Why did Alexander the Great burn the palace of Xerxes at Persepolis?

The burning of the palace of Xerxes at Persepolis in the spring of 330 BCE is widely interpreted as a symbolic act signaling that the Panhellenic war of revenge against the Persian Empire had reached its conclusion.123

While a less-creditable historical tradition—often attributed to the historian Cleitarchus—suggests the fire was the result of a drunken revel led by the Athenian courtesan Thais, many historians view this account with skepticism. Instead, the destruction of the palace likely served a calculated political purpose: it functioned as a powerful propaganda message to dissident Greeks back home, demonstrating that the conflict initiated by Xerxes’s invasion of Greece more than a century earlier had been decisively avenged.1423