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 HERODOTUS

ON THE WAR FOR

GREEK FREEDOM
 HERODOTUS

ON THE WAR FOR

GREEK FREEDOM
Selections from the Histories

Translations by
SAMUEL SHIRLEY
Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by
JAMES ROMM

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Indianapolis/Cambridge
Copyright © 2003 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

All rights reserved

Printed in Canada

09 08 07 06 05 04 234567

For further information, please address:

Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

P.O. Box 44937
Indianapolis, IN 46244-0937
www.hackettpublishing.com

Cover art: Audience Scene from Treasury. King with Crown Prince and Attendants behind Him. Persepolis, South Portico, Courtyard
17, c. 522–486. Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

Cover design by Abigail Coyle

Text design by Meera Dash
Maps on pages xxii–xxv, xxvii by Bill Nelson
Composition by Agnew’s, Inc.
Printed at Webcom Limited

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Herodotus.
[Historiae. English. Selections]
On the war for Greek freedom : selections from the Histories / translations by Samuel Shirley ; edited, with introduction and notes, by
James Romm.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-87220-668-8 (cloth) — ISBN 0-87220-667-X (paper)
1. Greece—History—Persian Wars, 500–449 B.C. 2. Iran—History—To 640. I. Shirley, Samuel, 1912– II. Romm, James S. III. Title.
DF225 .H3913 2003
938?.03—dc21 2002038791

PRC ISBN: 978-1-62466-227-0

 Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing

Herodotus, Histories. Translated by Pamela Mensch. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by James
Romm.

Thucydides, On Justice, Power, and Human Nature. Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by Paul
Woodruff.

Plutarch, Lives that Made Greek History. Edited, with Introductions and Notes, by James Romm.
Translated by Pamela Mensch.
 Contents

Introduction
Chronology of the Archaic Age
Maps
Herodotus, On the War for Greek Freedom

I. Herodotus’ Introduction
II. Prologue: The Reign of Croesus of Lydia
(c. 560–546 B.C.E.)
III. The Growth of Persia: Cyrus Conquers Asia
(c. 550–530 B.C.E.)
IV. The Growth of Persia: Cambyses Conquers
North Africa (c. 530–522 B.C.E.)
V. The Growth of Persia: Darius Enters
Europe (521–499 B.C.E.)
VI. The Greek Revolt from Persia (499–494 B.C.E.)
VII. Persia versus Greece: Darius’ Wars (494–490 B.C.E.)
VIII. Persia versus Greece: Xerxes’ War (484–480 B.C.E.)
IX. Persia versus Greece: Mardonius’ War and After
(480–479 B.C.E.)

