sophia’s Reviews > The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others > Status Update

omg guys thucydides won the father of historiography battle… sorry xenophon 😣

“What he must have meant to claim, therefore, is that what came to Greece from Egypt were the gods themselves, or at any rate the concept of them… Put differently, the Egyptians had invented initially the (or a) pantheon, which the Greeks had then much later borrowed and literally transfigured and transformed.”

me when the book on greek cultural polarity’s final chapter is titled knowing your place: gods vs mortals

“Their vocabulary of sanctity and piety revolved rather around concepts of appropriateness and order…there was no room in their mental world for religion ‘because to them everything participated in divinity, everything is actually, not symbolically divine’”

“The force of Herodotus' moral condemnation is concentrated into the concessive phrase 'although they were related by blood' (I. 15 I). It is no surprise to find the notion that Greeks should not enslave their fellow Greeks expressed by the author of the famous persuasive definition of Greekness” lmao

once again aristotle’s gorgeously unashamed sexism hits me in the face like a wet fish. women’s life in ancient greece & rome come save me

“Some barbarians, in other words, could on occasion be represented as honorary Greeks, without seriously tarnishing or denting the normal and normative Greek image of the barbarian other.”

would have been so cool to read some of this at the louvre

“Thus Pandora and Athena, so far from standing shoulder to shoulder for femininity, might even be construed as standing for opposed gender ideals.”

nothing so deliciously pretentious as naming your chapters “entr’acte”

“Indeed, such was the enduring power of myth that … even stern old Aristotle, who had once derogatorily labelled Herodotus the 'myth-teller' (muthologos), found himself confessing willy-nilly late in life that 'the more I am a self er and a loner, the more fond have I become of muthoi'