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Be Spartans!

James Romm: Thucydides, 21 January 2016

Thucydides on Politics: Back to the Present 
by Geoffrey Hawthorn.
Cambridge, 264 pp., £21.99, March 2014, 978 1 107 61200 6
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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 ...

His Eyes, Her Voice

Ange Mlinko: ‘Greek Lessons’, 10 August 2023

Greek Lessons 
by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won.
Hamish Hamilton, 146 pp., £16.99, April, 978 0 241 60027 6
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... 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 ...

Pond of Gloop

Claire Hall: Anaximander’s Universe, 18 May 2023

Anaximander and the Nature of Science 
by Carlo Rovelli, translated by Marion Lignana Rosenberg.
Allen Lane, 209 pp., £16.99, February, 978 0 241 63504 9
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... 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 ...

A Double Destiny

Susan Sontag: Artemisia Gentileschi, and Anna Banti, 25 September 2003

... 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 ...

Downward Mobility

Linda Colley, 4 May 1989

The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians 
edited by John Cannon, R.H.C. Davis, William Doyle and Jack Greene.
Blackwell, 480 pp., £39.95, September 1988, 9780631147084
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Edward Gibbon, Luminous Historian, 1772-1794 
by Patricia Craddock.
Johns Hopkins, 432 pp., £19, February 1989, 0 8018 3720 0
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Gibbon: Making History 
by Roy Porter.
Palgrave, 187 pp., £14.95, February 1989, 0 312 02728 1
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Macaulay 
by Owen Dudley Edwards.
Trafalgar Square, 160 pp., £5.95, October 1988, 9780297794684
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Acton 
by Hugh Tulloch.
Trafalgar Square, 144 pp., £5.95, October 1988, 0 297 79470 1
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... 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 ...

Littoral

Misha Glenny, 9 May 1996

Black Sea 
by Neal Ascherson.
Cape, 306 pp., £17.99, July 1995, 0 224 04102 9
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... 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 ...

Plato Made It Up

James Davidson: Atlantis at Last!, 19 June 2008

The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato’s Myth 
by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, translated by Janet Lloyd.
Exeter, 192 pp., £35, November 2007, 978 0 85989 805 8
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... 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 ...

Journeys across Blankness

Jonathan Parry: Mapping the Middle East, 19 October 2017

Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921 
by Daniel Foliard.
Chicago, 336 pp., £45, April 2017, 978 0 226 45133 6
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... 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 ...

Polygons

Tony Harrison, 19 February 2015

... 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 ...

Diary

Peter Parsons: Rooting around Oxyrhyncus, 4 June 2015

... 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 ...

Doubly Damned

Marina Warner: Literary riddles, 8 February 2007

Enigmas and Riddles in Literature 
by Eleanor Cook.
Cambridge, 291 pp., £48, February 2006, 0 521 85510 1
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... 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 ...

When was Hippocrates?

James Romm, 22 April 2021

The Invention of Medicine 
by Robin Lane Fox.
Allen Lane, 403 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 241 27705 8
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... 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 ...

How many gay men does it take to change an island?

James Davidson: The ancient Greek islands, 10 June 1999

... 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 ...

Speaking up for Latin and Greek

Mary Beard, 9 May 1991

Changes in the Roman Empire: Essays in the Ordinary 
by Ramsay MacMullen.
Princeton, 399 pp., $35, December 1990, 0 691 03601 2
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... 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 ...

Are we any better?

Gisela Striker, 19 August 1993

Shame and Necessity 
by Bernard Williams.
California, 254 pp., £25, May 1993, 0 520 08046 7
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... 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 ...

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