[Verginius Rufus]

"Persepolis" is the Greek name for the place ("polis" is a Greek word). For the Greeks, the Persians were "the barbarians" par excellence. The opening sentence of Herodotus' Histories tells us that he intends to tell of the great deeds of the Greeks, on the one hand, and of the barbarians, on the other hand...culminating, of course, in the great Persian invasion of Greece in 480 B.C.

[bagman]

What does “barbarian” mean to Herodotus?