Imagining Xerxes: Ancient Perspectives on a Persian King by Emma Bridges (review)

This is not a book about the historical Xerxes, the Persian king who invaded Greece in 480 b.c. As the title suggests—and as the author clearly states—the goal of this book is to explore how successive generations of writers in the ancient world conceptualized Xerxes, and to understand how these various literary expressions “were shaped by the diverse contexts within which they were produced” (3). This comparative perspective is the source of both the book’s strengths and its weaknesses.

The book’s greatest strength—the fact that it brings together different ancient authors whose works are not often compared—is much in evidence in the first two chapters, which focus mainly on Aeschylus’ presentation of Xerxes in the Persae (first produced in 472 b.c.) and Herodotus’ portrayal of Xerxes in the Histories (probably completed around 425 b.c.). Bridges points out that both the chorus of the Persae and the ghost of Darius (who is summoned in the second half of the play) condemn Xerxes in moral terms, contrasting Persian prosperity under Darius’ wise rule with Xerxes’ arrogance in bridging the Hellespont, his error of judgment in launching the expedition, and the destruction he has brought upon the Persian people. Herodotus, by contrast, presents Xerxes as continuing Darius’ expansionist policies toward Greece: “Herodotus’ narrative leaves us with a complex picture not of an individual who is immoral . . . but rather as part of a wider pattern of aggressive imperialistic overreach which replicates elements of the conduct of his predecessors—Cyrus and Cambyses, as well as Darius” (67–68).

This comparison between Aeschylus’ and Herodotus’ presentations of Xerxes is useful and thought-provoking, partly because both works were composed within living memory of the actual invasion; partly because Herodotus was probably familiar with Aeschylus’ play and may well have been responding to it;¹ and partly because the difference in genre between these two works makes scholars less likely to compare them, even though such generic differences would have been much less significant to a fifth-century audience. But Bridges’ analysis becomes less insightful in succeeding chapters, as she considers how Xerxes is portrayed in a variety of other works, including Persian inscriptions, fourth-century Athenian oratory, the Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible, and several works written during the Roman period. In analyzing these writings, most of which were composed long after the historical events they describe, Bridges discovers, again and again, that the authors’ perceptions of Xerxes are largely determined by their own perspectives. Thus we learn that the Xerxes of fourth-century Athenian rhetoric is “a product of the aims of the orators whose desire either to appeal to Greek unity or to compare a morally inferior present with the glorious past” led them to portray Xerxes as a stereotypical tyrant, thwarted by the courageous actions of the Athenians’ ancestors (112–13). We also discover that “the incidental details of the Persian court” in Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe are “the literary descendants of earlier narratives which focus on the king’s household” (149), and that “the reuse of the figure of Xerxes” in the Roman period “sits within the broader context of the Romans’ appropriation of the Persian Wars traditions in the service of their own political propaganda” (157). Such statements, while certainly not wrong, do not add much to our knowledge of Xerxes or to our understanding of the authors who wrote about him. Bridges’ conclusions are in fact determined by her comparativist approach; because she considers only how various authors’ portraits of Xerxes “were shaped by the diverse contexts in which they were produced,” she predictably discovers that the authors’ historical contexts and political concerns shape their presentations. Thus, while this book is well-written and competently researched, the fact that it is not well grounded in a single period, genre, or tradition limits the kinds of questions it can ask as well as the kinds of...