The man and the myth
Praises a look at Xerxes, the fifth-century BC king of Persia whose life and character has long been debated
MICHAEL SCOTT Xerxes: A Persian Life by Richard Stoneman This book opens with the claim that it is the “first attempt at a serious biography of Xerxes, or any Achaemenid [Persian] king since Plutarch’s Life of Artaxerxes, written in the second century AD”. What follows is an erudite insight into the problems of writing about the ancient world when the surviving sources do not, or have chosen not to, speak to a particular topic.
The sources relating to the life and character of the Achaemenid rulers, and particularly those of Darius and Xerxes – the two Persian kings who attempted and failed to conquer Greece in 490 BC at Marathon and 480–79 at Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea – are a mix of heady victorious rhetoric and careful character assassination from the Greek side, and sparse, often laconic, survival from the Achaemenid side. This is coupled with the thoughts of generations of later writers in both the west and east, who have responded to these famous individuals as one might respond to an empty bottle to be filled with one’s preferred tipple.
In this they are not alone. The game of turning ancient achievers (or, in this case, supposed nonachievers) into standardbearers for heroic or devilish characteristics is a long-standing one. What makes Xerxes interesting is that he was the ruler of the largest empire the world had seen by the fifth century BC. As such, as our gaze on the ancient world slowly widens – domi- nated as it often is by Greece and Rome – understanding the life and character of a figure such as Xerxes is paramount.
Richard Stoneman does this for us in an engaging and wide-ranging fashion. He nimbly tries to avoid the character assassination of Xerxes by Alexander the Great and his successors, combs through multiple Roman-era narratives for key ideas and insights, and, perhaps most deserving of admiration, tackles a wide selection of literature from the biblical book of Esther via the 10th-century Iranian national epic Shahnameh and Gore Vidal’s 1981 novel Creation. Stoneman masterfully weighs these difficult sources for what they can tell us, both about the individuals and societies that created them and Xerxes himself.
The book covers Xerxes’ accession, his empire, image, religion, invasion of Greece, family, romances and – finally – his assassination by the commander of the royal bodyguard. What emerges, on the one hand, is the public persona of a man who slowly learnt to deal with the great challenges faced by the ruler of the largest empire of his time, a man driven by a need to carry out a ‘great deed’ worthy of his ancestors and position, and who always maintained a proper religious attitude towards the gods. On the other hand, from what we can know of his ‘inward qualities’, Xerxes seems to have been a lover of nature, prone to amorous infatuations (in his middle age he fell for a younger woman), and a man overshadowed by what Stoneman labels “the Persian melancholy”.