Thomas Cahill - Greek Quotes

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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
Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic.

Thomas Cahill
The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was Ekklēsia, the same word used in the New Testament for Church (and it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word, which connoted equal participation in all deliberations by all members, came to designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia—which would have seemed patent nonsense to Greek-speaking Christians of New Testament times, who believed themselves to be equal members of their Assembly.)

Thomas Cahill
If we could save one word from Greek civilization, it would have to be aretē, excellence. The aristocrats gave themselves their name, the aristoi (the best). It is an open question whether anyone considered himself a member of the kakoi (the worst, the craven, the dumb shits). 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.

Thomas Cahill
Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back.

Thomas Cahill
Irish generosity extended not only to a variety of people but to a variety of ideas.... they brought into their libraries everything they could lay their hands on.... Not for them the scruples of Saint Jerome... they began to devour all of the old Greek and Latin pagan literature that came their way.

Thomas Cahill
We can understand Greek religion because, it operates on the same internal dynamic that fuels all (or certainly almost all) religion. The aboriginal Christian prayer Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy) is a Greek prayer far more ancient than Christianity.

Thomas Cahill
In another of history's terrible ironies, the barbarian influence on Western Christianity enlivened it beyond anything the diluted Greeks of Byzantium were now capable of. The mad barbarians pushed Western Christianity into retaining some of the plastic abundance, the inventive plasticity, the fathomless versatility that had once been incomparably characteristic of the Greeks.

Thomas Cahill
As... Greek philosophy split into scores of yip-yapping schools, the Greeks became more and more puzzled. They had lost their way philosophically—and the Romans, who were just aping them, had nothing original to propose by way of saving them all from their dilemmas.

Thomas Cahill
The Greeks never thought to unite all Greek speakers in one political union. Because each Greek gloried in his singular excellence—and each Greek clan gloried similarly—it was hard enough to unite a city. Each city or polis—from which come our words politics, politician, metropolis—thought itself unrivaled in some essential quality and reveled in its reputation.

Thomas Cahill
They [the Greeks] had become an essentially secular people.

Thomas Cahill
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
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.

Thomas Cahill
... the turns of the screw that Sophocles administered throughout the play [Oedipus Tyrannos] must have been received with sharp pain... because these cocky, princely, Oedipal Greeks were being made to feel acutely the limitations of human society—in which no political leader, no matter how gifted or courageous, can remain a savior forever, in which every man must come to know that he is no hero but essentially a flawed and luckless figure and that "the pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all."

Thomas Cahill
The [Greek] myths were... attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable.

Thomas Cahill
The worldview that underlay the New Testament was so different from that of the Greeks and the Romans as to be almost its opposite. It was a worldview that stressed not excellence of public achievement but the adventure of a personal journey with God... by imitating God's justice and mercy.

Thomas Cahill
The idea of physical resurrection struck them [the Greeks] as ghoulish.... Matter is the very principle of unintelligibity [or lack of intelligence]. Best to be done with it. For the Jews, who had little of no belief in the immortality of the soul, only salvation in one's body could have any meaning.

Thomas Cahill
To be without music was, for the ancient Greeks, to be already dead... Ancient Greece was a culture of song.

Thomas Cahill