lf up as a more dictatorial leader than his father had been. He put down a revolt in Babylon and spoke of himself as a religious leader carrying the banner for the Babylonian god, Marduk. He undertook the invasion of Greece beginning in 480 B.C., pushing aside the Spartans and burning Athens. The Persians lost the battle of Salamis, which undercut the thrust of the invasion:
Though Xerxes returned home, leaving Mardonius in charge, the war was not really won by the Greeks until after the battle of Plataea, the fall of pro-Persian Thebes, and the Persian naval loss at Mycale in 479 B.C. In the decade which followed, the formation of the Delian League, the rise of Athenian imperialism, and troubles in Ionia all marked the decline of Persian ambitions in the Aegean.
The work of Herodotus is described by M.I. Finley as a great leap forward. Herodotus, says Finley, extended the scope of the logography to take in a much wider area, including the Egyptians and the Scythians along with the Lydians and the Persians. He also had the idea of trying to control the mass of accumulated data through personal investigations on the spot by making a series of quick visits to all the places, by a rational analysis of the information assembled, and by using the royal annals of Assyria, Persia, and Egypt to attempt to establish an exact chronology covering at least the previous 100 to 150 years. Herodotus then went further and decided that he would write the history of the Persian Wars:
The daring of this undertaking is astonishing. Nearly a generation had gone by since the wars had ended. Scarcely any documentation was available in writing. Yet Herodotus set about reconstructing the story in all its detail, by drawing on the memory of survivors and of men in the next generation who remembered the tales they had been told.
From the beginning, though, Herodotus experienced both praise and criticism for his undertaking, and he has b...