Search Results

“... historians have insisted on a global view of the past: that tradition, after all, goes back to Herodotus.’ Did Herodotus, who was not aware of the earth as a globe, ever speak or even reflect on a ‘global view of the past’? I rather doubt it. As for Gallagher, his vision remained confined to the British Empire of ...”

“... falsifying a historical fact.’ Today science can appear just as much ‘the father of lies’ as Herodotus himself: not because of our appetite for wonders, but because the scientist has become much more aware of the possibilities of propaganda, whether personally or ideologically motivated. ‘You’re lying’ is still a possible accusation, but perhaps ...”

“... of a continuation or that the work is unfinished or has lost its conclusion; Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Lucretius, and Virgil’s Aeneid could be cited. Kings comes to a very abrupt ending; Jonah and Acts would be easily extensible. Modern readers take too much for granted the well-finished ending. Having thus alerted us to the dangers of interpretation ...”

“... of their travels. Still others were known through the writers of classical antiquity, above all Herodotus and Pliny, whose mixture of fact and fiction had peopled the world indiscriminately with real races and tribes, like the Scythians, and monstrous peoples, always just over the horizon, like the headless Blemmyae and the dog-headed Cynocephali. It ...”

“... Yoruba and Urdu, instead of, say, German and French? Academics ask students to read Tacitus, Herodotus, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida and, more rarely, Judith Butler. But how many are also required to read Audre Lorde, Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon, Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed, Kim TallBear or Kimberlé Crenshaw? What if ...”

“... to such tales. It also helps if one remembers that Thucydides is the follower and rival of Herodotus and Homer, not just a political commentator on his own times. What will remain is a man of whose life and opinions we know little, and a writer who examines the horrors of war, the tangle of human motives, the glory and degradation of his own ...”

“... and ‘bon vivant’ are not used in their languages of origin, and that although Herodotus does say that Pheidippides (or Philippides) ran 150 miles to solicit Spartan help at the battle of Marathon, the relevant statistic is the 26 miles and 487 yards he is supposed to have run back to Athens to announce ...”

“... did not preserve like the dry sands. Thus began the elaborate processes described in detail by Herodotus, which in the costly full treatment took 70 days. Dehydrated in natron, eviscerated – the organs carefully preserved for the subject’s later use in separate pickle-jars – the emptied thorax stuffed with rags, the shrunken limbs often padded with ...”

“... the episode is fully documented, how Iraq fell is the subject of much debate. According to Herodotus, Cyrus diverted enough of the Euphrates to enable his troops to wade into Babylon. ‘The Babylonians themselves say that, owing to the great size of the city, the outskirts were captured without the people in the centre knowing anything about it.’ He ...”

“... empire – itself a product, ironically, of their earlier victory over Xerxes’ invasion. As Herodotus foresaw, the Athenians soon acquired those habits of imperial domination that they had won praise for putting down in the Achaemenid Persians. It was in this context, after a decade that had seen Spartan invasions of Attica and a plague that killed ...”

“... its beak: presumably one of the ‘Arimaspians’ who, according to Milton (borrowing both from Herodotus and from Pliny’s Natural History), robbed the griffins’ hoards of gold. Shortly after there is a full-page plate of a mild-looking elephant, with a green and white striped trunk and a tower on its back from which soldiers with crossbows, pikes and ...”

“... more significant were. Burrow makes no apology for devoting the first third of his book to them. Herodotus, with whom, after a dutiful prologue on the keeping of records and accounts in Egypt and Babylon, Burrow begins, was conversing with Homer; Thucydides was responding rather less generously to Herodotus; Xenophon was ...”

“... book on this subject is the strange and brilliant work by François Hartog called The Mirror of Herodotus. Hartog discusses the contrast, as observed by Herodotus, between the Scythian pastoral nomads of the Black Sea steppe and the trudging infantry battalions of the Persian Empire under the command of Darius. When ...”

“... They were said to be descended from the Scythians, whose cannibal habits are reported as early as Herodotus, and who are deemed by a tendentious etymology to be the ancestors of the modern Scoti or Irish. The savage or cannibal Irish are featured in English writers like Spenser and Camden, and there are significant parallels between English descriptions of ...”

“... has been implicit in the process of historical reconstruction since the pioneering achievement of Herodotus: he is subscribing to the belief that ‘history itself consists of a congeries of lived stories, individual and collective, and that the principal task of historians is to uncover these stories and to retell them in a narrative, the truth of which ...”