Robin Waterfield > Quotes

“Reading Plato should be easy; understanding Plato can be difficult.”
― Robin Waterfield, Republic

“If I am in love, many things about the world, not just the immediate object of my love, seem lovable. To say 'I love X' is somehow really to say 'X inspires love in me', and that love then attaches itself to objects other than X as well. The expansiveness of love is a natural means of ascent between levels.”
― Robin Waterfield

“I will cover minor and major human settlements equally, because most of those which were important in the past have diminished in significance by now, and those which were great in my own time were small in times past. I will mention both equally because I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place.”
― Robin A.H. Waterfield, The Histories

“Philip had arguably created the first nation-state in Europe, with a population of perhaps a million. He would next create Europe’s first empire.”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“Chapter 8”
― Robin Waterfield, Who Was Alexander the Great?

“These enquiries of mine, then, clearly show that Heracles is an ancient god. So I think those Greeks did just right who established two kinds of cult for Heracles, in one of which they sacrifice to Heracles as an immortal god—Olympian Heracles, as he is known—while in the other they make offerings to him as a hero.”
― Robin A.H. Waterfield, The Histories

“The rich wanted to be kaloi k’agathoi, the beautiful and the good—so let them use their graces in the service of the democracy”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“In thanks for their survival, the Rhodians erected a huge bronze statue of Helios—the Sun god, their patron deity—at the entrance to their harbor. With a height of thirty meters (a hundred feet), the Colossus of Rhodes, as it is known, was considered one of the wonders of the world—this was an age that admired gigantism—but it snapped at the knees and fell during an earthquake in 227.”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“The man who has never desired or experienced anything base and bad is not a man of restraint, because he has never had to master anything to compose himself.”
― Robin Waterfield, The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists

“Ptolemy II’s far-famed parade, held in Alexandria perhaps in 278, included eighty thousand soldiers; even Adolf Hitler’s fiftieth birthday in 1939 was celebrated by only fifty thousand”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“Cassander had now killed the mother, wife, and son of Alexander the Great.”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“If a man is guilty of impiety, he is to be tried in the court of the King Archon and made liable to death or confiscation of property. Any citizen who so wishes may bring the prosecution.”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“Socrates is guilty of not acknowledging the gods the city acknowledges, and of introducing other new deities. He is also guilty of subverting the young men of the city. The penalty demanded is death.”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“Aristotle’s residence in Athens became untenable—he had, after all, been Alexander’s tutor—and he fled into exile, saying, with a reference to Socrates’ trial, that he was doing so “lest Athens sin twice against philosophy.”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“Six thousand Thebans died in battle, and another thirty thousand were sold into slavery. Alexander established his authority over the Greeks by an act of singular violence, and any chance he had in the future of trusting them was destroyed along with Thebes.”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“For all their attempts to impose their rule on one another, they succeeded only in losing their ability to rule themselves,” was a late historian’s somber but accurate comment.1 In 338, at the battle of Chaeronea, the Macedonians under Philip II defeated the Greeks and curtailed their cherished freedoms forever.”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“The most accurate criterion by which to judge if a man has good sense is to see whether he resists his heart’s immediate impulses towards pleasure and has proved capable of self-control and self-mastery. But the man who tends to gratify his heart’s impulses is the man who tends towards the worse, not the better, course of action.”
― Robin Waterfield, The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists

“The stoics divided philosophy into three branches: logic, physics, and ethics. Logic covered not only the rules of correct argumentation, but also grammar, linguistics, rhetorical theory, epistemology, and all the tools that might be needed to discover the truth of any matter. Physics was concerned with the nature of the world and the laws that govern it, and so included ontology and theology as well as what we would recognize as physics, astronomy, and cosmology. Ethics was concerned with how to achieve happiness, or how to live a fulfilled and flourishing life as a human being. A stoic sage was supposed to be fully expert in all three aspects.”
― Robin Waterfield, Meditations

“another of Pericles’ associates (a kinsman by marriage), the Athenian musicologist and political theorist Damon of Oa, was ostracized “for seeming to be too much of an intellectual.”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“On the strength of these successes, Alcibiades at last returned to Athens in 408. The Athenian people had short memories:”
― Robin Waterfield, Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

“Although it is uncomfortable to admit it, and many scientists especially try to brush it under the carpet, each of us is a bundle of rational and irrational impulses, and the attempt to divorce the two is doomed to failure...In this sense the Presocratic combination of vision and logic is a precise model for two strands of future development in human intellectual endeavor, which should not perhaps have been allowed to separate from each other as far as they sometimes have. Or rather, the attempt to separate them is ultimately unreal, a violation which leads to abominations such as the rape of the planet and the dehumanizing loss of imagination...As Homer well knew, the gods in some disguise or other never die.”
― Robin Waterfield