Ancient Greece

"Thou gazest on the stars: Would I might be, O star of mine, the skies With myriad eyes To gaze on thee."

"Within the shady grove we chanced to peep, And caught Cythera’s rosy boy asleep: None of his brave artillery had he, But bow and quiver hung upon a tree; While he on rosebuds smiling lay, in warm Slumber fast bound; and o’er his lips a swarm Of honey bees laid sweets and wrought no harm."

"Hushed be on Dryads’ wooded rock the rills, And hushed the bleatings on the meads, Now Pan his pipe with breath melodious fills And kisses with moist lip the reeds; While, treading nimble dances all around, Dryads and Hamadryads beat the ground."

"In view of this state of affairs it could not be called out of the way to ask what there was in Archaic Greece which did not come from the orient."

"Angesichts dieser Sachlage wäre es durchaus nicht als abwegig zu bezeichnen, daß man fragte, was im archaischen Hellas eigentlich nicht aus dem Orient herstammte."

"There was not simply one ‘orientalizing’ period, there were several."

"Through his doctrine of the similarity between Sparta and the perfect state, Plato became one of the most successful propagators of what I should like to call ‘the Great Myth of Sparta’—the perennial and influential myth of the supremacy of the Spartan constitution and way of life."

"Four hundred thousand slaves must be devoted to forty thousand citizens; weak and deformed children must be exposed; morality and humanity, as well as all the comforts, elegancies, and pleasures of life, must be sacrificed to this glaring phantom of vanity, superstition, and ambition. Separated from the rest of mankind, they lived together, destitute of all business, pleasure, and amusement, but war and politics, pride and ambition; and there occupations and passions they transmitted from generation to generation, for seven hundred years; as if fighting and intriguing, and not life and happiness, were the end of man, and society; as as if the love of one's country, and of glory, were amiable passions, when not limited by justice and general benevolence; and as if nations were to be chained together for ever, merely that one family might reign among them… Human nature perished under this frigid system of national and family pride."

"The institution of Lycurgus was well calculated to preserve the independence of his country, but had no regard to its happiness, and very little to its liberty. As the people's consent was necessary to every law, it had so far the appearance of political liberty: but the civil liberty of it was little better than that of a man chained in a dungeon; a liberty to rest as he is. The influence of this boasted legislation on the human character was to produce warriors and politicians, and nothing else. To say that this people were happy, is to contradict every quality in human nature, except ambition. They had no other gratification: science and letters were sacrificed, as well as commerce, to the ruling passion."

"There are, at any rate, two or three things in Spartan life that I think ought to appeal to all sections of this generation. The example that the Spartans made of the drunken Helots would find some to applaud it to-day. The alacrity with which some of our modern womanhood are striving now to overtake the modes and the fashions of those girls who took part in the festivals of Greece shows that their practices in this respect command emulation in some quarters. There is much also in the Spartan regime that would appeal to the modern Fascisti. The Spartans had another rule which one has often heard Britons blamed for following—never to trust the foreigner. I do not think that there would have been much chance for a Soviet Delegation in Sparta."

"I like to think of the earth being stirred over grim Sparta. To all boys—and I am speaking of my own recollections—she had a peculiar appeal. I think most boys prefer her to Athens and prefer Leonidas to Alcibiades in spite of the fact that Alcibiades is a much more successful character in the modern world than Leonidas. But there is something in Spartan discipline and mode of life that appeals to strenuous youth, and it may be the cherished recollections of far distant days that make me feel a thrill at the thought of the investigations of the School in Sparta."

"Here is what you do, friends. Forget country. Forget king. Forget wife and children and freedom. Forget every concept, however noble, that you imagine you fight for here today. Act for this alone: for the man who stands at your shoulder. He is everything, and everything is contained within him. That is all I know. That is all I can tell you."

"The ideal Spartan was plucky, indifferent to hardship and pain, a first-rate athlete. The less he talked or, for that matter, thought, the better. It was for him emphatically not to reason why, but always to do and die. He was a soldier and nothing else. The purpose of the Spartan state was war."

