Sources on Xerxes as a Personality (1 Viewer)

[LittleBird96]

Hi everyone, I am just wondering if anyone out there has any sources (primary, secondary and archaeological) On Xerxes for the personality topic? I have plenty of notes but need sources to avoid narrating the information. Thanks anyone who can help.

 

[belovedfinch]

HERODOTUS- there “was not a man who, for stature and noble bearing, was more worthy than Xerxes to wield so vast a power.”

 

[belovedfinch]

“He is capable of large designs and generous impulses, and true to his word…he normally had a chivalry of magnamity that his father seems to have lacked. The admirable discipline of the Persian troops suggests that he inspired their reverence.” J. M. Cook

 

[belovedfinch]

Early scholars saw him as debauched and slothful, weak and degenerate; later scholars are more balanced, trying to judge him in the Persian context of his day.
P.Green (The Greco-Persian Wars, Berkeley, 1996) sums up the position: “Our traditional picture of Xerxes is a caricature, put together from hostile, and faintly contemptuous, Greek propaganda. We see him as…a cowardly despot ruled by his women and his eunuchs…cruel in victory, spineless in defeat. Persian sources…reveal a very different man. Tall, regal and handsome he stands in the Persepolis reliefs, and his proclamations have a ringing dignity which echoes down the ages…”
Hope these help!