Quick questions on Xerxes and the invasion of Greece 480 to 479 BC: HSC Ancient History

Xerxes came to the throne in 486 BC and inherited a war his father Darius I had left unfinished. Darius had been humiliated at Marathon in 490 BC and was preparing a second expedition against Greece when he died. Several motives combined:

Xerxes' preparations were on a scale designed to overawe. Two feats dominate the tradition and the exam:

The turning point came in the narrow straits off the island of Salamis in late September 480 BC. Themistocles engineered the battle, reportedly sending a secret message (via his servant Sicinnus) that lured the Persian fleet into the confined water between Salamis and the Attic coast, where its numbers became a liability rather than an advantage. The Greek fleet inflicted a heavy defeat. Herodotus (8.90) pictures Xerxes watching the disaster from a throne on the slopes of Mount Aigaleos, a scene that is as much a moral tableau of pride humbled as a piece of reportage.

In 479 BC Mardonius reoccupied Athens, then withdrew into Boeotia, where the largest Greek land army yet assembled, commanded by the Spartan regent Pausanias, defeated and killed him at Plataea. In the same season the Greeks won at Mycale, on the Ionian coast across the Aegean, destroying the remnant of the Persian fleet and encouraging the Ionian cities to revolt. With these two victories the invasion was over. Xerxes himself never returned to the Greek front.