Count Belisarius Quotes

“Once two clever Athenian policemen were pursuing a Theban thief towards the city boundaries when they came upon a sign: ‘The Sign of the Grape. Thebans made welcome.’ One said: ‘He will have taken refuge here.’
‘No,’ cried the other, ‘this is just the place where he will expect us to look for him.’ ‘Exactly,’ rejoined the first, ‘so he will have decided to outwit us by entering.’ They therefore searched the place thoroughly. Meanwhile the Theban thief, who could not read, had run on to safety across the boundary.”
― Robert Graves, Count Belisarius

“Malthus's school was in the centre of the town of Adrianople, and was not one of those monkish schools where education is miserably limited to the bread and water of the Holy Scriptures. Bread is good and water is good, but the bodily malnutrition that may be observed in prisoners or poor peasants who are reduced to this diet has its counterpart in the spiritual malnutrition of certain clerics. These can recite the genealogy of King David of the Jews as far back as Deucalion's Flood, and behind the Flood to Adam, without a mistake, or can repeat whole chapters of the Epistles of Saint Paul as fluently as if they were poems written in metre; but in all other respects are as ignorant as fish or birds.”
― Robert Graves, Count Belisarius

“Once two clever Athenian policemen were pursuing a Theban thief towards the city boundaries when they came upon a sign: ‘The Sign of the Grape. Thebans made welcome.’ One said: ‘He will have taken refuge here.’ ‘No,’ cried the other, ‘this is just the place where he will expect us to look for him.’ ‘Exactly,’ rejoined the first, ‘so he will have decided to outwit us by entering.’ They therefore searched the place thoroughly. Meanwhile the Theban thief, who could not read, had run on to safety across the boundary.”
― Robert Graves, Count Belisarius

“All sorts of explanations were given for the ravages of Porphyrios (the whale). The Orthodox held that he was sent as a punishment for the sin of Monophysitism, but the Monophysites said that this could not be so as he struck at Orthodox and Monophysites alike...Bishops of both opinions had been sent to preach to him from the shore and texts floated down the current to him, written on strips of paper - conjuring him in the name of the Trinity to return to the ocean from whence he came. But Porphyrios was unlettered and unbaptised, and paid no attention.”
― Robert Graves, Count Belisarius

“have indeed seldom known a eunuch who could confess truly to having no tender feelings for women’s hands and eyes and feet and hair—oh, but especially for their hair! I know many a rich and learned eunuch who spends his leisure time, wantonly and shamefully, in the slow combing of the hair of some frivolous woman of his household! You may laugh, my sisters, but you know it is so, and it is a great sin that you are committing if you pander thus to the ineffectual lusts of the castrated. Angels are no less subject to temptation than eunuchs: the Arch-Fiend himself was an angel who fell from Grace—was it perhaps partly from delight in the hair of some daughter of Earth? Out”
― Robert Graves, Count Belisarius

“Now, in Constantinople, there is a square called the Square of Brotherly Love, with a fine group of statuary on a tall pedestal commemorating the fraternal devotion of the sons of the Emperor Constantine, who subsequently destroyed one another without mercy.”
― Robert Graves, Count Belisarius