I N this volume the writer concludes a program of work undertaken
many years ago, attempting to produce a readable account of the
early age of Greece, from the age of the Trojan War (in Minoans,
Philistines and Greeks, 1930) and the late prehistoric (in The World of
Hesiod, 1936; both long out of print, and the former largely out of
date), through The Lyric Age of Greece ( 1960), to the eve of the rise of
the Athenian Empire. The rise of Greek civilisation was described in
the last-named book; in the present work we begin with that of the
Persians, one of the great imperial peoples of history, who deserve
more sympathetic treatment than, from our inevitably and rightly
phil-Hellenic point of view, they have sometimes received. The
Persian Wars themselves, too, embrace much more than the great
culminating episode of Xerxes' invasion, which Thucydides dismissed
as 'settled by two battles at sea and two on land'. He would have been
more just if he had compared that, not to the whole length of the
Peloponnesian War, but to the one episode of the Sicilian expedition.
The Persian wars too, together with the simultaneous struggle against
Persia's allies, the Phoenicians, were a prolonged though intermittent
series of campaigns, ranging in time from Cyrus' conquest of Ionia in
546 to Kimon's last campaign in Cyprus in 450, and in space extending
throughout the whole length of the Mediterranean. To trace the
course and connections of these campaigns, together with the rise, just
in time to be the decisive factor, of the democracy of Athens and of its
sea-power, is a task the more worth attempting for the fact that it has
not been the subject of a full-length study since that of Grundy,
published in 1899.

The author is greatly indebted to the Director and Faculty of the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for electing him to member-
ship for 1961-2, and thus enabling him to complete the work under
ideal conditions, and to the University of Glasgow for granting him
leave of absence; also to A. Alföldi, B. D. Meritt, M. H. Jameson,

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