Historical Epilogue
Main Characters and Places
Index of Proper Names

Titles of Related Interest Available from Hackett Publishing

 Introduction
“Those cities that were formerly great are now diminished, while those that are now great were once
small.” If a single sentence can be said to sound the keynote of Herodotus’ Histories, surely it is this
one, privileged by its position at the end of the work’s introductory segment. Change is the greatest of
Herodotus’ many themes and the one that, like the sun in Plato’s famous metaphor, sheds illumination
on all the others. A particular kind of change interested him most, moreover: Not mere instability or
flux, but the movement that results in a leveling of extremes, like the reversal of a pendulum that has
swung too far in one direction. Such changes reveal the hand of divinity at work in the world, for the
gods dislike extremes and everywhere favor balance, proportion, and the mean. Human attempts to
attain extremes—of power and wealth, for example—are doomed to fail in the long run; just as with
the oscillation of boom and bust in finance, a “correction” must inevitably take its course.
The long run, however, may be very long indeed. While the ups and downs of economic cycles can
be plotted on monthly charts, the rises and falls of nation-states occur over decades or even centuries,
often too slowly to be perceived in the span of any one lifetime. Hence the need for historians, who
can remind us of the larger perspective when we feel we have attained a stasis or a control of our
destiny (“the end of history,” as the triumph of liberal democracy was famously dubbed at the end of
the twentieth century). Herodotus was the first writer in the Western tradition to examine the ebb and
flow of political power over such a vast time span, to capture not just a single war (as Homer had
done) but the rise of a great empire, the cresting of its influence and might, and the beginnings of its
inevitable lapse into decline. Although he has been called the father of history, he might be better
hailed as the discoverer of the historical time scale, a breakthrough as significant for his era as the
invention of the telescope was to the Renaissance.
The Scope of the Histories
Herodotus claims at 1.5 that he will begin his story with the rise of Croesus of Lydia (c. 560),1 but
this claim quickly turns out to be disingenuous. No sooner has Croesus been introduced in 1.6 than
Herodotus leaps back in time five generations, to relate how Croesus’ ancestor Gyges seized the
Lydian throne from Candaules; and he even pauses to take a further look backward at the origin of
Candaules’ dynasty among the offspring of the god Heracles, over five hundred years earlier. Much
the same back-leaping movement occurs in the narratives of the Medes, the Egyptians, and the Greeks,
tracing a continuous line of development over about three thousand years (in the case of Egypt, one of
the world’s two oldest peoples). But even such vastitudes of historical time are dwarfed by the slow
evolution of the earth’s surface, as in the formation of the land of Egypt out of Nile silt “in the vast
stretch of time before my birth” (2.11)—an expanse marked off by Herodotus in increments of ten
thousand years. Here his time scale approaches the geological, easily surpassing the biblical scheme,
which, up until the eighteenth century C.E., circumscribed all terrestrial events within a span of six
thousand years.
Of course, this reach back into the distant past had a benefit for Herodotus, as Thucydides was
quick to point out some years later: With no surviving evidence to gainsay him, Herodotus had a free
hand in embellishing, altering, or perhaps even inventing the events he records as history. Readers
who are accustomed to the empirical bias of modern-day historiography will feel at sea in the first
few books of the Histories, no longer sure where the boundary lies between fact and fiction, memory
and invention; indeed, the most accomplished experts are often unsure (as was, on some occasions at
least, Herodotus himself). In most cases, a solid grounding of recoverable facts underlies the
narrative, but many layers of imaginative material have been added, including speeches and
dialogues, omens and portents, folktales and myths. Some readers will adapt easily to this
Herodotean farrago and come to savor it as one of the text’s principal delights; others will remain
uneasy and mistrustful of the author’s intentions. In this regard I think it worth quoting at length what
Robert Alter has recently written of the historiographical method of the biblical books of Samuel:

The known general contours of the historical event are not tampered with, but the writer brings
to bear the resources of literary art in order to imagine deeply, and critically, the concrete
moral and emotional predicaments of living in history, in the political realm. To this end, the
writer feels free to invent an inner language for the characters with a fine mesh of recurrent
motifs and phrases and analogies of incident, and to define the meaning of events through
allusion, metaphor and symbol. The writer does all this not to fabricate history but in order to
understand it.2

