I will screen my soul From reach of Pallas’ grievous wrath.
And whoever places a friend above the good of his own country, he is nothing.
The mind convicts itself in advance, when scoundrels are up to no good, plotting in the dark. Oh but I hate it more when a traitor, caught red-handed, tries to glorify his crimes.
For dullards know not goodness in their hand, Nor prize the jewel till ’tis cast away.
The most powerful man in nothing without self-control and mental discipline.
Mortal man must always look to his ending. And none can be called happy until that day when he carries his happiness down to the grave in peace.” – Sophocles.
Tis hard for power to observe each pious rule.
For you have confused the upper and lower worlds. You have thrust the child of this world into living night, You have kept from the gods below the child that is theirs. The one on a grave before her death, the other, Dead, denied the grave. This is your crime.
Who would choose uneasy dreams to don a crown when all the kingly sway can be enjoyed without?
Fate will never punish a man for returning harm first done to him. Deceit matched by deceit, the tables turned: treachery pays you back in pain, not kindness.
I’ve never known an honest man who can plead so well for any plea whatever.
All things the long and countless years first draw from darkness, then bury from light; and there is nothing for which man may not look. The dreaded oath is vanquished, and the stubborn will.
Sophocles had his full share of such rewards, for we have evidence that he won the first prize at the Dionysia eighteen times, and it is recorded that he never won the third prize.
But this material offered more than variety of dramatic incident. These myths were the only national memory of the remote past, of a time before the Greeks invented the alphabet, so that, shifting and changing though they might be, they had the authority, for the audience, of what we call history.
A herdsman, were you? A vagabond, scraping for wages? MESSENGER: Your savior too, my son, in your worst hour.
Greece and Poverty,” said the historian Herodotus, “have always been bedfellows”;.
The Greeks, who gave us history, philosophy and political science, never managed to solve the problems posed by their political disunity;.
When the Greek mercenaries of Xenophon’s Anabasis, after months of marching and fighting in the mountains of Turkey, finally reached the Black Sea, one of them said, thankfully, “Now I can go home like Odysseus, flat on my back.
Reserved for the priest of Dionysus.
Dionysus is the life-spirit of all green vegetation – ivy, pine tree and especially the vine; he is, in Dylan Thomas’ phrase, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.