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

The air is dense, a suffocating mixture of heavy incense, myrrh oil, and a subtle, almost imperceptible scent: fear. The only light comes from the weak rays of the sunset, filtering through thick silk curtains, dyeing the chamber a sickly amber color. We are not in the magnificence of Susa or Persepolis.

We are in the depths of the king’s private fortress, the harem. The maids’ fingers move quickly over smooth skin. They are applying perfumed oil. Their hands tremble, but it is not from the cold. The young woman being prepared is barely a child. Her collarbones stick out fragilely beneath the fine veil.

She does not know if she is number 100 or number 1000. Numbers have lost all meaning in this labyrinth. She only knows one truth. A truth that freezes the blood in her veins. The man waiting for her in the adjoining room is not just the King of Kings, not just the ruler of millions of souls from India to Greece, not just the earthly incarnation of Ahura Mazda; he is also her father.

On the outside, the Persian Empire is the wonder of the world, a colossal machine of conquest and administration. Xerxes I, the King of Kings, possesses unimaginable wealth and absolute power over life and death. But power, when it reaches the absolute level, does not just govern territories; it also corrodes the soul. It demands ever-greater transgressions to feel alive.

And behind the gold-plated walls, in the chambers guarded by eunuchs where the law of men cannot enter, absolute power had transformed into absolute depravity. This is not a story about great battles. It is the story of a prison disguised in silk and a crime buried by its own family tree.

A secret that ancient Greek historians only dared to whisper, but never dared to write clearly. To understand the fall of Xerxes, we must understand the machinery that created him. The Persian royal harem was not simply a place of pleasure; it was a complex political institution, a state within a state, operating under its own secret laws.

When Xerxes inherited the throne from his father, Darius the Great, he did not just inherit territories; he inherited this system of control. The harem was a tool of power. It was located in the bowels of the palace, designed so that no one could enter without permission and no one could escape. Long, endless corridors, heavy cedar doors, interior gardens where sunlight was trapped.

Inside lived hundreds of women, a living mosaic of Persia’s conquests. There were princesses from defeated kingdoms sent as a guarantee of peace. There were daughters of Persian nobles offered as tribute to ensure their families’ loyalty. There were dancers, musicians, and concubines from every province. Each had a role in a rigid hierarchy. They were property of the empire.

And who managed this luxurious prison? The eunuchs, men who had been stripped of the ability to procreate, and with it, all loyalty to a lineage or family of their own. Their only loyalty belonged to the king. They were the administrators, the spies, the guardians, and occasionally, the executioners. They controlled access, food, jewels, the visitation schedule, and most importantly, they controlled information.

Every woman who entered the harem went through a meticulous preparation process. They were taught erotic arts, music, dance, and refined conversation. Some, through intimacy, could influence the king’s decisions, but it was a deadly game. Competition was fierce. A whisper at the right moment could elevate a woman to principal wife.

A wrong look could mean immediate death. It was a world of silent conspiracies, false smiles, and daggers hidden in silk sleeves. It was the perfect prison, a golden cage where the inmates were dressed in the finest fabrics and fed the most exquisite delicacies, but where they had permanently lost their autonomy.

And within this cage, a new tragedy had begun to germinate, one that not even the architects of the system had fully foreseen. It was then that children began to be born within its walls. When a concubine in the harem became pregnant and gave birth to a girl, that child’s fate was sealed from her first cry.

These girls, biological daughters of Xerxes, grew up within the same walls that imprisoned their mothers. They were princesses, but they had no status. Unlike the daughters of the principal wives, they were not being prepared for dynastic marriages with foreign princes or Persian nobles. Their position floated in a terrifying gray zone: carriers of royal blood, but considered part of the harem collection.

From their infancy, their world was this labyrinth. They watched their mothers and hundreds of other women living in perpetual waiting, waiting for the king’s call. They breathed the oppressive atmosphere of rivalry, jealousy, and sexualized submission. Our omniscient gaze sees their indoctrination. They learned to walk, to talk, to use their eyes, but above all, they learned absolute obedience.