This description, it seems to me, eloquently defines the technique Herodotus uses in the first book of
the Histories, where he often looks back as many centuries into the past as did the chroniclers who
composed the historical books of the Hebrew Bible.
The length of Herodotus’ chronology is matched by the breadth of his geography. His predecessor
Hecataeus had composed a kind of world tour in prose, probably entitled Periodos Gēs (circuit of the
earth). The surviving fragments show that this was an ambitious catalogue of the lands and peoples
known to the archaic Ionian Greeks, who, with their exposure to the intellectual crosscurrents of the
Asian mainland, had learned more about such matters than their European kinsmen. Herodotus shared
Hecataeus’ goal of depicting the entire known world and, quite possibly, borrowed some of his
information as well, but unlike his predecessor he housed his verbal world atlas within a connected
narrative framework. His is not a mere “circuit of the earth” but a study of how power advances,
stage by stage, across the globe, until it threatens to encompass under one regime all that the globe
contains. And this includes all the richly varied cultures of the earth’s peoples, ranging from the Stone
Age primitives of its least developed regions to the masters of its great urban centers, the Egyptians,
Babylonians, and the Greeks themselves, whom Herodotus never describes explicitly but whose
culture often stands as the norm against which others are evaluated.
The Persians
The framework that allows Herodotus to survey so much of the earth’s surface is the story of Medo-
Persian imperial expansion, from roughly 650 to 480. In these 170 years the map of the ancient world
underwent as much change as it had in perhaps the preceding millennium. The Medes, a nomadic
people skilled in horsemanship and archery, first entered the historical record as tribute-paying
subjects of the Assyrians in the ninth century. By the seventh century they had begun to chafe under the
overlordship of the ancient Assyrian empire, and around 650 they actually dared to attack it, with the
help of their own subjects, the Persians. Only a few decades more sufficed to make the Medes strong
enough to overcome the Assyrians and destroy the imperial capital, Nineveh, in 612. In the next
century the Persians under Cyrus overthrew the Medes and took over the territory won from Assyria,
and the Achaemenid empire was born.
World history offers few parallels to the aggressiveness and drive of this new Persian entity; only
perhaps the Mongols in the thirteenth century C.E. and the Aztecs in the fifteenth had similarly
meteoric rises to superpower status. In the thirty years following Cyrus’ accession, the Persians
subdued the kingdoms of Lydia, Chaldaea (Babylon), and Egypt, along with numerous other less
prominent realms (including the Greek cities of Ionia). A departmental system of taxation was quickly
put in place, with tribute payments collected by twenty regional satraps, or governors, being funneled
to the imperial capitals of Susa, Persepolis, and Pasargadae; all the precious metals of Asia were
drained into these coffers. Highways were built, sea routes charted, and lines of communication laid
across the length and breadth of the empire. Lands stretching from North Africa to the banks of the
Indus River were united in a single contiguous state, by far the biggest the ancient world had yet seen.
The Jews, who have left us the most complete record of how these events were perceived by
contemporary observers, attest in many of their scriptures to a sense of awe at the rapidity of the
changes around them—changes that, from their perspective, could only have been guided by a divine
hand. They chose to interpret the rise of Cyrus as part of a plan for their own redemption: For unlike
the now-fallen empires of Babylon and Assyria, the Persians were tolerant masters who did not
interfere with the religious practices of their subjects. Indeed, Cyrus’ capture of Babylon and freeing
of the captive Jewish population earned him the epithet messiah (the anointed one) in the later
sections of the book of Isaiah. Conversely, the dramatic collapses of the former overlords of the Near
East were viewed as punishments for their arrogance, over-confidence, material decadence, and
mistreatment of the Jews.
To the Greeks, by contrast, who had had very little experience of imperial subjugation prior to the
coming of Cyrus, this new Persian state looked far less benign. The Greek cities on the coast of Asia
felt the most immediate threat. Granted, they had been paying tribute to the kings of Lydia for decades,
but these were hellenized monarchs from a culture resembling their own (1.95); the Greeks even
fought on Croesus’ side in his war against Cyrus, rather than supporting the Persians as liberators. As
a result, Cyrus bore them a grudge from the time of his first arrival in western Asia Minor, and most
of them sought, in vain, to build defensive walls to resist him. These new Persian overlords,
moreover, neither knew nor respected the Greek way of life, as illustrated in the anecdote Herodotus
relates (1.153) concerning the first encounter between Persians and mainland Greeks. The prospect of
