Herodotus: Imperial Hubris to Catastrophic Retribution

Initially, I subscribed to The New Yorker in the hopes of becoming an intellectual.

But they actually have some fascinating articles.

This week's fascinating article, by Daniel Mendelsohn, entitled Arms and the Man, is about the ancient historian, Herodotus, and his nine volume account of the Persian Wars (490 to 479 B.C.E.)

Apparently, this history was the first substantial narrative of anything ever to be written.

Perhaps Herodotus suffered from some strange compulsive disorder, which came to be called prose, and the world has been emulating him ever since, until prose became blogs.

I just now dove into the article and plucked out these sentences:
Herodotus' overarching theme: the seemingly inevitable movement from imperial hubris to catastrophic retribution.

...
The unstable leader of a ruthlessly centralized authoritarian state is a nightmare vision that has plagued the sleep of liberal democracies ever since Herodotus created it.