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

"In morality, as in alphabet, measures...music, astronomy, & mystic cults, classic Athens seems more Oriental than European. The physical basis of love is accepted frankly by both sexes; the love philters that anxious ladies brew for negligent men have no merely Platonic aim. Premarital chastity is required of respectable women, but among unmarried men...there are few moral restraints upon desire" (299).

"War of some kind - of city against city or of class against class - is a normal condition in Hellas. In this way the Greece that defeated the King of Kings turns upon itself, Greek meets Greek in a thousand battles, and in the course of a century after Marathon the most brilliant civilization in history consumes itself in a prolonged national suicide" (296).