He asked “Who are these Athenians?” and then appointed a slave to remind him every day, “Master, remember the Athenians!” The Persians retaliated by destroying the Greek city of Miletos. Athens and Eretria supported the rebellions and Greeks sacked the important Persian city of Sardis. The Persian Wars were triggered by a rebellion by Ionian Greeks in Asia Minor against their Persian lords and the Persian King Darius in 499 B.C.
Greece, which consisted of bunch of disparate states that fought against one another more than they were united, seemed like an easy target. Its expansion westward seemed inexorable. It controlled a huge expanse of territory, including Greek cities in Asia Minor. In 492 B.C., Persia was of one of the world's largest empires. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Herodotus is in four volumes.Between 499 to 479, Greece and Persia fought a series of wars that determined the balance of power in the Mediterranean. After personal inquiry and study of hearsay and other evidence, Herodotus gives us a not uncritical estimate of the best that he could find. All is most entertaining and produces a grand unity. Even in the later books on the attacks of the Persians against Greece there are digressions. It includes the rise of the Persian power and an account of the Persian empire a description and history of Egypt and a long digression on the geography and customs of Scythia. Herodotus’s famous history of warfare between the Greeks and the Persians has an epic dignity which enhances his delightful style. He was “the prose correlative of the bard, a narrator of the deeds of real men, and a describer of foreign places” (Murray).
He lived, it seems, for some time in Athens, and in 443 went with other colonists to the new city Thurii (in South Italy), where he died about 430.
He travelled widely in most of Asia Minor, Egypt (as far as Assuan), North Africa, Syria, the country north of the Black Sea, and many parts of the Aegean Sea and the mainland of Greece. Herodotus, the great Greek historian, was born about 484 BCE at Halicarnassus in Caria, Asia Minor, when it was subject to the Persians.
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