Robin Lane Fox > Quotes

“Excavations at Ai Khanoum on the northern border of modern Afghanistan have produced great quantities of Greek inscriptions and even the remnants of a philosophical treatise originally on papyrus. One of the most interesting is the base of a dedication by one Klearchos, perhaps the known student of Aristotle, that records his bringing to this new Greek city, Alexandria on the Oxus, the traditional maxims from the shrine of Apollo at Delphi concerning the five ages of man:

In childhood, seemliness
In youth, self-control
In middle age, justice
In old age, wise council
In death, painlessness”
― Robin Lane Fox

“I wish I was here, or I wish I was there...' In our age of global travel we are all potential heirs to the simile of Hera's flight.”
― Robin Lane Fox, Travelling Heroes

“Their (the Greeks)encounters with foreign were not coloured by the belief that such people's religion was false and inferior, the belief that thinges Christians, Muslims, Hindus or atheist nowadays”
― Robin Lane Fox, Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer

“Good governance, Nicias says, is when ‘someone benefits his country as much as possible or does it no willing harm.”
― Robin Lane Fox, The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates

“Those who idealize the past tend not to understand it: restoration kills it with kindness.”
― Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome

“From Death alone man will not procure a refuge, but from diseases hard to resist he has devised escapes’.16”
― Robin Lane Fox, The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates

“Even nowadays, the southern crook of the modern Turkish coast, the most glorious stretch of country which can still boast Greek ruins, is a challenge to the traveller. The highlands north of Xanthus, the twisting coast roads of Lycia, the citadels of the longlived Lycian league or the Pamphylian river plains, all these sites can still be visited, unspoilt and imposing in early summer but extremely daunting in the winter months. Though there are tracks and passes which remain open throughout the snows, they are enough to deceive the resident shepherds, whereas Alexander had no maps, no supply train, no fleet to support his coastal advance; his treasure was too heavy to accompany his travels and hence he relied for army pay and presents on whatever moneys he could exact from the towns on his way. Throughout he must have been very short of food.”
― Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great

“blameless Ethiopians’. They are people with burnt faces, dark-skinned therefore, but they are not the Ethiopians of modern repute: the Odyssey divides them between the eastern and western edges of the world.15 Being blameless, they are able to entertain the gods to a banquet face to face: for Homer indeed, dark lives matter.”
― Robin Lane Fox, Homer and His Iliad