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.

湯姆·霍蘭（Tom Holland）英國暢銷曆史作傢，尤其擅長古典曆史文學寫作。他曾就讀於劍橋大學，取得瞭英語、拉丁語兩科一等榮譽學位。

湯姆·霍蘭著有多部暢銷曆史作品，他的代錶作《盧比孔河》與《波斯戰火》齣版後，被《星期日泰晤士報》《每日電訊報》《獨立報》《衛報》《觀察傢報》等多傢媒體評選為年度最佳圖書，《盧比孔河》被授予赫塞爾—蒂爾特曼曆史學奬，並被提名塞繆爾·約翰遜奬，《波斯戰火》被授予“朗西曼奬”。

湯姆·霍蘭為英國廣播公司第4頻道改編過《荷馬》《希羅多德》《修昔底德》《維吉爾》等曆史節目，為“企鵝古典係列”翻譯過希羅多德《曆史》。他曾擔任英國作傢協會主席，目前是英國古典協會委員。