In 480 BC, Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of
mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For
seventy years, victory - rapid, spectacular victory - had seemed
the birthright of the Persian Empire. In the space of a single
generation, they had swept across the Near East, shattering ancient
kingdoms, storming famous cities, putting together an empire which
stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of
those conquests, Xerxes ruled as the most powerful man on the
planet. Yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest
expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks of the mainland
managed to hold out. The Persians were turned back. Greece remained
free. Had the Greeks been defeated at Salamis, not only would the
West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival,
but it is unlikely that there would ever have been such and entity
as the West at all. Tom Holland''s brilliant new book describes the
very first ''clash of Empires'' between East and West. Once again he
has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our
own. There is no competing popular book describing these
events.
關於作者:
Tom Holland received a double first from Cambridge. He has
adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for BBC Radio. He
was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for RUBICON and won
the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History 2004.