Persian Fire
The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
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Narrated by:
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Michael Page
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By:
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Tom Holland
About this listen
In the fifth century BC, a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states. The superpower was Persia, incomparably rich in ambition, gold, and men. The terrorist states were Athens and Sparta, eccentric cities in a poor and mountainous backwater: Greece. The story of how their citizens took on the Great King of Persia, and thereby saved not only themselves, but Western civilization as well, is as heart-stopping and fateful as any episode in history. Tom Holland's brilliant study of these critical Persian Wars skillfully examines a conflict of critical importance to both ancient and modern history.
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- By L Young on 08-14-19
By: Harold Lamb
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Lords of the Horizons
- A History of the Ottoman Empire
- By: Jason Goodwin
- Narrated by: Grahame Edwards
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The Ottoman Empire has long exerted a strong pull on Western minds and hearts. For over 600 years the empire swelled and declined, rising from a dusty fiefdom in the foothills of Anatolia to a power which ruled over the Danube and the Euphrates with the richest court in Europe. But its decline was prodigious, protracted and total.
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Good introduction to the Ottomans, bad narration
- By Skeptical on 06-06-18
By: Jason Goodwin
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The Spartacus War
- By: Barry Strauss
- Narrated by: Ray Grover
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The Spartacus War is the extraordinary story of the most famous slave rebellion in the ancient world, the fascinating true story behind a legend that has been the inspiration for novelists, filmmakers, and revolutionaries for 2,000 years. Starting with only 74 men, a gladiator named Spartacus incited a rebellion that threatened Rome itself.
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Interesting
- By Jean on 08-02-15
By: Barry Strauss
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The Trojan War
- A New History
- By: Barry Strauss
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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The Trojan War is the most famous conflict in history, the subject of Homer's Iliad, one of the cornerstones of Western literature. Although many listeners know that this literary masterwork is based on actual events, there is disagreement about how much of Homer's tale is true. Drawing on recent archaeological research, historian and classicist Barry Strauss explains what really happened in Troy more than 3,000 years ago. For many years it was thought that Troy was an insignificant place that never had a chance against the Greek warriors who laid siege and overwhelmed the city.
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Good summary of a great myth and its realities.
- By Kenneth M. Northrup on 07-09-20
By: Barry Strauss
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God's Wolf
- The Life of the Most Notorious of All Crusaders, Scourge of Saladin
- By: Jeffrey Lee
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In a 2010 terrorist plot, Al-Qaeda hid a bomb in a FedEx shipment addressed to Reynald de Chatillon, a knight who had died centuries ago in the Crusades. A reviled figure in Islamic history, often portrayed as the very epitome of brutality, Reynald remains as controversial - and as vividly present in the minds of many in the Middle East - as the story of the Crusades themselves.
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A great look into the life of a great crusader
- By Jon on 02-28-19
By: Jeffrey Lee
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Cleopatra
- A Life
- By: Stacy Schiff
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order.
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Approach this book with caution
- By GolfZilla on 12-02-10
By: Stacy Schiff
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Ancient Rome
- The Rise and Fall of An Empire
- By: Simon Baker
- Narrated by: Chris MacDonnell
- Length: 17 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of the greatest empire the world has ever known. Simon Baker charts the rise and fall of the world's first superpower, focusing on six momentous turning points that shaped Roman history. Welcome to Rome as you've never seen it before - awesome and splendid, gritty and squalid. From the conquest of the Mediterranean beginning in the third century BC to the destruction of the Roman Empire at the hands of barbarian invaders some seven centuries later, we discover the most critical episodes in Roman history.
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Clear and dramatic
- By Tad Davis on 08-01-17
By: Simon Baker
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Alexander of Macedon
- By: Harold Lamb
- Narrated by: Charlton Griffin
- Length: 14 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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The enigma of Alexander the Great has remained with us for 2,300 years. In spite of the best efforts of historians, Alexander is no less a mystery to us now than he probably was during his own lifetime. There was no one like him before or since. In the pages of Harold Lamb's intriguing Alexander of Macedon, we find some of the answers to the great riddle of his character.
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Read Arrian first
- By cbrann on 10-16-05
By: Harold Lamb
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1453
- The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West
- By: Roger Crowley
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The fall of Constantinople in 1453 signaled a shift in history and the end of the Byzantium Empire. Roger Crowley's listenable and comprehensive account of the battle between Mehmed II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and Constantine XI, the 57th emperor of Byzantium, illuminates the period in history that was a precursor to the current jihad between the West and the Middle East.
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A well written narrative with bizarre and biased commentary
- By Patrick D. Flynn on 08-17-17
By: Roger Crowley
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The Day Democracy Died
- By: Anselm Audley
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 2 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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How scapegoating and hysteria doomed the world's first democracy. From the chaos of a sea-battle to the fury of a lynch mob, from personal bravery to political machinations, The Day Democracy Died tells in vivid detail the tragic story of the Arginusae trials and the fall of Athens: a cautionary tale of democracy's demons which is as relevant in the age of instant news and mass media as in the volatile city-states of ancient Greece.
