In defence of Herodotus

How many writers would give their eye teeth to have a book reissued 2,500 years after their death? It certainly beats being pulped after a year or two. And who better to receive the Penguin Hardback Classic treatment than Herodotus, the fifth-century BC ‘Father of History’, he to whom historians today owe so much, whether they know it or not? This is a new translation. of a book that remains more relevant than ever. by the popular historian Tom Holland, with an introduction by the Cambridge professor Paul Cartledge, doyen of classicists, citizen of Sparta and a Herodotean to the core.

The Histories is a masterpiece on the grandest scale, a chronological history of the Persian Wars from the invasions of the empire-building Cyrus in the middle of the sixth century BC through the stories of the ill-fated Cambyses and the opportunist regicide Darius to the depredations of that arch-megalomaniac Xerxes in the early fifth.