Atossa was in every sense a Persian royal woman. She was a daughter of Cyrus the Great, who ruled the Persian Empire from 559 to 530 bc, a wife of her brother Cambyses, king from 530–522 bc, one of the many wives of Darius I, king from 522 to 486 bc, and the mother of Xerxes I, 486–465 BC (Figure 15).1 But her lasting fame in the western tradition comes from her appearances in two of the most well-known texts from ancient Greece, Aeschylus’ Persians and Herodotus’ Histories. Both of these works, one a tragedy play the other combining history and anthropology, present the war between the Greeks and Persians in the early fifth century bc – the wars marked by the famous battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Atossa is portrayed as a powerful woman with great influence over the men in her life.