It has become conventional among conservative ‘clash of civilization’ thinkers to assume that Greek victory in the Persian Wars constituted the founding act of western civilization, and that what Herodotus’s Histories are good for is to recount the origins of what Anthony Pagden calls the ‘perpetual enmity’ between East and West. Even many popularly oriented books written by highly respected classicists opt for sensationalizing titles that might attract readers whose views tend in this direction, or who admired the ‘300’ movies. There is unquestionably a tradition of reading Herodotus in this way, which may have its origins in the Enlightenment – Voltaire, for example, in a brief excursus on the uses of Herodotus, said that the main thing one learned from the Father of History was the ‘superiority of a small, generous people, free while all of Asia was enslaved’. We can find it elaborated by nineteenth-century liberals, such as J. S. Mill, who famously claimed that ‘Even as an event in English history, the battle of Marathon is more important than the battle of Hastings. Had the outcome of that day been different, the Britons and Saxons might still be roaming in the woods.’ Even in the twentieth century – full to bursting with innumerable barbarisms inflicted by the West on itself, and on ‘the rest’ – this sensationalist, Graecophile reading of the Histories has had many advocates. Benjamin Isaac, writing in 2004, cited upwards of a dozen classicists, ranging from J. B. Bury in 1909 to Oswyn Murray in 1980, invoking – positively – a supposedly Herodotean dichotomy between East and West, barbarity and culture, Asia and Europe. In the wake of the wars, Murray contended, an ‘iron curtain had descended: east against west, despotism against liberty – the dichotomies created in the Persian Wars echo throughout world history, and seem ever more likely to continue’. Samuel P. Huntington, author of the widely discussed Clash of Civilizations (1993), argued that this curtain has never been, and can never be, raised.