Book I of the Histories provides a particularly good illustration of the discursiveness and diversity of Herodotus' materials and of the ingenuity with which he develops his narrative and welds it into an artistic whole. Here he deals first with the distant mythological and then in greater detail with more recent history of Greek relations with the Near East, in an attempt to explain the origin of the quarrels between east and west which formed the background to the Persian Wars. This edition contains an introduction, text and annotation on matters of language and content. There is also an explanatory index of historical and geographical names.