"Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World"

[Jona Lendering]

To Xerxes, "not even a battle"? Then are we to just throw away the claims that he reportedly jumped from his throne in ashtonishment and anger thrice during the fight as sheer myth?

I think it is fiction. There is the effeminate Asian who is discovering what real men can do. I do not know who invented the story -it may be old- but the extreme types of the Spartan men and effeminate Persians are suspect in all of Herodotus.

Xerxes was more than likely expecting to just run right through the Greeks in one day.

I don't think so. He expected problems and serious delays. Otherwise, he would not have needed an army of about 200,000 men 1,000 ships. His preparations took three years.

If for some catastrophic reason my history is the only surviving record 2000 years on, I would be confident that the real important stuff would be accurate.

This is sometimes called the 'positivist fallacy', the idea that the sources that survive are also the sources that matter. Now it is true that people who were forced to select which texts were important enough to be copied, tried to select the ones they thought were the best. The 3x7 Greek tragedies with scholia are no doubt the result of selecting the 3x7 best plays.

However, the criterium of selection changed. Monks have decided not to copy Livy's second decade (Pyrrhus, First Punic War) and instead copied every single letter written by the fathers of the church. The things we consider to be the best, were not regarded as the best by the generations between Antiquity and now.

Why was Herodotus copied? Not because he was considered to be reliable. Lucian illustrates it: he says the Herodotus was admired for his style. Not for what he had to say, because Herotodus was considered to be lunatic philobarbarian, as Plutarch says.

Just like today, quality is elusive and not a guarantee for survival. Unfortunately, it's not survival of the best, but survival of the fittest, which, for literature, means survival of authors who continue to please the reader. Herodotus has achieved that; and parts of his History show that he was not a bad historian at all; but that is not why it survived.