"The idea that underlay the young Spartans' training was their obligation to maintain the power of the state and ignore everything that did not directly contribute to it. All the other possibilities of life — imagination, love of beauty, intellectual interests — were put aside. The goal of human aspiration and achievement was to uphold the fatherland. Only what helped the state was good, only what harmed it was bad. A Spartan was not an individual but a part of a well-functioning machine which assumed all responsibility for him, exacted absolute submission from him, molded his character and his mind, and imbued him with the deep conviction that the chief end of man was to kill and be killed."

"It was natural for [Spartan women] to think and speak as Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas, is said to have done, when some foreign lady, as it would seem, told her that the women of Lacedaemon were the only women of the world who could rule men; 'With good reason,' she said, 'for we are the only women who bring forth men'."

"Their [Lacadaemonian] women, it is said, were bold and masculine, overbearing to their husbands in the first place, absolute mistresses in their houses, giving their opinions about public matters freely, and speaking openly even on the most important subjects."

"The freedom which thus prevailed at that time in marriage relations was aimed at physical and political well-being, and was far removed from the licentiousness which was afterwards attributed to their women, so much so that adultery was wholly unknown among them. And a saying is reported of one Geradas,​ a Spartan of very ancient type, who, on being asked by a stranger what the punishment for adulterers was among them, answered: "Stranger, there is no adulterer among us." "Suppose, then," replied the stranger, "there should be one." "A bull," said Geradas, "would be his forfeit, a bull so large that it could stretch over Mount Taÿgetus and drink from the river Eurotas." Then the stranger was astonished and said: "But how could there be a bull so large?" To which Geradas replied, with a smile: "But how could there be an adulterer in Sparta?" Such, then, are the accounts we find of their marriages."

"The king marched against the enemy in close companion­ship with one who had been crowned victor in the great games. And they tell of a certain Spartan who refused to be bought off from a contest at Olympia by large sums of money, and after a long struggle outwrestled his antagonist. When some one said to him then: "What advantage, O Spartan, hast thou got from thy victory?" he answered, with a smile: "I shall stand in front of my king when I fight our enemies.""

"Men are not born equal in themselves, so I think it beneath a man to postulate that they are. If I thought myself as good as Sokrates I should be a fool; and if, not really believing it, I asked you to make me happy by assuring me of it, you would rightly despise me. So why should I insult my fellow-citizens by treating them as fools and cowards? A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as Sokrates, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but under a democracy, Sokrates is there in the Agora to prove me wrong. I want a city where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are; and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient, or some other man's will."

"Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see they judge of things very different which they have never seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery, on account of the patience with which the slaves within their notice carry the yoke; not reflecting that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known but by those who possess them, though the relish for them is lost with the things themselves. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a satrap who was comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the Persepolites; but you can not know the pleasures of mine.”"

"To understand Plato, and indeed many later philosophers, it is necessary to know something of Sparta. Sparta had a double effect on Greek thought: through the reality, and through the myth. Each is important. The reality enabled the Spartans to defeat Athens in war; the myth influenced Plato's political theory, and that of countless subsequent writers. The myth, fully developed, is to be found in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus; the ideals that it favours have had a great part in framing the doctrines of Rousseau, Nietzsche, and National Socialism. The myth is of even more importance, historically, than the reality."

"Alexander the Great"

"The "Hellenes" astonished us because, although open to the spiritual disturbances of their age, they appealed to ancient methods to find a solution to the anxieties of the present. Their placid faith in a tradition stemming from Plato and constantly evolving was perhaps the most reassuring aspect of late antique civilization. In fact, many classical and enlightened societies had collapsed under the weight of their own traditionalism, leaving their immediate successors only with a memory of anxieties and nightmares. If this did not happen in the Roman Empire, it is largely due to the "Hellenic Renaissance" and the dialogue between its proponents and the new Christian aristocratic intellectuals. (Peter Brown)"

"Hellenism is the pot on the stove, the scoop for the embers, the jug of milk, it is the furnishings, the crockery, what surrounds the body; Hellenism is the warmth of the domestic hearth, perceived as sacred, it is everything belonging to man that puts him in contact with a part of the outside world [...]. Hellenism is purposely surrounding man with furnishings instead of just any objects, transforming the latter into furniture, humanizing the surrounding world, infusing it with a subtle teleological warmth. Hellenism is the stove by which a man sits and enjoys the warmth it emanates, so akin to the warmth he has inside. (Osip Emilyevich Mandelshtam)"

