I see murky visions of other gods and rival magic." That REALLY didn't sound good. "What do you mean?" I asked. "what OTHER GODS?" "I don't know, Sadie. But Egypt has always faced challenges from outside –– magicians from elsewhere, even gods fro...
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw t...
The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and ...
Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model the longer the tether of our slavery? The...
But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from...
We are so accustomed to thinking of European civilization as the vanguard of the world that we forget that for much of human history, the European peninsula was at the receiving end of the miracles of the East. Over the millennia, innovations such as...
I go back and research, say, every reference to the Gorgons, and I find what the classical writers said about them and it's so much richer than you might get in an average Greek mythology text. I feel like an archaeologist - I'm dusting off these thi...
Juno MacGuff: My dad had this weird obsession with Roman or Greek mythology or something and he decided to name me after Zeus' wife. Mark Loring: Zeus' wife? Juno MacGuff: Yeah and I mean Zeus had tons of lays but I'm pretty sure Juno was his only wi...
Dr. Jeremiah Naehring: Did you know that the word 'trauma' comes from the Greek for 'wound'? Hm? And what is the German word for 'dream'? Traum. Ein Traum. Wounds can create monsters, and you, you are wounded, Marshal. And wouldn't you agree, when yo...
Xerxes: You Greeks take pride in your logic. I suggest you employ it. Consider the beautiful land you so vigorously defend. Picture it reduced to ash at my whim! Consider the fate of your women! Spartan King Leonidas: Clearly you don't know our women...
The man who came into the room did not look as though his name was, or could have ever been, Robinson. It might have been Demetrius, or Isaacstein, or Perenna - though not one or the other in particular. He was not definitely Jewish, nor definitely G...
A road trip with your ancient mommy is just what you need after falling off a mountain and having your soul ripped out by your best friend.
The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is f...
For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations, as in ancient Greece in the time of , where there were gods of the sky and the Earth, the thunderstorm, the oceans and the underworld, fire and time and l...
Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.
Saints and mystics, revelations, origin myths, and heroes' journeys, as well as ethical and spiritual guidelines, speak to us from ancient times and far-flung lands and peoples.
Do you realize that a middle-class couple, one archaeologist, one dolls' expert, can't move from their house because ancient spirits are blocking them in? It's a reasonable sort of day's experience, isn't it?
come, ancient and unchanging night Night, born as dethroned king, Night, internally equal to silence, Night. With sequins of volatile starlight Woven on your robe with infinity Come quietly Come fleet-footed Come alone.
Throughout the ancient world, naming was a sacred act. It was the word by which a child was called into his calling. It was the voice of destiny, summoning the child into his future with all its glorious promise.
To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [....] Without cruelty there is no festival.
As far as I was concerned, a little danger of head-shrinking is a small price to pay in return for a people who have remained true to an ancient code.
