Status Updates From 希腊的生活 (文明的故事, #2)

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).

"Compared with the bold advance of the 5th century, & the revolutionary achievements of the 3rd, science in the 4th marked time, & contented itself...with recording its accumulations...The problems of religion, morals, & politics, appearing to be more vital & pressing than the problems of nature, men turned with Socrates from the objective study of the material world to a consideration of the soul & the state" (500).

"The fifth century had modeled nude men & draped women; the fourth...nude women & clothed men. The fifth century had idealized its types, & had cast...the harassed life of man into an emotionless repose; the fourth century tried to realize in stone something of human individuality & feeling...the head & face took on more importance, the body less; the study of character replaced the idolatry of muscle" (494-5).

"Athens had ruined itself by carrying to excess the principles of liberty & equality, by 'training the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty...& license to do what they pleased as happiness.' All men are not equal, & should not be equally free to hold office. The institution of the lot...had lowered disastrously the level of Athenian statesmanship" (487).

"Macedonia, despite the cultural hospitality of Archelaus, was still for the most part a barbarous country of hardy but letterless mountaineers when Philip came to the throne (359); indeed, to the end of its career, though it used Greek as its official language, it contributed no author, or artist, or scientist, or philosopher, to the life of Greece" (475).

"As politics grew more intense, patriotism waned; the bitterness of faction absorbed public energy and devotion, and left little for the city. The constitution of Cleisthenes and the individualism of commerce and philosophy had weakened the family and liberated the individual; now the free individual, as if to avenge the family, turned around and destroyed the state" (469).