What King Xerxes Did to His Own Daughters Was Worse Than Death

The royal arena of King Xerxes was said to be filled with scents of roses and myrrh, yet no perfume could mask the horrors that transpired within those walls. In the perfumed silence of Pepilolis, a girl no older than fifteen knelt as attendants painted her body with oils meant for queens. They told her this was the highest honor a woman could receive in the empire, but deep down, she knew better. Her fingers trembled, not from the chill of the desert air slipping through the marble corridors, but from the truth she dared not voice. She wasn’t afraid of death; that would be mercy compared to what awaited her. The guards called her princess, but titles meant nothing in the eyes of the man she would face that night—the man whom the world worshipped as a god. To him, she was merely another possession.

To understand why the King of Kings turned his own blood into victims, we must delve into the roots of his empire and the birth of his madness. Xerxes was born in 519 BC, into the heart of a kingdom that spanned three continents. The Persian Empire stretched from the banks of the Indus to the edges of Greece, from the burning sands of Egypt to the cold peaks of the Caucasus. Fifty million subjects obeyed the commands of his father, Darius I, who ruled from palaces carved in stone and gold, where the young heir seemed to bow before him.

When Xerxes entered the world, priests proclaimed him chosen by Ahura Mazda, the god of light and order. He was not raised as a boy; he was raised as a deity. At the royal academy of Susa, Zoroastrian magi drilled him day after day, teaching him that he was the living reflection of the divine, that his thoughts were sacred and his will, law. Humility and philosophy were foreign concepts; he learned the theology of absolute power. Every feast, every ceremony reinforced this belief. Servants recited hymns to his name at sunrise, and nobles tasted his food first to prove their loyalty. Even courtiers approached him with their backs turned and their eyes averted, reinforcing the idea that he was not human.

As a child growing up in the palace, Xerxes absorbed lessons that compassion was a weakness. His mother, a daughter of Cyrus the Great, further deepened this corruption, having witnessed the chaos that could tear through royal lines. She whispered into Xerxes’s ear that only complete control guarantees survival, a lesson that hardened him. He learned that love must be owned to be safe, and loyalty could only be trusted if enforced through fear.

By the time he ascended to the throne at twenty, Xerxes believed the empire itself was his body, its people merely veins serving his will. His early reign was marked by conquest, brutally crushing uprisings in Babylon and leaving a trail of destruction across Egypt. The message was clear: defy him, and even the gods would not protect you. Yet the true test of his power came when he turned his sights on Greece. For Xerxes, this campaign was not merely a war; it was a theological battle. To subdue Greece would affirm his divinity.

He ordered a bridge of ships across the Hellespont, allowing his nearly million-strong army to march over the sea. When storms shattered the bridge, Xerxes commanded his men to whip the sea with chains, branding it as punishment for defying his will. To his followers, it was divine theater; to everyone else, it was madness. The Persian fleet met a fiery end at Salamis, and months later, his ground forces were slaughtered at Plataea. For the first time, the man who called himself immortal tasted failure.

Upon returning to Pepilolis in 479 BC, Xerxes’s triumphal procession halted, and the grand feasts ceased. He withdrew from public life, no longer meeting foreign emissaries. His paranoia grew; he executed architects for choosing the wrong shade of tile and had generals flayed alive for questioning him. His empire, once ruled by strategy, now succumbed to erratic orders and fear.

The most disturbing transformation occurred behind the walls of the imperial arena. What had begun as a dynastic custom—the royal harem—mutated into an obsession. Within this walled labyrinth lived 360 official concubines and countless slaves gathered from across the empire. Girls from Egypt, Babylon, Lydia, and India arrived in gilded caravans, chosen not for lineage but for beauty. The arena became a world unto itself, a city inside a prison.

