Miracula – Review

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.

The New Criterion

A book full of astonishing facts and strange stories drawn from Ancient Greece and Rome – rarely retold in English – is a surprise and a delight . . . Paul Chrystal has upended the paradigm of sober history-telling to produce a potpourri of stranger things . . . When you’re not laughing aloud or cracking a smile, you may just be impressed by how much the ancients knew.