The work appears to be essentially intact and complete. With many digressions and insertions, and written in a lively, anecdotal style, History of the Persian Wars describes the early rise of the Persian Empire and the resistance to that empire in 490 B.C. and again in 480-479 B.C. by a small group of Greek city-states on its western, or Aegean, border. Some ancient scholar—not the authordivided Herodotus's text into nine "books" named after the nine Muses; a further division of each book into numbered chapters dates back only to the first printed edition (1502).
Herodotus is the earliest substantial prose chronicler in the Western tradition, and his History of the Persian Wars is virtually the only source for most of the events it describes. Persian inscriptions offer some controlling evidence for his account, but no narrative Persian source for this period is known. Aeschylus's Persians (470 B.C.) supplies some valuable information about the momentous battle of Salamis, in which the playwright was a combatant. Herodotus's predecessor, Hecataeus of Miletus, of whose work only fragments exist, seems to have written only brief, rationalized versions of Greek mythology.
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