Mark Gagnon

And the rebellion needed to be crushed before it could inspire all these other provinces to follow.

Now Xerxes moved quickly.

By 484, he had suppressed the Egyptian revolt with...

Crazy efficiency.

Basically stripped Egypt of many of the privileges that it actually enjoyed under Darius and immediately installed his brother Achenemes as the satrap.

This was a Xerxes that really understood that empires are held together by determination as much as they are by administration.

The second problem was Babylon.

Babylon had been a jewel of the empire, an ancient, wealthy, culturally significant city that both Cyrus and Darius had treated with great respect.

But once again, Babylon revolted as well, possibly twice during the early years that Xerxes had the throne.

and xerxes response to this rebellion was extremely harsh greek and other later sources claim that he damaged babylon's main temple and carried off or potentially even destroyed the golden statue of marduk this was babylon's chief deity and this was an act that would have been seen as extremely sacrilegious to

to the Babylonians, and modern scholars are divided on this to this day.

Some see the accounts as exaggerations or maybe misinterpretations, and so the ultimate fate of the statue is still debated.

What isn't debated, though, is that Xerxes treated Babylon far more harshly than his predecessors had, and the city never quite recovered its former status within the empire.

So Xerxes' empire was...

On fire, basically.

And in the middle of putting out those fires, he returned to an old family grudge, and that's Greece.

Sorry, Christos.

Now, in 490 BC, Darius had sent an invasion basically across the Aegean Sea to punish the Athenians for supporting a revolt in the Persian province of Iona.

That invasion ended in humiliation at the Battle of Marathon, where a heavily outnumbered Athenian army defeated the Persians on the beach near Athens.

Darius had been planning a second and much larger invasion