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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... The Spartans, notoriously shy of overseas commitments, refused their request; but they did, Herodotus tells us, send a diplomatic mission to Sardis. Its purpose was ‘to deliver a proclamation of the Lacedaemonians, warning Cyrus against harming any city on Hellenic soil, since this they would not overlook’. Cyrus’s reaction, when the diktat ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... books. Cyrus is initially persuaded to relate his history when he expresses his outrage on hearing Herodotus lecture on the Persian Wars. Though the point is not made explicit, the posthumous arrangement of Cyrus’s alternative historical text is presumably an imitation of the way Herodotus’s history was posthumously ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”