Xerxes, the Persian king who invaded Greece in 480 BC, quickly earned a notoriety which endured throughout antiquity and beyond. The onslaught of this eastern king upon Greek territory, culminating in the burning of Athens, ensured that the character of Xerxes soon found his way into the Greek cultural encyclopaedia as a symbol of arrogance, hubris and cruelty. The Xerxes-tradition is rich in episodes which have captured the imagination of writers throughout antiquity and into modern times, including the crossing of the Hellespont, the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis, and the destruction of Athens. The earliest ancient Greek sources created an image of a figure to be both feared and mocked by those for whom the experience of the Persian Wars was a key moment in their own self-definition. Within this rhetorical framework Xerxes was constructed as the antitype of the virtuous Greeks who had resisted his attempt to enslave them. In later traditions this image was revisited, adapted and, in some cases, contradicted.Imagining Xerxes is a transhistorical analysis bringing together the disparate cultural responses to the Persian king; it includes an evaluation of his portrayal in historiographical works by Herodotus and Ctesias and in the literary representations of Aeschylus, the Athenian orators, the Roman poetic tradition and Plutarch. It also considers evidence which goes beyond the Hellenocentric view, such as extant Persian epigraphic and artistic sources and the Jewish tradition. From the image of the tyrannical yet effeminate bully seen in Aeschylus' Persae, to the official picture of the rightful king portrayed in Persian inscriptions, or the cruel and enslaving despot who transgresses boundaries seen in the historical and oratorical tradition, Xerxes is a figure who has been reinvented in a remarkable variety of cultural and literary contexts. Analysing these reinventions, this title examines the reception of a key figure in the ancient world: one whose image was in many cases inextricably bound up with notions of how the receiving societies imagined and defined themselves.

Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars addresses the huge impact on subsequent culture made by the wars fought between ancient Persia and Greece in the early fifth century BC. It brings together sixteen interdisciplinary essays, mostly by classical scholars, on individual trends within the reception of this period of history, extending from the wars' immediate impact on ancient Greek history to their reception in literature and thought both in antiquity and in the post-Renaisssance world. Extensively illustrated and accessibly written, with a detailed Introduction and bibliographies, this book will interest historians, classicists, and students of both comparative and modern literatures.

Epic poetry and tragic drama provide us with some of the richest ancient Greek depictions of women who are married to soldiers. In tales of the Trojan War, as told by Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, we encounter these mythical warriors' wives: Penelope, isolated but resourceful as she awaits the return of Odysseus after his lengthy absence; the war widow Andromache, enslaved and displaced from her homeland after the fall of Troy; the unfaithful and murderous Clytemnestra; and Tecmessa, a war captive who witnesses her partner's breakdown and suicide in the aftermath of battle. Warriors' Wives compares the experiences of these mythical characters with those of contemporary military spouses. Emma Bridges traces aspects of the lives of warriors' wives—mythical and real, ancient and modern—from the moment of farewell, through periods of separation and reunion, to the often traumatic aftermath of war, to consider the emotional, psychological, and social impacts of life as a military spouse. By unearthing a wealth of contemporary evidence for the lives of the often silenced and unacknowledged partners of those who serve in the military, and by examining this alongside the ancient stories of warriors' wives, Warriors' Wives sheds fresh light on the experience of being married to the military.

Hailed by Tom Holland as a 'fascinating and compendious survey of ancient attitudes to Xerxes' and now available in paperback, Imagining Xerxes is a transhistorical analysis that explores the richness and variety of Xerxes' afterlives within the ancient literary tradition and the reinvention of his image in a remarkable array of cultural and historical contexts. This Persian king, who invaded Greece in 480 BC, quickly earned a notoriety that endured throughout antiquity and beyond. The Greeks' historical encounter with Xerxes - which resulted, against overwhelming odds, in the defeat of the Persian army - has inspired a series of literary responses to the king in which he is variously portrayed as the archetypal destructive and enslaving aggressor, as the epitome of arrogance and impiety, or as a figure synonymous with the exoticism and luxury of the Persian court. Emma Bridges examines the earliest representations of the king, in Aeschylus' tragic play Persians and Herodotus' historiographical account of the Persian Wars, before tracing the ways in which the image of Xerxes was revisited and adapted in later Greek and Latin texts. The author also looks beyond the Hellenocentric viewpoint to consider the construction of Xerxes' image in the Persian epigraphic record and the alternative perspectives on the king found in the Jewish written tradition.