Whatever the case may be, we cannot judge Xerxes’ reign in terms of dynastic difficulties, nor, a fortiori, can we postulate with the Classical authors that his assassination was destiny’s just punishment of a man guilty of immoderation. We must renounce, once and for all, the Greek vision of Xerxes’ reign. At bottom, his policy does not appear fundamentally different from his father’s, even if the defeats suffered on the western front betoken an incontestable shrinkage of Darius’s imperial realm. Again we must stress that, seen from the center, these setbacks were only temporary and that Xerxes never gave up the idea of reconquest. Because the general concept of the palace at Per-sepolis (A'Pu) built by Xerxes and completed by his son Artaxerxes 1 goes back to Xerxes, we realize that, as if to claim an extent never achieved l)y the Empire, even under Darius, the Great King installed a frieze of tributaries/gift-bearers, where the number of delegations (30) and delegates (300, versus 138 on the Apadana) was greater than ever before.
Although faced with constraints and contradictions, Xerxes was able to promote a robust policy of colonization with the goal of establishing Persian dominion more solidly, a policy that included appealing to Greek supporters, especially in Asia Minor. Difficult though it is to date the archaeological and iconographic evidence precisely ("Greco-Persian” stelas and impressions), it nevertheless seems that Xerxes’ reign marked a quantitative and spatial increase of the Persian imperial diaspora in the provinces; this at least is the impression gained from the data coming from Asia Minor, and more specifically from the region of Dascylium, which at this date appears to have been more important than it had been previously.
1 he Great King’s authority was further strengthened by ideological propaganda that tied religion (Ahura-Mazda) and throne closer and closer together by proclaiming the
Great King to be the regulator of Persian rituals. Although the accent on the “Persian" character of the Empire did not, properly speaking, constitute a novelty, it nonetheless appears to have been affirmed with a new force. This insistence, we Irave seen, does not imply that Xerxes sought to “persecute” local religions or to “convert” his peoples to Mazdaism. The message was perhaps primarily addressed to the Persians, those in Persia and those in the imperial diaspora, in such a way as to bind together still more closely the dominant socioethnic class around its king.
World History
