Herodotus wrote The Histories, an inquiry into the Greco-Persian Wars and the peoples of the known world. This is Book 9, Calliope, the last volume. In Book 8, after the sea fight at Salamis, Xerxes the Great King fled toward the Dardanelles and left Mardonius, his best remaining general, wintering in Thessaly in northern Greece.

Mardonius burns Attica, the land around Athens, again. At Plataea the Spartans under Pausanias take the omens and charge. Masistius falls in gold armor under purple. Mardonius is killed and the camp looted. That same day, the story goes, the Greek fleet breaks the cables at Mycale on the Turkish coast, and the Ionians — Greeks of Asia who started this — turn on the Persians. The last act is the siege of Sestos, a fort on the Dardanelles. Artayctes, the Persian governor, is nailed to a plank looking at the water Xerxes bridged. Ionia is loose. The book ends with that crucifixion and Cyrus's warning that soft countries make soft men. Next comes Greek on Greek.