Weak and easily led, puerile in his gusts of passion and his complete abandonment of himself to them--selfish, fickle, boastful, cruel, superstitious, licentious--he exhibits to us the Oriental despot in the most contemptible of all his aspects--that wherein the moral and the intellectual qualities are equally in defect, and the career is one unvarying course of vice and folly.

From Xerxes we have to date at once the decline of the Empire in respect of territorial greatness and military strength, and likewise its deterioration in regard to administrative vigor and national spirit.

With him commenced the corruption of the Court--the fatal evil, which almost universally weakens and destroys Oriental dynasties.

His expedition against Greece exhausted and depopulated the Empire; and though, by abstaining from further military enterprises, he did what lay in his power to recruit its strength, still the losses which his expedition caused were certainly not repaired in his lifetime.
As a builder, Xerxes showed something of the same grandeur of conception which is observable in his great military enterprise and in the works by which it was accompanied.

His Propylaea, and the sculptured staircase in front of the Chebl Minar, which is undoubtedly his work, are among the most magnificent erections upon the Persepolitan platform; and are quite sufficient to place him in the foremost rank of Oriental builders.