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

"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).

"The Golden Age ended with the death of Socrates. Athens was exhausted in body and soul; only the degradation of character by prolonged war and desperate suffering could explain the ruthless treatment of Melos, the bitter sentence upon Mytilene, the execution of the Arginusae generals, and the sacrifice of Socrates on the alter of a dying faith. All the foundations of Athenian life were disordered..." (455).

"Under [Pericles] Athens had reached her zenith; but because that height had been attained in part through the wealth of an unwilling Confederacy, and through a power that invited almost universal hostility, the Golden Age was unsound in its foundations and was doomed to disaster when Athenian statesmanship failed in the strategy of peace" (442).

"Form & order are the essence of the classic style...the typical Greek writer, like the Greek artist, is never satisfied with mere expression, but longs to give form & beauty to his material. He cuts his matter down to brevity, rearranges it into clarity, transforms it into a complex simplicity...This persistent effort to subordinate fancy to reason is the dominant quality of the Greek mind..." (436).

"If comedy throughout the fifth century was hostile to democracy, it was partly because poets like money and the aristocracy was rich, but chiefly because the function of Greek comedy was to amuse with criticism, and the democratic party was in power" (421).

"...it would be foolish to judge Euripides chiefly as a playwright; his ruling interest is...philosophical inquiry & political reform. He is the son of the Sophists, the poet of the Enlightenment, the representative of the radical younger generation that laughed at the old myths, flirted with socialism, & called for a new social order in which there should be less exploitation of man by man..." (413).

"...Aeschylus cleared the way & set the forms for Greek drama with his harsh verse & stern philosophy, Sophocles fashioned the art with measured music & placid wisdom, & Euripides completed the development in works of passionate feeling & turbulent doubt. Aeschylus was a preacher of almost Hebraic intensity; Sophocles was a 'classic' artist clinging to a broken faith; Euripides was a romantic poet..." (401).

"[In the Oresteia] is a breadth of conception, a unity of thought...a power of dramatic development, an understanding of character, & a splendor of style which in their sum we shall not find again before Shakespeare...these chorals are supreme in their kind, full of grandeur & tenderness, eloquent with their plea for a new religion of forgiveness, & for the virtues of a political order that was passing away" (390).

"Pindar was not popular in his lifetime, and for some centuries yet he will continue to enjoy the lifeless immortality of those writers whom all men praise and no one reads. While the world was moving forward he asked it to sand still and it left him so far behind that though younger than Aeschylus he seems older than Alcman" (377).