The Birth of Classical Europe Quotes

“In 335 BC, the year before his crossing into Asia, the young Alexander the Great was met by an embassy from the Danubian Celts, seeking an alliance with Macedon. When the king asked the Celts to name their greatest fear, hoping that they would say ‘You’, they replied that the only thing they feared was the sky falling on their heads. There is something strangely thrilling about this fleeting encounter between Celtic migrants from the forests of northern Europe and the future conqueror of India, as if two great currents of history had touched for an instant, and parted again.”
― Simon Price, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine

“Point-for-point comparisons between Bronze Age and Classical religions ignore systemic differences between the religious systems of the two periods. The two religious systems are embedded in entirely different social and political settings, and even the similarity of some names does not imply that those deities have the same meanings in both periods.”
― Simon Price, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine

“On the basis of this personal investigation, Posidonius wrote an extensive ethnography of the Gauls. He noted the un-Mediterranean houses of the Gauls (the account quoted at the start of this chapter was probably derived from his work). Posidonius was initially shocked by the widespread custom of nailing the heads of defeated enemies to their houses, but noted rather honestly that he gradually became accustomed to it.”
― Simon Price, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine

“The deities of the great city were summoned to Rome, and Carthage was ‘devoted’ to the gods of the underworld. This infernal dedication of the city had remote precedent in the treatment of some towns in Italy, including Veii, but it had no precedent outside Italy. The city walls were dismantled, roofs removed, making the buildings unusable, and the population sold into slavery. Spoil that the Carthaginians had removed from Akragas in Sicily in 405 BC was restored to its rightful owners. There is a widespread modern story that in addition salt was ploughed into Carthage’s soil to make it infertile, but that story was simply invented by a historian writing in 1930.”
― Simon Price, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine

“Many wish to believe that there was a Trojan War, so powerful is the hold of Homer on our imaginations. As a result, people do not always pause sufficiently to ask what sort of work the Iliad is, nor what might count as good archaeological evidence for a Trojan War. The Iliad, composed five hundred years after the events it purports to describe, is an imaginative creation of a world mostly very different from the contemporary world of the poet. It cannot be treated as a work of history.”
― Simon Price, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine

“The Ionian invaders killed all the males they captured, marrying their wives and daughters; these forced marriages were said to be the origin of a Milesian law which forbade women to sit at table with their husbands or to address them by name.”
― Simon Price, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine

“the seventh-century biblical narratives transformed a slow, peaceful process into a something more dramatic, in order to stress the importance of the obedience of Israel to the will of Yahweh.”
― Simon Price, The Birth of Classical Europe: A History from Troy to Augustine