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

"...the profoundest question that ethics can ask: is a natural ethic possible? Can morality survive without supernatural belief? Can philosophy, by molding an effective secular moral code, save the civilization which its freedom of thought has threatened to destroy? (372).

"The announcement of the relativity of knowledge did not make men modest, as it should, but disposed every man to consider himself the measure of all things; every clever youth could now feel himself fit to sit in judgment upon the moral code of his people, reject it if he could not understand and approve it, and then be free to rationalize his desires as the virtues of an emancipated soul" (362).

"The age of Pericles resembled our own in the variety and disorder of its thought, and in the challenge that it offered to every traditional standard and belief. But no age has ever rivaled that of Pericles in the number and grandeur of its philosophical ideas, or in the vigor and exuberance with which they were debated" (349).

"The mind of Hippocrates was typical of the Periclean time...imaginative but realistic, averse to mystery & weary of myth, recognizing the value of religion, but struggling to understand the world in rational terms. The influence of the sophists can be felt in...the emancipation of medicine...philosophy so powerfully affected Greek therapy that the science had to fight against philosophical... impediments" (344).

"If Greek sculpture achieved so much in the fifth century, it was in part because each sculptor belonged to a school, and had his place in a long lineage of masters and pupils carrying on the skills of their art, checking the extravagances of independent individualities, encouraging their specific abilities, disciplining them with a sturdy grounding in the technology and achievements of the past..." (321).

"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).

"Demagogues arise who point out to the poor the inequality of human possessions, and conceal from them the inequality of human economic ability; the poor man, face to face with wealth becomes conscious of his poverty, broods over his unrewarded merits, and dreams of perfect states. Bitterer than the war of Greece with Persia, or of Athens with Sparta, is, in all the Greek states the war of class with class" (281).

"The merchants who accompany their goods to all quarters of the Mediterranean come back with changed perspective, & alert & open minds; they bring new ideas & ways, break down ancient taboos & sloth, & replace the familial conservatism of a rural aristocracy with the individualistic & progressive spirit of a mercantile civilization. Here in Athens East & West meet, & jar each other from their ruts" (276).

"This corrupt and incompetent democracy is at least a school: the voter in the Assembly listens to the cleverest men in Athens, the juror in the courts has his wits sharpened by the taking and sifting of evidence, the holder of office is molded by executive responsibility and experience into a deeper maturity of understanding and judgment; 'the city,' says Simonides, 'is the teacher of the man'" (266-7).