Search Results

“... When, as a vaguely anti-authoritarian ex-service undergraduate, I first studied Herodotus seriously in the years immediately following the Second World War, my overriding impression was of a man both broad-minded and cosmopolitan; fascinated by the infinite varieties of human nature; surprisingly alert to the influence of women in history, which I’ve always thought of as the subtext, by no means always sexual, of so much public action; appreciative of thaumata, marvels, wherever they might be found (parallels with the New World suggested themselves); and open-minded about religion ...”

“... Custom is king of all things,’ Herodotus proclaimed, arguing that if customs were like goods in a marketplace, set out alongside other such goods, each people would choose its own above all others. An experiment conducted by the Persian king Darius proved the point for Herodotus ...”

“... Empire. At the very top were Homer and the epic poets; and a little lower down, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, along with the tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and (less congenial to modern taste) those bombastic orators Lysias and Demosthenes. What’s more, as Menippus’ answer to Apollonius shows, judgments of literary ...”

“... Herodotus​ tells us that when Darius’ Persian army invaded Scythia, in the late sixth century bce, the Scythians ran away. The Persians followed them over the steppeland north of the Black Sea until, tiring of the pursuit, Darius sent a messenger to the Scythian king to tell him to make a stand or bend the knee ...”

“... Memory is a large part of it. Herodotus tells us the name of Leonidas, the king of Sparta who died at Thermopylae in 480 BC, not exactly holding the multitudinous Persians at bay but at least showing how it might be done. Herodotus also says he has ‘learned the names of all the three hundred’ Spartans who fell with their king ...”

“... turning to re-examine the history writers of the ancient world themselves. John Gould’s Herodotus is just one example of this current interest. It is, of course, a hard job to take on the ‘Father of History’. But Gould does extraordinarily well in avoiding all the old stereotypes which have surrounded ...”

“... ride horses; we know nothing of woman-ly tasks,’ the Amazons said of themselves, according to Herodotus. He had learned the legends of the women warriors on a trip to the southern outskirts of their territory – the region the Greeks called Scythia, the vast steppe lands to the north and east of the Black Sea. ...”

“... back on the pendulum before it gathers too much momentum’. I think his effort is in vain. Herodotus created the discipline of history (as opposed to telling stories about the past) when he began his ‘inquiries’ into the origin of the Persian Wars with Croesus, ‘the man who I myself know was the first to act unjustly against the ...”

“... was entirely uninterested in these Greeks further west, who had much less to offer a new empire. Herodotus captures this attitude in his history of Greco-Persian relations: when a Spartan ambassador arrived at the Lydian capital of Sardis to warn Cyrus that he would incur the wrath of the Spartans if he harmed any Greek city, Cyrus responded that he had ...”

“... and eyewitness to Carthage’s destruction, were Flaubert’s chief sources, but he also relied on Herodotus, Xenophon, Cornelius Nepos and Procopius. For geography and fortifications, he turned to Appian and Diodorus of Sicily, and to Aelian for military tactics. He mined Pliny, Theophrastus and others for Carthaginian magical lore and religion. Athenaeus ...”

“... planned and unified opposition notably lacking in the sole narrative account of it we possess, by Herodotus, which presents the two instigators as little more than local opportunists with strongly pro-Persian backgrounds. In 499 a small force from Athens and Euboean Eretria joined the revolt, advanced fifty miles inland to Sardis (Sart in modern Turkey) and ...”

“... to come, and nothing that he and the Alcmaeonids had offered held any noticeable attraction. Herodotus’ account is infuriatingly vague: he claims, in an ambiguous verb, that Cleisthenes took uncertain action for the benefit of the demos (a generic term for ‘people’, leaving their political status indeterminate). This action could mean forming any ...”

“... stretch of barren, mountainous country extending through Tien Shan to the Gobi Desert. Herodotus, writing in about 430 BC, gives details of the lives and legends of the nomads who populated these remote steppes, and some of his observations have been borne out by recent archaeology – the ‘father of lies’, as he was once known, is proving to ...”

“... lived, he is a difficult source for the modern historian to use, because for the most part, unlike Herodotus, he did not cite his sources. Should we start from a presumption that Thucydides is likely to be right, at least most of the time? Or should we suspect that he is no more likely to have been unbiased than anyone else? The answer is not obvious, and ...”

“... as the Achaemenid dynasty. That the prize Darius won was worth fighting for hardly needs saying. Herodotus, who spent the first half of his Histories exploring the many nations under Achaemenid rule, tells us that the annual tribute they paid was the equivalent of 14,560 talents; since the bulk of the sum was paid in gold and silver, with the talent set at a ...”