Herodotus: The Seventh Eighth and Ninth Books

Fellow and Master of University College, Oxford, the classical scholar Reginald Walter Macan (1848–1941) published in 1908 this two-volume edition (in three parts) of the last books of Herodotus, which cover the Greco-Persian Wars during the period 486 to 479 BCE. Volume 2 contains appendices, indexes and maps pertinent to Books 7-9. Macan includes essays on supporting authorities, hypotheses on lost witnesses, and textual evidence presented by poets such as Pindar and the philosophers Plato and Aristotle. He also examines the events in the last books of The Histories, outlining the preparations of the Persians and Greeks for war, as well as reviewing the conflict's strategic aspects as it shifted from Thessaly through to Plataea and Sestos. Macan's edition remains valuable to scholars of the history of textual criticism and the historiography of the classical world.