Its marble baths shimmered under gold lamps, but its windows were barred. The scent of jasmine masked the ever-present fear; no woman who entered ever left. Guards stood watch at the gates, and even generals were forbidden entry. Only Xerxes walked freely within, wrapped in silks and silence. From this gilded captivity, daughters were born—dozens, perhaps hundreds—but they were invisible in royal records. They were not acknowledged as princesses, had no names carved into stone tablets, and existed only as shadows, children of the god-king raised to understand their bodies belonged to him.

Years later, one of the palace’s chief guardians, Mithrates, would whisper to conspirators about what he had seen inside those walls. His testimony would ultimately end Xerxes’s reign and stain his legacy forever. He recalled that the beginning of the end came in 471 BC, six years after Greece humbled the empire. That year, the emperor crossed a line so monstrous that even his closest advisers fell silent.

At the center of it all was a girl barely twelve years old, raised under imperial etiquette and carrying herself like nobility. Her eyes were green like polished jade, her hair dark as obsidian, and her face eerily reminiscent of her grandmother, a Tosser. That resemblance awakened something in Xerxes that defied reason—court officials later called it divine fixation; others labeled it insanity. From that moment on, the empire’s most powerful man began spiraling toward a darkness no priest could bless away.

The encounter was prepared as if the gods themselves required it. Every movement, every breath inside the arena adhered to the precision of a sacred rite. Servants dressed in white moved silently, their eyes fixed to the floor, repeating gestures learned from generations of obedience. The girl was told she would partake in a divine ceremony of cosmic importance for the empire’s balance. No one told her the truth. That night changed the emperor forever.

The man who once commanded armies and dreamed of uniting the known world never returned from that chamber. What emerged instead was a colder, more twisted version of himself, determined to prove that even as his empire weakened, his authority remained absolute. This was never a story about desire; it was about domination—the point where greatness and tyranny fused so tightly that they devoured everything around them.

By 468 BC, Xerxes’s reign had become a shadow of its former glory. The palace, once a symbol of order and splendor, now pulsed with quiet dread. Inside its walls, a new hierarchy emerged—rigid, cruel, and meticulously bureaucratic. The young women of the arena were cataloged like tribute from conquered lands, their names, ages, and physical traits filling scrolls stored in cedar chests. The most favored were reserved for the emperor; the rest were traded like currency offered to governors and noble families in exchange for loyalty.

Childhood didn’t exist in this world; there were only ranks of servitude. The guardians of the arena, led by senior Unix, developed an administrative system rivaling that of the empire’s armies. They recorded every audience, maintained schedules, and rationed perfumes and ointments. Nothing escaped documentation. What transpired behind those golden doors was treated with the same precision as Persia’s tax collection or military deployments.

The mothers, imprisoned in adjoining quarters, could do nothing but watch. Some resisted and vanished within days; others broke under pressure, losing their minds in silence. Most learned to survive by pretending not to see. Yet no one suffered more than the daughters themselves, who grew up in a world where obedience was holy and fear mistaken for piety. They lived in a kind of emotional exile, hiding inside themselves as their bodies told stories they could not articulate.

Xerxes observed this decay like a man gazing at his own reflection in a cracked mirror. His eyes had lost warmth. What he sought was not pleasure but submission. He had lost Greece, but within the walls of Pepilolis, he found new territories to conquer—the minds and spirits of those who could not resist him. Artabbanis, captain of the royal guard, was one of the few men who witnessed the empire’s descent firsthand. His duties required his presence near the inner palace, though he could never intervene.

He later wrote that at night, Pepilolis sounded like a temple of despair, filled with muffled cries, whispered prayers, and silences that hurt more than screams. The empire smelled of incense and decay, but it wasn’t the death of enemies that haunted him; it was the death of a civilization rotting from within. Absolute power demands accomplices, and Xerxes had plenty. The Persian elite dined under gilded ceilings, feigning ignorance while justifying their silence with self-preservation.

Many profited directly from the system—new estates, tax exemptions, and political marriages sealed by favors from the arena. Corruption became the empire’s second religion. Even the Zoroastrian high priests, guardians of moral order, offered divine cover for the king’s sins, proclaiming that the king of kings ruled over all creation. To challenge him, even within his household, was to defy Ahura Mazda himself.

