INTRODUCTION

Like the Jews, the Greeks learned to define themselves as a nation in the course of their contacts with the Persians: from the series of conflicts between them in the early fifth century arose that sense of separateness and superiority over other peoples which created the conditions for Greek culture of the fifth century, exclusive, self-confident and hellenocentric. It is this autonomous aspect of Greek culture which has caused it to become the Classical Age for European civilization. As John Stuart Mill declared, ‘The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important that the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.’

It is hard to discern to what extent Herodotus' Histories are a symptom or the cause of this central importance of the Persian Wars in the history of western culture. Born between the two great wars, composing his work as a contemporary of Sophocles some thirty years after their end, he retained an understanding of the wider horizons of early Greece, which made Plutarch accuse him of being ‘a friend of the barbarian’ (Mor. 857A). Yet it was his conception of the meaning of the Persian Wars which caused him to write the first non-religious historical narrative, and it is his history which in turn has given these wars their universal significance.

This is the account of the investigation of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, undertaken so that the achievements of men should not be obliterated by time, and the great and marvellous works of both Greeks and barbarians should not be without fame, and not least the reason why they fought one another. (Herodotus 1.1)