But though the Persians are never dehumanized, the differences between them and the Greeks – political and moral – make up a powerful message which Herodotus was to convey to posterity and which many generations were to draw on copiously. (Location 522)
Another aspect of the East–West contrast, with a long future as a historiographical cliché, is attributed to Cyrus the Great, and quoted by Herodotus as almost the last words of the whole work: ‘Soft countries breed soft men,’ and have to suffer the rule of aliens. (Location 538)
Warned by Cyrus, the Persians choose for preference to live in a rugged land, but the association in European thought and historiography conveyed by the phrase ‘Asiatic softness’ was to endure down to the nineteenth century. The East-West antithesis was to be highly significant for the Greeks and Romans. Through them it reached a particular pitch of intensity in the European Enlightenment, and it still echoes resonantly in nineteenth-century historiography and the literature of imperialism, and in this long tradition Herodotus is by no means the most biased and unqualified manipulator of it. (Location 539)
‘How, when and why all the known parts of the world were brought under the domination of Rome is to be seen as a single action and a single spectacle, which has an identifiable beginning, a fixed duration and an acknowledged end’ (Location 1403)
My history possesses a certain distinctive quality which is related to the extraordinary spirit of the times in which we live, and it is this. Just as Fortune has steered almost all the affairs of the world in one direction and forced them to converge upon one and the same goal, so it is the task of the historian to present to his readers under one synoptical view the process by which she has accomplished this general design. It was this phenomenon above all which originally attracted my attention. (I.4) (Location 1409)
‘From this point onwards history becomes an organic whole: the affairs of Italy and of Africa are connected with those of Asia and of Greece, and all events bear a relationship and contribute to a single end’ (Location 1466)
‘Just as Fortune has steered almost all the affairs of the world in one direction and forced them to converge upon one and the same goal, so it is the task of the historian to present to his readers under one synoptical view the process by which she has accomplished this general design’ (Location 1468)
As often with Ammianus, we can suspect an echo, conscious or perhaps occasionally unconscious, of an admired author, in this case probably Tacitus. One of Gallus’ exploits to keep himself informed is to wander in disguise in the streets of Rome at night (an imitation of Nero perhaps) – even, as Ammianus says interestingly, ‘in a city where the brightness of the street-lighting made night as clear as day’. (Location 3002)
Huizinga spoke of the possibility of a ‘history of vanity’, and claimed that the seven deadly sins were seven chapters in the history of culture waiting for treatment. (Location 8586)