"Ancient Greece"

"In the many centuries, since Toledo, that Western historians have been talking of transmission from the Greeks, who ever produced a Sanskrit manuscript of Ptolemy? Who ever proved that Aryabhata had seen such a Sanskrit manuscript? Yet every Western reference work on the subject asserts that Indian astronomy is transmitted from the Greeks. ... So, it is not so much that the standards of evidence have changed, but that there are (even as of today) two simultaneous standards of evidence for transmission. One for transmission to the West, and another for purported transmission from the West. Not only is the judge biased, the very rules of evidence are biased!... So, similarity and precedence do not always establish transmission. Whether or not they establish transmission depends upon the direction of transfer. Thus, in practice, there are two standards of evidence for transmission: an ultra-lax standard for transmission from Greeks, and an ultra-strict standard for transmission to the West."

"So, in practice, Western history has used two standards of evidence for transmission: one ultra-lax standard of evidence for transmission from "Greeks", and another ultra-strict standard for transmission to the West. For cases of alleged transmission from the Greeks, mere speculations—a speculative chronology combined with speculative attribution—are regarded as ample evidence of transmission. In the other direction, similarity with a real earlier work, by a real author, together with a clear channel of transmission, do not prove anything, for there is always the possibility of repeated miracles by which any number of people in the West may independently reinvent things just when they could be transmitted."

"The West spoke fairly enough, talking of honor, the sanctity of the given word, and of promises; of freedom and enlightenment. It vaunted its poets, its philosophers, Its scientists, Its classical inheritance from that beautiful, far off Greece, whose greatest philosophers, it forgot to mention, had been inspired through Egypt and Persia, by India."

"Everything is narrow in the Occident. Greece is small — I stifle. Judea is dry — I pant. Let me look a little towards lofty Asia, towards the deep Orient. There I find my immense poem, vast as India’s seas, blessed and made golden by the sun, a book of divine harmony in which nothing jars. There reigns a lovable peace, and even in the midst of battle, an infinite softness, an unbounded fraternity extending to all that lives, a bottomless and shoreless ocean of love, piety, clemency. I have found what I was looking for: the bible of kindness. Great poem, receive me!… Let me plunge into it! It is the sea of milk."

"‘These coincidences of thought,’ says A.N. Marlow who documents many more, ‘each small in itself, amount to quite a formidable total. As to the…way by which Indian influence reached Greece, I have no new solution to offer and fall back with others on Persia as the intermediary. The problem is, however, that the influences can be seen centuries earlier’"

"It will no longer remain to be doubted that the priests of Egypt and the sages of Greece have drawn directly from the original well of India; that only Brahmanism can provide those fragments of their teaching which have come down to us with the clarity which they do not possess."

"Plato, through the Pythagoreans and also the Orphics, was subjected to the influence of Hindu thought but he may not have been aware of it as coming from India."

"There are reports by writers of the Hellenistic and Roman periods that Greeks had visited India in much earlier times... In fact Plutarch, Diodoros Sikeliotes and Diogenes Laertios manage between them to send just about every Greek sage into the East (including Pythagoras and Democritos, but notably not Socrates and Aristotle)."

"The mythology, as well as the cosmogony of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, were borrowed from the doctrines of the Brahmins."

"Journeys to India and indebtedness to Brahminical wisdom are now ascribed to numerous founders and leaders in Greek thought, such as Plato, Democritus, Pherecydes of Cyrus and, quite often, Pythagoras. We hear that Pythagoras studied astronomy andastrology with the Chaldeans, and psychological as well as soteriological doctrines with the Indian gymnosophists."

"Lord Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859) in comparing the ancient Greeks with the ancient Hindus, says: "Their (Hindus) general learning was more considerable; and in the knowledge of the being and nature of God, they were already in possession of a light which was but faintly perceived even by the loftiest intellects in the best days of Athens.""

"In parts of their careers, Arjuna and Odysseus show similarities so numerous and detailed that they must be cognate figures, sharing an origin in the proto-hero of an oral proto-narrative."

