The History of Herodotus — Volume 2

This is where Western civilization tells its own origin story. Herodotus, the first writer to distinguish fact from myth, chronicles the cataclysmic collision between the young Greek world and the vast Persian Empire. Volume Two traces the Ionian Revolt that sparked the wars, then follows the giant Persian host southward: the平原 of Marathon, the narrow pass at Thermopylae where three hundred Spartans made their stand, the naval battle at Salamis that changed warfare forever, and the final confrontation at Plataea. But this is no mere campaign chronicle. Herodotus fills his account with the strange customs of foreign peoples, the caprices of kings, the political machinations that shaped both empires, and the irreducible role of fortune in human affairs. He asks what makes some peoples free and others subject, what drives men to resist impossible odds, and how tomorrow's victors become history's judges. Nearly twenty-five centuries later, we still live in the world these battles made.