The Greeks Quotes

“It is an interesting, though idle, speculation, what would be the effect on us if all our reformers, revolutionaries, planners, politicians, and life-arrangers in general were soaked in Homer from their youth up, like the Greeks. They might realize that on the happy day when there is a refrigerator in every home, and two in none, when we all have the opportunity of working for the common good (whatever that is), when Common Man (whoever he is) is triumphant, though not improved--that men will still come and go like the generations of leaves in the forest; that he will still be weak, and the gods strong and incalculable; that the quality of a man matters more than his achievement; that violence and recklessness will still lead to disaster, and that this will fall on the innocent as well as on the guilty.”
― H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks

“...unless our standards of civilization are comfort and contraptions, Athens from (say) 480 to 380 was clearly the most civilized society that has yet existed.”
― H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks

“Typical of the limitations, even the contradictions of life, is the fact that what is most worth having can often only be had at the peril of life itself.”
― H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks

“The city-state was the means by which the Greek consciously strove to make the life both of the community and of the individual more excellent than it was before.”
― H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks

“Plato utterly condemns the poets for publishing trivial, false and indeed wicked stories about the gods, such as that they fight with each other, or are overcome by emotions like grief, anger, mirth. Reluctantly, he will not allow Homer in his Republic, and he is very angry with the tragic poets for spreading unworthy ideas of the Deity.

It may well be that there were inferior tragic poets who deserved Plato's strictures, but so far as concerns the tragic poets whom we know, Plato's attack is absurd. It is the attack of a severely intellectual philosopher who was also more of a poet than most poets have contrived to be; one who invented some of the profoundest and most beautiful of Greek myths. 'There is a long-standing quarrel', says Plato, 'between philosophy and poetry.' So there was, on the part of the philosophers, and most of all in Plato's own soul.”
― H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks

“Hence, no doubt, the startling difference between the Homeric and the classical Greek diet; in Homer, the heroes eat an ox every two or three hundred verses, and to eat fish is a token of extreme destitution; in classical times fish was a luxury, and meat almost unknown.”
― H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks