OCR Anthology for Classical Greek GCSE by Judith Affleck and Clive Letchford

Author:Judith Affleck and Clive Letchford [Letchford, Judith Affleck and Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

What happens next?

After the long digression on Egyptian customs in Histories 2, Herodotus returns to his main narrative, the expansion of the Persian empire, at the start of Histories 3.

Cambyses led his army, which included Ionian mercenaries, against Amasis, King of Egypt 570–526. He was helped by a deserter, one of Amasis’ Greek mercenaries called Phanes, who was originally from Halicarnassus, the city where Herodotus was born. Phanes offered advice to Cambyses on how to enter Egypt via Arabia. The Greek mercenaries loyal to Amasis and his son, Psammenitus, made Phanes pay for this betrayal by killing his sons before the deciding battle and openly drinking their blood (3.4–11). After his conquest Cambyses established the 27th Dynasty in Egypt, but these rulers were satraps, provincial governors subject to Persia. Persian rule of Egypt ended briefly in 402, but the land was conquered again by the Persians in 343, then passed to Alexander the Great in 332. His Macedonian satrap, Ptolemy Soter, established the final, 32nd Dynasty and Greek became the official administrative language. The last Ptolemy to rule Egypt independently was Cleopatra, the only Ptolemy to learn Egyptian as well as her native Greek. She was defeated by Octavian, the future emperor Augustus, at Actium in 31.

Final questions

• What impressions have you formed of Herodotus from your reading? Do you think he is someone you would have liked to meet?

• Would you agree that Herodotus is a good story-teller?

• Which of these extracts do you find most memorable and why?

• Do you consider what you have been reading to be history? If not, how would you categorize it?

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