Xerxes and the invasion of Greece

Xerxes succeeds his father and carries on his design — to subdue the Greek cities. He leads an enormous army and fleet across the Hellespont, occupies and burns an abandoned Athens, but loses his ships in the strait of Salamis, and the next year his army is broken at Plataea. Thereafter the king turns to building: at Persepolis the Apadana and the Gate of All Nations are completed. Jewish tradition knows him as Achashverosh: the events of the scroll of Esther are set at the court of the Persian king in Shushan, the capital where the Achaemenids wintered.