Persia’s Greek Campaigns: Kingship, War, & Spectacle

with John Hyland

The wars between the Achaemenid Persian empire and the Greek city-states are among the most famous conflicts in world history – above all Xerxes’ expedition of 480-479 BCE, which captured Athens but lost the battles of Salamis and Plataia. In the absence of Achaemenid accounts, this “Persian War” is remembered from the Greek perspective as a disastrous failure, which ended Persian expansion and empowered Athens’ Classical empire. The full story, though, is more complex. Achaemenid and Near Eastern evidence shows that campaigns led by kings served as political spectacles, designed to project images of royal heroism, imperial cohesion, and logistical mastery through warfare on distant frontiers. Xerxes’ Greek campaign accomplished these objectives, and its initial victories at Thermopylai and Athens permitted a royal claim of overall success, despite the problematic conclusion.  The campaign’s mixed legacy set the stage for an evolution of Persia’s frontier imperialism from military to diplomatic methods of power display.

About the speaker:

John O. Hyland holds a Ph.D. in the Ancient Mediterranean World from the University of Chicago (2005). Since 2006, he has taught in the Department of History at Christopher Newport University in  Newport News, Virginia, USA. Persia’s Greek Campaigns, published by Oxford University Press in 2025, is his third book. He is also the author of Persian Interventions: The Achaemenid Empire, Athens, and Sparta 450-386 BCE, and co-editor of Brill’s Companion to War in the Ancient Iranian Empires. His next project will explore the modern afterlife of the Persian Wars as a contested political symbol.