“... establish and maintain a channel of communication – battlefields, for instance – is terseness. Xenophon records in his Hellenica a dispatch sent by the second-in-command of the Spartan fleet after the disastrous sea battle of Cyzicus that roughly translates as ‘ships sunk, admiral dead, survivors starving, no idea what to do next’. Similarly, Red ...”

“... begins, was conversing with Homer; Thucydides was responding rather less generously to Herodotus; Xenophon was continuing Thucydides; and so it went on. After the Roman historians of Alexander, Burrow proceeds to Rome itself, to Polybius, Sallust, Livy and Plutarch; to Appian and Cassius Dio on the civil war; to Tacitus and the self-serving Josephus, sensibly ...”

“... on?’ (as in the barber asking the customer whether he wants gel on his hair) with ‘Xenophon’. But even when they’re clever, the rhymes are clunky. He wants us to hear the industry involved in his verse-making, the clatter of dialect and thud of monosyllables.Defiance isn’t always ‘ink-stained’. In his selected prose, Harrison ...”

“... to make an honest living. In return they would keep the conversation light and flatter the host. Xenophon introduces us to one such character, Philip, in his Symposium, a work of historical fiction written in c.365 BC. Philip stands on the threshold and announces that he is a laughter-maker (gelotopoios) and jokes that he came uninvited because he thought it ...”

“... dry archaeological reports. For the curious and initiated she added, direct from the pages of Xenophon, Thucydides and Plato’s Phaedo, portraits of Socrates and Plato and a seamless rendering of their ideas on the individual’s moral obligations, and how to live under an unjust government.In her next novel, The King Must Die, she approached the ...”

“... necessarily make sense when combined. Such ‘irrational names’ – Andrippos (‘Man-horse’), Xenophon (‘Strange[r]-Voice’) – would also have to include the name of Plato’s great-uncle, Kallaischros, a name possessed by a number of distinguished Athenians of the classical period, which sounded exactly like ‘Beautugly’. Doubtless even the most ...”

“... to be suspended on tracks made from animal organs is itself knowledgably and sensitively foody: Xenophon claimed that the helots would have liked to eat the Spartans raw.) In fact, a simultaneous fascination and disgust with food is evident throughout Roussel’s writing. A little later in Impressions d’Afrique we meet a sculptor who has invented a ...”

“... The evidence he must discount, however, much of it from contemporaries, is overwhelming. Xenophon claimed that in Boeotian Thebes, ‘man and boy live together, like married people,’ in E.C. Marchant’s Loeb translation, or, more pedantically, Boeotian men ‘form relationships (homilousi) once they have been conjugally yoked (syzygentes) as man ...”