Ancient Military Writers

"Rude Talk in Athens is brave, brilliant, and incredibly funny. There are loads of very specific characters, including Mark himself. It's the Mark Haskell Smith version of hanging out with Stanley Tucci and Anthony Bourdain, but in present day and ancient Greece. I agree with everything he says about comedy and have never read anything like it." ―Barry Sonnenfeld, Film Director and author of Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother: Memoirs of a Neurotic Filmmaker

Weaving together the accounts of the ancient historian Herodotus with other ancient sources, this is the engrossing story of the triumph of Greece over the mighty Persian Empire.

Persia's Achaemenid Empire flourished between 550 and 331 BC, and encompassed a rich diversity of different peoples and cultures. It originated with Cyrus the Great (559 - 530 BC) and expanded under his successors - who ruled from the royal capitals of Susa and Persepolis - until at its peak it stretched from the Indus Valley to Greece and from the Caspian Sea to Egypt. The Achaemenids acted as a bridge between the earlier Near Eastern cultures and the later Classical world of the Mediterranean, and had a profound influence on Greece in political, military, economic and cultural fields.