“... buskers, chuggers, hoodies. What’s lost when the agora is reduced to a huckster’s den? Herodotus’ Histories opens with a famous hyperbolical description of ancient Babylon’s walls: the sanctum-like quality of walled space made it claustral and hallowed, as in the mud-brick ziggurat sacred to Mardak. An illustrated 15th-century French ...”

“... in a long line of distinguished Muslim geographers stretching from al-Masudi (888-957), the ‘Herodotus of the Arabs’, to King Roger II of Sicily’s court cartographer al-Idrisi (1099-1166) and Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Ibn Battutah’s younger contemporary who wrote the vast work of historical sociology known as the Kitab al-Ibar. It’s ...”

“... in England’s rural Essex that he chose finally to settle.Travel writing is a trade older than Herodotus. It’s about ‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders’. It’s designed to amaze, to bring back accounts of strangeness, especially human strangeness, from far places. Sometimes it feeds escape fantasies about happier, freer lands on the ...”

“... its proximity to the despotic rule and military virtue of the nomadic Scythians described by Herodotus, that made it the perfect agent for the regeneration of Europe. In a continent already suffused with premonitions of its own decadence, the purification promised by exertions of Russian power was a serious temptation. The ...”

“... this. As Paul Kosmin points out, ‘history begins on the shore, and there it finds its limit.’ Herodotus, the first to record the results of historical ‘inquiries’ in the late fifth century bce, begins by surveying a series of legends of Phoenician, Trojan and Greek sailors kidnapping each other’s women from the shoreline: these he says helped his ...”

“... his Life by printing Bagehot’s gloomy reflection on the author of the History of Brazil, ‘the Herodotus of the South American Republics’: As if his epics were not already dead, and as if the people who now cheat at Valparaiso care a real who it was that cheated those before them. Yet it was only by a conviction like this that an industrious and ...”

“... Equally ancient are the conceptions of ethnicity discussed in the rest of Geary’s book. Herodotus, ‘the father of History’ (a.k.a. ‘the father of lies’) who was actually the first ethnographer, had a quite exceptionally ‘broad and non-judgmental’ view of ethnic identity, based on culture rather than biology. His perspective, Geary ...”

“... Philosophy (1497), Metaphysics (1497), Moral Philosophy (1498). Thucydides’ Histories (1502), Herodotus’ Histories (1502). Plays by Aristophanes (1498), Sophocles (1502), Euripides (1503). The Iliad and the Odyssey (1504). The works of the Greek orators (Demosthenes in 1504, anthologies in 1513). The complete works of Plato (1513). He was so busy that ...”

“... spoken in Eden before Babel. He alludes to some of the historical suggestions: according to Herodotus, the pharaoh Psammeticus decided to conduct a scientific experiment by plucking two newborn babies from their families, handing them over to a shepherd, ordering him never to speak to them and to keep them in solitary confinement, with only a nanny goat ...”

“... back and joined him. Something was loudly discussed. The lecturer stumbled through the rest of his Herodotus sermon. Then I saw the chapter head pick up the phone. I grabbed my bag, dashed past the soldiers, out the stairwell and ran down the street. I took three different cabs home. I haven’t been ...”

“... who holds the stage, than the chatter of the prophetic birds in the nearby oak tree mentioned by Herodotus, the one replanted for us in sweet memoriam by French ...”

“... loose and self-indulgent; in his incapacity to resist an interesting byway he more resembles Herodotus than Thucydides, whom (along with Aristotle) he so much reveres. On the other hand, it is precisely this width of reference, both ancient and modern, which contributes most to the book’s uniquely personal tone. What I have said about the book above ...”

“... the Greek testament … at sight … read any easy prose Greek author, as Xenophon, Lucian, Herodotus and also Homer … then all the usual common Latin schoolbooks … to read at sight Virgil, Horace, Caesar’s Commentaries … you should be able to write pretty correctly Latin prose – and a Greek play or two should be added. It was ...”

“... clear. Like other ethnographers, Tacitus wrote in a tradition, one that went back to Hecataeus and Herodotus, more than half a millennium before him. For the most part, Tacitus did not draw on the first-hand reports of Roman travellers and soldiers, but recycled commonplaces. When he described the Germans’ settlement patterns, way of life and religious ...”

“... for children, but the story she tells is widespread in other cultures, too: the birth of Cyrus in Herodotus, of Krishna and Karna in the Hindu tradition, not to mention Superman in American comics.Rowling brings new life to the old chestnut. At the end of the first book,* Harry learns from the good wizard Dumbledore why Voldemort’s successor could not kill ...”