27 quotes
The terms of this new religion, though based on Hebrew models, were Greek terms.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
Human beings never know more than a part, as "through a glass darkly"; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
They [the Greeks] had become an essentially secular people.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
Only when we step back can we see that we have been reassembling something that can stand in the wind.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
To be without music was, for the ancient Greeks, to be already dead... Ancient Greece was a culture of song.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
It is... ironic that, given its subsequent history of Jew-hatred, Christianity should become the vehicle by which Jewish values entered the mainstream.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
Of the many people's of the earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all. ...basically a businessman's religion of contractual obligations.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
For the most part, in the union of Greco-Roman with Judeo-Christian, the Greco-Roman turn of mind combined with Judeo-Christian values. While the outward form of the Western world remained Greco-Roman, its content became gradually Judeo-Christian.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
The [Greek] myths were... attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society always at war—"the father of all, the king of all," "always existing by nature," as the Greek philosophers expressed it.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
When Donald Rumsfeld, a practical imperialist if ever there was one, took over the Pentagon, he commissioned a study of how ancient empires maintained their hegemony. Might he more profitably study how they lost all they had gained?
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
The Greek world will continue in almost constant cultural revolution from the time of Homer to the day Rome brings Greece to its knees in the second century B.C. ...the longest trajectory of fluid development in any society known to history.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
We can understand Greek religion because, it operates on the same internal dynamic that fuels all (or certainly almost all) religion. The aboriginal Christian prayer Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy) is a Greek prayer far more ancient than Christianity.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
Dour, anxious Hesiod writes about the daily round of farming and the effects if the seasons on rural life but also speaks in his Works and Days about the value of festal competitions with "potter against potter, carpenter against carpenter... poet against poet."
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
Though the poems of Homer and his successors were recorded, there will be no Greek reading public till we reach the fifth century B.C. ...There was instead, a hearing public that formed responsive audiences at festivals and contests.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
Unfortunately, much of the post-Homeric poetry—called lyric poetry because it was usually sung to a lyre—was lost in the upheavals of subsequent centuries, especially in the depredations and decay that would follow the barbarian incursions into the Greco-Roman world in the fifth century A.D.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)
The philosophy of self-denial also taught the brotherhood of man, based on the Stoical belief that every human being without distinction possesses a spark of divinity that is in communion with God, who in the Stoical system is called Logos (Word, Reason, Meaning)—the word John's Gospel uses to describe Jesus.
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)