** Gods, not Heroes **
The Persians initially reads as self-congratulation in disguise. Athens watches its enemy mourn Salamis. But Aeschylus resists the easier victory lap, or lazy comparisons. Rather than later Christian Orientalist leanings, where defeat is moralized as doctrinal error or civilizational inferiority, the Persians reserves the arbiters of victory to gods, not heroes.
Xerxes loss is framed as cosmic miscalculation: hubris, yes, but hubris as a tragic error before the gods, not a racial or moral defect. Xerxes fails because he overreaches divine order, not because Persians are lesser men. That makes it worth the read.