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“... was built on the site of older settlements that benefited from the region’s legendary fertility. Herodotus remarked that ‘as a grain-bearing country Assyria is the richest in the world … The blades of wheat and barley are at least three inches wide.’ The ruins of Ctesiphon, imperial capital of the Parthian and Sassanid empires, lay just twenty miles to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... slackness, Collingwood’s tale of the development of European historical knowledge from Herodotus and Thucydides to Croce is impressively clear. And his description of history as the ‘re-enactment of past experience’ provided a crisp formulation of the historian’s dilemmas in applying present forms of understanding to a past which may have ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... while praising the excellence of the Greeks in speeches at once morale-boosting and cajoling. Herodotus had optimistically written of ‘the kinship of all Greeks in blood and speech … and the likeness of our way of life’, and Xenophon takes up the theme. It’s significant, however, that these speeches become more frequent in the Anabasis’ final ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Georgia or Armenia, where the Ancients set the dividing-line between Europe and Asia. No wonder Herodotus himself, the first historian to discuss the question, remarked that ‘the boundaries of Europe are quite unknown, and no man can say where they end – but it is certain that Europa’ – he is referring to the beauty borne away by Zeus – ‘was an ...”