Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you're interested in ancient history, you owe it to yourself to know something about Robert B. Strassler. This retired businessman did his undergraduate degree in -- and has had a lifelong interest in -- the classics. He has dedicated his "retirement," apparently, to the re-issue of ancient authors in handsome, reader-friendly editions. This is his second such edition, the first having been his Landmark Thucydides. My comments so far: THE MAPS There is no edition of Herodotus like this -- abundant maps, all easy to use and pleasing to the eye. Newcomers to Herodotus will find the maps invaluable. The reason: Herodotus takes you on a tour of much of the ancient world, telling you stories and legends and relating recent history. You may not know exactly where Miletus was located, or Sardis, or the river Scamander, and you can't simply look them up on a Google map -- that world has vanished; the place-names are now all different. So it's incredibly helpful, when you bump into references to such places, to have at hand an attractive set of maps to refer to. Also, Strassler is faithful to his own method, which is always to provide at least TWO maps -- one an overview of a region (say, the eastern Mediterannean), the other a zoomed-in, detailed look at one portion of that region (e.g., the western coast of Turkey). As a result, the maps always work -- always helpful, never mystifying. THE TRANSLATION I'm no expert in ancient Greek, so I can't comment on the quality of the translation, which is by Andrea L. Purvis. Strassler, as the general editor of this edition, says that his goal was to ensure that the text "would be clear, simple, and easily comprehensible to a modern reader. My narrow objective occasionally created difficulties for Andrea and led to some disagreements between us -- she arguing for tighter fidelity to the Greek text and I for clarity in the English... With time and iteration, we were always able to find a mutually agreeable compromise." THE PRICE Were this book a college text, just looking at it, you might expect it to cost $70 - 80. The fact that you can get it for less than $30 is amazing. My view, in short, is that if you're going to tackle Herodotus, this is the only way to do it. UPDATE — 06/22/2017: I've been teaching close reading of Herodotus for several years now, using this edition. It's easily the most student-friendly edition of Herodotus now available and is probably destined to remain so. I've come to appreciate, in particular, the appendices, which comprise essays by qualified scholars on a range of relevant topics, e.g., a detailed discussion of what Herodotus got right (and what he got wrong) about Egypt; a detailed discussion of Spartan culture (by none other than Paul Cartledge); the backstory on the Ionian Revolt (an event with great resonance in subsequent decades); and so on — all wonderful supplements to the main text.