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Biography of Xerxes
Name: Xerxes
Birth Date: N/A
Death Date: N/A
Place of Birth: N/A
Nationality: Persian
Gender: Male
Occupations: king
Xerxes
Xerxes (reigned 486-465 BC), a king of Persia, made an unsuccessful effort to conquer Greece in 480-479, suffering a major naval defeat at the Battle of Salamis.Xerxes was the son of Darius I and Atossa, daughter of Cyrus I. When Xerxes succeeded his father, Egypt was already in revolt and troubles soon broke out in Babylon; further, there was still pending the matter of the Greeks, where the Persian defeat at Marathon called for vengeance. He crushed the revolts in both Egypt and Babylon with great severity, not sparing even the gods, and then turned to the conquest of Greece.The superiority of the Greek infantry, man for man, was by then well known, but Xerxes' force outnumbered the Greeks, and he decided to make a land invasion around the northern end of the Aegean. Enormous preparations were made all the way to the borders of Greece. There could be no …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…was free.The war dragged on, chiefly a naval affair with Athens leading, until the Persians were cleared from Europe and the coasts of the Aegean, but Xerxes took no further part in it. He retired to his capitals and spent the remainder of his reign building, particularly at Persepolis. He became a drunken, embittered man, a pawn of his scheming courtiers, and was murdered in Susa by the captain of the guards. Further Reading The principal source on Xerxes is Herodotus, Histories, but it ends with the failure of Xerxes' invasion; information on his later years appears only in isolated references. Among modern works G. B.Grundy, The Great Persian War (1901; repr. 1969), and Peter Green, Xerxes at Salamis (1970), contain detailed information on Xerxes. Albert T. Olmstead, A History of the Persian Empire (1948), and Roman Ghirshman, Iran, from the Earliest Times to the Islamic Conquest (1954), discuss Xerxes as a builder.
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