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.

汤姆·霍兰（Tom Holland）英国畅销历史作家，尤其擅长古典历史文学写作。他曾就读于剑桥大学，取得了英语、拉丁语两科一等荣誉学位。

汤姆·霍兰著有多部畅销历史作品，他的代表作《卢比孔河》与《波斯战火》出版后，被《星期日泰晤士报》《每日电讯报》《独立报》《卫报》《观察家报》等多家媒体评选为年度最佳图书，《卢比孔河》被授予赫塞尔—蒂尔特曼历史学奖，并被提名塞缪尔·约翰逊奖，《波斯战火》被授予“朗西曼奖”。

汤姆·霍兰为英国广播公司第4频道改编过《荷马》《希罗多德》《修昔底德》《维吉尔》等历史节目，为“企鹅古典系列”翻译过希罗多德《历史》。他曾担任英国作家协会主席，目前是英国古典协会委员。