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“... have been the first Western author to address himself to posterity. His forerunners – Homer and Herodotus, principally – show no awareness of a readership extending beyond their own time. But Thucydides called his work ‘a possession for eternity’, and spoke of the chaos of civil war as something ‘that is and always will be, as long as human nature ...”

“... impediment. ‘She is almost entirely uninterested in the literature of Homer, Plato and Herodotus, or the literature of the later period, written in demotic Greek, which her fellow students wish to read in the original.’ Her teacher, conversely, is very interested in philosophy and its cold comfort; he repeats a talismanic quote from Borges about ...”

“... the most prosperous of the Greek trading posts, welcoming merchants from across the Mediterranean. Herodotus, looking back on its golden age, called it the ‘jewel of Ionia’. The city had been occupied by Minoans from Crete and by Mycenaean Greeks. It had been raided by the Hittites several times. It was a place of confluence and multiculturalism, where ...”

“... what men do. Artemis – Artemisia means follower of Artemis – is the goddess of the hunt. In Herodotus’ great History, it is the name of a queen and a military leader: Artemisia, Queen of Halicarnassus, a Greek city in Ionia, who joined the Persians and was put in command by Xerxes of five of his ships. A Greek queen commanding a Persian naval squadron ...”

“... entries to French, German and Italian historians, and thirty more to Classical writers like Herodotus, Livy and Tacitus. But the bulk of biographical essays are about Anglo-American scholars. As a result, this book supplies something of a prosopography of the Transatlantic historical profession. And a very bizarre profession it is too. It is, first of ...”

“... peoples drift effortlessly from their ancient history into our millennium and back, from Herodotus to Lermontov, and from the Zaporozhe Sich of the Cossacks to the loners on the Oregon trail. He possesses a great ability to distinguish real meaning, however obscured by surface detritus, from stories which dazzle on the outside but on deeper ...”

“... was no historian … he manifested a pronounced hostility towards history as practised by Herodotus and Thucydides’) and whose most famous essay, ‘The Black Hunter and the Origin of the Athenian Ephebeia’, is a Lévi-Strauss-inspired analysis of the binary oppositions – dark-fair, wild-tame, hunter-hoplite, margin-centre – within the myths ...”

“... uniform sources: the Bible and a few classics. If the Euphrates was navigable, it was because Herodotus had said so. The first-century Periplus was the usual source for discussions of the Red Sea. Little was known about the tribes other than that they were ‘nomads’ or ‘barbarians’. Very few travellers knew more than a few basic facts about Islamic ...”

“... limestone/flysch such masonry’s carved from can crash down as boulders in rockfalls like those Herodotus tells us crushed Xerxes’ Persians. Twenty-ton blocks cause clobbering bounce tracks. Now falling rocks signs keep the stadium closed. This stadium was where my clog-dancing satyrs with phalluses upright had their world premiere,The Trackers of ...”

“... lined with sphinxes. They had various guides to the new environment: an archaic Greek view in Herodotus, a Hellenised native view in such works as Manetho’s History of Egypt and Berossus’ History of Babylonia, even direct access to indigenous sources (recent finds in Egypt show how many such texts circulated in Greek translation). All this informed ...”

“... sphinxes (both part leonine) and are fierce guardians of treasure – the gold of the Indies in Herodotus – so, like the Sphinx, they move into the metaphorical terrain of rich secrets and knowledge. Cook makes great play with griffins, moving between the Latin terms for griffin (gryphus) and riddle (griphus) with pleasing sleight of hand. Lewis Carroll ...”

“... poet of the same name’). The language and style, and some of the patterns of thought, resemble Herodotus, who wrote in the second half of the fifth century BCE. It’s a fair guess that the treatises date to that time, and therefore belong to what has been considered the oldest stratum of the Hippocratic corpus; other texts are clearly much later, some by ...”

“... the beach,’ but B. interrupts me. The Persians came here to Mykonos on at least one occasion, as Herodotus records, in 490 BC. They put in here after the Athenians had defeated them at Marathon. It’s impossible to re-create their mood but we can at least make a guess at it. It had not been a massive expedition for the Persians; that would come ten years ...”

“... their discipline comes from an enjoyment of the great historical texts of the ancient world, from Herodotus or Plutarch. ‘I like it,’ he imagines them saying. ‘I’ll try my own hand at it.’ This is all even more palpably absurd than Finley’s version of the argument. It is certainly true that an intelligent reading of Classical literature can ...”

“... Not all history writing is bad literature, and where it is good literature, as one might claim for Herodotus and Thucydides, it is still not literature in the sense of fiction. It is a pity Williams has so little to say about his choice of sources. After setting the scene, Williams proceeds to discuss, in turn, the concepts of agency, responsibility and ...”