Some priests claimed the royal daughters were extensions of the emperor’s sacred essence, vessels of his divine light. To oppose his will was heresy. Court physicians added their layer of complicity, preparing herbal tonics and ointments to mask bruises and dull pain, erasing visible traces of the rituals. Reports were written in coded medical terms so that no outsider could comprehend what had been treated. Everything was done quickly, quietly, and efficiently.

The most devastating betrayal came from within. Older daughters, women who had endured the same fate, became assistants in preparing the younger ones. They combed their hair, applied oils, and repeated the same comforting lies once told to them. They did not act out of cruelty but from despair. Participation was survival; refusal was death. In that twisted world, the family itself became a mechanism of control. The cycle of abuse fed on its own pain, perpetuating itself through fear and hopelessness.

Mithrates, the chief guardian of the arena, later kept mental records of every night, every ritual, and every disappearance. He noted that the emperor’s hunger was not for pleasure but for affirmation. Each act of cruelty reminded Xerxes that he still commanded fate, that he was still a god in a world that had dared to humiliate him. In his later confession, Mithrates recalled dozens of young women scarred or erased during those final years. Some vanished entirely; others lived on in silence, ghosts behind silk curtains.

“It was never lust,” he said. “It was starvation and endless hunger for control.” By 466 BC, fear spread among the upper ranks. Artabbanis had seen enough and gathered a circle of nobles who had also witnessed the horrors. They called it a conspiracy, but it was really self-defense. They feared not divine wrath but contamination—the idea that Xerxes’s madness could infect their households, that their wives and daughters might be next.

Their plan was simple: during the New Year festival, when the king withdrew for his nightly ritual of divine meditation, they would strike. Artabbanis and his men would slip through the inner gate, kill him swiftly, and stage the scene as ritual suicide. No talk of justice; only stability. The empire had to survive, even if truth didn’t.

But Xerxes was no longer merely paranoid; he had become prophetic in his suspicion. He saw betrayal in every eye, treachery in every whisper. Servants vanished for smiling too long; ministers were executed for speaking softly. He turned Pepilolis into a labyrinth of fear. In his final months, he refused to leave the arena, surrounded only by Unix and trembling women. The air inside grew thick with incense and dread.

Then came the night of August 4, 465 BC. Xerxes chose his youngest victim yet, an eleven-year-old girl who had not yet reached womanhood. For weeks, he had watched her, waiting for her body to change, for the moment she would be ready for his ritual. The palace fell silent that evening, the kind of silence that comes before catastrophe. What happened next would end an empire and carve Xerxes’s name into history, not as a god but as a warning.

That night, impatience crushed caution. Artabbanis and his co-conspirators had waited for weeks, watching for the smallest crack in the emperor’s routine. When they learned that Xerxes would visit the arena alone, guarded only by Unix who never left their posts outside the chamber, they knew it was their chance. The guards, following sacred protocol, were forbidden from entering when the divine ritual began, leaving the tunnels beneath the kitchens—the secret arteries of the palace—unguarded.

Artabbanis led his men through those narrow corridors, where the smell of cooked meats mixed with old incense. They moved in silence, armed with daggers instead of swords. There would be no second attempt. When they reached the emperor’s private chamber, they witnessed a sight no man should ever have to see. Xerxes, the king of kings, the living god of Persia, was naked, drenched in sweat, restraining a small girl who cried without sound. His face was unrecognizable, a grotesque mask of madness and obsession. Years of unchecked power had erased whatever humanity remained within him.

Artabbanis acted first, striking once through the ribs, piercing the emperor’s heart. Xerxes turned, eyes wide—not in pain or fear but disbelief—as if the world itself had betrayed him. His final words, recorded later by Artabbanis himself, were chilling: “But I am God.” The second blade sliced through his throat; the third was unnecessary, a final act of rage and release that tore through his abdomen. The King of Kings collapsed across the girl’s small body, his royal blood mingling with hers on the cold marble floor.

