Greek Exiles in the Achaemenid Empire: A Case of Divided Loyalities?

There were many more Greeks living in the Persian Empire than there were subjects of the Great King who had come or fled to Greece. Most of the Greeks worked for the Achaemenid kings as mercenaries, artists, doctors or the like, others had been deported in the course of military engagements. But there were others who had been exiled from their Greek mother cities by their own countrymen, the most prominent of those people being the families of the former Spartan king Demaratus or the Athenian victor of Salamis, Themistocles. The aim of the pper is to describe their partly precarious situation and status in the empire and at home but also their scope of action and their special relationship to the Great King.