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

"The lesson of Ptolemaic socialism is that even a government may exploit. Under the first two Ptolemies the system worked reasonably well; great engineering enterprises were completed, agriculture was improved, marketing was brought into order...there was a rapid deterioration in the quality of the kings; they ate & drank & mated, & allowed the administration of the system to all into the hands of rascals" (596).

"This imposition of Geek civilization upon the Near East is one of the startling phenomena of ancient history; no change so swift...had ever been seen in Asia...Never before...had a civilization achieved so wide a spread & such complex unity amid so man diverse environments. For a century western Asia belonged to Europe. The way was prepared for the Pax Romana, & the embracing synthesis of Christendom" (576-7).

"Classic Greek civilization had been built upon a patriotic devotion to the city-state, and classic morality, though rooted in folkways rather than in faith, had been powerfully reinforced by supernatural belief. But now neither faith nor patriotism survived in the educated Greek; civic frontiers had been erased by empires; and the growth of knowledge had secularized morals, marriage, parentage, and law" (566).

"When one faction won it exiled the other and confiscated its goods; when the exiles returned to power they revenged themselves in kind, and slaughtered their enemies; imagine the stability of an economic system subject to such decerebrations and disturbances. Some ancient Greek cities were so devastated by class strife that industry and men fled from them, grass grew in the streets, cattle came there to graze" (64).

"The city-state had proved incapable of solving the problems of government; it had failed to preserve order within, and defense without; despite the appeals of Gorgias, Isocrates, and Plato for some Dorian discipline to tame Ionian freedom, it had discovered no way of reconciling local autonomy with national stability and power; and its love of liberty had seldom interfered with its passion for empire" (554).

"Amid all the excitement and chaos of his campaigns he kept clearly at the center of his thoughts the great purpose that even his death would not defeat: the unification of all the eastern Mediterranean world into one cultural whole, dominated and elevated by the expanding civilization of Greece" (542).

"The most fortunate of men is he who combines a measure of prosperity with scholarship, research, or contemplation; such a man comes closest to the life of the gods" (534).

"When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near. The rich, afraid that democracy will bleed them, conspire to overthrow it; or some enterprising individual seizes power, promises everything to the poor, surrounds himself with a personal army, kills first his enemies and then his friends 'until he has made a purgation of the state,' and establishes a dictatorship" (520).

"The world of science and philosophy is composed not of individual things, but of Ideas; history, as distinct from biography, is the story of man; biology is the science not of specific organisms, but of life; mathematics is the study not of concrete things but of number, relation, and form independently of things and yet as valid for all things. Philosophy is the science if Ideas" (516).

"Compared with the bold advance of the 5th century, & the revolutionary achievements of the 3rd, science in the 4th marked time, & contented itself...with recording its accumulations...The problems of religion, morals, & politics, appearing to be more vital & pressing than the problems of nature, men turned with Socrates from the objective study of the material world to a consideration of the soul & the state" (500).