Xerxes

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Xerxes' Battle Strategy:

-At Thermopylae, Xerxes got impatient with waiting to fight the Spartans and ordered the Medes and Cissians to attack and try to bring them back alive, but the Medes' fell, but others had taken their place.

Reasons for Xerxes' Failure:

-Greeks fighting for their freedom and the thought of losing their homes caused them to fight against the Persians even harder, and the Persians did not have the spirit. the Greeks saw it as slaves fighting for their master. They weren't there in their own free will, but they were members of a vast empire, in which they had little belief in.

-Also, the planning and careful organisation of strategies compared to the size of the army was difficult, and they required large amounts of food and other materials needed for the expedition. The farther they went from Persia, the more difficult it was to stay supplied.

Xerxes' Actions:

-Xerxes gets angered very easily, for example when the Hellespont was destroyed in a storm, he had the engineers beheaded.

-This tells us that he was a very tempered person, and also wrote down the names, the city, and the parentage of Persian officers who acted in a distinguished way.

Reliability:

-We are not sure whether Herodotus and Aeschylus' accounts are reliable, with support that Herodotus was Ionian and Aeschylus was Athenian, which probably could mean that they both have biased opinions against Persia and Xerxes.