Introducing the Ancient Greeks Quotes

“I do not deny that the Greeks acted as a conduit for other ancient peoples’ achievements. But to function successfully as a conduit, channel, or intermediary is in itself to perform an exceptional role.”
― Edith Hall, The Ancient Greeks: Ten Ways They Shaped the Modern World

“The Babylonians had known about Pythagoras’s theorem centuries before Pythagoras was born. The”
― Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

“The Open Society of Athens In democratic Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, Greek civilization reached the apex of creativity. Perhaps alone among the Greek communities studied in this book, the classical Athenians demonstrated their ample endowment with every one of the ten characteristics that defined the ancient Greek mind-set. They were superb sailors, insatiably curious, and unusually suspicious of individuals with any kind of power. They were deeply competitive, masters of the spoken word, enjoyed laughing so much that they institutionalized comic theater, and were addicted to pleasurable pastimes. Yet the feature of the Athenian character that underlies every aspect of their collective achievement is undoubtedly their openness—to innovation, to adopting ideas from outside, and to self-expression.”
― Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

“he dislikes “a boy who sleeps around.”
― Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

“The openness of Athens created by the democracy, he had seen, threatened to destabilize the democracy itself.”
― Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

“Odysseus is one of antiquity’s few exclusively heterosexual heroes.”
― Edith Hall, Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind