"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

“Chrystal triumphs in terms of sources and detailed narratives, written in clear prose (no academic jargon) with gusto and humour. . . . A breath-taking assembly of ancient sources, unlikely to be bettered.”

Fortean Times

"A collection of startling anecdotes fresh from the printer (though it’s taken three millennia to recycle some of them). English broadcaster and bookshop owner Chrystal has upended the paradigm of sober history-telling to produce a potpourri of stranger things (now there’s an idea) in his new book, Miracula: Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome. . . . Chrystal’s humorous tales will chime with diverse senses of humor."

InReview

"This massive collection of miscellany, with seventy-three chapters across 456 pages, is accompanied by a subtle communication of the ancient Greeks and Romans as real people. . . . [It] is a series of darts thrown at the reader’s mind, aiming for the reader’s curiosity. Miracula has more detail than anyone would ever need to know about the Ancient Classical world. This includes the obscure: How did the ancient Greeks and Romans think tattoos could be removed? Why, ’by smearing on them a mixture of very sharp vinegar and the stuff that sticks to the inside of a chamber pot,’ of course."

Orange Blossom Ordinary

"Entertaining to dip in and out of."

Publishers Weekly

"A rich collection. . . . For readers less interested in nitpicking and more in marvel upon marvel (upon marvel), Chrystal’s collection will be an entertaining read, a mer à boire of weird ‘stories,’ and a source for that which all paradoxographers want you to be: amazed."

Bryn Mawr Classical Review