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"Mature Content Warning!" |
| “ | Yours is a fascinating tribe, even now you're defiant, in the face of annihilation, in the presence of a god. | „ |
| ~ Xerses |
Xerxes is the God King of Persia and the main antagonist of the 300 duology of films. He is based on the real king Xerxes I of Persia who sent his army to fight against 300 Spartans in the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. Xerxes won the battle due to the superior number of his forces and the help of the traitor Ephialtes.
He was portrayed by Rodrigo Santoro.
His Evil Ranking[]
What Makes Him Close to Being Pure Evil?[]
- He launches an invasion against Greece with the intention of conquering it.
- He uses the people of many conquered nations as canon fodder at the battle of Thermopylae presumably against their will because on one scene a group of barbarians are shown to be forcefully pushed to the front lines with lashes. He sends them to be killed at the hands of the Spartans by the hundreds if not thousands in order to overwhelm his enemies.
- He is shown to have decimated a village to the ground with his army and made a twisted “Tree of the Dead” figure with their corpses, with a young boy being shown covered with ashes and on the verge of death when Leonidas and his men came across the remains.
- He regularly executes commanding officers of his army if they fail him.
- When he offers Leonidas the chance to surrender he threatens him that Sparta would be reduced to ash should he refuse and tells him to consider the fate of their women, indicating that he plans to allow his soldiers to rape them.
- He admits that he would kill any of his men for victory, showing that he doesn't care about them, at all.
- He offers Leonidas to make him a warlord of all Greece and to carry his battle banner to the heart of Europa, showing that he plans to continue his conquest even after he has subjugated Greece.
- When Leonidas refuses his offer to join him, Xerxes tells him that Sparta would be erased even from the histories and he would make sure that everyone would forget about them in the future by plucking out the eyes and cutting off the tongues of every Greek historian and scripter and that even muttering the names of Sparta or Leonidas would be punishable by death, so the world wouldn't even know about their existence.
- Some of the slaves that are shown in Xerxes' army are mutilated like a female sex slave with two missing arms, showing how cruel he is.
- He uses a secret passage to ambush the 300 Spartan defenders at Thermopylae, killing them all. He personally cuts off Leonidas' head and carries it around like a trophy.
- Afterwards he continues his march and razes Athens, the biggest city in Greece, massacring most of the population and burning everything.
- At one point, when he has an argument with Artemisia, he slaps her so hard that the blow causes her lip to bleed a little.
- When he sees that Artemisia and her navy are about to get destroyed by the Greek forces, he leaves them to their doom and retreats with the rest of his army.
- While he claims to be a kind and generous god, this is not redeeming as he is shown to be cruel to his subordinates whenever they fail him and he only offers generous gifts to Leonidas and Ephialtes when he thinks they could be useful to him. Not to mention that when Leonidas refuses to kneel before him, Xerxes has no trouble killing him and carrying his head around as a trophy.
What Prevents Him from Being Pure Evil?[]
- He truly cares about his father, Darius as he attempts to save him from a Spartan arrow and is saddened when he is shot and when Darius dies, Xerxes mourns his death for 7 days.
- The reasons why he attacks Greece is because Artemisia has manipulated him into believing that this is what his father would want from him.
- He is tragic because the Greek warriors killed his father and, additionally, he was also manipulated by Artemisia. When Darius, shortly before he dies, tells him to leave the noble Greeks to their ways and not to seek conflict with them because only the gods can defeat them, Artemisia, who seeks revenge against Greece, plucks out the arrow from his chest causing him to die to prevent him from from talking. A few days later she manipulates Xerxes into believing that his father's words were actually a challenge for his son to conquer all of Greece because Xerxes would need to become a god himself to accomplish this. She sends him through the desert until he reaches a hermit's cave and he goes inside a pond which removes everything human from him. Meanwhile, Artemisia kills all of his former advisors and friends, leaving him even more vulnerable to her manipulations. However, his actions also seem to stem from his own megalomania and lust for power and he reveals he plans to continue with the conquests even beyond Greece, making his tragedy a minor prevention.
External Links[]
- Xerxes on Villains Wiki
