ancient-greece

"Our history of philosophy can only be the Greco-Roman-Christian one. We know neither the time of formation nor any kind of history about other, Asian philosophemes. Moreover, the simple beginnings of Greek philosophy, which developed from mythology, makes it unimportant for our purpose to ask whether this mythology did or did not have a foreign origin... ."

"The first Graeco-Egyptian astrologists did not invent the discipline they claimed to teach the Hellenic world. They used Egyptian sources going up to the Persian period which were themselves at least partially derived from ancient Chaldaean documents. Traces of this primitive substratum still survive in our much later texts, erratic blocks transported on to more recent soil. When we find mentions there of ‘the king of kings’ or ‘satraps’ we are no longer in Egypt but in the ancient Orient … We limit ourselves to noting that in all appearances, the priests who were the authors of Egyptian astrology stayed relatively faithful to the ancient Oriental tradition."

"It is worth quoting Anthony Grafton’s summation of Scaliger’s assault on the prisca theologia presumptions of his contemporaries here, as Scaliger’s position strongly foreshadows the nineteenth-century philhellenist view of cultural relations in the ancient world: “In astronomy and astrology, it had been the Greeks, not the Babylonians and the Egyptians, who performed most of the observations and, above all, tabulated and systematized the results. The ancient Near East had been not a world of gold, populated by calm sages, but a world of iron, haunted by superstitious fears and only fitfully illuminated by the work of certain science- minded priests — themselves prone to spin out unfounded speculations.”’"

"We have no texts explaining the rites and ceremonial of the Dionysiac mysteries in the Greco-Etrusco-Roman world, although there are allusions which can often be clarified with the aid of Indian texts... By studying Shivaite rites [from India], the only ones which have continued down to our own times, the real practices of the Dionysiac rites and “mysteries” may be reconstructed."

"There has never been a war fought for purer motives than the war against Persia. Marathon and Salamis are still words that "send a ringing challenge down through the generations." Their victories still seem a miracle as they seemed to the men who won them. The mighty were put down from their seats and those of low degree exalted, and for fifty years and more Persia could do nothing to Greece. What followed was one of the most triumphant rebirths of the human spirit in all history, when the bitter differences that divide men were far in the background and freedom was in the air — freedom in the great sense, not only equality before the law, but freedom of thought and speech."

"The whole concept of political and intellectual liberty, of the constitutional state – however individually inefficient or corrupt – depended on one thing: that the Greeks, for whatever motive, decided to stand out against the Oriental system of palace absolutism, and did so with remarkable success."

"O sons of the Greeks, go on! Free your fatherland, and free your children, your wives, and the shrines of your paternal gods, and the tombs of your ancestors! Now the struggle is for all!"

"The great conflict between Greece and Persia – or, to be more accurate, between a handful of states in mainland Greece and the whole might of the Persian empire at its zenith – must always remain one of the most inspiring episodes in European history. As Aeschylus and Herodotus clearly saw (despite the obfuscations of national pride and propaganda) this had been an ideological struggle, the first of its kind known to us. On one side, the towering, autocratic figure of the Great King; on the other, the voluntary and imperfect discipline of proudly independent citizens. In Herodotus's account, Xerxes' soldiers are driven forward to fight under the lash; the recurrent Persian motif of flogging, mutilation and torture throughout his narrative repays study. The Greeks, on the other hand, fought because they had a personal stake in victory: their struggle was to preserve a hard-won and still precarious heritage of freedom."

"Common resistance and sacrifice in the face of a profoundly alien invader had begun, however slowly and imperfectly, to forge a sense of what afterwards came to be known as the Panhellenic ideal, of an identifiable and unique Greek spirit which no other race could share. This was perhaps the best and most lasting legacy of the Persian Wars."

"September of the year 490 B.C. was to my mind a more cardinal moment of fate for Europe than August 1914. Western civilisation, as we know it with its merits and its faults, was saved in its infancy at Marathon, and ten years later by Leonidas and by the men of Salamis. Rome was then in her in fancy; and had it not been for that decade there would have been nothing to prevent Eastern Europe being orientalised and the ultimate fight for the hegemony of Europe would have been left to the Persians and the Carthaginians. But for the Greeks there would have been no civilisation as we know it, and we should all have been dark-skinned people with long noses."

