Cecil Maurice Bowra > Quotes

“Buggery was invented to fill that awkward hour between evensong and cocktails”
― Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra

“In their education they learned no foreign languages, almost no natural science, little geography or history, and no economics. But they learned music and poetry, and when they listened to a poet’s work, they understood it with that almost instinctive ease which comes from early training and prolonged practice. They were prepared, as very few people have ever been, to understand almost as experts the intricacies and difficulties of a mature art.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“Some, indeed, conform to the strict notion that a myth is a story invented to make sense of some ritual whose significance has been forgotten, if indeed it has ever been fully understood.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“Unbridled arrogance shocked the Greeks morally, politically, and aesthetically. It was, in their view, quite different from legitimate ambition, since it was possible only with a large degree of self-control and even of self-sacrifice.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“Both [Aristotle] and Plato denied the greatness of Periclean Athens and rejected its fundamental assumption, that its citizens could be trusted to take even the most important decisions because they were free and responsible men.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“We cannot doubt that the distinction of the Athenian democracy owed much to slavery, since it provided the free citizen with leisure to spend his time on other matters than finding his livelihood. The majority of citizens had still to work hard, but at least they had times when they could leave their work and attend to public affairs or the graces of leisure. However much we may deplore slavery in any form, we must remember that in Athens the variety of origin in slaves and their relatively small numbers prevented the development of anything like a ‘colonial’ economy.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“A third view, even more destructive, was that of Critias (c. 460-403), who made a character in a play say that the gods are an invention of some great teacher who wished to frighten men into keeping the laws and did so by saying that thunder and lightning are the work of gods.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“Greek politics [(including the litany of fascist city-states)] were at least founded on the conviction that men have a right to live for their won sake and not for the sake of some exalted individual or supernatural system.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“The Greeks of historical times were physically a mixed people, and advocates of ‘purity’ of breed will find in them no support for their views. If their sculpture and painting present recognizably standard type, that is probably because climatic conditions exert their own control and not only give preference in survival to a type which has long been adapted to them but make acclimatization slow and difficult. The Greeks were not the blond giants of Teutonic fancy. The majority of them seem to have been, as they are today, dark-haired and olive-skinned, but among them, then as now, there were a few whose fair hair marked them out for admiring comment, like Homer’s Menelaus, who is called xanthos and looks as if he had brown hair.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“They [, the Greek Gods,] do what they please, and their society is what human society would be if men could follow their desires without risk of failure.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“Pythagoras divided men into three classes: the seekers of knowledge, the seekers of honour, and the seekers of gain, and in comparing life to the Olympic Games, matches the first class with the onlookers, the second with the competing athletes, and the third with the hucksters.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience

“When Plato has inscribed over the door of his Academy the words, ‘Let no man enter who knows no geometry’, he was not being eccentric, but paying his tribute to the Greek conviction that through geometry the world could be known as a rational whole.”
― Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Greek Experience