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

"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).

"Philoctetes asks the old question, 'How justify the ways of Heaven, finding Heaven unjust?' Sophocles answers hopefully that though the moral order of the world may be too subtle for us to understand it, it is there, and right will triumph in the end...Like a good Victorian he is uncertain of his theology, but strong in his moral faith" (398).

"[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).

"...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).