Abstract
‘Greeks and Persians at war’ highlights Herodotus's skills as a dramatist in his treatment of the Persian Wars. Pride of place has generally been given to the world-famous defeat at Thermopylae. Herodotus not only gave us the legend of Thermopylae, the centrepiece of his war epic, but also reinforced the very notion of the war monograph as the long, grand story par excellence, an idea taken over from Homer and passed on to Thucydides and countless others. Herodotus's account of the wars reprises the same themes we see elsewhere in The Histories : wondrous deeds worthy of remembrance, the fragility of human happiness, but also the endemic nature of imperial ambition.
