The first work of history in the European tradition, and the reason the word means what it means: Herodotus called it his historia, his enquiry. It sets out to explain why the Greeks and the Persians went to war and digresses, gloriously, into Egypt, Scythia, Libya and Babylon on the way. The Alexandrian editors divided it into nine books and named each for a Muse.
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No other book on this shelf shares a run of seven words with The Histories that is not a formula. On the evidence of the wording, nothing here quotes it and it quotes nothing here. That is not proof of isolation — this measure cannot cross a translation, so it finds nothing between Virgil and Homer either — but there is no quotation to show.
Of the sixty counted across the shelf, the ones this book names most. A name is counted wherever it is written, whoever is speaking. Each one has a page of its own listing every chapter, in every book, that carries it.
51 of 1534 are not here. Section markers absent from the transcription. The text is complete; those sections run on inside the one before.
Translator: G. C. Macaulay, 1890. Source: Gutenberg 2707, 2456.
The text here is G. C. Macaulay’s translation, Macmillan, 1890, public domain, from Project Gutenberg ebooks 2707 and 2456, set unaltered. Macaulay’s footnote markers are removed; nothing else is altered.
Of the 1,534 numbered sections, 1,483 are separately marked here; the remaining 51 have no marker in the transcription and run on inside the section before them. The text is complete either way.
Public domain, and free to read, copy and quote. Nothing on this page is written by anyone living: the words are the translator’s and the counts are the text’s.