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Aristotle found support for his thesis in facts drawn from geopolitics or ‘natural law’. Greek superiority had to be proved demonstrably innate, a gift of nature. In one celebrated fragment he counsels Alexander to be ‘a hegemon [leader] of Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants’.

— Peter Green

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More quotes by Peter Green

The booby never perceived
that under his rich-fleeced sheep there were men tied on!

The Odyssey: A New Translation (2018)

Macedonia as a whole tended to remain in isolation from the rest of Greece.

Alexander the Great (1970)

In less than four years he had transformed Macedonia from a backward and primitive kingdom to one of the most powerful states in the Greek world.

In their criminal folly they perpetrated a monstrous wrong,
squandering the possessions and insulting the bedfellow
of a most noble man, saying he would never return.

The Odyssey: A New Translation (2018)

First, while she was washing clothes near the hollow ship,
one of them made love to her, a thing that fuddles the senses
of truly feminine women, even one that’s well-behaved.

The Odyssey: A New Translation (2018)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Peter Green (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.