Jeff Ragan’s Reviews > The Story of Civilization, Volume 2: The Life of Greece > Status Update

"All the world knows that this political atomism brought to Hellas many a tragedy of fraternal strife. Because Ionia was unable to unite for defense it fell subject to Persia; because Greece, despite confederacies and leagues, was unable to stand together, the freedom which it idolized was in the end destroyed. And yet Greece would have been impossible without the city-state" (204).

""By the time of the Periclean Enlightenment the most vigorous element in Greek religion was the mystery. In the Greek sense a mystery was a secret ceremony in which sacred symbols were revealed, symbolic rites were performed, and only initiates were the worshipers. Usually the rites represented or commemorated, in semidramatic form, the suffering, death, and resurrection of a god..." (188).

"Religion divided the cities as much as it united them. Under the polite and general worship of the remote Olympians lay the intenser cults of local deities and powers who served no vassalage to Zeus. Tribal and political separatism nourished polytheism, and made monotheism impossible" (175).

"Aristotle described the constitutional history of 158 Greek city-states...In the colonies, rather than on the mainland, were born Greek poetry and prose, mathematics and metaphysics, oratory and history. Without them, and the thousand absorbing tentacles which they stretched out into the old world, Greek civilization, the most precious product in history, might never have been" (174).

"The Greek invaders took possession of this coastal region by the ruthless law of colonial expansion - that natural resources unexploited by the native population will draw in, by a kind of chemical attraction, some other people to exploit them and pour them into the commerce and usage of the world" (159).

"The orbit of empire in east & north had come full turn...Greek enterprise had transformed the islands of the Aegean & the coasts of Asia Minor, the Hellespont, the Black Sea, Macedonia, & Thrace into a busy network of Hellenized cities, throbbing with agriculture, industry, trade, politics...It only remained to conquer another Greece in the West, & build a bridge between ancient Hellas & the modern world" (158).

"Harmony is not an ending of conflict, it is a tension in which neither element definitely wins, but both function indispensably (like the radicalism of youth & the conservatism of old age). The struggle for existence is necessary in order that the better may be separated from the worse...the competition of individuals...& empires constitutes nature's supreme court, from whose verdict there is no appeal" (147).

"The real creators of Greek culture were not the Greeks of what we now call Greece, but those who fled before the conquering Dorians, fought desperately for a foothold on foreign shores, & there, out of their Mycenaean memories & their amazing energy, made the art & science, the philosophy & poetry that, long before Marathon, placed them in the forefront of the Western World" (127).

"When the greatest empire of the age decided to destroy these scattered cities called Greece, or to lay them under tribute to the Great King, it forgot that in Attica it would be opposed by men who owned the soil that they tilled, and who ruled the state that governed them. It was fortunate for Greece, and for Europe, that Cleisthenes completed his work, and Solon's, twelve years before Marathon" (126).

"The barrenness of the soil, the nearness of the coast, the abundance of harbors lured the people of Attica into trade; their courage and inventiveness won for them the markets of the Aegean; and out of that commercial empire came the wealth, the power, and the culture of Athens in the Periclean age" (109).