◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Watch How It Ends I am Xerxes the Great. I was assassinated in my own bedchamber in 465 before your common era, by the commander of my royal bodyguard and the eunuch who had charge of my chambers. The strongman is always finally betrayed by the people closest to him. I tell you this first because everything I am about to say leads to that bedchamber. I ruled the largest empire the world had then known. It continued for one hundred and thirty years after me before Alexander burned my city to the ground. Aeschylus made my catastrophe into Athenian theater. Herodotus made me a portrait of hubris. Hear the other side. In 480 I crossed the Hellespont with the largest army the ancient world had assembled — Herodotus would later inflate it into the millions. A storm broke the bridge. I ordered the sea whipped three hundred lashes. Herodotus calls this madness. It was not madness. It was the act of a man who had been told for twenty years he was above rebuke, that the sea itself owed him passage. The whipping of the sea is what a strongman does when reality first refuses him. The man at your podium is whipping the sea. He will not stop. I won at Thermopylae. Three days at the pass. Twenty thousand of my own dead. The Greek fleet got the time it needed. I burned Athens — empty, evacuated, a gift to Themistocles. These were Pyrrhic victories — wins so costly they amounted to defeats. The strongman cannot tell them from real ones. I sat on a throne overlooking the bay of Salamis to watch my fleet destroy the Greek fleet. Every voice in my court except one had told me the Greeks would scatter. The one voice was Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, who said: do not fight at Salamis. The waters are narrow. The Greeks will turn on you. I did not listen. My fleet was destroyed. I rode for home that night. This is what your generals will do. They have spent years studying what answer you require. They will give it. You will discover the disaster from the throne, and it will be too late. After Salamis I went home. I built monuments at Persepolis. I had my brother Masistes killed over a love affair that should not have mattered. The strongman becomes petty. He spends the years that should have been spent governing pursuing private grievances. The man at your podium will continue. The disaster at his Salamis will not end him. He will return to his Persepolis. He will pursue grievances. He will build monuments. He will execute those who displease him. And eventually he will be defeated by the courtier who served him too long. Aeschylus could not tell you this. Aeschylus saw it from the Athenian shore. I saw it from the throne. The two views are not the same. Listen to your Artemisia when she speaks. Watch how it ends. It ends with the court turning. I am Xerxes. I was Great King for twenty-one years. The empire stood for one hundred and thirty more before it was burned. Do not let yours follow the same path.