One of the wonderful things about Herodotos is that he defined history as "marvels and great deeds performed by Greeks and barbarians". He set out a world full of people he considered worthy of note, and while his main focus is the Persian Wars, he shows us with small comments and anecdotes that the lives of Greeks were filled with much more than politics and war. There are many wonderful examples, of which I'll list just a few:

• Instead of simply noting the carnage when the Spartans came under Persian arrow fire at the battle of Plataia, Herodotos records the death of Kallikrates the Lakedaimonian, who was "the most beautiful man not only among the Spartans, but among all the Greeks" (9.72.1).

• When Kylon set out to become tyrant of Athens in 632 BC (the earliest dateable event in Athenian history), his only claim to fame was that he was an Olympic victor, which was apparently enough to give him towering social status at home (5.71.1).

• When the Oracle told Tisamenos of Elis that he would win five great victories, Tisamenos immediately set about his athletic exercises, naturally assuming that these victories would be in the Olympic Games and not in war; only his defeat in the final wrestling match against Hieronymos of Andros proved him wrong (9.33.2).

• Herodotos mentions in passing that no matter how successful the Samian merchants were when they opened up the Celtiberian markets to Greek wares, and even if they "brought back the greatest profit of all the Greeks about which we know for sure," they would never be able to match the profits of Sostratos son of Laodamas, from Aigina (4.152.3).

All these people are inconsequential to Herodotos' story; they are not Xerxes or Themistokles or Leonidas; their names typically occur only once. But they show that marvellous achievements come in many forms, and that it's not just warriors who are worthy of eternal memory.

The fifteenth-century in England saw a number of rich and famous people attempt to cultivate for themselves a flashy new kind of celebrity, as enlightened humanist men of letters. For the most part, this involved collecting books produced on the Continent and commissioning new Latin and English translations of Classical and Italian humanist works, often by employing Italian scholars as go-betweens. Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, for instance, hired Leonardo Bruni/Aretino and others to amass the impressive library that would eventually become the core of Oxford University's collection.

But not all such famous people got on famously. A much less happy celebrity partnership was made between Henry Beaufort and Poggio Bracciolini. In theory it was a match made in heaven. Beaufort was the bishop of Winchester (later a cardinal) and a member of probably England's most powerful family. Bracciolini was a humanist scholar who had re-discovered texts by Statius, Lucretius and Cicero, and had heard that other books of interest might be hidden away in English monastic libraries. They met at the Council of Constance, and Bracciolini entered Beaufort's employ in England for the years 1418 to 1423.

Things didn't go to plan. Beaufort's travel schedule essentially dictated where and when Bracciolini could go. He wasn't paid a tremendous amount and travel drained his resources; in the end, he never even achieved his intention of scouring collections in Oxford. Those monastic libraries he did visit were barren of the sort of texts he was after, and the catalogues he consulted proved equally unexciting. Even the food disagreed with him.

At last, he wrote to his friend Nicolaus de Niccolis: 'you had better give up hope of books from England, for they care very little for them here.'

Well he does straddle the line between politics and just general fame, but that's to be expected for the time period.

Bede tells us quite a bit about a certain Irish monk named Aidan. And he was kind of a Big Deal at the time. Famed for his missionary work in Northumbria, including founding the famous Lindisfarne Priory and his incessant travels across the kingdom spreading the gospel and doing general good deeds. A plethora of miracles are attributed to him by Bede, including saving cities from fire, calming storms, and how the pole that he was leaning against when he died was untouched by fire damage.

While a lot of this hagiographical work is, well somewhat suspect, it is clear that Aidan enjoyed a level of fame in Northumbria matched only by the king. Even though he ascribed to a heretical calculation of Easter according to the mainline Church in Rome, and Bede tries to sidestep this issue as much as possible, the chapters concerning Aidan come off to me at least as barely tempered fanboyism.

One celebrity if sorts I recently read about was Hong Liangji, a low-level Han Chinese scholar-official, who, shortly after the death of the retired Qianlong Emperor in 1799, wrote a scathing critique of his successor, Jiaqing, who had been on the throne since 1796. He laid out all of the problems afflicting the country and, crucially, how Jiaqing had failed to deal with them, and managed to make use of some personal connections to get this letter to the emperor.

This did not go over well, and Hong Liangji was condemned to death.

Then Jiaqing changed his mind. Instead, Hong was to be posted to Xinjiang, which the standard fate for officials who hadn't committed treason but were still deemed worthy of punishment – later on, most of the imperial commissioners dealing with the British in the First Opium War suffered the same.

But Hong Liangji's bold move had become well-known. On the way westwards to Xinjiang, crowds came out cheering. Although his own reputation had been ruined, the floodgates had opened for other scholars to voice the grievances of the people and seek redress. Jiaqing now saw the chance for a propaganda coup, and did a complete U-turn, pardoning Hong and recalling him to regular government service. I'll let Stephen Platt say the rest for me:

Jiaqing let it be known that he had not destroyed the original letter in which Hong Liangji criticised him – in fact, he said, he kept it by his bedside so that he would always be reminded of its contents. There had been a terrible drought that year in Beijing, which, like other natural disasters in China, was taken to be a potential sign of Heaven's displeasure with the emperor. According to the imperial records, on the day that Jiaqing officially pardoned Hong Liangji, the rains began to fall again.

It certainly approaches politics, but given that popularity was not really a means of advancement I think this counts.