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Quotes About Herodotus

Hellenistic culture spread throughout the Roman world from Syria to Britain. Julius Caesar studied Homer and Herodotus as carefully as any Greek scholar and wept when he saw a statue of Alexander on display at a temple in Spain on the shores of the Atlantic.
~ Philip Freeman
Hindu" is not a native word but comes from a word for the "river" (sindhu) that Herodotus (in the fifth century BCE28), the Persians (in the fourth century BCE), and the Arabs (after the eighth century CE29) used to refer to everyone who lived beyond the great river of the northwest of the subcontinent, still known locally as the Sindhu and in Europe as the Indus.
~ Wendy Doniger
The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, said that the Indians were the most populous country on earth (5.3).
~ Wendy Doniger
18th April, 1872.—I pray the good Lord of all to favour me so as to allow me to discover the ancient fountains of Herodotus, and if there is anything in the underground excavations to confirm the precious old documents (Ä ²¹²»1±), the Scriptures of truth, may He permit me to bring it to light, and give me wisdom to make a proper use of it.
~ David Livingstone
In peace children inter their parents, war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
~ Herodotus
Accordingly, Herodotus showed keen interest in understanding Persian politics, while Sima Qian was very concerned about the culture and religion of barbarous steppe people.
~ Yuval Noah Harari
a historian named Herodotus, tells of a thief who was to be executed. As he was taken away he made a bargain with the king: in one year he would teach the king's favorite horse to sing hymns.
~ Larry Niven
People who dislike budging from their homes or walking beyond their own backyards--and they are always and everywhere in the majority--treat Herodotus' sort, fundamentally unconnected to anyone or anything, as freaks, fanatics, lunatics even.
~ Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski
So dispatched, Aristagoras traveled to Athens—the most powerful city in Greece. Here he changed tactics: instead of speaking with the ruler, he addressed the crowd (in accordance with another of Herodotus's rules, that it seems to be easier to fool a crowd than a single person) and appealed directly to the Athenians to help the Ionians.
~ Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski
The most hateful human misfortune is for a wise man to have no influence.
~ Herodotus
Europe's history of trading relations with India is borne out in the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus, Pliny, Petronius and Ptolemy, and
~ Shashi Tharoor
In Book II, Section-104, of his celebrated History, Herodotus states :—"For my part I believe the Colchi to be a colony of Egyptians, because like them they have black skins and frizzled hair." (See any English translation of THE HISTORY of HERODOTUS.
~ John G. Jackson
The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse — you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
~ Aristotle
Greece and Poverty," said the historian Herodotus, "have always been bedfellows";
~ Sophocles
I Have been asked to tell you about the back of the north wind. An old Greek writer mentions a people who lived there, and were so comfortable that they could not bear it any longer, and drowned themselves. My story is not the same as his. I do not think Herodotus had got the right account of the place. I am going to tell you how it fared with a boy who went there.
~ George MacDonald
A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.
~ Richard Russo
Plutarch gave her nine languages, including Hebrew and Troglodyte, an Ethiopian tongue that—if Herodotus can be believed—was "unlike that of any other people; it sounds like the screeching of bats.
~ Stacy Schiff
We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus's further assertion that Egypt was a country in which "the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.
~ Stacy Schiff
Herodotus, the 'Father of History', records the moment – and you can hear the emotion in his voice as he does so, a mixture of horror and awe: Then Kleisthenes took into his faction the common people.19
~ Bettany Hughes
This history of mine,' Herodotus says, 'has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.' What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history—how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love....
~ Michael Ondaatje
must his simplicity of thought and occasional quaintness be reproduced in the form of archaisms of language; and that not only because the affectation of an archaic
~ Herodotus
philosophical writers after his time: nor again must his simplicity of thought and occasional quaintness be reproduced in the form of archaisms of language; and
~ Herodotus
Acrescentam alguns que foi a pitonisa quem lhe ditou a constituição ora vigente em Esparta; mas como julgam os próprios Lacedemônios, Licurgo trouxe as referidas leis de Creta, no reinado de Leobotas, seu sobrinho, rei de Esparta. Realmente
~ Herodotus
Let anyone who finds them credible believe the stories told by the Egyptians. For my part, I have made it a rule throughout this account to record, just as I hear them, the traditions of the various nations.
~ Herodotus