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Almost a Legal drama of Socrates as the judge
- By resol on 10-12-17
By: Anselm Audley
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Persians
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The Achaemenid Persian kings ruled over the largest empire of antiquity, stretching from Libya to the steppes of Asia and from Ethiopia to Pakistan. In Persians, historian Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones tells the epic story of this dynasty and the world it ruled. Drawing on Iranian inscriptions, cuneiform tablets, art, and archaeology, he shows how the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the world’s first superpower—one built, despite its imperial ambition, on cooperation and tolerance. This is the definitive history of the Achaemenid dynasty and its legacies in modern-day Iran.
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Good History and Historiography
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The Rise of Athens
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Filled with tales of adventure and astounding reversals of fortune, The Rise of Athens celebrates the city-state that transformed the world - from the democratic revolution that marked its beginning through the city's political and cultural golden age to its decline into the ancient equivalent of a modern-day university town. Anthony Everitt constructs his history with unforgettable portraits of the talented, tricky, ambitious, and unscrupulous Athenians who fueled the city's rise.
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Good but not great. With some disturbing opinions.
- By Anthony on 06-25-19
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The Rise of Rome
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Emerging as a market town from a cluster of hill villages in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., Rome grew to become the ancient world's preeminent power. Everitt fashions the story of Rome's rise to glory into an erudite book filled with lasting lessons for our time. He chronicles the clash between patricians and plebeians that defined the politics of the Republic. He shows how Rome's shrewd strategy of offering citizenship to her defeated subjects was instrumental in expanding the reach of her burgeoning empire.
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Rome from the fall of Troy through Julius Caesar
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What listeners say about Persian Fire
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Joe Morton
- 03-16-18
Another book about Greeks
What does Michael Page bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
I can't say the narrator provides something that reading could not. However, the dramatized tone of this book could have been disastrous in less capable hands. Page's reading makes the text dramatic, where it might otherwise come across as corny.
Any additional comments?
Perhaps I did not adequately preview this book before purchase -- I was disappointed to discover that it is much more focused on a making-present of the Hellenistic "story" of the Persian threat than the Persian Empire itself. To that end, it is successful, so long as one is interested in the Greek narrative (as opposed to an anaylitical historical text -- there are a number of episodes recounted without aside which range from dubious to downright Greek fiction). I found value in this book, as it colorizes and synthesizes a number of (primarily Greek) sources elegantly. If you are unfamiliar with the details of the Greek resistance, this is an excellent place to start. The downside of this emphasis is that it has been done a number of times, and though this installment is a worthy telling of the Greek story, it is still, at root, a telling of the same, much-told story of Greek resistance.
This book is NOT an examination of the Persian Empire. Anyone desiring to learn more about Cyrus/Cambyses/Darius will likely be disappointed when, about an hour into the audiobook, Cyrus and Cambyses are already dead, and the book has turned to detailed considerations of Athenian and Spartan societies.
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2 people found this helpful
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- John
- 08-01-23
History well-told, as a story
Well-written and excellently performed by the narrator. If you have any interest in the ancient conflict between Persia and Greece, this is the perfect was to learn about it. My only complaint is that a PDF with some maps and perhaps a list of the key characters would have made this perfect. As it was, Wikipedia proved sufficient to support this deficiency.
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- aRandomSkeptic
- 10-28-23
Good narrative with a dry sense of humor
The paradoxes are interesting. There is a bit of sarcasm evident as well.
A nitpick - There’s quite a bit of usage of ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ without and explanation that in 3000BC, it meant different things in terms of land mass. Neither the Persians nor Greeks had much visibility in to things beyond Mediterranean Sea.
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- Byron
- 09-11-21
Everytbing thanks to Marathon
The thesis of tying back the liberty of the West to Marathon was neat. The narrations about how often the Greeks squabbled, inter polis, and intra polis, was interesting in that it painted the squabbles as somewhat inherent in democracies. The book did well to highlight the struggle of liberty, fraternity, and equality, with each equally weighted, as going back to the "origins of the West."
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Greek Fire
Not to much about Persia. Greek Fire might be a better title.
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- Travis M. Fucich
- 06-13-18
Excellent account of the Persian wars.
I felt as if I was living during the times of Cyrus the Great and the Persian wars. Character development and explanation of the times is great.
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Overall
- Felisa Kay
- 02-14-19
More like Persians war on Greece, exciting read
I found this easy to listen to. And follow. really nota good title since it focuses and the famous battles when Persia invaded Greece. I found the battle descriptions exciting, of course Greece prevailed against all odds which made it interesting to begin with. You get history of Sparta, and Athens as well as xerxes an Persia at the time. Good book.
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- David Schwartz
- 06-06-17
The never ending battle continues
Kind of got confused several times with all the different characters names and the positions they held.
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- Kevin
- 02-05-17
Started out a little slow, but 2nd half worth the wait
Great read overall. The level of detail in the first few chapters was a little much but worth it
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- Jason Kirkendoll
- 09-30-17
Great listen. Kept me riveted.
Loved this book. It is not so much a comprehensive history of the Persians as I would have liked, but a story of the rise of the empire and its collision with the Greeks. The second half of the book focuses almost solely on Greece.
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