Herodotus

"Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται, τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν ἀλλήλοισι."

"I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place."

"Men trust their ears less than their eyes."

"When this response reached Croesus, it afforded him far more pleasure than anything else the oracle had told him, because he was sure that a mule would never replace a man as the Persian king, and that in consequence he and his descendants would rule for ever. He next turned his mind to investigating which was the most powerful Greek state, so that he could gain them as his allies. As a result of his enquiries, he discovered that Lacedaemon and Athens were the outstanding states, and that Lacedaemon was populated by Dorians while Athens was populated by Ionians. For these two peoples—the one Pelasgian, the other Hellenic—had been pre-eminent in the old days. The Pelasgians never migrated anywhere, but the Hellenes were a very well-travelled race. When Deucalion was their king, they were living in Phthia, but in the time of Dorus the son of Hellen they were in the territory around Mounts Ossa and Olympus, known as Histiaeotis. Then they were evicted from Histiaeotis by the Cadmeans and settled on Mount Pindus, where they were called Macedonians. Next they moved to Dryopis, and from Dryopis they finally reached the Peloponnese and became known as the Dorians."

"In peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons."

"It was a kind of Cadmean victory."

"I am going to talk at some length about Egypt, because it has very many remarkable features and has produced more monuments which beggar description than anywhere else in the world."

"From great wrongdoing there are great punishments from the gods."

"If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it."

"For if one should propose to all men a choice, bidding them select the best customs from all the customs that there are, each race of men, after examining them all, would select those of his own people; thus all think that their own customs are by far the best"

"It is better to be envied than pitied."

"Force has no place where there is need of skill."

"The Scythians take kannabis seed, creep in under the felts, and throw it on the red-hot stones. It smolders and sends up such billows of steam-smoke that no Greek vapor bath can surpass it. The Scythians howl with joy in these vapor-baths, which serve them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water."

"Tell your king (Xerxes), who sent you, how his Greek viceroy (Alexander I) of Macedonia has received you hospitably."

"Now, that these descendants of Perdiccas are Greeks, as they themselves say, I myself chance to know."

"But Alexander (I of Macedon), proving himself to be an Argive, was judged to be a Greek; so he contended in the furlong race and ran a dead heat for first place."

"It is the gods' custom to bring low all things of surpassing greatness."

"Haste in every business brings failures."

"When life is so burdensome death has become a sought after refuge."

"Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances."

"Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks."

"Far better is it to have a stout heart always, and suffer one's share of evils, than to be ever fearing what may happen."

"I am bound to tell what I am told, but not in every case to believe it."

"Although he had plenty of troops he did not have many men."

"The Lacedaemonians fought a memorable battle; they made it quite clear that they were the experts, and that they were fighting against amateurs."

"Before battle was joined they say that someone from Trachis warned him how many Persians there were by saying that when they fired their bows, they hid the sun with the mass of arrows. Dianeces, so the story goes, was so dismissive of the Persian numbers that he calmly replied, "All to the good, my friend from Trachis. If the Persians hide the sun, the battle will be in shade rather than sunlight.""

"Stranger, tell the people of Lacedaemon That we who lie here obeyed their commands."

"From Peloponnesos (came) the Lakedaimonians..., the Corinthians..., the Sikyonians..., the Epidaurians..., the Troiezenians... All these (groups)... belong to the Dorian and Macedonian nation (and) had emigrated last from Erineus and Pindos and Dryopis."

"It is sound planning that invariably earns us the outcome we want; without it, even the gods are unlikely to look with favour on our designs."

""At sea your men will be as far inferior to Greeks as women are to men." (By Artemisa, the best persian warrior in Salamina, a very courageous woman. A superbe irony!)."

"My men have turned into women and my women into men!"

"It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed."

"The king's might is greater than human, and his arm is very long."

"This is the bitterest pain among men, to have much knowledge but no power."

"In soft regions are born soft men."

"Call no man happy till he dies."

"Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give lustre, and many more people see than weigh."

"Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; while others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before."

"The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance."

"Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects."

"The invention of brewing is ascribed to the Egyptians... from whence it seems to have passed to... western nations... Herodotus attributes the discovery of the art of brewing to the wife of ."

"If we take up his book, we are filled with admiration till the last syllable and always seek for more."

"The History of Herodotus works up the materials thus collected into an artistic picture of the world, grouped round a central idea. This idea is the great struggle between East and West, between Asiatic and Greek, of which the Persian Wars formed the last chapter. The History falls into two chief parts. The first five books are an introduction, tracing the rise and growth of the Persian power. The last four books relate the Persian invasions of Greece under Darius and Xerxes."

"It is a prose tragedy, which justifies the ways of Heaven to men by showing how sin is punished with ruin."

"He was the first artist in prose. As a historian, he fails chiefly by inattention or insensibility to political cause and effect. He will account for a great event merely by some accident which was the immediate occasion of it, without seeking to find any deeper source. And he tells us little or nothing about constitutional change. His charm of style is all the greater for his almost child-like simplicity, and he is one of the most delightful story-tellers. His narrative flows on in what the Greeks called the running style, seldom attempting compact periods."

"Herodotus was the first to organize a vast enquiry about a war and its causes. This is indeed the legacy of Herodotus to European historiography, and I am not going to say that it is an enviable legacy from every point of view. It has made war the central theme or one of the very central themes of European historiography ever since. If I had to answer the famous question an Oxford undergraduate once put to Sir John Myres – "Sir, if Herodotus was such a fool as they say, why do we read him for Greats?" – my answer would be that Herodotus was not only the founder of European historiography in a generic way: he provided European historiography with one of its leading and recurring themes, the study of war, in its origins, main events, results."

"We have now collected enough evidence to be able to say that he can be trusted. Curiously enough we are in a better position to judge him as an historian of the East than as historian of the Persian Wars. In the last century Orientalists have scrutinized Herodotus with the help of archaeology and with the knowledge of languages that he could not understand. They have ascertained that he described truthfully what he saw and reported honestly what he heard. Where he went wrong, either his informants misled him or he had misunderstood in good faith what he was told. We are not so well placed for the history of the Persian Wars because Herodotus himself remains our main source. Wherever we happen to be able to check him with the help of inscriptions or of simple topography, we have no reason to be dissatisfied with him... We know that his history is respectable because we are now able to check it against independent evidence."

"His epic tale of the Persian wars was a unique document of the Greek past."

"Now the Caspian Sea is apart by itself, not having connection with the other Sea: for all that Sea which the Hellenes navigate, and the Sea beyond the Pillars, which is called Atlantis, and the are in fact all one, but the Caspian is separate and lies apart by itself."