Perhaps this man is as well born as any, second to no son of an ancient house. Yet now his life lacks everything, and he makes his bed without neighbors or with spotted shaggy beasts for neighbors. His thoughts are set continually on pain and hunger. He cries out in his wretchedness; there is only a blabbering echo, that comes from the distance speeding from his bitter crying. There is […]
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“Ajax” by Sophocles
Quotes of Characters: Athena Who was more full of foresight than this man [Ajax], Or abler, do you think, to act with judgment? Odysseus None that I know of. Yet I pity His wretchedness, though he is my enemy, For the terrible yoke of blindness that is on him. I think of him, yet also of myself; For I see the true state of all us that live– We are […]
Read more“Iphigenia in Tauris” by Euripides
Iphigenia “From the beginning my fate was unhappy, from that first night of my mother’s marriage; from the beginning the Fates attendant on my birth directed a hard upbringing for me, wooed by Hellenes, the first-born child in the home, whom the unhappy daughter of Leda, by my father’s fault, bore as a victim and a sacrifice not joyful, she brought me up as an offering. … My father too, […]
Read more“Ion” by Euripides
Apollo raped Creusa, a young princess of Athens, who gave birth to Ion in secret and in shame and fear exposed the infant to die. Apollo arranged to have the baby brought to his temple in Delphi and raised by his priestess. Creusa, now married to Xuthus but remained childless, came to Delphi with her husband to inquire of the oracle. While writing an intriguing story of love, abandonment, treachery, […]
Read more“Helen” by Euripides
The Real Cause of the Trojan War Hera, indignant at not defeating the goddesses, made an airy nothing of Helen’s marriage with Paris; she gave to the son of King Priam not Helen, but an image, alive and breathing, that she fashioned out of the sky and made to look like Helen; and Paris thinks he has Helen—an idle fancy, for he doesn’t have her. And in turn the plans […]
Read more“Brutus, Orator” by Cicero
“As reason is the glory of man, so the lamp of reason is eloquence.” The Origin and History of Oratory In “Brutus“, Cicero traces the origin and history of oratory in ancient Greece and Rome, and provides a concise and astute critique of various classes of individual orators, ranking their achievements in the five components of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, diction/expression, action/delivery and memory). Demosthenes is considered the greatest among the […]
Read more“Homeric Hymns” by Anonymous
The Art of the Lyre “Whoso with wit and wisdom enquires of it cunningly, him it teaches through its sound all manner of things that delight the mind, being easily played with gentle familiarities, for it abhors toilsome drudgery; but whoso in ignorance enquires of it violently, to him it chatters mere vanity and foolishness.” The Contest of Homer and Hesiod Hesiod: ‘Homer, son of Meles, if indeed the Muses, […]
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