I, Demokedes

Publisher Marketing: Demokedes was a Greek physician--possibly a specialist in sports' medicine--who lived through the hinge period around 500 BCE.--an era of rapid and radical change from Italy to China. It is in Book Three of the Histories of Herodotus that we learn of the doctor's peregrinations from his home in Italy to Athens, to Ionia, to the very heart of the emerging Persian empire, and finally many years later back to his hometown of Kroton. Along the way he has encounters the major celebrities of that world: sports heroes, playwrights, poets, philosophers, tyrants, and King Darius of Persia. Indeed, after witnessing his employer--Polykrates, the tyrant of Samos--being brutally mutilated and then murdered by a Persian satrap, Demokedes is forced into the service of Darius as court physician. Some years later, Darius assigns Demokedes to lead a contingent of Persians whose assignment it is to survey the coastal regions of Greece in preparation for the eventual attempt by Darius to conquer the Greek lands and add them to his empire. By a clever ruse, Demokedes escapes from his Persian chaperones and returns home--where he immediately marries the daughter of the greatest sports hero of antiquity--Milo of Kroton