Word: herodotus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Babylon reached its greatest heights in the early 6th century B.C. under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, who endowed his capital with unequaled architectural splendor. Cuneiform sources offer little evidence of what the city looked like, but classical accounts - in particular, by the 5th century Greek historian Herodotus - describe a city that extended for 14 miles (23 km) in each direction, divided in the middle by the mighty Euphrates, and fortified by five sun-dried mud-brick walls, each up to 23 ft. (7 m) thick. The walls guarded a spectacular inner city, whose grand streets ran parallel...
...writing of history is one of the great legacies of the ancient Greeks, and its earliest masters, Herodotus and Thucydides, are as central to the foundations of Western civilization as Homer, Socrates and Sophocles. In more modern times, multivolume sagas of crumbling empires, explosive revolutions and nations nudging toward greatness were huge best sellers, making historians like Edward Gibbon, Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle as well known as Stephen King and John Grisham are today...
...must intermittently re-emphasize history's relevance to understanding ourselves, points to a problem that has hounded the discipline in recent years - its tendency toward clubby academic isolation. A fine antidote to this trend is John Burrow's A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century, an ambitious and accessible account of the historian's craft over the last 2,500 years. In the tradition of Ford Madox Ford's The March of Literature and Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, Burrow's book is at once idiosyncratic...
Along with Herodotus - hailed here as "a marker set down against the oblivion with which time threatens all human deeds" - and Thucydides, the earliest exponent of realpolitik, Burrow devotes the first third of his book to a long line of Greco-Roman historians. He goes on to discuss "the radical and pervasive" impact of the Bible on history - for example, in the writings of the 6th century French Bishop Gregory of Tours, whom he dubs "Trollope with blood." Equally intriguing is Burrow's discussion of the secular historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, a fabricator who claimed that his 12th century account...
...Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans under King Leonidas stood up to several thousand invading Persian troops, refusing to retreat and meeting certain death. But now their source is Frank Miller's graphic novel 300, the movie it inspired, or the video-game tie-in, not the original account by Herodotus. On one level this is lamentable, but at least this tale of extraordinary heroism lives on, and children continue to be moved by the self-sacrifice of the Spartans...