“... to Phrynicus’ play that led later tragedians to prefer mythological topics to contemporary ones. Herodotus tells us that the entire theatre fell to weeping and that Phrynicus was fined a thousand drachmae for reminding the Athenians of misfortunes all too familiar to them. Any future production of the play was forbidden. The Octavia, a first-century drama of ...”

“... shadowy traders and tricksters of the Odyssey, to the instigators of the Trojan War (according to Herodotus), to the author of the last and the most ambitious of the ancient Greek novels, An Ethiopian Story. Together with the archaeological finds, these sources form a picture of a maritime people, blessed with rich soil along the Levantine coast and a knack ...”

“... pride in its uninterrupted national durée, as evidenced by references in the Bible, the Iliad, Herodotus’ Histories and other ancient texts, can be an impediment to reckoning with that history. It is not enough simply to preface accounts of the current conflict with ancient historical descriptions.As the fighting continued last November, refugee camps ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a passion for accuracy that exceeded even that of his mentor, A.E. Housman. Powell’s Lexicon to Herodotus, published in 1938, had exemplified these qualities. It was hailed at the time for ‘amazing industry, much thought and care and fine scholarship’; later judgments found it either an ‘astonishingly focused and accurate achievement’ or the product ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... facts, as opposed to the interpretation, seem to be as follows. Classical writers from the time of Herodotus referred to ‘Celts’ in Western and North-Western Europe. Some writers distinguished them from other ethnic groups in the region such as Ligurians and Cynesians, while others, like Ephorus, used ‘Celts’ as a blanket term for the whole area, by ...”

“... his monumental History of Marriage, begun in 1891, furnished partial evidence for his theory from Herodotus, and from Brazil, the Caribbean, Senegal, Libya, Morocco, Kurdistan, Cambodia and Malabar, while steadfastly rejecting its existence in medieval Europe. This tendency to displace cuissage in time and space was scarcely new, however. It can be found in ...”

“... only in despair at its extraordinariness.) In it the narrator adopts the dialect and techniques of Herodotus, the fifth-century ‘father of history’, to describe the cult of Atargatis, the Syrian goddess of the title, in Hierapolis (modern Manbij), not too far down the Euphrates from Lucian’s hometown. His Herodotean pose encourages us to see the cult ...”

“... of history was a catastrophe. In 548 the shrine once again caught fire: by spontaneous combustion, Herodotus suggests. The conflagration was so intense that it melted Croesus’s gold lion. The Amphictiony took charge of the rebuilding programme, which was vastly ambitious, cost three hundred talents, and took more than forty years to complete. It’s this ...”

“... their own views about the gods in part because they were confronted with the views of others. Herodotus gives a good example: The Persians do not make statues, temples, or altars; in fact, they count those who do so as fools, because (I suppose) they do not anthropomorphise the gods as the Greeks do. Their worship of Zeus consists in going up to the ...”

“... to dramatise the lives of African refugees. Clueless about geography, and given to consulting Herodotus, he draws up an almost childlike list of questions and decides to interview the Oranienplatz protesters out of a need to do something with his brain as well as a more obscure feeling of moral unease.Richard’s daily life is portrayed with eerily ...”

“... very far with the Greek myths if outrage is our only response to stories of rape. Calasso quotes Herodotus’s relaxed, man-of-the-world view that to abduct women is generally considered to be the ‘action of scoundrels’, but to worry about abducted women is the ‘reaction of fools’. ‘Had they not wanted to be abducted, they would not have ...”

“... reader frets not because too much is said but because too little. There is nothing on the story in Herodotus of the Egyptian King who sought to discover the true, primal language by bringing up children in isolation and noting their first utterances, nothing on Chaucer’s mysterious (and non-existent?) authority, Lollius, nothing on the greatest example in ...”