It is well recognised by scholars that in the ancient Greek mind the theme of the revengeful woman was as pervasive as it was persuasive.

Fiona McHardy, for instance, has noted that the idea of the foreign or barbarian woman enacting gross acts of vengeance is pretty much routinely presented in Greek literature, and that barbarian women are depicted using specific ‘womanly' tactics of persuasion, deception and patience in order to ensure that their revenge is both effective and devastating.¹ Robert Rollinger's recent investiga­tion into human violence in Herodotus has noted that throughout the Histories, in which no fewer than ninety-two acts of violence are to be found, forty-two are perpetrated by Greece's natural enemies, the Medes and Persians.

In this chapter I will consider how Greek authors construct the image of powerful barbarian women and their devotion to the idea of revenge by examining texts which focus on the Persian court. I want to present evidence for the Greek vision of female cruelty, but I want to go further than this by suggesting that what is recorded of Persian royal women are not orientalist fantasies on the part of Greek writers, as might easily be supposed, but accurate reflections of the politicking practices within the royal harem.^[730] The accounts reflect genuine Persian (and wider Near Eastern) practices wherein violent punishments were a standard norm of legitimate rulership, even for women.