The Histories

Before there were history books, there was this one.

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Welcome to our summary of The Histories by the ancient Greek writer Herodotus. Often hailed as the first great work of history in Western literature, this monumental book is an 'inquiry' into the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus seeks not just to chronicle battles, but to understand the diverse cultures, customs, and motivations of the peoples involved, from the Greeks to the Persians and Egyptians. He masterfully weaves together historical narrative, ethnographic observation, and captivating anecdotes, aiming to preserve the memory of great deeds and explain why these two great powers came into conflict.
The Purpose of This Inquiry
This is the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that human events may not be forgotten by time, and that the great and wondrous deeds of both Hellenes and barbarians may not lose their glory; and especially, to show why they waged war against each other. The learned among the Persians, for their part, trace the enmity back to the abduction of Io from Argos by the Phoenicians, which was answered by the Hellenes carrying off Europa from Tyre and Medea from Colchis, culminating in Paris's theft of Helen. But I shall not say whether this or that story is true. I prefer to rely on what I myself know and to point to the man who I am sure first began the wrongdoing against the Hellenes. My purpose is to set down what I have learned through sight (opsis), reports (akoe), and judgment (gnome), telling the story of the clash between East and West. This conflict was not just of armies, but of opposing principles: the free Greek, under the law of the polis, against the subject of the Persian King, who knows only one man’s will. It is a contest between freedom and tyranny. During my travels, I have learned that nomos, or custom, is king of all; men everywhere believe their own ways are best. Yet beneath this variety, I observe a pattern that seems to belong to physis, the nature of things itself: the pattern of divine justice. Great prosperity and pride, which the Greeks call hubris, always invites a balancing retribution from the gods, a downfall known as nemesis. This cycle has brought down mighty kings and empires, and it is a deep current in the war I am to relate. My inquiry begins, then, not with these ancient legends, but with the man I know started it all.
Book I: Clio - The Seeds of Conflict and the Folly of Kings
While some blame the Phoenicians for the original quarrel, I point to the man I know first committed unjust acts against the Greeks: Croesus, king of the Lydians. His empire was so wealthy his name became a byword for riches. Believing himself the happiest of men, he was visited by the wise Athenian Solon. When Croesus, flaunting his treasury, asked who was the happiest man alive, Solon named not the king, but common men who lived honorably and died well. 'One must look to the end of a man's life,' Solon warned, 'for the gods often grant a glimpse of happiness before utter ruin.' Croesus dismissed this wisdom, but the nemesis for his hubris was already near. The first blow came from a dream that his beloved son and heir, Atys, would be killed by an iron spear. Despite his every precaution to keep weapons away from the boy, the prophecy was fulfilled when a guest, the luckless Adrastus, accidentally killed Atys with a javelin during a boar hunt. Grieving and eager to distract himself, Croesus set his sights on the rising Persian kingdom of Cyrus the Great. He consulted the Oracle at Delphi, which replied that if he attacked, he would destroy a great empire. Taking this as a sign of victory, Croesus marched to war, only to have his army crushed and his capital, Sardis, captured. As he stood upon his own funeral pyre, he cried out Solon's name, finally understanding the oracle's true meaning: the great empire he had destroyed was his own. Saved from the flames by Apollo's intervention, he became an advisor to Cyrus—a living monument to the instability of human fortune. Thus Lydia fell to the Persians under Cyrus, himself a man of legendary origins, having been saved from death as a baby to fulfill his destiny. The Persians, a people who taught their sons to ride, shoot, and speak the truth, now stood at the borders of the Ionian Greek world, and the seeds of the great conflict were sown.
Book II: Euterpe - A Digression Concerning the Egyptians
Before I continue with the Persian expansion under Cyrus's successor, I must make a lengthy digression concerning Egypt. The next king, Cambyses, turned his attention there, and his actions are incomprehensible without first describing that most remarkable of lands. Egypt possesses more wonders than any other country. The land itself is a gift of the Nile, a strange river that floods not in winter when other rivers swell, but in summer. I have heard three explanations for this—that melting snows are the cause, that winds block its egress to the sea, that it flows from the mythical Ocean stream that encircles the world—but I find none of them convincing. The customs, or nomoi, of the Egyptians are, in almost every way, the opposite of those of other peoples. Their women conduct trade in the marketplace while the men weave at home; they write from right to left; they practice circumcision for cleanliness. Their reverence for animals is so extreme that to kill a cat, even accidentally, is a capital crime. Their piety is exceptional; they were the first, in my judgment, to establish solemn assemblies, processions, and services in honour of the gods, from whom the Greeks learned these things. Their priests maintain scrupulous rituals of purity, and their methods of embalming the dead are elaborate and various, designed to preserve the body for eternity. Their pharaohs built tombs of a scale that defies belief—the pyramids, vast mountains of stone that serve as a testament to the labor of countless men under kings like Cheops. This digression, though it may seem to interrupt my narrative, is essential. It is the clearest demonstration of the theme of nomos, showing how differently men can live and believe, and it provides the backdrop for the madness that would soon overtake the son of Cyrus when confronted with this ancient and alien world.
