LifeOfGreece
The Life Of Greece (Will Durant)
- Very good. Arts and architecture boring in places.
- There is hardly anything secular in our culture that does not come from Greece.
- It is as difficult to begin a civilization without robbery as it is to maintain it without slaves.
- In the history of civilization Crete was the first link in the European chain.
- Civilization is always older than we think.
- "Be patient now my soul; thou hast endured still worse than this" Something that Socrates loved to quote.
- Men must have phrases if they are to give their lives.
Many Greeks believed that the discovery of Iron had been to the hurt of man.
- Instead of thinking of Greek culture as a flame that shone suddenly and miraculously amid a sea of barbarism, we must conceive of it as the slow and turbid creation of a people almost too richly endowed in blood am memories, and surrounded challenged, and instructed by warlike hordes, powerful empires, and ancient civilizations.
- Hardly anything remains, even in the modest museum, of the city (in Sparta) that once ruled and ruined Greece.
The past would be startled if it could see the pages of historians.
The gods are mortal, but piety is everlasting.
- Institutions may with impunity be altered or destroyed from above if their names are left unchanged.
Equality is unnatural; and where ability and subtlety are free, inequality must grow until it destroys itself in the indiscriminate poverty of social war; liberty and equality are not associates but enemies. The concentration of wealth begins by being inevitable and ends by being fatal.
- The Greeks spread into all of southern Europe the seeds of that subtle and precarious luxury called civilization, without which life would have no beauty, and history no meaning.
- Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law. That the Greeks, so far as our knowledge goes, where the first to achieve this recognition and this freedom in both philosophy and government is the secret of their accomplishment, and of their importance in history.
- A man's vices (or errors) are common to him with his epoch, but his virtues (or insights) are his own.
The most unfortunate man is he who has not learned how to bear misfortune; men ought to order their lives as if they where fated to live both a long and short time; wisdom should be cherished as a means of traveling from youth to old age, for it is more lasting than any other possession - Polycrates of Samos
For men to get all they wish is not the best thing; it is disease that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; toil, rest.
- All in all, Pythagoras was the founder, so far as we know, of both science and philosophy in Europe.
The Locrians required any man who wished to propose a new law to speak with a rope around his neck, so that if his motion failed, he might be hanged with a minimum of public inconvenience.
- History, like life, must be continuous or die; character and institutions may be altered slowly; a serious interruption of their development throws them into national amnesia and insanity.
- The realization of self-government was something new in the world; life without kings had not yet been dared by any great society.
The European system won against the Oriental partly because transport by water is cheaper than transport by land, and partly because it is almost a law of history that the rugged, warlike north conquers the easygoing, art-creating south.
The Greco-Persian war was the most momentous conflict in European history, for it made Europe possible. It won for Western civilization the opportunity to develop its own economic life- unburdened with alien tribute or taxation- and its own political institutions, free from the dictation of Oriental kings.
- "The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle is undoubtedly, the most memorable in the history of the world" - Shelly
- Pericles is an example of that principle that liberal reforms are most ably executed and most permanently secured by the cautious and moderate leadership of an aristocrat enjoying popular support.
- The great class of small proprietors is a steadying conservative force in a democracy where the property-less city dwellers are always driving toward reform.
- Salt is collected in salt pans from the sea, and is traded in the interior for slaves; a cheap slave is called a "salting", and a good one is "worth his salt".
- The Greece that defeated the King of Kings turns upon itself, Greek meets Greek in a thousand battle, and in the course of a century after Marathon the most brilliant civilization in history consumes itself in a prolonged suicide.
- They insist upon a degree of liberty that seems fantastically chaotic to their Oriental visitors. But because they are free, because, ultimately every office is open to every citizen, and each is ruled and ruler in turn, they give half their lives to their state.
- "Nature has given woman so much power that the law cannot afford to give her more" - Samuel Johnson
- Zeuxis agreed to paint Helen for the temple of Lacinian Hera, on condition that the five loveliest women of the city should pose in the nude for him, so that he might select from each her fairest feature, and combine them all in a second goddess of beauty.
In general "a man should have only one mean a day, unless he have a very dry belly.
- Many cities - above all - Sparta forbade the public consideration of philosophical problems, "on account of the jealousy and strife and profitless discussions to which they give rise"
Viewing a multitude of articles for sale in the market Socrates remarked "How many things there are that I do not want!"
- No common doctrine united Socrates followers; they differed so widely among themselves that they became the leaders of the most diverse philosophical schools and theories in Greece - Platonism, Cynicism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism.
I think that to want nothing is to resemble the gods, and that to want as little as possible is to make the nearest approach to the gods.
- The oracle at Delphi when asked how one should worship the gods, answered, "According to the law of your country"
- Can morality survive without supernatural belief? In Euthyphro, Socrates argues that the good is not good because the gods approve of it, but that the gods approve of it because it is good, he is proposing a philosophical revolution.
The great achievement of Periclean prose was history. In a sense it was the 5th century that discovered the past, and consciously sought for a perspective of man in time.
"equality is just, but only between equals."
Alexander: "a night march gave him a good appetite for breakfast, and a light breakfast gave him an appetite for dinner"
Alexander won a military victory of the West over the East, but he died before he could realize that he had also made a pathway for the religious victory of the East over the West.
- Mazzel-tov "May your planet be favorable".
- This imposition of Greek civilization upon the Near East (following Alexander) is one of the startling phenomena of ancient history; no change so swift and far-reaching had ever been seen in Asia.
The Greeks offered The East philosophy, the East offered Greece religion; religion won because philosophy was a luxury for the few, religion was a consolation for the many.
"There is no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past it is history, and history alone, which without involving us in actual danger, will mature our judgment and prepare us to take the right views." - Polybius
- Polybius understood that mere facts are worthless except through their interpretation, and that the past has no value except as our roots and our illumination.
Epicurus: "Desires may be ignored when our failure to accomplish them will not really cause us pain" To accustom ourselves to plain living and simple ways is an almost certain road to health. The gods are not to be feared; death cannot be felt; the good can be had; the bad can be avoided.
- The Stoics lent countenance to superstition, and had an injurious effect upon science; but they saw clearly the basic problem of their age - the collapse of the theological basis of morals – and they made an honest attempt to bridge the gap between religion and philosophy.