It’s part of an 11-book series on civilization, but it’s a stand-alone piece as well.
So many great stories, looking forward to sharing these in my videos and blogs in the future.
It’s not an easy read though. Only read if you are interested in learning about history and Greece.
Flow: 3/5
Actionability: 3/5
Mindset: 5/5
Some of My Highlights:
“Everywhere in Cretan life man expresses his vainest and noblest passion – the zeal to beautify.”
“Perhaps there too, as in most declining cultures, population control went too far, and reproduction was left to the failures. Perhaps, as wealth and luxury increased, the pursuit of physical pleasure sapped the vitality of the race, and weakened its will to live or to defend itself; a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean.”
“It is difficult to say whether Crete taught Sparta, or Sparta Crete; perhaps both states were the parallel results of similar conditions -the precarious life of an alien military aristocracy amid a native and hostile population of serfs.”
“Heinrich became a clerk, and earned a hundred and fifty dollars a year; he spent half of this on books, and lived on the other half and his dreams.”
“In Homer the Achaeans are, specifically, a Greek-speaking people of southern Thessaly; often, however, because they had become the most powerful of the Greek tribes, Homer uses their name for all the Greeks at Troy.”
“None the less, it is impossible to say how far the poems reflect the age in which the poet lived, rather than the age of which he writes.”
“Like the Romans a thousand years after them, the Achaeans look down upon literary culture as effeminate degeneration; they use writing under protest, and the only literature they know is the martial law and unwritten song of the troubadour.”
“…the greatest gift a man can give is to cut off his hair and lay it as an offering upon the funeral pyre of his friend.”
“As we read Homer the impression forms that we are in the presence of a society more lawless and primitive than that of Cnossus or Mycenae.”
“Even war does not thwart the Greek passion for games.”
“How are these passionate and vigorous Achaeans ruled? In peace by the family, in crisis by the clan.”
“…skilled speakers who can sway the people are valuable to the state; already, in old Nestor, whose voice ‘flows sweeter than honey from his tongue,’ and in wily Odysseus, whose words fall ‘like snowflakes upon the people…'”
“In the end the two conceptions of life -the mysticism of the East and the rationalism of the West- would fight for the body and soul of Greece. Rationalism would win under Pericles, as under Caesar, Leo X, and Frederick; but mysticism would always return.”
“To these long-haired northerners, hardened by mountains and habituated war, there seemed to be no alternative in life but conquest or slavery; war was their business, by which they made what seemed to them an honest living…”
“Tyrtaeus, said the Spartan King Leonidas, ‘was an adept in tickling the souls of Youth.'”
“Lycurgus forbade the citizens to engage in industry or trade, prohibited the use or importation of silver or gold, and decreed that only iron should be used as currency. He was resolved that the Spartans (i.e., the landowning citizens) should be left free for government and war.”
“‘Return with your shield or on it.’ was the Spartan mother’s farewell to her soldier son.”
“When an advanced thinker asked Lycurgus o establish a democracy Lycurgus replied,’Being, my friend, by setting it up in our own family.'”
“At twelve he boy was deprived of underclothing, and was allowed but one garment throughout the year.”
“…character was more important than intellect. The young Spartan was trained to sobriety, and some Helots were compelled to drink to excess in order that the youth might see how foolish drunkenness can be.”
“Nearly every lad had a lover among the older men; from this lover he expected further education, and in return he offered affection and obedience.”
“All in all, the position of woman was better in Sparta than in any other Greek community.”
“Fat men were a rarity in Lacadaemon; there was no law regulating the size of the stomach, but if a man’s belly swelled indecently he might be publicly reproved by the government, or banished from Laconia.”
“Self-control, moderation, equanimity in fortune and adversity -qualities that the Athenians wrote about but seldom showed- were taken for granted in every Spartan citizen.”
“‘The disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor,’ says Plutarch, ‘had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a truly dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances… seemed possible but a despotic power.'”
“Solon’s peaceful revolution is one of the encouraging miracles of history.”
“The best proof of his wisdom was the lasting effect of his legislation. Despite a thousand changes and developments, despite intervening dictatorships and superficial revolutions, Cicero could say, five centuries later, that the laws of Solon were still in force in Athens.”
“When the dictatorship had served to destroy the aristocracy the people destroyed the dictatorship; and only a few changes were needed to make the democracy of freemen a reality as well as a form.”
“No powerful priesthood, no ancient and inspired text limited men’s thinking; even the Homeric poems, which were to become in some sense the Bible of the Greeks, had hardly taken yet a definite form.”
“Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.”
“We are reminded of Goethe’s remark that a man’s vices (or errors) are common to him with his epoch, but his virtues (or insights) are his own.”
“Prose is the voice of knowledge freeing itself from imagination and faith…”
“We know of no public library before Alexandria’s, none in Athens till Hadrian.”
“Religion failed to unify Greece, but athletics -periodically- succeeded.”
“We must not think of the average Greek as a student and lover of Aeschylus or Plato; rather, like the typical Briton or American, he was interested in sport, and his favored athletes were his earthly goods.”
“So important were the games that not even the Persian invasion stopped them…”
“When Darius, before invading Greece, sent heralds to Athens and Sparta to demand earth and water as symbols of submission, both cities had put the heralds to death.”
“…when Xerxes’ army drank water whole rivers ran dry.”
“The Greek historians assure us that the Persians lost 20,000, the Greeks 300.”
“The Greco-Persian War was the most momentous conflict in European history, for it made Europe possible.”