Customer Reviews

Persia & the Greeks: The Defense of the West, 546-478 B. C.

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I read this book over thirty some years ago as a student of ancient history at the University of Florida. I found it to be well written and well researched. It tells the story of the Greco-Persian Wars in greater detail and with greater scholarship than just about anything else currently available.

Having recently read both "Thermopylae: the Battle for the West," and "The Greco-Persian Wars," (both of which cite this work extensively, and both of which are available on Amazon.com) I wanted to go back and re-read this apparently seminal work on the Greco-Persian Wars.

I was disappointed. As a college student, I was used to reading scholarly tomes by academicians. As a leisure reader, I am put off by the stilted grammar, complex sentence structure, and ostentatiously erudite diction of the professional scholar. If there's a clear way to say something and an obscure way to say something, for heaven's sake, say it clearly!

If you have a tolerance for scholarly syntax, by all means read this book. It is much more information dense than either "Thermopylae" or "The Greco-Persian Wars." If you want a much more readable history of the Greek defense of the West, read "Thermopylae" or "The Greco-Persian Wars."