ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Herodotus' treatment of a few outstanding personalities. Herodotus is by no means enslaved to any sort of biographical treatment of history; but given that one of his aims is to record the marvellous achievements of men, it is inevitable that some dominant figures will emerge from his narrative; inevitable, too, for one of his cast of mind, that among the secondary characters some should exercise a particular fascination. Darius meets the first great personality in Herodotus who is the subject of full-length treatment that is unambiguously historical, with minimal adulteration by elements of folk-tale, unbalanced hostility or theology. Herodotus' accounts of the Marathon campaign in 490 and Xerxes' great invasion of 480 can be faulted in some respects, but they will always remain the foundation for the historical study of those years, and for all their shortcomings do contain a great deal of solid gold to reward the enquirer.
