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Entry type: Book Call Number: 3455 Barcode: 31290036142073
  • Publication Date

    1954

  • Place of Publication

    Middlesex

  • Book-plate

    No

  • Edition

    Reprint (first published 1951)

  • Number of Pages

    256

  • Publication Info

    softcover

Copy specific notes

Bookplate inserted; various highlights of passages in text made in pen and pencil throughout, including: [p. 11] “This certainly is what an ancient Greek would put first among his countrymen’s discoveries, that they had found out the best way to live.”; [p. 62] “beauty, like glory, must be sought, though the price be tears and destruction. Is this not at the very centre of the whole legend of the Trojan War? For its hero, Achilles, the very perfection of Greek chivalry, was given precisely this choice by the gods. They offered him a long life with mediocrity, or glory with an early death. Whoever first made this myth expressed in it the essence not only of Greek thought but also of Greek history.”; [p. 67] “The modern writer is sometimes heard to speak with splendid scorn of ‘those pretty Greek states, with their interminable quarrels’. Quite so; Plataea, Sicyon, Aegina and the rest are petty, compared with modern states. The Earth itself is petty, compared with Jupiter – but then, the atmosphere of Jupiter is mainly ammonia, and that makes a difference. We do not like breathing ammonia – and the Greeks would not much have liked breathing the atmosphere of the vast modern State. They knew of one such, the Persian Empire – and thought it very suitable, for barbarians. Difference of scale, when it is great enough, amounts to difference of kind.”; [p. 70] “The ironies of history are many and bitter […] Therefore this lively and intelligent Greek people was allowed to live under some centuries allowed to live under the apparently absurd system which suited and developed its genius instead of becoming absorbed in the dull mass of a large empire, which would have smothered its spiritual growth, and made it what it afterwards became, a race of brilliant individuals and opportunists.”; [p. 71] “The actual business of governing might be entrusted to a monarch, acting in the name of all according to traditional usages, or to the heads of certain noble families, or to a council of citizens owning so much property, or to all the citizens.”; [p. 73] “Therefore to say ‘it is everyone’s duty to help the polis’ was not to express a fine sentiment but to speak the plainest and most urgent common sense. Public affairs had an immediacy and a concreteness which they cannot possibly have for us.”; [p. 124] “There is the astonishing beauty of the Parthenon – in size so modest, only 220 feet long: in impression so overwhelming; in photographs, only another Greek temple, but in reality the most thrilling building there is.”; [p. 133] “Athens, we know, was a slave-owning state: we confidently expect therefore that the Parthenon and the Erechtheum and the rest were each built by a contractor using teams of slaves. On reflection, it is perhaps rather foolish to suppose that architecture and sculpture of this quality – so grave, so humane, so intelligent – should be created by slaveowners: these buildings are so different from the Pyramids. And we find that in fact nothing of the sort was done, but something else just as incredible. These buildings were erected through thousands of separate contracts: one citizen with one slave contracts to bring ten cartloads of marble from Pentelicus; or a citizen employing two Athenians and owning three slaves contracts for the fluting of one column.”

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