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“... into household parlance, at least into the domain of those who enjoy Thucydides, Xenophon or Herodotus. Burton Watson’s Qin Dynasty poses its greatest challenge to the reader in its opening chapter, ‘The Basic Annals of Qin’: the unknown names come thick and fast, and the action is tersely described and often opaque in motivation to those without ...”

“... involved in the slaughter of the population of various Greek islands in 493 BC, as spoken of by Herodotus:         I did the best I could to make it happen so we killed not just men or not just women but children too, to thin them equally so that each family would remember us, but Farhad said he was tired of killing women. Elliot’s ...”

“... is precious little – comes from a few pages in the first of our Western monumental histories, Herodotus. Later historians do not spend much time on a people who lived so resolutely, not to say religiously, at the margin, and who would soon be swallowed up in the quick abyss of time. We know the Massagetae must have had a rich culture from their brief and ...”

“... in imitating the West; nor in a fabricated monarchical past, derived from Persian translations of Herodotus and celebrated in the Shah’s jamboree at Persepolis in 1971; nor yet in the traditional Persian vices of composing quatrains and smoking opium; but in Islam. By Islam, Shari‘ati was quick to point out, he did not mean the rituals of the official ...”

“... Ajax and Telamon from Salamis itself, and sent a ship to Aegina to fetch Aeacus and his sons’ (Herodotus, VIII 64). Fortified by dead heroes, the troops were led by living prophets: an inscription records that in 394 BC a victorious seer, a Thasian called Sthorys, was invited to a public banquet and given hereditary Athenian citizenship. Ritual and cult ...”

“... remained safely in hiding.’ Hints of the story of the phantom Helen are given in Aeschylus and Herodotus, and it is told explicitly in Plato’s account of Stesichorus’ recantation. Stesichorus was forced to repent his unjust description of Helen: she never went to Troy, he claims, it was her phantom that was fought over. Paris was a simpleton, beguiled ...”

“... David English, variously described as the best editor on Fleet Street and the biggest liar since Herodotus. (English once invented a whole interview with Betty Ford and on another occasion pretended to have been in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot.) By the end of his valiant career, Sir David, who edited the paper for two decades, had won all the awards and ...”

“... the alphabet has been reconfigured in every era, and given a host of different origin stories. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, claimed it was a gift from the Phoenician Cadmus to the Greeks. The legend has a grain of truth to it: the latest archaeological discoveries point to a piecemeal emergence in the Middle East some three and a half ...”

“... for all. The story of Metiochus and Parthenope took its characters from history, or at least from Herodotus; they are bit-players padded out into principals. A mosaic from the millionaires’ playground near Antioch catches a characteristic scene, the lovers in full simper. An Egyptian potsherd has just contributed a typically glutinous soliloquy: ‘O my ...”

“... poetry and life, it is argued, will regain the organic vitality they lost just before Herodotus. Much of the millennial rhetoric of Olson’s numerous manifestos points forward, with touching optimism, to this cancellation of the gap between self and world; or it tries to outline, in the most emphatic terms possible, the means by which modern ...”

“... his Life by printing Bagehot’s gloomy reflection on the author of the History of Brazil, ‘the Herodotus of the South American Republics’: As if his epics were not already dead, and as if the people who now cheat at Valparaiso care a real who it was that cheated those before them. Yet it was only by a conviction like this that an industrious and ...”

“... Equally ancient are the conceptions of ethnicity discussed in the rest of Geary’s book. Herodotus, ‘the father of History’ (a.k.a. ‘the father of lies’) who was actually the first ethnographer, had a quite exceptionally ‘broad and non-judgmental’ view of ethnic identity, based on culture rather than biology. His perspective, Geary ...”

“... in a long line of distinguished Muslim geographers stretching from al-Masudi (888-957), the ‘Herodotus of the Arabs’, to King Roger II of Sicily’s court cartographer al-Idrisi (1099-1166) and Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Ibn Battutah’s younger contemporary who wrote the vast work of historical sociology known as the Kitab al-Ibar. It’s ...”

“... was built on the site of older settlements that benefited from the region’s legendary fertility. Herodotus remarked that ‘as a grain-bearing country Assyria is the richest in the world … The blades of wheat and barley are at least three inches wide.’ The ruins of Ctesiphon, imperial capital of the Parthian and Sassanid empires, lay just twenty miles to ...”

“... buskers, chuggers, hoodies. What’s lost when the agora is reduced to a huckster’s den? Herodotus’ Histories opens with a famous hyperbolical description of ancient Babylon’s walls: the sanctum-like quality of walled space made it claustral and hallowed, as in the mud-brick ziggurat sacred to Mardak. An illustrated 15th-century French ...”