Book III: Thalia - The Madness of Kings and the Rise of Darius
After Cyrus's death, his son Cambyses took the throne and invaded Egypt. Though victorious, the conquest seemed to drive him mad, as if the alien nomoi of that land had unhinged his Persian soul. He committed acts of shocking impiety, mocking Egyptian gods, opening ancient tombs, and stabbing the sacred Apis bull, laughing as it bled to death. He murdered his own brother Smerdis out of jealousy and his sister, whom he had married, in a fit of rage. In one terrifying episode, to prove he was not mad, he asked his courtier Prexaspes what the Persians thought of him. When Prexaspes reported they said he drank too much wine, Cambyses drew his bow and shot the courtier's young son through the heart, boasting as he pointed to the still-beating heart, 'Now you see that I am not mad.' While Cambyses was lost in this insanity, a Magian who resembled the dead Smerdis seized the Persian throne. As Cambyses rushed back to deal with the coup, he died from an accidental, self-inflicted wound from his own sword. During this time, the story of Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, provides another lesson in hubris. His fortune was so unbroken that his friend, King Amasis of Egypt, advised him to throw away his most prized possession. Polycrates cast a signet ring into the sea, but it returned inside a fish. Amasis knew Polycrates was doomed, and soon after, the tyrant was lured to the mainland and crucified. After a conspiracy of seven nobles unmasked and killed the false Smerdis, they held a remarkable debate on the best form of government. Otanes argued for democracy (isonomia), warning that absolute power corrupts even the best of men. Megabyzus argued for oligarchy, trusting in a select group of the best. But Darius argued for monarchy, claiming the rule of the one best man is most efficient. Darius’s argument prevailed. The seven decided that he whose horse neighed first at sunrise would be king. Thanks to a clever groom, Darius's horse was the first to cry out, and he became the new Great King of Persia.
Book IV: Melpomene - An Expedition into the Unknown
Darius, secure on his throne, proved no less ambitious than his predecessors. He resolved to march against the Scythians, a nomadic people of the vast plains north of the Black Sea. His stated reason was revenge for an ancient invasion, but his true motive was a desire for glory. He assembled a vast army, bridged the Bosphorus to cross into Europe, and then bridged the great Ister river, plunging into the Scythian lands while leaving his Ionian Greek vassals to guard the bridge. The campaign proved to be an exercise in futility. The Scythians, having no cities or farms to defend, refused to give battle. They simply retreated, laying waste to the land and drawing the Persian army deeper into an empty, hostile expanse. It was a clash not of armies, but of nomoi: the settled, centralized empire against the mobile, stateless tribe. When Darius demanded the Scythian king stand and fight, the king replied they had no cities or crops to fear for, and would only fight to defend their ancestral tombs if the Persians found and desecrated them. Finally, the Scythians sent Darius a symbolic gift: a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows. The meaning, as Darius's advisor Gobryas interpreted it, was clear: 'Unless you Persians can fly like birds, burrow like mice, or hide in swamps like frogs, you will not escape our arrows.' Realizing the truth, Darius was forced into a humiliating retreat, his great expedition having achieved nothing. This campaign allows me to describe the strange customs of the Scythians, who drink from the skulls of their enemies and use their scalps as napkins, and the peoples of Libya, from chariot-driving hunters to sun-cursing tribesmen. These digressions underscore the world's variety, which the Persian kings arrogantly sought to conquer and make uniform.
Book V: Terpsichore - The Spark of Revolt
Now my narrative returns to the direct cause of the war: the Ionian Revolt. It began with Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus. He had persuaded the Persian satrap to back him in an expedition to conquer the wealthy island of Naxos, but the siege failed due to his quarreling with the Persian commander. Fearing punishment from Darius for this costly failure, Aristagoras chose to save himself by inciting all of Ionia to rebel against Persian rule. He sailed to mainland Greece for allies, first visiting Sparta. He showed King Cleomenes a bronze map of the world, pointing out the vast lands and riches of the Persian empire, all the way to the capital Susa. But when the cautious Spartan learned the journey to Susa was a three-month march inland, he ordered Aristagoras to leave Sparta before sunset. Aristagoras then went to Athens, where he found a far more receptive audience. The Athenians had recently expelled their own tyrant, Hippias (who had taken refuge with the Persians), and established a democracy; they felt a kinship with the Ionians and a deep suspicion of tyranny. As I have observed, it is easier to persuade a crowd of thousands than a single man. Athens agreed to send twenty ships to aid the revolt, a decision I believe was the beginning of all the troubles for Hellenes and barbarians alike. The allied force marched inland and burned Sardis, the regional Persian capital. In the fire, a temple to the local goddess Cybele was destroyed, an act of sacrilege the Persians would not forget. When Darius heard the news, he asked, 'Who are the Athenians?' Upon being told, he shot an arrow into the sky, praying for vengeance, and commanded a servant to remind him three times at every meal: 'Master, remember the Athenians.' Though the revolt spread, it could not stand against the might of Persia. It was finally crushed at the naval Battle of Lade, and Miletus was destroyed.
