For thousands of years humans were oppressed— as some of us still are— by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. Then,...

Youths of the Pellaians and of the Macedonians and of the Hellenic Amphictiony and of the Lakedaimonians and of the Corinthians… and of all the Hellenic peoples, join your fellow-soldiers and entrust yourselves to me,...

Sexual frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must suffer in the passage of life. ‘Nothing in excess,’ professed the ancient Greeks. Why if I spend half the month in healthy scholarship and...

You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the...

… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.

Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror

Holy shadows of the dead, I am not to blame for your cruel and bitter fate, but the accursed rivalry which brought sister nations and brother people to fight one another. I do not feel...

Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one’s knowing: the obscurity of the subject...

Let him submit to me! Only the god of death is so relentless, Death submits to no one—so mortals hate him most of all the gods. Let him bow down to me! I am the...

Few of the many wise apothegms, which have been uttered from the time of the seven sages of Greece to that of poor Richard, have prevented a single foolish action

The person who has trust in divine justice is neither upset when treated unfairly, nor seeks his justice; on the contrary, he accepts the false accusations as if they were true, and does not try...

a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which...

I’m a damsel, I’m in distress, I can handle this. Have a nice day!

But now, as it is, sorrows, unending sorrows must surge within your heart as well—for your own son’s death. Never again will you embrace him stiding home. My spirit rebels—I’ve lost the will to live,...

Greek customs such as wine drinking were regarded as worthy of imitation by other cultures. So the ships that carried Greek wine were carrying Greek civilization, distributing it around the Mediterranean and beyond, one amphora...

I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece’s great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don’t really act as if we believed in...

[T]hose who willed the means and wished the ends are not absolved from guilt by the refusal of reality to match their schemes.

…Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death...

Come then, put away your sword in its sheath, and let us two go up into my bed so that, lying together in the bed of love, we may then have faith and trust in...

Greece’s history in the drachma was an up-and-down history, a roller coaster.

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness...

Holy mother!””Hmph. More like holy father. I’d think you’d know the difference.”-Hephaetus

You, you insolent brazen bitch—you really dare to shake that monstrous spear in Father’s face?

It was her last breakfast with Bapi, her last morning in Greece. In her frenetic bliss that kept her up till dawn, she’d scripted a whole conversation in Greek for her and Bapi to have...

Out in the stone-pile the toad squatted with its glowing jewel-eyes and, maybe, its memories. I don’t know if you’ll admit a toad could have memories. But I don’t know, either, if you’ll admit there...

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century...

I think we fulfilled all the promises we made at the start of the competition. After our win over Portugal in the first match, I said all of Europe would be talking about Greece. Now,...

And his good wife will tear her cheeks in grief, his sons are orphans and he, soaking the soil red with his own blood, he rots away himself—more birds than women flocking round his body!

Greece is not an easy country to do business in.

He said, ‘If I ever win the lottery, I would see the world. I want to go to France and Greece.’ He wanted to go everywhere.

Why should I fear death?If I am, then death is not.If Death is, then I am not.Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?Long time men lay oppressed with slavish...

After our win over Portugal in the first match, I said: `All of Europe will be talking about Greece,’

…and they limp and halt, they’re all wrinkled, drawn, they squint to the side, can’t look you in the eyes, and always bent on duty, trudging after Ruin, maddening, blinding Ruin. But Ruin is strong...

She would have been a better fuck in Greece, maybe. America was a shitty place to fuck.

Gradually the magic of the island [Corfu] settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.

When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,Let him combat for that of his neighbours;Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,And get knocked on the head for his...

I have seen or heard of no other man whom destiny treated with such enmity as it did Philoktetes

Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness—she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one...

And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe. The handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered.

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or...

…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.

It is but sorrow to be wise when wisdom profits not.

Like a girl, a baby running after her mother, begging to be picked up, and she tugs on her skirts, holding her back as she tries to hurry off—all tears, fawning up at her, till...

Life – with or without softener- is hard

Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you –...

The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of...

When the travesties scattered throughout our modern art museums are set alongside the glories of ancient Greece, the Christian heart should swell with pride.

If it were not my purpose to combine barbarian things with things Hellenic, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia...

Do you see those dull stars?” She outlined the formation with her finger.”A pentagram,” whispered Scott.”Yes, but not just any pentagram. Take a look through the telescope.”Scott approached the eyepiece.”They’re not stars!” “What do they...

…but there they lay, sprawled across the field, craved far more by the vultures than by wives.