Persian Fire
Persian Fire
副标题: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
ISBN: 9780385513111
出版社: Doubleday
出版年: 2006-05-02
页数: 418
定价: USD 27.50
装帧: Hardcover
内容简介
In 480 B.C., Xerxes, the King of Persia, led an invasion of mainland Greece. Its success should have been a formality. For seventy years, victory—rapid, spectacular victory—had seemed the birthright of the Persian Empire. In the space of a single generation, they had swept across the Near East, shattering ancient kingdoms, storming famous cities, putting together an empire which stretched from India to the shores of the Aegean. As a result of those conquests, Xerxes ruled as the most powerful man on the planet. Yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks of the mainland managed to hold out. The Persians were turned back. Greece remained free. Had the Greeks been defeated in the epochal naval battle at Salamis, not only would the West have lost its first struggle for independence and survival, but it is unlikely that there would ever have been such an entity as the West at all.
Tom Holland’s brilliant new book describes the very first “clash of Empires” between East and West. As he did in the critically praised Rubicon, he has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our own. There is no other popular history that takes in the entire sweep of the Persian Wars, and no other classical historian, academic or popular, who combines scholarly rigor with novelistic depth with a worldly irony in quite the fashion that Tom Holland does.
作者简介
汤姆?霍兰获得了剑桥大学两科一等荣誉学位，曾经为英国广播公司的广播节目改编了荷马、希罗多德、修昔底德以及维吉尔的著作。他的上一部著作《卢比肯河》，得到了塞缪尔?约翰逊奖的提名，并且荣获了2004年度赫塞尔－蒂尔特曼历史学奖。