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Μάθησις ΣτοιχείωνMathesis Stoicheion

The Mouseion › Herodotus

Work

Histories

Ἱστορίαι

Read it with the English beside the Greek More by Herodotus

Kind of writing: History
Dialect: Ionic
Written: 5th c. BC
Length: 209,843 words analysed
Vocabulary: 71% common words
In the library: 1 Greek text, 1 English translation

The texts

Each is the collection's own file, read unchanged from the Perseus Digital Library or Open Greek and Latin. The description is theirs too.

In The Painted Stoa

Entries that quote or point to this work's Greek.

Voting a man out of Athens for ten years, on a broken potOstracismOnce a year the citizens of Athens could decide to hold a strange election.The mines that paid for Athens' fleet, and the slaves who worked themThe silver of LaurionThe fleet that beat the Persians at Salamis in 480 BC was paid for with silver dug out of the hills of southern Attica.The people who fed Sparta, and how Sparta kept them downThe helots and the krypteiaSparta's citizens could spend their lives training for war because someone else grew their food.Where kings asked Apollo, and the answers could ruin themDelphi and the oracleOn a ledge of Mount Parnassus, for a thousand years and more, a woman sat on a tripod in the innermost room of Apollo's temple and spoke for the god.Three teachers, a slave to walk you there, and Homer by heartGoing to school in AthensThere were no state schools in classical Athens.Wine, water, song and argument: the Greek drinking partyThe symposiumA symposion means "drinking together".A crown of wild olive, a truce, and statues paid for by cheatsThe Olympic GamesEvery four years for more than a thousand years, Greeks from all over the Mediterranean travelled to the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia to watch naked men run, wrestle, box and race chariots.How Athens trusted chance, and built a machine to make sure nobody cheated itChosen by lot: the allotment machineModern democracies choose their officials by election.The secret kept by thousands for a thousand yearsThe Eleusinian MysteriesEvery autumn for about a thousand years, crowds walked the fourteen miles from Athens to Eleusis to be initiated into the Mysteries of Demeter and her daughter Persephone.Homer's city of Agamemnon, and the graves Schliemann opened in 1876Mycenae, rich in goldHomer called Mycenae "rich in gold".How archaeologists turn soil, graves and broken pots into dates, from Thucydides to tree ringsReading the layersIn the winter of 426 BC the Athenians dug up every grave on the sacred island of Delos and carried the bones across the strait.Homer's sacred Ilios, the Greek town that claimed to be it, and the mound of many citiesTroy at HisarlikFor Homer, Troy was "sacred Ilios", the city whose fall everyone in the Iliad knows is coming.