Word: herodotus
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Salt routes crisscrossed the globe. One of the most traveled led from Morocco south across the Sahara to Timbuktu. Ships bearing salt from Egypt to Greece traversed the Mediterranean and the Aegean. Herodotus describes a caravan route that united the salt oases of the Libyan desert. Venice's glittering wealth was attributable not so much to exotic spices as to commonplace salt, which Venetians exchanged in Constantinople for the spices of Asia. In 1295, when he first returned from Cathay, Marco Polo delighted the Doge with tales of the prodigious value of salt coins bearing the seal...
Candlelight flickers softly in the room, dancing on the tablecloth and glinting on the goblets' crystal stems. The elegant table, laid for eight, is set for a lavish gourmet feast, and the guests, clad in evening gowns and tailored suits, talk of Herodotus and scientific ethics over white wine, blanched vegetables and cheddar cheese fondue. In the seat of honor, Emily Vermeule, professor of Fine Arts, discusses her excavations in Cyprus during the Turkish invasion. It is Jim Mitchell's dream come true...
...vehicle for this latest goring is Cyrus Spitama, 75, emissary of the Persian King Artaxerxes, miserably stationed in Athens "amongst a people as cold and windy as the place itself." When he hears Herodotus lecture at the Odeon, Cyrus decides that the Greek historian has concocted a thoroughly slanted account of the so-called Persian Wars and that it is up to him to set the record straight. Because he has gone blind, Cyrus enlists his nephew Democritus as amanuensis. "So make yourself comfortable," he tells the young man. "I have a long memory, and I shall indulge...
Vidal fans might, at this point, expect a typically witty send-up of Herodotus and of classical Greece in general. But though he gives the Athenians the back of his hand whenever possible, Cy rus the narrator really has several other missions on his mind. He wants to tell the story of his long life and his decades of service to the Persian Kings Darius the Great and Xerxes. Even more urgently, as a grandson and the last descendant in the male line of the prophet Zoroaster, Cyrus feels obliged to argue theology, to devise an acceptable theory...
...study of Tolstoy first published in 1951. Berlin divided the world's writers and thinkers into two categories. The hedgehogs (men like Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche) are monists-they organize their universe into a central vision, one comprehensive principle The foxes (Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, for example) are pluralists pursuing many unrelated, even contradictory ends, moving simultaneously on many different levels...