paying tribute to such a distant and unrecognizable master rankled more deeply than subjection to
Lydia, and Herodotus uses the word “enslavement” to describe the new relationship (1.169, not in
this volume), though its terms could hardly have been as harsh as that would imply.
Politically, the Persian state was organized as a strong, centralized monarchy, a system Herodotus
believed had been chosen by the Persians themselves over oligarchy or democracy (3.80–83). The
imperial leader was known to the Greeks as “the King” or “the Great King”; his supremacy over the
barbarian world was so overwhelming that the qualifier “of Persia” was not needed. The semidivine
stature of this monarch meant that all subjects had to prostrate themselves before him, a custom
abhorred by the Greeks as a blurring of the boundaries between mortals and gods. The solemn,
reverent stone reliefs from the royal palaces at Persepolis, still visible today in the deserts of Iran,
attest to the awe inspired by the king’s presence. By contrast, Herodotus’ portraits of the four kings of
Persia who ruled in the empire’s first century—Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius, and Xerxes—are drawn on
a human scale and at times reveal deep flaws, though as personifications of supreme power they
remain majestic.
The Greeks
Whereas monarchy thrived in Asia in the sixth century, the institution had mostly been eliminated from
the Greek world well before that time. Of the major Greek city-states, only Sparta retained a
monarchy during the period Herodotus records—or perhaps “dyarchy” would be a better term, since,
by a curious development (explained by Herodotus in legendary terms at 6.52), two kings reigned
there at any one time. Other cities were governed by loosely formed oligarchies in which most
powers rested with a council of wealthy estate owners, and only token privileges were extended to
the assemblies constituted by the great mass of poorer citizens. In many cases, strife between these
two economic strata, or factionalism within the aristocracy, became severe enough in the sixth century
to allow a self-appointed strongman, or tyrannos, to come to power and govern the city as a kind of
private corporation. These tyrannoi, or “rulers”—the English derivative “tyrant” is inaccurate since
it implies a harsh or despotic regime—often did great good for their populations, especially the more
disadvantaged elements who had no other champions. But without any constitutional checks on their
power, they were also capable of great abuses, and the sons who succeeded them were often harsher
and more rapacious still. By about 500, the tyrannoi, like the kings before them, had been mostly
swept out of the city-states of mainland Greece, though in Ionia the Persians found it useful to retain
them as puppet rulers of their Hellenic subjects.
At Athens, the ejection of the ruling tyrannos Hippias in 510 created a political upheaval that led,
two years later, to the enactment of a radically progressive, antiaristocratic set of reforms. The newly
organized regime can be called the world’s first working democracy, though it was hardly democratic
by today’s standards; the great majority of residents, including all women, had few civil rights.
Nevertheless the popular assembly at Athens was now given unprecedented control of the city’s
affairs, and high offices were thrown open to all but the poorest adult male citizens. Herodotus
referred to this new experiment as isonomia (equality under the law), or isēgoriē (equal rights of
[political] speech); on only one occasion does he use the more modern term, demokratia, to refer to
similar assembly-based governments set up by the Persians in Ionia as a way to win popular support.
His interest in its development at Athens, especially its relationship to military strength, attests to the
remarkable success the regime had enjoyed in his own lifetime, as it became both increasingly
democratic and increasingly powerful during much of the course of the fifth century (more on this
below).
While divided internally by factionalism and class tensions, the archaic Greek cities were also
divided from one another by territorial disputes, rivalries for power and trade, and ethnic
distinctions. Though all Greeks of the age acknowledged a shared culture that set them apart from
non-Greeks, they also had few collective institutions in which that shared culture was made manifest,
the shrine of the Delphic oracle being one early and prominent exception. Herodotus is in fact the
earliest Greek author we know of to use a single name, Hellas, to refer to all the lands inhabited by
Greek peoples, or to use the adjective Hellenic to refer to the gods, language, and customs that
characterized them. In his work, especially the three last books with their account of an allied Greek
resistance to Persian domination, we see the first halting steps taken by the Greeks toward
establishing a national identity that would transcend the bounds of the city-state. But at the outset of
his narrative such steps were still a long way off, and cooperation or even consultation between the
