Herodotus' Histories, his account of the Persian invasions of Greece and their background, are not the earliest of the works discussed in this part on sources. That privilege goes to Aeschylus' play the Persians, performed in 4 72 BC within a decade of Xerxes' expedition to Greece. In another sense, however, they provide a natural starting point. As James Redfield's 'Herodotus the Tourist' (Ch. 1) demonstrates, the Histories reveal a whole range of different models (relativism, polarity, diffusionism) for the understanding of foreign peoples. Herodotus' accounts of foreign peoples also cover a wide variety of topics - Herodotus finds symmetries, for example, in nature, in climate, in geography, and in a whole range of human customs or nomoi - and introduce an enormous range of 'barbarians'. Redfield's distinction of 'hard' and 'soft' peoples, and his demonstration of how the Persians, initially hard, become soft through their conquests of the soft peoples of Asia, also show how Herodotus' ethnography is vital to his presentation of historical causation.' Perhaps the most important contribution of Redfield's piece, however, is to bring out the way in which Herodotus' accounts of foreign peoples are structured by Greek categories and assumptions/ the way in which 'cultural relativism becomes ethnocentric'. This emphasis provides a useful antidote to a modern tendency to ascribe an excessive cultural relativism to Herodotus.3