Emma Bridges

Imagining Xerxes (eBook, ePUB)

Ancient Perspectives on a Persian King

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Xerxes, the Persian king who invaded Greece in 480 BC, quickly earned a notoriety that endured throughout antiquity and beyond. The Greeks' historical encounter with this eastern king - which resulted, against overwhelming odds, in the defeat of the Persian army - has inspired a series of literary responses to Xerxes 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.

Imagining Xerxes is a transhistorical analysis that explores the richness and variety of Xerxes' afterlives within the ancient literary tradition. It 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.

Analysing these diverse representations of Xerxes, this title explores the reception of a key figure in the ancient world and the reinvention of his image in a remarkable array of cultural and historical contexts.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. November 2014
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781472511324
• Artikelnr.: 41816617

Autorenporträt

Emma Bridges is a Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University, UK. Her doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Durham, focused on the representation of Xerxes in ancient literature from the fifth century BC to the second sophistic. In 2007 she co-edited (with Edith Hall and P. J. Rhodes) a volume entitled Cultural Responses to the Persian Wars: Antiquity to the Third Millennium.