Xerxes

Xerxes is the Persian ruler invoked in The Federalist as the defeated external adversary of the Greek cities. His invasion provides the turning point in a political argument: the Greeks’ success against Persia offered a chance to strengthen their confederacy, but victory and glory instead fed the rivalry that culminated in the Peloponnesian War. The essays make Xerxes significant less as an individual portrait than as the measure of a danger the Greeks survived without learning how to secure their union.

Xerxes and the Greek Confederacy

The account places Xerxes within the history of the Amphictyonic League, a confederacy of Greek republics whose members retained their independence and equal votes in a common council. The council could address the common welfare, declare and conduct war, judge disputes between members, impose fines, and call on the confederacy’s force against disobedient cities. These formal powers did not ensure concerted action: even during defensive and dangerous wars with Persia and Macedon, the members failed to act together and were repeatedly deceived or hired by their common enemies.

Xerxes’s campaign marks a rare collective success, but the essays present it as an unfulfilled political opportunity. After the Greek victory over the Persian forces, the peace that followed could have been used to reform the loose union. The argument, attributed to the Abbé de Mably, is that experience should have taught the Greeks the need for closer union, and that their success gave them a moment in which to establish it. Xerxes is thus the external threat against which the confederacy’s capacity—and its deeper weakness—becomes visible.

Victory, Rivalry, and Reversal

The Greeks did not convert their triumph into institutional reform. Instead, Athens and Sparta, inflated by their victories and renown, became rivals and then enemies. Their mutual fears, jealousies, hatreds, and injuries produced the Peloponnesian War, which the essays describe as doing the Greeks more harm than they had suffered from Xerxes. The contrast reverses the apparent meaning of victory: the foreign invasion had been overcome, yet the confederacy could not contain the conflict between its strongest members.

The consequences sharpen the comparison. The Peloponnesian War ended in the ruin and enslavement of the Athenians, who had begun it. Xerxes therefore occupies a compact but consequential place in the essays’ sequence: his defeated invasion is followed not by durable security, but by a missed chance to strengthen the union and by internecine war. The episode supports the broader warning that a confederacy unable to bind its members to common purposes may survive an external crisis only to be undone by rivalry within.

Narrative and Political Significance

The Federalist does not develop Xerxes’s character, motives, or personal actions beyond his role as the leader of the Persian force against which the Greeks had succeeded. Instead, it places him in a historical analogy about political organization. The Greek example is used to challenge the confidence that a loose association of sovereign states can reliably coordinate defense or preserve internal peace; the victory over Persia demonstrates shared capacity, while the subsequent Greek conflicts expose the limits of that capacity without closer union.

The essay’s emphasis is therefore on the sequence surrounding Xerxes rather than on the Persian ruler himself: foreign danger, common success, failure to reform, rivalry among leading states, and destructive war. Xerxes’s defeat does not resolve the political problem. In this argument, the decisive lesson is that victory over a common enemy cannot substitute for institutions capable of restraining division among the allies.