fiercely independent poleis took place only rarely. The tension between this fractious diversity of the
Greek world and the collective action needed to fight the Persians forms one of the central themes of
the Histories.
Among the features of Greek life that distinguished it from that of the barbarians was the use of a
particular military strategy developed in the seventh and sixth centuries. Hoplites, metal-clad foot
soldiers, were organized into cohesive blocks called phalanxes, such that the shields of those in the
front lines joined together to form a wall of armor. Used against less organized armies or against
soldiers not protected by metal, the hoplite phalanx was devastatingly effective. Already by the mid-
seventh century, Egyptian pharaohs had begun using Greek hoplites as mercenaries to support their
regimes and defeat their enemies, a development noted by Herodotus at 2.152 (not included in this
volume). Eventually the Greek way of war would prove so superior to that of the barbarian world as
to enable a largely Hellenic army, led by Alexander the Great, to conquer not only Egypt but most of
Asia as well. But in the period covered by the Histories, this tactical advantage was as yet still
inchoate and was offset by the many weaknesses in Greek military organization, principally by the
amateurishness of armies who were assembled by each state on an occasional basis from its untrained
and self-equipped citizens.
Only one Greek city of this era had established a truly professional standing army, by devoting
almost the whole of public life toward the goal of training its offspring to become soldiers. As in its
political institutions, so in its military, Sparta had evolved along totally unique lines during the age of
city-state formation. With its tiny population, and its need to dominate the much more populous
neighboring region of Messenia, which supplied most of its food crops, the Spartans early on became
a warrior race, devoting all civic resources to the perfection of hoplite tactics. Constant drill and
exercise made each Spartan citizen or “Spartiate” a kind of superman, greatly feared by both Greek
and barbarian foes. Relying on its superiority in hoplite warfare, Sparta had by about 600 established
a hegemony over its own region, the Peloponnese, and a much looser and less formalized leadership
of the Greek world generally. But its military supremacy came at a steep price: Culturally and
economically, the city remained frozen in time and resistant to the innovations that marked other
Greek societies of the age, in particular Athens.
Herodotus
The author of the Histories belonged to neither Athens nor Sparta by birth, nor even to the Greek
world exclusively. He was born in Halicarnassus, a mixed Greek and Carian city on the western
coast of modern Turkey, and his own family tree contains both Greek and Carian names. The date of
his birth can only be inferred from his writings and a few other slender bits of biographical data, and
it probably should be placed around 485. Thus, he might have been just old enough to witness and
recollect the events he describes in the last third of his Histories, though his mature understanding of
them could only have come from secondhand stories passed on by his elders. Halicarnassus, it should
be noted, appears in the Histories as a city fighting perforce on the Persian side against the Greeks,
led by an enthusiastic supporter of Xerxes, the colorful Carian queen Artemisia.
At some point in his youth, as we are told by an ancient but not always reliable biography, the
Suda, Herodotus clashed with a ruler of Halicarnassus named Lygdamis, one of Artemisia’s
descendants, and was forced into exile on Samos (the information squares with Herodotus’ detailed
knowledge of Samian history and monuments). Thereafter, the course of his life remains almost totally
opaque to us. He is said to have lived at Thurii, a Greek colony founded in Italy around 443, and to
have died either there or in Macedonia. The date of his death is usually given as circa 425, but this,
too, like his birth date, is purely inferential (the latest events mentioned in his text occurred around
430).
From his one surviving work, the Histories, we know that Herodotus traveled widely throughout
the ancient world, visiting (by his own account) much of Egypt, the coast of the Black Sea, the
Levantine coast, northern Africa, southern Italy, and perhaps Babylon as well. Such far-flung journeys
would not have been easy to undertake in that time, and some scholars have supposed that he sailed as
a merchant seaman to these various ports of call. Others, more cynically, have suggested that he
cribbed much of his foreign material from other writers and then lied in claiming that he had gathered
it himself. Such a view would call Herodotus’ credibility into question on many fronts, but it is not
generally accepted. Assuming he is not one of history’s great hoaxers, then, Herodotus must be ranked
as one of its great inquiring travelers, anticipating Ibn-Battuta and Marco Polo in his penetration of
distant lands and peoples.
Herodotus’ personality is sketched on every page of his text, even though he tells us almost nothing
about his own thoughts and emotions. He was a keen observer of the world around him, whose
