Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

Like fish who do not know they swim in water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they are. But when we approach another age, its alienness stands out before us, almost as if that were its most obvious quality...

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

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

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.

For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life.

Human beings never know more than a part, as "through a glass darkly"; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces.