Herodotus, the father of historical writing, wrote these accounts of the fifth-century-B.C. wars between the Greeks and Persians with a continuous awareness of the mythic and the wonderful while laying bare the intricate human entanglements at their core.

Herodotus was born in 484 or 485 B.C. at Halicarnassus, a Greek colony on the coast of Asia Minor, now Turkey. When the colonies were freed from the Persian yoke, he left his native town and travelled extensively. On his travels, he collected historical, geographical, ethnological, mythological, and archaeological material for his history, which was designed to record not only the wars but the causes of the wars between Greece and the barbarians. Cicero called him "the father of history."