INTRODUCTION (1-5): The origins of the conflict
between the Greeks and the Asiatic Barbarians.
According to Herodotus the quarrels of the Greeks
with the Asiatics began when the Phoenicians abducted the girl Io, daugher
of the king of Argos, a city on the East coast of the Greek Peloponnese. Greeks, probably Cretans, he says, then stole
Europa, daughter of the king of Tyre; the Greeks also took Medea,
daughter of the king of Colchis, a kingdom on the West Coast of the Black Sea ("Euxine Sea") in
the region now part of the nation of Georgia.
Alexander, also known as Paris, the son of Priam, the king
of Troy ("Ilion"), next snatched Helen, a woman of Greece ("Hellas"),
specifically of Lacedemon (of which Sparta was the principle
city).
It was, according to Herodotus, the Greeks who first
escalated the affair to war when they made a military expedition
to the coast of Asia. The event, known to us as the Trojan War,
was, according to Herodotus, the reason for Asia (which by the time
that Herodotus was writing was ruled by the Persians) to be a
sworn enemy of Greece.
Thus far Herodotus has related ancient, probabably mythical, history.
In the next section he will relate the story of Croesus, king of Lydia,
the first historically attested Asian ruler to wrong the Greeks.
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