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Home  »  Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men  »  Xerxes the Great


Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S.A. Bent, comp. Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. 1887.

Xerxes the Great

  • [King of Persia; succeeded Darius, 485 B.C.; raised an immense army for the invasion of Greece, 480; captured Athens, after turning the Pass of Thermopylæ, but defeated at Salamis, and returned to Asia; murdered, 465.]

    • I shall not buy my Attic figs in future, but grow them.

  • When planning the invasion of Greece, he refused to eat the figs offered for sale.—PLUTARCH: Apothegms.
  • He gave as a reason for the tears which he was seen to shed as his army was crossing the Hellespont into Greece, that in a hundred years not one of all that vast assembly would be alive.
  • Admiring the bravery of Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, his ally at the battle of Salamis, he exclaimed, “My men have proved themselves women, and my women men.”


    • Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD