Xerxes I, king of the Persian Achaemenid Empire from 486 to 465 BCE, was a man of grandeur, ambition, and serious grudge-holding. You might know him as the gold-draped villain from 300, but the real Xerxes was less body oil, more world domination.
Let’s break it down.
Son of a Legend
Xerxes inherited the throne from Darius the Great—yes, the same Darius who built highways, a royal mail system, and basically treated Persia like a startup scaling hard. But Darius had one major failure: getting clowned by the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon. Xerxes, his son, decided to finish what Dad started. Spoiler: He didn’t.
The Invasion That Launched a Thousand Ships
In 480 BCE, Xerxes built a floating bridge across the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles) by tying together hundreds of boats—because bridges are for chumps and kings walk on water. After a storm destroyed it, he had the sea whipped. That’s not a metaphor. He literally ordered his men to lash the ocean and curse it.
Then he marched possibly the largest army the ancient world had ever seen—estimates range from 100,000 to 2 million—into Greece. The showdown? Thermopylae. Yes, that Thermopylae. 300 Spartans and a few thousand allies held him off just long enough to become legends.
The Fall
Despite a successful sack of Athens, Xerxes' navy got wiped at Salamis by the outnumbered Greeks using clever tactics and tight straits. After that, Xerxes lost interest and went home, leaving generals to clean up the mess—and lose at Plataea.
Back in Persia, he lived out his years building extravagant palaces at Persepolis and Susa. He was eventually assassinated—because even absolute monarchs forget to watch their backs.
Why He Matters
Xerxes wasn’t just a tyrant with delusions of grandeur. He symbolized the clash of empire and independence, East and West, autocracy and democracy. The Persian Wars shaped the identity of ancient Greece, and through that, the foundations of Western civilization.
TL;DR:
Xerxes was the blinged-out Persian king who tried to steamroll Greece, got humbled by clever tactics and bad geography, and ended up a cautionary tale in ambition, logistics, and hubris.