"As regards the qualities of the Persians we are in the main dependent on Greek sources. Clearly they were not a people that we should call intellectual. They do not themselves seem to have had an inclination towards literature, medicine, or philosophical and scientific speculation. They were probably most at ease when living as country gentlemen. Despite the uncompromising black and white of their religious creed as expressed by Darius, there is no trace of fanaticism in them, and in general they would seem to have been tolerant. They liked to live in pleasant surroundings; coming from a country in which cultivation is restricted to fertile patches of watered land they may have been rather narrowly ‘oasis-minded’. Luxury appealed to them."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Manuel_Cook
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Manuel Cook
1910 – 1994
John Manuel Cook, FBA (1910–1994) was a British classical archaeologist. He was educated at Marlborough College, and went to King's College, Cambridge (1929–32).
4 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Manuel Cook →
Related Quotes
"[The milieu of the Persian court was one in which intellectual and artistic intercourse between representatives of th…"
"From the Greek writers we get some idea of Persian education; but it applies only to the nobility, and there was no p…"
"But the one remarkable achievement was the mixing of races that set the example for the cosmopolitan civilization of …"
"The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever …"
"From water level, I observed the mating joined in flight like refuelling aircraft, and the random progress of the clo…"
"It is through trees that we see and hear the wind: woodland people can tell the species of a tree from the sound it m…"
"Waterlog (1999), Roger's now-classic account of swimming through Britain, published twenty years ago this year, opens…"
"In 1973, Roger Deakin, a British writer and environmental activist, acquired a tumbledown sixteenth-century farmhouse…"
"Der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen."
"The poet of England, he gave to the love of country, to patriotism as nowadays we call it, a voice which never shall …"