"If we could save one word from Greek civilization, it would have to be aretē, excellence. The aristocrats gave themselves their name, the aristoi . It is an open question whether anyone considered himself a member of the kakoi . though this put-down prances everywhere in the surviving literature. ...that shame—the paralyzing fear of being numbered among the kakoi—is the hidden engine that ran Greek life."

“No longer did philosophers aspire to the deep spiritual insights and broad moral vision of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They divided into conflicting schools and wandered through the Greco-Roman world as permanent immigrants, picking up tutoring jobs as they could. ...the upshot was a debased intellectual climate, fragmented and agnostic.”

“This hamartia is not incidental to Oedipus but is, rather, essential to his admirable character. He is strong, courageous, self-possessed, taking charge and striding boldly where others fear to go—the very qualities that foretell his undoing.”

“Though the poems of Homer and his successors were recorded, there will be no Greek reading public till we reach the fifth century B.C. ...There was instead, a hearing public that formed responsive audiences at festivals and contests.”

“Beowulf grappling with the monstors was a type of Christ grappling with Satan.”

“These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society always at war—"the father of all, the king of all," "always existing by nature," as the Greek philosophers expressed it.”

“The myths were... attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable.”