The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 B.C. Quotes

“The vital roles that schema and pattern play in Archaic art can be considered symptoms of a larger Greek demand for regularity and order which extends beyond the realms of representational art into architecture, poetry, and philosophy and beyond the limits of the Archaic period itself. The language of Homer is highly ordered: its formulae were originally patterns for the ear. Hesiod's Theogony imposes patterns on gods and heroes by putting each in his genealogical place, and his Works and Days moves from a particular instance of injustice to universal truths and patterns of human activity. Archaic poetry in general is full of literary schemata or conventions, and Archaic poets express thought and meaning through the harmony of opposites. Archilochos detected a rhysmos (pattern) even in the rise and fall of human fortunes. The philosophers of Miletos attempted to fit nature to preconceived patterns and so to extract order from apparent chaos. Pythagoras (or his followers) ordered the world through number. The urge to impose kosmos (order) on the nature of things is not peculiar to the Archaic mind – in Xenophon's Oikonomikos Sokrates reports that all things, even pots and pans, look more beautiful when they are kept in order, and even the space between them looks beautiful – but is nonetheless particularly characteristic of it.”
― Jeffrey M. Hurwit, The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 B.C.