Herodotus

The Histories

  Great read to get immersed in the 5th century BC world.

Herodotus was a great story teller, whether of mythical or real stories. Some pages are really fun to read because of the friendly tone and plain language he uses. There are also a lot of unnecessary data -in my opinion- since he talks about all kinds of stories and gives plenty of detail, true or not that sometimes result boring.

The real interesting part comes in the last quarter of the book, where all the major battles between Persians and Greeks take place. A pity he didn't dwell a little more in the Marathon and Thermopylae battles, but we get the big picture.

This is more an ethnographic study of all kinds of tribes that populated Greece and the Near East at the time. It's quite interesting to see what were the limitations as far as geography is concerned, the strange ideas they had about the far and unexplored areas of Europe, their peoples, etc. The comparison of what people thought and what really was is really amusing.

Skip the pages that you care less and enjoy the rest. There's plenty of good reading time to spend here.