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Herodotus (ca. 484 B.C – ca. 425 B.C.) was born into a family of the upper rank at Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, at that time subject to the Persian Empire. Because of his kinship to the epic poet Panyasis, who was put to death for political reasons, Herodotus left Halicarnassus as a young man, never to return. Most of what we know of him and his travels is derived from his writings. He lived for a time in Athens, where he was on friendly terms with the great men of the day, including Sophocles and Thucydides. Unable to obtain the franchise at Athens, he sailed from that port to the new colony of Thurii on the Gulf of Tarentum in Italy, where he became a citizen. He died and was buried there.
THE PERSIAN WARS is unquestionably one of the world’s greatest works of literature. But what, precisely, is it? The Persian Wars is part history, part geography, part travelogue, part anthropology...and completely entertaining. It possesses a charm that is legendary. With Herodotus we experience the impact of that great intellectual, moral, and ethical force that set the Greeks apart from the rest of the Ancient World. Herodotus has succeeded for all time in brilliantly expressing the conflict between the ideal of the free man and that of the despot – a magnificent epic of human triumph over the forces of tyranny, of the struggle over two diametrically opposed concepts of government...between which man must still choose today.
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