Persian Fire (Tom Holland, 2005)

I tell people I like to read my history chronologically. I find it too disorienting to bounce around from, say, the fall of Rome to World War I. I need to explore all the stuff in-between. I launched a new series of world history reading with Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything, but that turned out to be a little off the mark as far as being a true history book, but it did set down a truly awesome tablecloth for the picnic table upon which I embarked on this latest world history feast.

In this latest round, I've tried to focus in more on particular authors and series, at least for the pre-476 stuff. Oxford University Press's series "Ancient Warfare and Civilization" has a strong first volume, so I've added the next two, one about Philip and Alexander, the other about the Roman conquest of Greece. Anthony Everitt has some decent biographies (Cicero, Augustus, Hadrian) to supplement his latest on the rise of Rome (coming soon to this blog!). However it's the four books by Tom Holland I've been looking most forward to reading. Since Persia falls earliest chronologically in my list, it was the first to be read.

Overall, it's a great book, especially if most of what you know about Athens, Sparta, and Persia comes from watching Hollywood goop like 300. It's not particularly scholarly, so even though it has an excellent narrative tone, if you have an advanced degree you will probably be lacking in a-ha moments. My primary disappointment was that I was really looking for a Persia-centric book and instead got something more 50/50 between Greece and Persia, plus not much following the Battle of Plataea. I mostly give Holland a pass for this because even what we know about Greece in the fifth and sixth centuries BCE is quite scanty for such an influential period, and information on Persia is even scantier, most of it written by their enemies.

I've still got some more reading in ancient Greece to work on before moving on to Rome. Stay tuned!