"Cato said, "I had rather men should ask why my statue is not set up, than why it is.""

"It is a difficult thing for a man to resist the natural necessity of mortal passions."

"The general himself ought to be such a one as can at the same time see both forward and backward."

"Leo Byzantius said, "What would you do, if you saw my wife, who scarce reaches up to my knees?… Yet," went he on, "as little as we are, when we fall out with each other, the city of Byzantium is not big enough to hold us.""

"He is a fool who lets slip a bird in the hand for a bird in the bush."

"It was the saying of Bion, that though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest."

"Pythagoras, when he was asked what time was, answered that it was the soul of this world."

"Alexander was wont to say, "Were I not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.""

"Socrates said, "Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.""

"And Archimedes, as he was washing, thought of a manner of computing the proportion of gold in King Hiero's crown by seeing the water flowing over the bathing-stool. He leaped up as one possessed or inspired, crying, "I have found it! Eureka!""

"Spintharus, speaking in commendation of Epaminondas, says he scarce ever met with any man who knew more and spoke less."

"No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune."

"I am whatever was, or is, or will be; and my veil no mortal ever took up."

"The great god Pan is dead."

"When Hermodotus in his poems described Antigonus as the son of Helios, "My valet-de-chambre," said he, "is not aware of this.""

"There is no debt with so much prejudice put off as that of justice."

"Xenophon says that there is no sound more pleasing than one's own praises."

"When Demosthenes was asked what was the first part of oratory, he answered, "Action;" and which was the second, he replied, "Action;" and which was the third, he still answered, "Action.""

"Lampis, the sea commander, being asked how he got his wealth, answered, "My greatest estate I gained easily enough, but the smaller slowly and with much labour.""

"Statesmen are not only liable to give an account of what they say or do in public, but there is a busy inquiry made into their very meals, beds, marriages, and every other sportive or serious action."

"It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration,—nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome."

"Like watermen, who look astern while they row the boat ahead."

"I, for my own part, had much rather people should say of me that there neither is nor ever was such a man as Plutarch, than that they should say, "Plutarch is an unsteady, fickle, froward, vindictive, and touchy fellow.""

"Like the man who threw a stone at a bitch, but hit his step-mother, on which he exclaimed, "Not so bad!""

"Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds; and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer: "Do you not think it a matter worthy of lamentation that when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one?""

"Pittacus said, "Every one of you hath his particular plague, and my wife is mine; and he is very happy who hath this only"."

"He was a man, which, as Plato saith, is a very inconstant creature."

"The pilot cannot mitigate the billows or calm the winds."

"Have in readiness this saying of Solon, "But we will not give up our virtue in exchange for their wealth.""

"Epaminondas is reported wittily to have said of a good man that died about the time of the battle of Leuctra, "How came he to have so much leisure as to die, when there was so much stirring?""

"Anacharsis said a man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible favours and blessings of Fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind."

"Said Periander, "Hesiod might as well have kept his breath to cool his pottage.""

"That proverbial saying, "Ill news goes quick and far.""

"Said Scopas of Thessaly, "We rich men count our felicity and happiness to lie in these superfluities, and not in those necessary things.""

"A traveller at Sparta, standing long upon one leg, said to a Lacedæmonian, "I do not believe you can do as much." "True," said he, "but every goose can.""

"What is bigger than an elephant? But this also is become man's plaything, and a spectacle at public solemnities; and it learns to skip, dance, and kneel."

"Let us not wonder if something happens which never was before, or if something doth not appear among us with which the ancients were acquainted."

"Athenodorus says hydrophobia, or water-dread, was first discovered in the time of Asclepiades."

"Why does pouring oil on the sea make it clear and calm? Is it for that the winds, slipping the smooth oil, have no force, nor cause any waves?"

"Remember what Simonides said,—that he never repented that he had held his tongue, but often that he had spoken."