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The European (Re)discovery of the Shamans

Carlo Ginzburg, 28 January 1993

... had, in turn, transferred onto the Thracians the description of a Scythian custom furnished by Herodotus (IV, 73-75). The point of this digression is to allow us to reconstruct the cultural filter which permitted Oviedo (and not only him, as we shall see) to tame the natural and cultural otherness of the North American continent. Thanks to Pomponius Mela ...

The Day a God Rode In

Claire Hall: Meetings with their Gods, 20 February 2020

The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History 
by Greg Anderson.
Oxford, 336 pp., £55, September 2018, 978 0 19 088664 6
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... chariot. She was to pretend to be the manifestation of the goddess Athena, the patron of Athens. Herodotus gives her height as some four cubits – around 5’11", more than a foot taller than the average woman at the time – and notes that not only was she dressed in full armour but was ‘instructed of the bearing in which she might best beseem her ...

Things they don’t want to hear

Clancy Martin: Lydia Davis, 22 July 2010

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis 
Hamish Hamilton, 733 pp., £20, August 2010, 978 0 241 14504 3Show More
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... tell themselves nothing at all, but even this is meaningful, as in ‘Certain Knowledge from Herodotus’: ‘These are the facts about the fish in the Nile:’. That’s the whole story. Of course there is a play on the word ‘certain’ (‘certain’ is one of Davis’s favourite words, it occurs in a great many of her stories): ‘certain’ as in a ...

What Columbus Didn’t Know

Peter Green: The history of cartography, 21 February 2002

The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, the Man who Discovered Britain 
by Barry Cunliffe.
Allen Lane, 182 pp., £12.99, October 2001, 0 7139 9509 2
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Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters 
edited by J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones.
Princeton, 232 pp., £17.95, January 2002, 0 691 09259 1
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Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World: Atlas and Map-By-Map Directory 
by Richard J.A. Talbert.
Princeton, three volumes, £300, September 2000, 9780691031699
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... As early as 600, Phoenicians had circumnavigated Africa, only to have their account discredited by Herodotus because they asserted that ‘in sailing round Libya’ – Africa – ‘they had the sun on their right hand’: ironically, the Southern hemisphere in fact provided proof positive of their claim. The idea of a spherical globe had been dreamed up by ...

Facing South

Alistair Elliot, 23 June 1994

... X.8 Theoria: ... a looking at, viewing, beholding ... ‘to go abroad to see the world’ (Herodotus) ... 2. of the mind, contemplation, speculation, philosophic reasoning ... theory ... II. the being a spectator at the theatre or the games ... Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon Sat at my desk, I face the way I would migrate: sunwards along ...

The Philosophical Phallus

Clive James, 3 May 1984

... dog-skulled horse of the Greeks and the Etruscans, But the horse of the Persians as noted by Herodotus, Big, built thickly, hefty-headed, Its two great globular hindquarters throbbing Like the throats of rutting frogs. The prancing pudendum curls its lip but says Yes to Life: It is a yea-neigher. Not only does it say ‘ha-ha!’ among the ...

Writing it down

Peter Parsons, 31 August 1989

Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens 
by Rosalind Thomas.
Cambridge, 321 pp., £27.50, March 1989, 0 521 35025 5
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... in Athenian society, and the consequences for Greek historians and their modern analysts. Herodotus, chronicling the great patriotic war of the last generation, and Thucydides, chronicling the great civil war of his own, in the new-fangled medium of prose and the new-fangled language of research, relied heavily on eye and ear, witnesses and ...

Image Problems

Peter Green: Pericles of Athens, 6 November 2014

Pericles of Athens 
by Vincent Azoulay, translated by Janet Lloyd.
Princeton, 291 pp., £24.95, July 2014, 978 0 691 15459 6
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... seldom emphasised, is that the basic evidence, such as it is, has been in plain view all along: Herodotus, Thucydides, Old Comedy, Protagoras, Xenophon, Plato, Plutarch’s biography and of course the remains (above all on the Acropolis) of the great civic building programme. This suggests that any interpretative changes are due more to the varying ...

Megafauna

Adrienne Mayor: Aristotle and Science, 2 July 2015

The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science 
by Armand Marie Leroi.
Bloomsbury, 501 pp., £25, August 2014, 978 1 4088 3620 0
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... explain scallop and other shells found far inland, in Asia Minor, Armenia and Iran. By the time of Herodotus this understanding of shells and fish marooned by receding seas had become general knowledge. Aristotle knew the writings of Xenophanes, Xanthos and Herodotus, and he had examined and dissected countless fish and ...

Fie On’t!

James Buchan, 23 March 1995

The Oxford Book of Money 
edited by Kevin Jackson.
Oxford, 479 pp., £17.99, February 1995, 0 19 214200 3
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... are coins) in or around Lydia at or about the end of the seventh century BC. The first book of Herodotus’ Histories appears to be about money, and that is what one would expect: Herodotus could not have travelled and enquired, could not have existed, without it. The European Middle Ages selected for their legacy from ...

Adrift from Locality

James Davidson: Captain Cook’s Mistake, 3 November 2005

Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa 
by Marshall Sahlins.
Chicago, 334 pp., £21, December 2004, 0 226 73400 5
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... simply unable to view the culture he is swimming in, an endotopic observer in contrast to exotopic Herodotus, the observer of others, for ‘it takes another culture to know another culture.’ One can get around this problem – and it is more of a problem than Sahlins is prepared to admit – in various ways. I suppose the answer that would occur to most ...

Only a Hop and a Skip to Money

James Buchan: Gold, 16 November 2000

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession 
by Peter Bernstein.
Wiley, 432 pp., £17.99, October 2000, 0 471 25210 7
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... the end of the seventh century BC and the beginning of the sixth. We also possess the Histories of Herodotus, which attribute the invention of gold coinage to the kingdom of Lydia in what is now western Turkey. ‘The Lydians were the first people we know of,’ Herodotus writes in the first book of the Histories, with a ...

Impressions of Nietzsche

Keith Kyle, 27 July 1989

The Lives of Enoch Powell 
by Patrick Cosgrave.
Bodley Head, 518 pp., £16, April 1989, 0 370 30871 9
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... of Llyfr Belgywryd (the Law Book of the Welsh King Hywel the Good), the author of the Lexicon to Herodotus, of a massive history of The House of Lords in the Middle Ages, of a short life of Joseph Chamberlain, and of the major work on the reinterpretation of the New Testament on which he is presently engaged, is perceptibly the same man who attacked the ...

Flower or Fungus?

Barbara Graziosi: Bacchylides, 31 July 2008

Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition 
by David Fearn.
Oxford, 428 pp., £70, July 2007, 978 0 19 921550 8
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... of Bacchylides’ Ode to Alexander of Macedon (an ancestor of Alexander the Great) by drawing on Herodotus’ Histories. When the Persians set out to annex the Greek city-states, Alexander of Macedon sided with them against the Greeks. But when he realised that the Persians were likely to lose, he swiftly hedged his bets, offering the Greeks intelligence ...

Against Hellenocentrism

Peter Green: Persia v. the West, 8 August 2013

Trouble in the West: Egypt and the Persian Empire, 525-332 BC 
by Stephen Ruzicka.
Oxford, 311 pp., £45, April 2012, 978 0 19 976662 8
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King and Court in Ancient Persia 559 to 331 BCE 
by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones.
Edinburgh, 258 pp., £24.99, January 2013, 978 0 7486 4125 3
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... 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 ...

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