Thomas Cahill - Century Quotes

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The Greek world will continue in almost constant cultural revolution from the time of Homer to the day Rome brings Greece to its knees in the second century B. C.... the longest trajectory of fluid development in any society known to history.

Thomas Cahill
Unfortunately, much of the post-Homeric poetry—called lyric poetry because it was usually sung to a lyre—was lost in the upheavals of subsequent centuries, especially in the depredations and decay that would follow the barbarian incursions into the Greco-Roman world in the fifth century A. D.

Thomas Cahill
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.

Thomas Cahill
For a century and a half—from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the sixth—there had been... no formal communication between Rome and the Christians of Britain, nor had there been any between Rome and Ireland...

Thomas Cahill
A century after the death of Patrick... there were few Romans left in western Europe. [By the mid sixth century] the whole subtle substructure of Roman political organization and Roman communication has vanished. In its place have grown the sturdy little principalities of the Middle Ages, Gothic illiterates ruling over Gothic illiterates, pagan or occasionally Arian—that is, following a debased, simpleminded form of Christianity in which Jesus was given a status similar to that of Mohammed in Islam.

Thomas Cahill