Quotes from Roderick Beaton

already more than a thousand years old before anyone ever lived on this bare stretch of desert shore.

This is why, when the Greeks adapted this system for their own use, they called it the 'alphabet'.

It really was power (kratos) to the people (demos).

brought by barge down the Nile from temples hundreds of miles away

This can only have been the initiative of a single individual, because it happened only once

The satraps, in turn, were content to allow the Greek city-states to manage their internal affairs

a single point in space and time.

The campaign that cost Julian his life was part of a series of wars on the empire's eastern frontier

Alexander sent a trophy to Athens, to be dedicated to the city's patron goddess, Athena.

that would drag on inconclusively for most of the next three centuries.

Alexander, son of Philip, and the Hellenes, excluding the Lacedaemonians

But there was a barb, too. The 'Lacedaemonians'—the Spartans—were the only Greeks who had refused to join Philip's 'Common State

Heraclius became the first ruler of a 'Roman' empire to revive the long-disused Greek word for 'king', basileus.

And the trophy itself consisted of precisely three hundred captured suits of armour.

From then on, this would remain the official title, in Greek, of every ruler to rule from Constantinople

At almost exactly the same moment, far to the south, the valley of the Nile is lit up.

When Helen deserted her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta, and eloped with the handsome Trojan prince Paris

This had been the number of Spartans killed during the defence of the pass of Thermopylae in 480 BCE

The sun first catches the tops of the pyramids of Giza, which are already some fifteen hundred years old.

the Greeks mounted a mighty expedition to bring her back.

remembered ever since as the most heroic act of self-sacrifice during the Persian Wars.

The people of the coastal lowlands have their own languages, related to Hittite.

The military machine that had humbled Athens in the Peloponnesian War had become simply irrelevant.

But in 1500 BCE, they are not ruled directly from Hattusa.