Status Updates From The Life of Greece (The Sto...

In this masterful work, readers will learn about:

- the siege of Troy- the great city-states of Athens and Sparta- the heroes of Homer's epics- the gods and lesser deities of Mount Olympus- the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle- the life of Alexander the Great

From the days of Crete's vast Aegean empire to the final extirpation of the last remnants of Greek liberty, crushed under the heel of an implacably forward-marching Rome. The dry minutiae of battles and sieges, of tortuous statecraft of tyrant and king, get the minor emphasis in what is preeminently a vivid recreation of Greek culture, brought to the reader through the medium of supple, vigorous prose.

Literature from the literate 5th century Greece. Form and order and beauty! A complex simplicity!

"The most fortunate of men is he who combines a measure of prosperity with scholarship, research, or contemplation; such a man comes closest to the life of the gods" (534).

One can learn that Homer didn’t do a credible job of Penelope—Odysseus’ wife.

Who knew Dido was so rich? Is this the same Dido who couldn’t live without her boyfriend and killed herself on a funeral pyre?

Very interesting! Who knew Dido owned property? The same girl who couldn’t go on in life without her boyfriend and burned herself on a pyre?

"When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near. The rich, afraid that democracy will bleed them, conspire to overthrow it; or some enterprising individual seizes power, promises everything to the poor, surrounds himself with a personal army, kills first his enemies and then his friends 'until he has made a purgation of the state,' and establishes a dictatorship" (520).

"The world of science and philosophy is composed not of individual things, but of Ideas; history, as distinct from biography, is the story of man; biology is the science not of specific organisms, but of life; mathematics is the study not of concrete things but of number, relation, and form independently of things and yet as valid for all things. Philosophy is the science if Ideas" (516).