Dr Philip de Souza FRHistS studied History and Classics at Royal Holloway College, London. He is the author of Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge, 1999), plus numerous articles and essays on Greek and Roman history. He is a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare and is currently finishing a book on Ancient Naval Warfare, to be published by Routledge. He is Lecturer in Classics at University College Dublin.

This book covers one of the defining periods of European history. The series of wars between the Classical Greeks and the Persian Empire produced the famous battles of Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis, as well as an ill-fated attempt to overthrow the Persian king in 400 BC, which helped to inspire the conquests of Alexander the Great.To tell the story of these momentous events, of the lives of great men and women, of the societies and cultures that produced them, and to explain how and why they came into conflict was the aim of Herodotus, 'the Father of History', whose account of the wars is our principal source and the first book to be called a 'history'.