injury that the Athenians did to my father. HERODOTUS, HISTORIES, 7: VIIIA
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