The King's Speech. La retorica dei re persiani fra Eschilo, Erodoto e Tucidide

This paper aims at collecting and investigating, from a rhetorical point of view, the speeches of the Achaemenid kings (from Cyrus to Xerxes), which are mentioned in the Greek sources, with a special focus on Herodotus' Histories. The many and heterogeneous discourses which this historian attributes to the different Persian kings (dialogues, private conversations, messages, letters and simple speech acts) are analyzed and compared, and the research seems to allow the finding of some recurrent – and probably well devised – patterns. The paper takes also into account the poetic speeches of Darius and Xerxes in Aeschylus' Persians, and the scanty evidence (a letter from Xerxes to Pausanias) transmitted by Thucydides.