Ancient World Quotes

“Truth-telling is a delicate dance between exposure and imposture, a dance whose steps I’m beginning to learn. When Theodora found me in the scriptorium, I was twenty-one. Still young, but I’d seen enough to feel old.”
― Carol Strickland, The Eagle and the Swan

“When you fear nothing, you have nothing to fear”
― S.F. Chandler, We the Great Are Misthought

“Snakes in the ancient world, because of their skin-shedding ability, often symbolized immortality or eternal youth.”
― Alice K. Turner, The History of Hell

“Classics is a subject that exists in that gap between us and the word of the Greeks and Romans. The questions raised by Classics are the questions raised by our distance from 'their' world, and at the same time by our closeness to it, and its familiarity to us. In our museums, in our literature, languages, culture, and ways of thinking. The aim of Classics is not only to discover or uncover the ancient world (though that is part of it, as the rediscovery of Bassae, or the excavation of the furthest outposts of the Roman empire on the Scottish borders, shows). Its aim is to also define and debate our relationship to that world.”
― Mary Beard, Classics: A Very Short Introduction

“Ancient historians lied. Modern historians play Chinese whispers. Now, it's time to tell you the true story of Lamia and her Knight - from the Garden of Eden to Ancient Rome.”
― Anna Canić

“Far, far out on the open sea a platform of stone held firm against the tossing waves. At first sight, it appeared as nothing out of the ordinary, other than that it lay in the middle of nowhere.
That was the view on the surface. Beneath the water existed an entirely alien world.”
― Jennifer McKeithen, Atlantis: On the Shores of Forever

“Wolf man, I have warned you. I will turn those things you call Maenads on you. Perhaps getting your limbs ripped off will bring you to your senses.”
― Kelley Heckart, The Wolf Queen

“We wouldn't expect to gather crucial information about modern cultures from their knives, forks, hammers, and screwdrivers, so why should we suddenly set different standards when we try to understand the ancient world?”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Nobody has ever been so much themselves over a span of three thousand years as the ancient Egyptians,”
― Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

“CLEOPATRA SPEAKS:
I conquered Caesar
yet was slain by Rome
Last true Queen of Egypt

It is not Antony
I speak from cold lips

I whisper, Ô mighty Egypt
Ô mighty Nile
into your glory, I give my spirit”
― Ramon William Ravenswood, Icons Speak