Miracula Review – The New Criterion

The efforts of a Robert Ripley or the Weekly World News are more recent examples, but the tradition of paradoxography – writings about the unusual, the miraculous, and the absurd – runs back to Hellenistic Greece and beyond, including Aristotle, Callimachus, Cicero, and Pliny alongside lesser-known practitioners. In this connection the historian Chrystal’s new Miracula is both a continuation and a commentary, presenting oddities, trivia, and twice-told tales from the ancient world and contextualizing them for the reader. Here are marvels from pygmies to the Polyphagus (Nero’s personal cannibal), the war-cats of Cambyses to the longest word in ancient Greece.’ –