He was the Persian king (reigned 486 to 465 BC), son of Darius the Great, who led the great invasion of Greece in 480 BC.

What is Xerxes I famous for?

For the vast invasion of Greece in 480 BC: bridging the Hellespont, forcing the pass at Thermopylae and burning Athens, before losing his fleet at Salamis.

What happened at Thermopylae and Salamis?

At Thermopylae in 480 BC Xerxes broke through the Greek defence after the stand of Leonidas; weeks later his fleet was shattered at Salamis, forcing him to withdraw from Greece.

Did Xerxes really whip the sea?

Herodotus tells that when a storm wrecked his first bridge over the Hellespont, Xerxes had the water lashed and cursed; it is a famous Greek story about his pride, not a securely documented fact.

How did Xerxes I die?

He was assassinated in 465 BC by a powerful member of his own court, and was succeeded by his son Artaxerxes I.

Was Xerxes' invasion a total failure?

It won at Thermopylae and burned Athens, but the defeats at Salamis in 480 BC and Plataea in 479 BC ended the invasion and marked the limit of Persian expansion into Europe.

Xerxes I: the king who invaded Greece

Xerxes I launched the greatest invasion the ancient world had seen. Inheriting his father's grievance against Greece, he gathered a vast army and fleet, bridged the sea itself, and forced his way into the heart of Greece, burning Athens. Yet the same campaign ended in the disaster at Salamis, the moment Persia's tide in the west finally turned.

The great expedition

Xerxes came to the throne in 486 BC as the son of¹ Darius the Great, and took up his father's unfinished war against Greece. He spent years assembling an enormous army and navy¹, and famously bridged the Hellespont with boats to march his host from Asia into Europe², a feat of engineering that awed the ancient world.

Watercolour of robed Persian courtiers on a terrace watching a vast army crossing a plain to the sea — Crossing the Hellespont, an ink and watercolour drawing by Samuel Woodforde, made before 1818 to illustrate Xerxes' invasion of Greece: the king and his courtiers watch the army march across. Public domain

Thermopylae and Athens

In 480 BC the invasion broke through the Greek defence³ of the pass at Thermopylae, where Leonidas and his Spartans made their famous stand, and swept on to take and burn Athens, whose people had fled.² For a moment it seemed all Greece would fall.

Coloured historical map of Greece and the Aegean showing the states and the Persian line of march — Greece at the time of the war with Persia, 500 to 479 BC, from William R. Shepherd's Historical Atlas (1923), with the route of Xerxes' march into Greece. Public domain

Salamis

Then, in the straits of Salamis, the Greek fleet drew the huge Persian navy into narrow water and shattered it as Xerxes watched from the shore. With his supply line at sea broken, Xerxes withdrew to Asia, leaving an army behind¹ that was crushed the next year at Plataea.

A 16th-century engraving of Xerxes I — Xerxes I in a 16th-century engraving. Public domain.

He bridged the sea and burned Athens, then watched his fleet break at Salamis.

The king after the war

Xerxes never returned to Greece. He turned to great building works at⁴ Persepolis and to the intrigues of his court, and in 465 BC he was assassinated by a powerful member of his own court⁴. To the Greeks he became the very image of the proud eastern king humbled⁵; to Persia he had ruled the empire at its zenith.

19th-century photograph of the ruined stone gateway of Persepolis with columns and a group of men at its foot — The Gate of All Nations, built under Xerxes at Persepolis, with its colossal winged bulls, in an albumen print attributed to Antoin Sevruguin, about 1880 to 1895. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. CC0 (public domain)

Meet his father Darius the Great, or explore the other great commanders of the Persian Empire.

Sources and notes

Numbered notes in the text point to the works below.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Xerxes I (Jean-Louis Huot)” ↩ a b c
Herodotus, Histories, Book 7, 20 to 36 (preparations, the Hellespont bridges of ships, the lashing of the sea); Book 8, 40 to 64 (Athens taken and burned, the allied debate over the Isthmus, Themistocles on the 'heavier and fewer' Greek ships at 8.60), 75 to 96 (Sikinnos' message, the battle, Xerxes seated below Mount Aigaleos at 8.90), 97 to 113 (retreat, Mardonius left behind). ↩ a b c
Peter Green, The Greco-Persian Wars (University of California Press, 1996). ↩
World History Encyclopedia, “Xerxes I (Joshua J. Mark)” ↩ a b
Richard Stoneman, Xerxes: A Persian Life (Yale University Press, 2015). ↩
Wikipedia, “Xerxes I, Wikipedia”