โ Scribed by Tom Holland
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In 480 BC, Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For seventy years, victory - rapid, spectacular victory - had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire. In the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Near East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, putting together an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. Yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks of the mainland managed to hold out. The Persians were turned back. Greece remained free. Had the Greeks been defeated at Salamis, not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely that there would ever have been such and entity as the West at all.
Tom Holland's brilliant new book describes the very first 'clash of Empires' between East and West. Once again he has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our own. There is no competing popular book describing these events.
**
After chronicling the fall of the Roman Republic in Rubicon, historian Holland turns his attention further back in time to 480 B.C., when the Greeks defended their city-states against the invading Persian empire, led by Xerxes. Classicists will recall such battles as Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis, which raises the question: why do we need another account of this war, when we already have Herodotus? But just as Victor David Hanson and Donald Kagan have reframed our understanding of the Peloponnesian War by finding contemporary parallels, Holland recasts the Greek-Persian conflict as the first clash in a long-standing tension between East and West, echoing now in Osama bin Laden's pretensions to a Muslim caliphate. Holland doesn't impose a modern sensibility on the ancient civilizations he describes, and he delves into the background histories of both sides with equally fascinating detail. Though matters of Greek history like the brutal social structure of the Spartans are well known, the story of the Persian empirelike the usurper Darius's claim that every royal personage he assassinated was actually an impostershould be fresh and surprising to many readers, while Holland's graceful, modern voice will captivate those intimidated by Herodotus. (May 2)
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Dramatizing ancient history--that is, amplifying the historical record's often fragmentary evidence with unknowable detail and inferred emotion--is always a gamble. Done well (think Herodotus), the long dead come alive, and readers are inclined to overlook their suspicions about what liberties the author may be taking with the story's veracity. Done poorly, one risks profaning history and literature alike. In dramatizing the Persian Wars--Athens' most glorious hour and the beginning of its decline into imperialism and hubris--Holland acknowledges the risks and strides boldly forward. The result is an ambitious contemporary retelling of an epic tale that, framed as a conflict between East and West, quietly subverts certain other recent histories' parallels between empires past and present. It has its awkward moments, mostly due to a predilection for melodramatic phrasing; for better or worse, its parallels to modern events are subtle and often implicit. But ultimately, one suspects that Holland's engaging narrative would do Herodotus proud--and it may even prompt readers to find out for themselves. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright American Library Association. All rights reserved
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
In the fifth century B.C., a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states. The superpower was Persia, incomparably rich in ambition, gold, and men. The terrorist states were Athens and Sparta, eccentric cities in a poor and mountainous backwat
<![CDATA[<p>Discover the origins of the warrior Clans in the third book of this thrilling prequel arc in Erin Hunter's #1 nationally bestselling Warriors series. The Dawn of the Clans series takes readers back to the earliest days of the Clans, when the cats first settled in the forest and began to
Discover the origins of the warrior Clans in the third book of this thrilling prequel arc from mega-bestselling author Erin Hunter. The Dawn of the Clans series takes readers back to the earliest days of the Clans, when the cats first settled in the forest and began to forge the Warrior code. The r
Nathan K he can hold two souls in his body. If he dies, he loses one yet lives on with the other. As long as he replenishes his second soul, he cannot be killed. Nathan K is immortal. AGAINST AN IMMORTAL ARMY After learning how some Immortal groups are using mortals as slaves and worse, Na