 The Histories by Herodotus
More than anything, Herodotus' great book is a treasure-trove of wonders. The omens and oracles, fantastic tales and fables, told to him on his travels through Greece, Africa and the Near East, and faithfully recorded, once earned him the soubriquet the Father of Lies. Stories of Hippias, the exiled Athenian tyrant and turncoat, who coughed up a tooth on the sands at Marathon and saw his hopes of reclaiming power vanish with it; of the mysterious tribe of Gyzantes, who painted themselves red and dined on monkeys; of the one-eyed Arimaspians who waged an endless struggle against the gold-guarding griffins of the frozen north. Only recently, as history has absorbed the lessons of anthropologists and ethnographers, archaeologists and folklorists, has the truth hidden at the heart of Herodotus' fanciful tales come to life. More than ever, his stature as a historian is unequalled.
It is Herodotus' narrative of the iconic episodes of the Persian Wars that have most inspired imaginations through the ages and retain their power to thrill to this day: the enraged King Xerxes ordering the seas to be flogged for daring to defy his orders; a mighty Persian army so vast it drank whole rivers dry; Athenian hoplites stampeding across the plain of Marathon; the last stand of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. The result is the first great work of prose in European literature - and one of the most inexhaustibly entertaining books ever written.
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