William C. Hall

“The appeal of history to us all is in the last analysis poetic.”
― Justin Marozzi, The Way of Herodotus: Travels With the Man Who Invented History

“Herodotus of Halicarnassus here displays his inquiry, so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvellous deeds - some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians - may not be without their glory; and especially to show why the two peoples fought each other. There it is. The birth of history in a paragraph.”
― Justin Marozzi, The Way of Herodotus: Travels With the Man Who Invented History

“Athena stroked Odysseus with her wand. She shriveled the supple skin on his lithe limbs, stripped the russet curls from his head, covered his body top to toe with the wrinkled hide of an old man and dimmed the fire in his eyes, so shining once. She turned his shirt and cloak into squalid rags, ripped and filthy, smeared with grime and soot. She flung over this the long pelt of a bounding deer, 500 rubbed bare, and gave him a staff and beggar’s sack, torn and tattered, slung from a fraying rope.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Give up the girl? I swear she will grow old
at home in Argos, far from her own country,
working my loom and visiting my bed.”
― Homer, The Iliad