interests were engaged by almost every field of knowledge, from geology to politics to moral
philosophy. He delights in sharing choice bits of information to which he alone is privy, or in
collecting the great rarities of human experience one finds today in “strange but true” newspaper
items. In his portraits of historical characters he shows a great capacity for clemency and
understanding; his sympathies go out even to the lunatic Cambyses (3.33), and the Persians who led
the assault on Greece in 480, Xerxes and Mardonius, are often treated with respect and even
admiration. Indeed, the whole narrative of the Histories reads more like a tragic portrait of the defeat
of Persia than a celebration of Greek victory (though both strains are present); like the playwright
Aeschylus before him, Herodotus refrained from demonizing the invaders of Greece or glorying in
their downfall. His lack of pro-Hellenic bias, not only in his account of the Persian Wars but in his
descriptions of foreign lands and peoples, earned him the epithet philobarbaros (barbarian-lover), in
a later era of Greek antiquity.
This lack of bias also extended to his evenhanded treatment of the two principal Greek cities
involved in the war, Athens and Sparta—also the two superpowers that were wrestling for
dominance during much of Herodotus’ own life. As a writer and thinker, Herodotus would naturally
be attracted to Athens as “the school of Hellas,” and, indeed, a poem supposedly written by
Sophocles is addressed to him, suggesting he had made friends among the Athenian intelligentsia. But
the Histories also contains glowing portraits of Spartan military valor, especially in the episode of
Thermopylae and the commentary by Demaratus that surrounds it. Herodotus seems almost studiously
evenhanded in recording the heroism first of one city, then of the other, though in an important passage
(7.139) he argues that credit for the victory belongs primarily to Athens. It is an opinion he thinks will
be unpopular among the majority of his readers, a sign of how much had changed in Greece since the
end of the Persian Wars.
The Histories in Its Time
No matter when we suppose Herodotus wrote the Histories—and he may have worked on it over
decades, with final publication at some point in the 420s—he addressed a Greek audience who knew
a very different world than the one he describes. Persia had ceased to be a threat to European Greece
and had even been decisively beaten in Asia during the 460s; after 449 not even the Ionian cities that
had always been Persia’s prey had anything left to fear from it. However a new master had arisen to
take its place as ruler of the Aegean: Athens, whose supreme naval power enabled it to dictate to any
island or coastal city, whether Greek or barbarian. The coalition of Aegean states formed by Athens
in 479 (see 9.106) evolved gradually from an anti-Persian alliance into a tributary empire, and after
454 Athens began treating her subjects’ contributions as her own personal treasury rather than a
common defense fund. Cities that regarded this arrangement as an infringement of sovereignty and
tried to exit the alliance now discovered that they were unable to; Athens would use naval blockades
to force them back in. Eventually this empire grew so powerful and expansive that Sparta, the
traditional military superpower of Greece, felt compelled to check it, and the disastrous twenty-
seven–year Peloponnesian War began in 431.
Herodotus only rarely makes explicit reference to these post–Persian-War developments. Yet they
formed the essential context in which he expected his Histories to be read, and we modern readers
must always bear them in mind. The actions of Miltiades after the battle of Marathon, or of
Themistocles after that of Salamis (8.111–12), closely anticipate the tactics of the mature Athenian
empire, while the speeches of Artabanus to Xerxes about the uncertain chances of war (7.10, 7.49–
51) are similar to arguments that were advanced at both Athens and Sparta in the years leading up to
their great conflict. We do not know how much of that conflict Herodotus lived to see, but
conceivably he already knew, at the time he gave his work final shape, that neither side was
succeeding in its war goals and that Athens had suffered a devastating plague that had undermined its
stability and strength. Just conceivably, he had witnessed the great Sicilian invasion mounted by
Athens in 415, in which many of the Persian errors of 480 and 479 were repeated, with disastrous
consequences. However that may be, he certainly knew that any intelligent reader would draw
lessons from the past regarding events in the present, and that Athens’ attempts to build and defend a
Greek empire would be compared with those of Persia to do likewise some fifty years earlier.
That is not to say that Herodotus means us to see Athens as the new Persia, for he was aware of
vast differences between the goals and characters of the two nations. But the remarks he puts into the
mouths of his wisest speakers over and over again, concerning the perils of big enterprises, the
inevitability of change, and the jealous opposition of the gods to any human quest for greatness, were