Book VI: Erato - The Vengeance of Marathon
Darius, his mind set on revenge, launched a new expedition. A first attempt under his general Mardonius failed when the fleet was wrecked in a great storm off Mount Athos. Undeterred, Darius launched a second, purely naval invasion in 490 BCE, commanded by Datis and Artaphernes. Their orders were to enslave Athens and Eretria and bring the people back in chains. The vast Persian fleet sailed across the Aegean, destroying Naxos and then Eretria before landing on the coast of Attica at the plain of Marathon, guided by the aged, exiled Athenian tyrant Hippias. Panic seized Athens. They dispatched their best runner, Pheidippides, to Sparta for aid. On his journey, he was said to have been visited by the god Pan, who asked why the Athenians paid him no honor, and promised his favor in the coming battle. The Spartans, however, were bound by a religious festival and could not march until the full moon. The Athenians stood alone, save for a small, brave force from Plataea. The ten Athenian generals (strategoi) were divided, some fearing to risk battle against the superior Persian numbers. But one of them, Miltiades, who had previously ruled as a tyrant in the Chersonese and knew Persian ways well, argued passionately that they must fight for their freedom immediately. His counsel won the casting vote of the War-Archon. The small Athenian army, perhaps 10,000 hoplites, marched to face the invaders. After several days of standoff, Miltiades gave the order to attack. In a move of unbelievable audacity, the Athenians charged the Persians at a dead run across a mile of open ground. The Persians, seeing them come on without cavalry or archer support, thought them madmen rushing to their doom. Miltiades had deliberately weakened his center and strengthened his wings. Though the Persian center, with its best troops, broke through, the victorious Athenian wings did not pursue, but wheeled inward, enveloping the Persian core. The maneuver turned the battle into a rout. The Persians fled to their ships in a panic, pursued to the water's edge by the ferocious Athenians. By the day’s end, 6,400 barbarians lay dead, for the loss of only 192 Athenians, who were buried in a great mound on the field of their glory. It was a stunning victory for eleutheria, the freedom that inspired men to run toward, not away from, a tyrant's army.
Book VII: Polymnia - The Hubris of Xerxes and the Glory of Thermopylae
The news of Marathon only deepened Darius’s anger, but he died before he could launch a third invasion. The throne passed to his son, Xerxes, who was at first reluctant to attack Greece. He was goaded into it by his cousin Mardonius and a series of haunting dreams promising him world dominion. And so Xerxes began to gather an army of a size the world had never seen, drawn from every corner of his empire: Persians in their glittering armor, Medes, Assyrians with bronze helmets, Indians in cotton with cane bows, eastern Ethiopians wearing horse-scalps, and countless others. The preparations were a display of titanic hubris. He ordered a canal dug through the Mount Athos peninsula, an act of a man wishing to master nature itself. When a storm destroyed his first bridge across the Hellespont, Xerxes flew into a rage, commanding that the sea be whipped 300 times and branded. As he sat on a marble throne watching his countless host cross the new bridge, an army that flowed for seven days and nights from Asia into Europe, he first called himself blessed, but then he wept. When asked why, he replied it was for pity at the thought of how short human life is, since not one of these many thousands would be alive in a hundred years. As this vast force moved south, drinking rivers dry, the Greek states met to plan their defense. The strategy was to hold the narrow pass of Thermopylae on land and the nearby straits of Artemisium at sea. To Thermopylae went the Spartan King Leonidas with his 300 royal guards and a few thousand allied troops. For two days, this small force held the pass against endless waves of Persian assaults, even repulsing the king’s elite 'Immortals.' Xerxes, watching from his throne, leaped up three times in terror for his army. The stalemate was broken when a local man, Ephialtes, betrayed the Greeks by showing the Persians a mountain path that bypassed the pass. Learning he was surrounded, Leonidas dismissed most of his allies to save them. But he, his 300 Spartans, and 700 loyal Thespians who refused to abandon their Spartan comrades, resolved to stay. They fought not for victory, but for glory and to buy time for Greece. They fought with a fury that astounded the Persians until every last one of them was killed. A monument later bore the inscription: 'Go, stranger, and tell the Spartans that we lie here, obedient to their laws.'
