Sublime

Herodotus called this collection of plain, unvarnished facts History, which in Greek means “inquiry,” and so written history was born.

Silver money can claim a 5,000-year history. Gold money did not make its first appearance until two millennia later around 550 BC when, according to Herodotus, the Ancient Greek 'father of history', the King of Lydia (in modern day Turkey) started minting coins made of it.

who ruled for eighty years and lived to the ripe old age of 120. Later Roman writers, including Pliny the Elder, would extend this to an even more impressive 150 years. John thought it possible that this legend of longevity came about because ‘Arganthonios’ was an official name for a king, as the leader of a silver-trading empire, rather than a

Among the most remarkable and revealing of all, however, are the eighty or so short clauses from the first written collection of Roman rules and regulations (or ‘laws’, to use the rather grand term that most ancient writers adopted), put together in the mid fifth century BCE and laboriously reassembled thanks to centuries of modern scholarly

During the following hundred years further excavations took place in the Paviland caves, and it became accepted that the Red Lady was a Palaeolithic man, and the first human fossil ever known to science.

But Thucydides certainly knew that in 425 B.C. the Athenians, running short of funds, made a radical re-assessment of the tribute from the empire, more than trebling the total demanded;

most early attack reports are anecdotal accounts collected by travelers and, with the exception of the German lepidopterist whose remains were identified only by his butterfly net and jacket buttons,

Immediately before his execution he delivered to his persecutors the fable of The Eagle and the Beetle,[21] by which he warned them that even the weak may procure vengeance against the strong for injuries inflicted. The warning was unheeded by his murderers. The shameful sentence was carried out, and so Æsop died, according to Eusebius, in the

It was necessary only to bridge the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars; and Thucydides did that by writing a brief digression (I, 89–118), in which he singled out some important events that occurred between 479 B.C. and the beginning of the Corcyra affair in 435.