Repetition is a critical issue in interpreting the work of Herodotus. Detlev Fehling, for one, has pointed to recurrence of motif and scene as evidence of the historian’s ‘free invention’. Words that occur twice in Herodotus are an efficient way to consider pressing issues at the centre of how and why Herodotus put together his narrative in the way he has. Pairs where the uses are close together in stories with a lot in common suggest that we may be seeing Herodotus’ ‘habit of presentation’, especially when phrasal repetition is also found. Where pairs are found further apart, the issue of deliberate linkage between discrete episodes may be indicated through the strategic redeployment of a key term. Finally, with Xerxes’ invasion, recurring terms help us to see how Herodotus could operate over large portions of text, deliberately linking one episode to another through the deployment of twice-occurring words, thereby also connecting the whole account of the campaign to the largest project of the History.

With entries of the adjacency matrix of a simple graph being regarded as elements of $\mathbb{F}_{2}$, it is proved that a finite commutative ring $R$ with $1\neq 0$is a Boolean ring if and only if either $R\in \{\mathbb{F}_{2},\mathbb{F}_{2}\times \mathbb{F}_{2}\}$ or the eigenvalues (in the algebraic closure of $\mathbb{F}_{2}$) corresponding to the zero-divisor graph of $R$ are precisely the elements of $\mathbb{F}_{4}\setminus \{0\}$ . This is achieved by observing a way in which algebraic behavior in a Boolean ring is encoded within Pascal’s triangle so that computations can be carried out by appealing to classical results from number theory.

This article attempts to account for the fact that nemesis occurs only once in Herodotus. It connects the term to Phrygia and the importance of Nemesis there, esp. as seen in ‘confession-inscriptions’ (Beichtinschriften). It argues that the Atys-Adrastus story is meant as an interpretative guide to the rest of the History through its use of significant names, comparable to the use of significant names in the Old Testament.

At Aristotle's Rhetorica III 9.2 (1409a), in a discussion of λ⋯ξις εἰρομ⋯νη and κατεστραμμ⋯νη, occurs the following misquotation of Herodotus' proem