Benjamin Ide Wheeler

"There was no priestly hierarchy either for Greece as a whole or for single cantons; not even among priests of the same in different cantons was there organized coöperation. Some popular or oracle might win more than local prestige and secure the protection and support of various neighboring states, but there the drift toward centralization and organization found its limit. At no time did there exist an organized authority which could formulate standards of faith or dictate the usages of religious etiquette. Ritual, seeking that which in matter and manner was believed to be well pleasing to the , followed the traditions of the individual shrines, and there were no better theologians than the poets."

"Viewing history in the large, we cannot fail to see that the world we live in is essentially a . All its fundamental forms and moulds for law and government, art, architecture, and literature, thought and faith., were created beside the Mediterranean; all its political and religious struggles, all its wars, were the fighting over of old Mediterranean questions; and as a system of types and forms, it never can be really understood and known except as it be reduced to Mediterranean terms, and studied in the perspective of a Roman, Greek, or Syrian horizon."

"No single personality, excepting the carpenter's son of Nazareth, has done so much to make the world of civilisation we live in what it is as Alexander of Macedon. He leveled the terrace upon which built. Whatever lay within the range of his conquests contributed its part to form that Mediterranean civilisation which, under Rome's administration, became the basis of European life."

"The rate at which your knowledge will ripen into wisdom depends in considerable part upon your distinguishing what is important and what is relatively unimportant. Some people seem never to know any difference between the s and the s."