"Much of the narrative heritage of India and Greece goes back to shared ancestral narratives told in early IE times – to ‘protonarratives’. (…) the Greek tradition quite often fuses or amalgamates traditions that were separate in the protonarrative and remain separate in the Sanskrit."

"Joseph Waligore is equally critical but has no solution except that they did borrow ‘from Indian philosophy but only had limited contact with the Indians and could not penetrate the core of Indian thought’."

"I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times."

"We have already acknowledged that arithmetic, geometry, astronomy were taught among the Brahmans. From time immemorial they have known the precession of the equinoxes and were in their calculation far closer to the real figure than the Greeks who came much later. Mr. Le Gentil (a French astronomer who spent several years in India) has with admiration acknowledged the Brahmans' science, as well as the immensity of time these Indians must have needed to reach a knowledge of which even the Chinese never had any notion, and which was unknown to Egypt and to Chaldea, the teacher of Egypt."

"It is very important to note that some 2,500 years ago at the least Pythagoras went from Samos to the Ganges to learn geometry...But he would certainly not have undertaken such a strange journey had the reputation of the Brahmans' science not been been long established in Europe."

"Our nations have mutually destroyed each other on that very soil where we went to collect nothing but money, and where the first Greeks travelled for nothing but knowledge."

"The Greeks, in their mythology, were merely disciples of India and of Egypt."

"Two nations of yore, namely the Greek and the Aryan placed in different environments and circumstances - the former, surrounded by all that was beautiful, sweet, and tempting in nature, with an invigorating climate, and the latter, surrounded on every side by all that was sublime, and born and nurtured in a climate which did not allow of much physical exercise - developed two peculiar and different ideals of civilization. The study of the Greeks was the outer infinite, while that of the Aryans was the inner infinite; one studied the macrocosm, and the other the microcosm. Each had its distinct part to play in the civilisation of the world. Not that one was required to borrow from the other, but if they compared notes both would be the gainers. The Aryans were by nature an analytical race. In the sciences of mathematics and grammar wonderful fruits were gained, and by the analysis of mind the full tree was developed. In Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the Egyptian neo-Platonists, we can find traces of Indian thought."

"Two curious nations there have been - sprung of the same race, but placed in different circumstances and environments, working put the problems of life each in its own particular way. I mean the ancient Hindu and the ancient Greek. The Indian Aryan - bounded on the north by the snow-caps of the Himalayas, with fresh-water rivers like rolling oceans surrounding him in the plains, with eternal forests which, to him, seemed to be the end of the world - turned his vision inward; and given the natural instinct, the superfine brain of the Aryan, with this sublime scenery surrounding him, the natural result was that he became introspective. The analysis of his own mind was the great theme of the Indo-Aryan. With the Greek, on the other hand, who arrived at a part of the earth which was more beautiful than sublime, the beautiful islands of the Grecian Archipelago, nature all around him generous yet simple - his mind naturally went outside. It wanted to analyse the external world. And as a result we find that from India have sprung all the analytical sciences, and from Greece all the sciences of generalization. The Hindu mind went on in its own direction and produced the most marvellous results. Even at the present day, the logical capacity of the Hindus, and the tremendous power which the Indian brain still possesses, is beyond compare. ...Today the ancient Greek is meeting the ancient Hindu on the soil of India."

"We find among the Indians the vestiges of the most remote antiquity... We know that all peoples came there to draw the elements of their knowledge... India, in her splendour, gave religions and laws to all the other peoples; Egypt and Greece owed to her both their fables and their wisdom."

"The Greek sought political liberty. The Hindu has always sought spiritual liberty. Both are one-sided."

"Even the loftiest philosophy of the Europeans, the idealism of reason, as it is set forth by Greek philosophers, appears, in comparison with the abundant light and vigour of Oriental idealism, like a feeble Promethean spark in the full flood of heavenly glory of the noonday sun—faltering and feeble, and ever ready to be extinguished."

"There is no language in the world, even Greek, which has the clarity and the philosophical precision of Sanskrit. India is not only at the origin of everything, she is superior in everything, intellectually, religiously or politically and even the Greek heritage seems pale in comparison."