They were taught that their bodies did not belong to them; they belonged to the empire, and the empire was the king. Meanwhile, the man who had fathered them was changing. Xerxes, after his catastrophic military defeats against the Greeks, especially in the Battle of Salamis, became progressively more paranoid and cruel. He had tried to conquer the outside world and had failed.

Now he retreated inward, determined to rule as an absolute God over the only world he totally controlled: the harem. This is where the psychology of unlimited power begins to rot. When you can have anything you desire, instantly, gratification becomes boring. When hundreds of the most beautiful women in the empire are willing to submit, beauty becomes trivial.

Submission loses its flavor. Absolute power no longer seeks satisfaction; it seeks transgression. It needs stronger stimuli, new frontiers to violate, just to feel that it is still absolute. Greek historians like Herodotus recorded the first warning signs. They recounted Xerxes’ obsession with the wife of his own brother, Masistes.

Upon being rejected, the king diverted his attention to her daughter—his own niece—forcing her into a relationship. A pattern was forming. The boundaries of family, of blood, were beginning to blur in the mind of a man who believed himself divine. For Xerxes, everything and everyone was an extension of his own will.

He ruled nations, he possessed women, and terrifyingly, he possessed the children he created. As his daughters born in the harem reached puberty, the ambiguity of their status turned into a sentence. They were not sent into marriages; they were not allowed to leave. They were retained for an unspoken purpose.

They remained there, within reach of the very man who had fathered them. The eunuchs knew it, the maids knew it, their mothers knew it and were horrified in silence. But in the harem, silence was the only survival mechanism. Anyone who dared to speak, even to whisper, simply disappeared. The machinery of control worked perfectly.

It was designed to protect the king’s secrets at all costs. Transgression was no longer just an idea; it was becoming a practice. The Greek historian Ctesias, who served as a physician in the Persian court and had access to the royal archives, hinted at the depths of this corruption. Although his works survive only in fragments, his accounts paint a picture of extreme moral decay, where the darkest taboos were the norm within the palace.

For the young princesses, the coercion was absolute. How could she refuse the man who was simultaneously her father, her king, and her earthly God? They were prisoners born in the cage, raised for the pleasure of the jailer. The system not only allowed it, it actively facilitated it. The eunuchs, whose sole function was to fulfill the king’s desires, were in charge of preparing and delivering these young women.

There was no morality in the transaction, only logistics. The architecture of the harem aided the secrecy. Isolated chambers connected by hidden passages ensured that what happened in the king’s private rooms remained invisible to the rest of the palace. Xerxes, isolated by his own power, no longer saw people; he saw objects for his use.

The dehumanization was total. His daughters were not family; they were the most exclusive product of his collection. Using them was the ultimate affirmation of his dominion over creation itself. The atmosphere inside the harem became heavier, more paranoid. Mothers tried to hide their daughters, but it was useless. The eunuchs kept precise records.

When the king requested one, there was no appeal. The man who had whipped the sea, the Hellespont, with chains for defying him, now exercised the same irrational tyranny over his own blood. The outer empire began to show cracks, but the inner empire, that of his palace, had become a realm of nightmare.

Even in ancient societies, with moral standards vastly different from ours, incest between father and daughter was the universal taboo. In Egypt, pharaohs married their sisters. In Persia itself, the custom called xwedodah (consanguineous marriage) might allow unions between cousins or even half-siblings to preserve the purity of the lineage.

But the father-daughter relationship was the final frontier, a line that even the most brutal tyrants rarely dared to cross. For Xerxes, that was precisely the attraction. Breaking the supreme taboo was the affirmation of supreme power. It demonstrated that he was truly above all human, natural, and divine law.

It was the only act left for a man who possessed everything to feel that he could still take something forbidden. The room is stifling with perfume. The young woman, the king’s daughter, is led inside. The eunuchs stand guard outside. Their faces are stone masks. They hear everything, but process nothing. They are breathing walls.

Our omniscient gaze focuses on the psychology of the victim. The concept of consent does not exist. How can someone reject the man who holds the literal power of life and death over her? A man who is at once her father, her king, and her God. She has been trained for this since she was born.

Her entire life and the entire system surrounding her has been designed to lead her to this precise moment. Submission has been industrialized. It is not a choice; it is a programmed function. For Xerxes, this is the pinnacle of possession. It is not about lust, not in the simple sense; it is about absolute solipsism.