The conspirators lifted his corpse, washed the wounds, and laid him in his ceremonial bed. They positioned his hands as if in prayer, lit the sacred fire, and announced to the court that the emperor had died peacefully during his nightly communion with Ahura Mazda. The lie became the official truth before dawn; the empire could not afford a scandal.

By morning, the throne had a new occupant: Artaxerxes I, son of Xerxes. His first act as ruler was to order the arena sealed forever. Publicly, he declared it an act of reverence toward his father’s sacred memory; privately, he wanted to erase every trace of the nightmare that had rotted the heart of Pepilolis. The surviving women were quietly relocated to other palaces across the empire. Many were hastily married to provincial nobles; others were sent to temples to live out their days as priestesses. None remained in Pepilolis. Their names never entered the royal archives. No poet sang for them. No historian recorded their suffering. They became the invisible dead, forgotten by history, remembered only by stone.

The Unix who had served in the arena met their own quiet extermination. One by one, they were executed for fabricated crimes—theft, blasphemy, conspiracy. In truth, they were silenced because they knew Mithrates, the last surviving guardian, was allowed to live just long enough to write a confession. His words, hidden for centuries, would resurface long after Persia itself had turned to dust.

Xerxes’s body was mummified according to Zoroastrian tradition and laid to rest in the royal necropolis of Naksh-e Rustam, carved deep into the cliffs. The tomb still stands, bearing inscriptions that praise him as king of kings, protector of the weak, beloved of the divine light. But the walls say nothing of the daughters he destroyed, the lives erased to feed his ego, or the horrors behind the golden curtains.

For 2,000 years, history remembered Xerxes for something else entirely—his failed campaign against Greece. Greek chroniclers like Herodotus mocked his arrogance, recounting his defeat at Salamis and Plataea. Later, Persian historians minimized his rule, describing it as an unremarkable bridge between the reigns of Darius and Artaxerxes. No one mentioned the arena; no one spoke of the girls. This silence may have been Xerxes’s final triumph: to have committed atrocities so vast that even time conspired to bury them.

But stone does not forget. In 1931, French archaeologists excavating the ruins of Pepilolis uncovered something the official records never dared to mention. Beneath the marble floors of what had once been the royal harem, they found an underground chamber filled with human remains—hundreds of small skeletons, most belonging to girls between the ages of 10 and 12. Many bore evidence of repeated injury and prolonged confinement; some were missing limbs, while others showed signs of deliberate mutilation. Among the debris were fragments of jewelry and shards of perfumed vases, grotesque reminders of beauty used to decorate suffering.

Laboratory studies confirmed what Mithrates had confessed centuries earlier: the king of kings not only enslaved and defiled the girls within his palace but ended their lives once they no longer served his purpose. The royal harem had not been a sanctuary; it was an execution ground hidden beneath silks and gold. Even today, when tourists walk among the ruins of Pepilolis, marveling at its grand columns and intricate reliefs, few realize what lies beneath their feet. The stone carvings celebrate victory, order, and divine power, but under those same stones rests a mass grave—a silent reminder that behind the glory of empires often lies the suffering of the powerless.

This is the untold story of Xerxes I, the so-called king of kings—not the one taught in classrooms filled with battles and monuments, but the one written in the blood of his own daughters. He was not merely an emperor defeated by Greece; he was a man destroyed by his own delusion of godhood. This is how civilizations die—not with swords or sieges, but when moral decay eats away at their foundations from within. When a kingdom is built on suffering, its strength is an illusion, and sooner or later, it collapses under the weight of the pain it tried to hide.

Today, in the silent ruins of Pepilolis, among the shattered reliefs and broken stairways, the echoes of those forgotten girls seem to whisper through the dust. Their voices say what no inscription ever could: that the true legacy of tyrants is not the monuments they build but the lives they destroy. And no matter how many centuries pass, cruelty never truly disappears; it leaves traces in the stones, in the bones, and in the collective memory of those willing to look beneath the surface.

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