meant to be heeded by imperial powers in all cultures at all times. Herodotus would be gratified,
certainly, to learn that they are being studied in America during the twenty-first century, at a time
when a latter-day hegemon debates where the limits of its power should be fixed.
In addition to the political and military changes he witnessed, Herodotus also lived through a
period of unprecedented intellectual ferment in the Greek world. Radically modern ideas and
teachings, including the moral philosophy of Socrates, were gaining adherents at Athens and
elsewhere, sometimes to the detriment of traditional religious practices and conceptions of the gods.
Indeed, an exact contemporary of Herodotus, Protagoras of Abdera, publicly proclaimed his
agnosticism about the gods, a risky move in a society that was capable of prosecuting and even
executing the impious. Herodotus takes a certain interest in these new schools of thought but holds
them at a great distance; his text constantly reaffirms the power of the divine, the forethought taken by
the gods for maintaining an orderly and balanced world, and even the intervention of divine forces in
recent human history. The episode of Xerxes’ and Artabanus’ dreams concerning the invasion of
Greece (7.15–18) forms a good case in point. Herodotus allows the two men to hold a discussion
over the origin of dreams, in which Artabanus advances a purely psychological explanation and
dismisses the role of the gods. But after giving an airing to this modern, quasi-scientific view,
Herodotus shows Artabanus proven wrong; it was the divine, after all, that willed the Persian attack.
Even in matters as deeply personal as religion, however, it is difficult to say with certainty what
Herodotus believed or what view his text expresses. Though in general, for example, he reveres the
sacred authority of the Delphic oracle, he also shows how the Priestess of that shrine can be bribed
or manipulated into giving a desired answer (6.66), or can even change an answer under pressure
(7.141, not in this volume). In other matters too, even the essential contrast between Asian and Greek
political systems, Herodotus does not sketch out a single doctrine or conviction but shows his readers
a wealth of stories and anecdotes that point sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another. The
Histories invites questions and explorations more than it gives answers; it seeks to capture the
complexities and contingencies of the world it records without reducing them to neat formulas. It
remains an enigmatic text for readers of today, as it presumably was in Herodotus’ own time; now, as
then, it provides an invigorating model of one man’s keen observation of the world, open-minded
inquiry, and humane, unbiased analysis of historical figures and events.
About This Edition
The title of this collection of excerpts, On the War for Greek Freedom, is intended to highlight the
main story line of the Histories, though in doing so it eclipses a great number of other subjects
Herodotus addresses in the text. The same can be said of the excerpts themselves: They have been
chosen so as to give a reduced version of the text’s central thread, with only a passing glance at its
many tangents, digressions, and subplots. We have tried to capture the main thrust of the Histories
without entirely losing a sense of its vastness, diversity, and breadth.
Most of the passages presented here were translated by Samuel Shirley and then edited and revised
by James Romm. The editor takes responsibility for whatever inaccuracies or infelicities the
translations may contain. Several passages were also added by the editor, in his own translation, to
those prepared by the translator; these have been identified in the notes as the work of the editor.
Each paragraph of the translation has been marked with the book and chapter numbers in brackets,
but the correlation with the same numbers in standard editions of Herodotus is not exact. In some
cases there is a small discrepancy where a sentence ending a story or marking the transition to a new
topic has been assimilated into the preceding chapter. The bracketed numbers serve not only as a
referencing system but as indicators of where excisions have been made within a single story or
episode; nonconsecutive chapter numbers, rather than ellipses at the ends of paragraphs, reveal these
cuts. Ellipses have been used only to show excisions within a single chapter. Italicized summaries,
which bridge the selections, are the work of the editor. Herodotean book divisions have been
superseded by the editor’s section headings denoting political events in the story; it is only
happenstance that there are nine of these, as there are nine books in the conventional division of the
Histories.
I wish to thank Leslie Clockel for helping to prepare the manuscript; Deborah Wilkes and the rest
at Hackett Publishing for their constant support and encouragement; Carolyn Dewald and Walter
Blanco for collegial consultations and conversations (Carolyn in particular suggested the title of the
volume); and, above all, my wife, Tanya Marcuse, without whose love and patience nothing would
flourish, including this book.

