Customer Reviews

The Greek Wars: The Failure of Persia

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This book should be the standard text on the Greco-Persian wars for years to come. Cawkwell has constructed a masterpiece by drawing on ancient sources and modern research with a very critical eye. His research is meticulously cited and approached from many angles, examining everything from logistics to the shape of the hulls of Phoenician warships. It is nothing short of a masterpiece of careful historical research.

Still, I have a couple of caveats. This book is not for the layman. Half of the book is appendices dealing with technical aspects of the war, and probably very boring for someone looking for a scholarly narrative of the period. Also, Cawkwell constructs his ideas over the course of long paragraphs, often with a twist at the end, so it is very important that this book is read with your full attention.

This book is full of solid research and should be the standard work in the field for many years to come. However, it is highly technical and written for other scholars. If you're looking for an advanced piece of work, get this. Otherwise, you're best off looking somewhere else.

This isn't so much a book with footnotes as a compilation of footnotes in book form. The style of writing is dry, choppy and disjointed to the point of unreadability, and the author fills most of the pages with interminable rehashings of the primary texts without constructing any kind of overall structure. Useful for the dedicated historian of this particular period (perhaps); painful and uninformative for the non-specialist.

Exceptionally vibrant look at history from the Persian perspective with a a rather scientific account of why the Persians failed to subjugate Greece and, later, why they were unable to stem the tide of Macedonian expansion.