Well since I finished my other book, I’m going to continue The Histories. I have it in Penguin Classic, like my Iliad and History of The Peloponnesian War. It bugs me, though because my copy of The Odyssey is a different style than The Iliad. I should’ve gotten it in Penguin Classic. It just bothers me that they’re different.
So anyway, it’s a pretty good book most of the time. It has some good stories. I think that the book was the result of a very worthy cause. It’s better said in the words of Herodotus himself though in the first paragraph:
“Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievement may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvelous deeds – some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians – may not be without their glory…”
I don’t know about you, but that seems a very noble goal to me. However, there’s an amusing bit of fantasy mixed in with it. Herodotus is a bit prone to embellish fact, but most of it is good information.
I saw 300 last night! It was really good, but not very historically accurate. The whole story actually comes from The Histories, you know. They conveniently forget the 1,100 other Greeks who were there at Thermopylae alongside the 300 Spartans. The army of Xerxes was not in the millions (they got that fact from Herodotus, who gave a staggering count of 2,461,610), but instead between 200,000 and 300,000. So the Greeks still didn’t stand a chance anyway. So, yes, the Persians win, burn Athens, but then lose their entire fleet at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. So Xerxes returns to Persepolis and leaves his brother-in-law, Mardonis, in charge of his army. He loses a year later at Platea, which wasn’t the same place that Leonidas I defended. But it was a really good movie anyway! Oh, and Xerxes was assassinated by the captain of his palace guard a little while later, so he got what was coming to him. And Xerxes wasn’t so weird looking in real life either. I’ve got a picture of him below.
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