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2 Volumes on 2 MP3-CDs, Unabridged, With Music and Sound Effects, Running Time: 29 hours THE PERSIAN WARS is unquestionably one of the world’s greatest works of literature. But what, precisely, is it? The Persian Wars is part history, part geography, part travelogue, part anthropology...and completely entertaining. It possesses a charm that is legendary. With Herodotus we experience the impact of that great intellectual, moral, and ethical force that set the Greeks apart from the rest of the Ancient World. Herodotus has succeeded for all time in brilliantly expressing the conflict between the ideal of the free man and that of the despot – a magnificent epic of human triumph over the forces of tyranny, of the struggle over two diametrically opposed concepts of government...between which man must still choose today. Contents of Volume I: The first four books of The Persian Wars serve as an introduction to the actual conflict itself. In this leisurely unwinding of events, people, and places in Volume I, Herodotus provides the listener with a fascinating glimpse of the Ancient World. It is a marvelous journey into an exotic time filled with strange and savage tribes, beautiful cities and monuments, and - as always - borne along on that inimitable charm that is unique to Herodotus. Contents of Volume II: Starting with Book Five, Volume II 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.