Quick questions on Xerxes' death, aftermath and interpretations: HSC Ancient History

Xerxes became king in 486 BC on the death of his father Darius I, and his reign is dominated in the Greek record by the great invasion of Greece in 480-479 BC. After the naval defeat at Salamis (480 BC) and the land and sea defeats at Plataea and Mycale (479 BC), Xerxes withdrew from the Greek theatre. For the empire this was the loss of a distant western frontier, not a mortal blow: the vast bulk of the empire - the satrapies of the Near East, the tribute system, the royal roads - continued to function, and Xerxes' enormous building programme at Persepolis (the Gate of All Nations and the Throne Hall, or Hall of a Hundred Columns) went on projecting undiminished wealth and power.

If the reign is judged by the Greek record alone, it reads as a story of hubris and failure: a colossal invasion humbled at Salamis, followed by decline and murder. Judged from the empire's own side, the picture is very different. The Greek campaign was an expensive failure on the western edge of a huge empire, but it did not shake the imperial core. Early revolts in Egypt (c.

The heart of this dot point is that we do not have one Xerxes but three, produced by three different kinds of evidence that pull in different directions.

This is the source of almost every vivid detail. Aeschylus' tragedy The Persians (472 BC) is the earliest surviving account and casts Xerxes as the type of the hubristic tyrant, punished by the gods for yoking the Hellespont and overreaching human limits, set against the wise dead king Darius. Herodotus (Histories, especially Books 7-9) develops the same pattern - the whipping of the Hellespont, the vast doomed host, the king swayed by flatterers - though Herodotus is more complex than the caricature and grants Xerxes moments of pathos, such as weeping at Abydos at the thought that all his soldiers would be dead within a century.

Against this stands the evidence Xerxes' own regime produced: the royal inscriptions and the building programme. The trilingual "daiva inscription" from Persepolis presents Xerxes as a pious king ruling by the favour of Ahuramazda, suppressing false gods (daivas) and upholding order (arta). The architecture - the Gate of All Nations, the Throne Hall - projects legitimate, ordered, universal kingship.

Twentieth and twenty-first century historians of the Achaemenids have argued that scholarship must stop reading Persia through Greek eyes. Pierre Briant (From Cyrus to Alexander, English 2002) reconstructs the empire on its own administrative terms and rejects the "decadence" narrative. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg coined the critique of "Hellenocentrism", arguing that the "decline of Persia" was a Greek literary theme, not a Persian reality.