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

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.