Starting with Book Five, Volume 2 of The Persian Wars enters directly into the intrigues between the Greeks and Persians. Darius, infuriated with Athens because of her support for the liberation of the Ionian Greeks, initiates the first invasion of Greece, which ends with the Athenian victory at Marathon in 490 B.C. When Xerxes ascends the Persian throne a few years later, the war is resumed on a vastly greater scale. In some of the most wonderful prose of all time, Herodotus describes the events culminating in the naval battle of Salamis and the clash of armies at Plataea.

Translation by George Rawlinson.