It is the act of consuming his own creation, a perverse cycle of control where he is both the creator of life and its consumer. It is the final demonstration that his dominion has no limits. The historical sources from Greece, who despised Xerxes and the Persians, recorded fragments of this truth.

They obtained information from defectors, spies, and fallen Persian nobles. They whispered that in his final years, Xerxes no longer made distinctions. His mind, worn down by unlimited power and military humiliation in Greece, had collapsed into a black hole of depravity. While the outer empire cracked, the king was busy consolidating his empire of internal corruption.

He neglected affairs of state. Provincial governors, the satraps, began to abuse their power. The army lost its morale. The Persian colossus was wobbling. The harem, once the vibrant symbol of his reach and power, had now become the tomb of his sanity. And within that tomb, countless young lives were crushed in a ritual silence.

The daughters history would never name, destroyed by their own progenitor, became wandering ghosts within their own home, silent witnesses to the moral fall of the most powerful man on earth. A system built on fear and secrecy inevitably devours itself. Collapse was inevitable.

In the year 465 BC, the patience of the Persian elite had run out. Xerxes’ death did not come from the battlefield in Greece; it came from the heart of his own palace, from his own bedchamber. The main conspirator was Artabanus, the captain of the royal guard, the man closest to the king, the custodian of his life, the man who perhaps knew too much about what happened behind closed doors.

He acted in complicity with a high-ranking eunuch, Aspamitres, one of the administrators of the very depravity the king had cultivated. One night, Artabanus entered the royal quarters. The death was quick and brutal. The man who believed himself a god, the man who had violated all natural laws, died under the blade of his own servant.

The forced silence of the harem was broken. Screams, the clash of metal, blood staining the expensive Persian carpets. Chaos took over the palace. Eunuchs and guards fought for control. Artaxerxes, Xerxes’ son, acted swiftly, blaming his older brother Darius for the murder and executing him immediately, thus consolidating his own rise to the throne.

And the women of the harem, those hundreds of lives—when the God fell, his sacrifices were abandoned among the rubble. They were not freed; they were simply transferred from being property of a dead king to being property of the next. For those shattered daughters, there was no justice, there was no liberation. The death of their abuser was only the beginning of a new cycle under a new master.

The machinery of the harem remained intact. What did Xerxes leave behind? He did not leave a stronger empire; he left an empire humiliated by the Greeks, an empire that had reached its zenith and began its irreversible decline. The architectural grandeur of Persepolis and Susa was now a hollow shell, a carapace hiding internal rot.

But his most terrifying legacy was not his palaces; it was the curse of absolute power. The true curse of the harem was systemic. It was a system designed to strip a group of people—women—of humanity and grant divine power to a single man. And within that system, tragedy was not an accident; it was a certainty.

Absolute power is a hereditary disease that is transmitted from king to king, corroding every generation. History is written by the victors. It records the name of Xerxes, of Artaxerxes, and of Alexander the Great, the man who would finally reduce Persepolis to ashes. But history does not record the name of a single one of Xerxes’ daughters born in the harem.

They remain anonymous forever. They are ghosts in the annals, silent statistics of the true cost of power. Their existence survives only as grotesque whispers in the texts of their enemies. A reminder that the most horrendous crimes often do not occur on the battlefield, but in sealed chambers, protected by the silence and complicity of an entire system.

The story of Xerxes and his harem is not just a dark chapter of ancient Persia, dead and buried two and a half millennia ago. It is an eternal warning about the nature of unchecked power. The stone walls of Persepolis have fallen, but invisible harems are constantly built around us.

They are erected wherever power is concentrated absolutely, wherever transparency is denied, and wherever a group of people is stripped of their humanity and treated as property. Official history is written by rulers. We only know what they wanted us to know.

The truth of the victims, the secrets of the locked chambers, almost always remain buried. “What do you think is the darkest truth about ancient dynasties that official history has tried to hide? What other crimes have been forgotten under the golden dust of palaces?” Comment below which hidden stories you would like us to investigate.

History was not written by its victims, but it is our responsibility to find their voices. Share this video to help us expose the dark corners that power has always wanted to keep secret.