Thermopylae Quotes

“who was one of the great innovating geniuses of the fifth century BCE is a heavy one.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“The responsibility of trying to do anything like proper justice to a thinker and writer”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“shall attempt something broader, and perhaps rasher, an assessment of his relevance”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“Earlier I have been concerned chiefly with technical questions to do with Herodotus’s reliability and credibility.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“paradox, though, was that the Greece Xerxes sought to conquer was not a rich, soft land of luxuries.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“and – fatally – sacrilegious attempt to add mainland Greece to his empire’s possessions.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“Herodotus will have known this, but did not choose to include it”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“the victim of an in-house, harem-based assassination in 465.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“As for his son and successor Xerxes, he came to a very bad end,”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“failed militarily first in Scythia, and then in Greece, where his forces lost the Battle of Marathon;”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“Cambyses his son won Egypt for the Empire, but in effect went mad”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“human prosperity never [note: not just ‘rarely’] abides long in the same place’.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“The best sailers among the ships were furnished by the Phoenicians”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“Of the trireme warships the number in total was 1,207,”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“there cut off its legs at the knees. In this way was Pharnouches deprived of his command.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“Pharnouches’s servants immediately carried out his orders and led the horse away to the place where it had thrown him”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“who fell and began to vomit up blood. The disease turned into consumption.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“the horse failed to see it in advance and was startled and reared up, throwing Pharnouches,”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“A dog ran under his horse’s feet as he was riding out,”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“The third co-commander of them was Pharnouches, but he had been left behind at Sardis sick.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“inasmuch as horses cannot endure camels.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“the Arabians were placed last and behind them so as not to frighten the horse troops,”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“The Arabians had the same equipment as their infantry, but they all rode racing camels that were no whit slower than horses.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“Ethiopians from the east have dead-straight hair, the hair of the Ethiopians from Libya is the thickest and curliest”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“the Ethiopians living in the direction of the sunrise (for two groups of Ethiopians were serving)”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“(her Darius loved the most of all his wives and had a statue of beaten gold sheets made of her).”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“They additionally carried spears, with points of sharpened antelope horn,”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“and small reed arrows with points of sharp stone instead”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“The Ethiopians wore leopard-skins and lion-skins and carried bows made of strips of palm wood”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World

“The Greeks called these ‘Syrians’, but non-Greeks knew them as ‘Assyrians’.”
― Paul Anthony Cartledge, Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed the World