Greeks were the first people to make coherent narratives, a literature even, of their gods, monsters, and heroes.
POLYHYMNIA was the Muse of hymns, of sacred music, dance, poetry, and rhetoric as well as – slightly randomly one might think – agriculture, pantomime, geometry, and meditation. I suppose today we would call her “the Muse of mindfulness.
Here Phaeton lies who in the sun-god’s chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.
We are playing the most artistic and beautiful game man ever devised. Of course I’ll cunting well cheat.
Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once.
It is the fate of the young never to learn,” the centaur sighed. “I suppose it is arrogance and unwavering self-belief that propels them to their triumphs, just as surely as it is arrogance and unwavering self-belief that unseats them and sends them plummeting to their ends.
Absolutely,’ lies Zeus, who has, in common with us all, a horror of hearing the details of anyone else’s dreams.
Wicked men never learn, for wicked men have no interest in myths, legends and stories. If they had they would learn from them and triumph, so we must be glad of their ignorance and dullness of wits.
You cannot control others if you cannot control yourself. Those who most understand their own limitations have the fewest.
Together Perseus and Andromeda look over their unruly shower of meteor children, the PERSEIDS, whom we can still watch showing off in the night sky once a year.
Oh, to be in England, now that England’s gone. This World Service, this little bakelite gateway into the world of Sidney Box, Charters and Caldecott, Mazawattee tea, Kennedy’s Latin Primer and dark, glistening streets. An.
Have faith in what music can do.
As Yoda had expressed it a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: “Do. Or do not. There is no try.
Know this: we are a long time dead. Life may be short, but it is sweet.”53.
But when the day came, Admetus had a radical change of heart. He realized how much he loved Alcestis and how much less of a life he would have without her. In fact, he now saw that a long and endless existence alone would be worse than death.
The poet Hesiod says of Eurynome, in a fragment from the eighth century BC: “A marvelous scent rose from her silvern raiment as she moved, and beauty was wafted from her eyes.” No one has ever said anything as wonderful as that about me.
For nine years the Trojan War was more plunder than thunder.
I will never forget my puzzlement when, in a vocabulary list, it presented the verb thaumazo, offering this helpful thought: “thaumazo, I wonder, or marvel at. This is easily remembered by thinking of the English word ‘thaumaturge.’” And I suppose that was true, since I’ve never forgotten it.
We have 18 or 19 plays by Euripides, for example, yet he is known to have written almost 100. Only 7 of Aeschylus’s 80 remain, while just 7 plays of Sophocles have come down to us out of 120 known titles. Almost every character you come across when reading the Greek myths had a play about them written by one, other, or all three of the great Athenian masters. The loss of so many of their works might be regarded as the greatest Greek tragedy of them all.
How strange is our mortal zest for fame. Perhaps it is the only way humans can be gods. We achieve immortality not through ambrosia and ichor but through history and reputation. Through statues and epic song.