Book VIII: Urania - The Cunning of Themistocles and the Victory at Salamis
With Thermopylae fallen, the Persian army swept south into central Greece, burning the cities that would not submit. The Athenians, heeding a Delphic oracle that bid them trust their 'wooden wall,' abandoned their city and took to their fleet of triremes. Xerxes marched into an empty Athens and burned the Acropolis to the ground in revenge for Sardis. The allied Greek fleet was gathered in the bay of Salamis, where despair and dissension reigned. The Peloponnesian commanders wished to retreat to the Isthmus of Corinth to defend their own land. But the Athenian commander, Themistocles, a man of supreme cunning, argued that they must fight in the narrow straits of Salamis. There, the massive Persian fleet's numerical advantage would be neutralized, leading only to their own confusion. Even Xerxes' own naval commander, Artemisia of Halicarnassus—my own queen—advised him against fighting in the straits, but he ignored her wise counsel. When reason failed to persuade his fellow Greek commanders, Themistocles resorted to a brilliant stratagem. He secretly sent a trusted messenger to Xerxes, pretending to be a Persian sympathizer. The message claimed the Greeks were terrified and planning to flee overnight, advising the king to block the straits immediately to trap them. Xerxes, arrogant and eager for a final victory, fell for the ruse. He ordered his fleet to move in, bottling up the Greeks. When dawn broke, the Greek commanders found they had no choice but to fight. The battle was exactly as Themistocles had predicted. Crowded into the narrow channel, the huge Persian ships could not maneuver and crashed into one another in chaos. The smaller, nimbler Greek triremes darted in, ramming and sinking the barbarian vessels. Xerxes watched the destruction of his navy from a golden throne on a nearby hill. His nerve shattered by the disaster, he took Artemisia's new advice to retreat himself and fled back to Asia in a panic, leaving his general Mardonius with a large land force to complete the conquest the following year. The invasion had been stopped by a 'wooden wall' of ships and the genius of one man.
Book IX: Calliope - The Final Victories and a Concluding Moral
The final act of the war came the following year, 479 BCE. Mardonius, the Persian general left in Greece, attempted to break the Greek alliance with diplomacy. He sent an envoy to Athens, whose city was still in ruins, offering them a full pardon, restoration of their lands, and partnership in the Persian empire. The Athenians famously replied that as long as the sun holds its course, they would never make a pact with Xerxes. For this defiance, Mardonius marched south and re-occupied Athens for a second time. The Spartans, meanwhile, were celebrating a festival and delayed sending their army, causing immense anxiety among the allies. At last, spurred on by an Athenian ultimatum, the full allied Greek army, led by the Spartan regent Pausanias, marched to meet the Persians. On the plains of Plataea, the two largest armies ever to meet on Greek soil prepared for battle. After days of maneuvering and skirmishing, the main engagement was joined. The Spartan phalanx, the finest heavy infantry in the world, held firm against the Persian infantry led by Mardonius himself. The fighting was fierce, but in the crucial moment, Mardonius was killed by a Spartan. With his death, the Persian army lost heart, broke, and fled. The ensuing slaughter and the storming of the Persian camp, with all its riches, ended the land invasion of Greece for good. Pausanias, marveling at the gold couches, tables, and cups in Mardonius's tent, ordered his helots to prepare a simple Spartan meal alongside it, to show the Greek commanders the folly of the Persians, who lived so luxuriously, yet came to rob the Greeks of their meager living. In a marvel of coincidence, on the very same day, the Greek fleet won another decisive victory at Mycale, on the Ionian coast, and sparked the final liberation of Ionia. Thus, my inquiry concludes. The war was a clash of nomoi, of freedom against servitude, but above all, a lesson in the eternal cycle of hubris and nemesis. As a final warning, I relate a story of Cyrus the Great, who told his people that 'soft countries breed soft men,' and that they must choose between a harsh land and ruling, or a pleasant land and being slaves. Whether his descendants have remembered this lesson, I leave for others to judge.
And so, Herodotus’s grand inquiry concludes with the astonishing triumph of the vastly outnumbered Greek city-states. Despite the might of Xerxes's empire, his hubris in attempting to conquer a free people is met with ruin. The Persian fleet is shattered at the naval Battle of Salamis, and their army is decisively defeated at Plataea, ending the invasion and securing Greek independence. The Histories stands as a testament to the importance of recording the past. Its strength lies in its ambitious scope, its pioneering attempt to analyze cause and effect, and its enduring lesson on the dangers of imperial overreach. Herodotus's work immortalized the conflict, ensuring the deeds of both Greeks and barbarians would not be forgotten.

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