James Romm

1. All dates in this volume are B.C.E. unless otherwise indicated.

2. Robert Alter, The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1999), xvii–xviii.
 Chronology of the Archaic Age
(All dates are B.C.E.)

GREECE EGYPT NEAR EAST

Early history
1400–1200 Mycenaean age 9th–7th c. Assyrian domination
c. 1150 Trojan War of Near East
c. 3400 Union of upper and lower
1200–750 Dark Ages 8th c. Invasions of Asia by
Egypt
c. 750 Homeric poems Scythians, Cimmerians from
2700–2200 Building of pyramids
composed North and East; rise of
8th c. Age of colonization Median kingdom

700
701 Invasions of Egypt and
c. 711–664 Egypt ruled by
Judea by Assyrians under
Beginnings of Greek literacy Ethiopians (25th dynasty)
Sennacherib
7th c. Establishment of Spartan 664 Conquest of Egypt by
c. 660 Rise of Lydian kingdom
constitution (perhaps by Assyrians
668–27 Reign of Ashurbanipal
Lycurgus) 663 Founding of Saite or 26th
in Assyria
dynasty by Psammetichus
664 Assyrians conquer Egypt

650
625–585 Periander tyrant in
612 Fall of Nineveh (Assyrian
Corinth 604 Egyptians under Necho
capital) to Medes, Scythians,
Late 6th c. Thales of Miletus; defeated in Asia by
and Babylonians
beginnings of Ionian Babylonians (Battle of
605–562 Nebuchadnezzar king
philosophy and natural Carchemish)
of Babylonians
science

600
Early 6th c. Egypt begins using
598 Babylonian conquest of
594 (?) Archonship of Solon at Greek mercenaries
Judea
Athens 593–88 Reign of Psammis
585 Battle of Medes and Lydians
560–56 First tyranny of (Psammetichus II)
(inconclusive)
Pisistratus at Athens 588–69 Reign of Apries
c. 560 Croesus king in Lydia
570–25 Reign of Amasis

550
549 Cyrus defeats Astyages
c. 550 Ionia subject to Croesus Mid-6th c. Alliance of Amasis 546 (?) Cyrus defeats Croesus
540–22 Polycrates tyrant in with Croesus of Lydia against 539 Cyrus conquers Babylon
Samos Persians 530 Death of Cyrus
510 Fall of Pisistratid tyranny at 525 Cambyses of Persia conquers 525 Cambyses conquers Egypt
Athens; democratic reforms Egypt 522 Death of Cambyses,
accession of Darius

500
492 Darius’ first attempt on
499–94 Ionian rebellion Greece
459 Amyrtaeus’ unsuccessful
490 Darius invades Greece 490 Darius’ second attempt on
rebellion against Persia;
485 (?) Birth of Herodotus Greece
Athenian troops called in for
480 Xerxes invades Greece 486 Death of Darius
support
479 Final defeat of Persians 480 Xerxes invades Greece
465 Death of Xerxes

450
454–32 Height of Athenian
empire; age of Pericles Late 5th c. Egyptians expel 448 Peace treaty between
431–04 Peloponnesian War Persians, regain independence Persians and Greeks
425 (?) Death of Herodotus
Herodotus’ View of the World

The Persian Empire at Its Height

Greece and Asia Minor
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