ABSTRACT
Xerxes is perhaps the figure from Persian history most familiar to us. The reason is, of course, that he is the Achaemenid ruler who invaded Greece in 480, but whose army was defeated and withdrew (479). The ‘Persian wars’ of Greece mark the beginnings of classical Greek culture in political discourse, literature and art, and have thus traditionally been seen as a crucially formative event, a turning point, in European (and, by extension, world) history. 1
