Mark Gagnon

Some modern writers even held up the Achaemenid policies, like allowing subjects to

keep their language and their own religions as a distant ancestor of later ideas about imperial pluralism and human rights and all that kind of stuff.

Now, that might be overstated, but it does highlight how different Persian rule could look compared to a lot of Greek city states where democracy was limited to only dudes that had land and slavery was everywhere, that kind of stuff.

Now, this doesn't mean that Persia was a modern liberal state, but it does mean that the Europe good, people over there bad, tells us a lot more about kind of how later politics was kind of written for American and European audiences.

And Xerxes himself was neither the monster that the Greeks describe or the flawless king that was doing God's will that he would claim.

He was a ruler of this enormous empire and was dealing with rebellions and conquest and wars and construction and religious policies and all sorts of stuff.

And of course, assassination.

And he was doing it all at the same time.

So, of course, he made decisions that were sometimes good and some that were terrible.

He won some battles.

He lost some others, just like

every ancient leader, it's not just all one way.

So in other words, he was human.

And unfortunately, with Xerxes being reduced to a caricature, you know, the villain to the Greeks, right, Chrysos?

All right.

The Greeks needed a tyrant to basically make a meaningful victory, right?

If Alexander the Great is going to go in there and destroy a whole city, they got to be bad people.

The Bible needs a powerful king to make Esther's courage look so extraordinary.

Hollywood needs a spectacle.

And as a result, underneath all of those layers of storytelling is the real king.