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The Histories (text only) by Herodotus,C. Dewald,R. Waterfield Unknown Binding – January 1, 2008
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- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOxford University Press, USA
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2008
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Product details
- ASIN : B0043DJ9IY
- Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA (January 1, 2008)
- Language : English
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
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Robin Anthony Herschel Waterfield (born 1952) is a British classical scholar, translator, editor, and writer of children's fiction. Waterfield was born in 1952, and studied Classics at Manchester University, where he achieved a first class degree in 1974. He went on to research ancient Greek philosophy at King's College, Cambridge until 1978, after which he became a lecturer at Newcastle University and then St Andrews University. He later became a copy-editor and later a commissioning editor for Penguin Books. He is now a self-employed writer, living in southern Greece, where he has Greek citizenship.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Can't go wrong with Oxford!
Binding seems good.
The translation is lucid, and there are many helpful remarks.
The charm for me is in the fantastical "histories"; Giant ants mining gold, flying serpents hunted by pigmies. Crazy!
but there is real value in the actual histories- this is important stuff about the origin of written history and he writes of the complexity ( political and social) of the ancient world. It's a great book.
Top reviews from other countries
Highly recommend.
Herodotus reports stories that he has picked up on travels around the Mediterranean about historical events of the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, and about social mores among the people involved. The sources are rarely identified, and Herodotus himself is less than certain about the credibility of some of the tales. There's probably as much myth as there is history in this book, but the translator's notes are very helpful at separating the wheat from the chaff for the reader who wants to know (I'm referring to the Oxford World's Classics edition translated by Robin Waterfield, just in case Amazon posts this review on every other edition, as it is wont to do).
For a history of the period, there are probably much better books to read than this one. What's exciting about The Histories is the feeling of hearing the account of events as it was told in Plato's Athens. Here are the stories that were shared in antiquity about the bravery of the Spartans at Thermopylae, the wiliness of Themistocles, the fearsome habits of the Cannibals, and the hubris of Xerxes, to mention just a few.
Regardless of their truth, the stories are hugely entertaining, such as the one about the renegade Egyptian commander whose only response to the messenger come to deliver an ultimatum from the Pharoah was to raise himself on his saddle and fart, or the better known story about the lashing of the Hellespont ordered by the Persian emperor Xerxes for not remaining calm during his army's passage. If nothing else, they confirm that malicious gossip is not a modern invention.