Greeks & Barbarians

This also he calls Celtic, although he knew his _Prometheus Bound_, and might have reflected that Milton knew it too. At last Arnold flings up his case, and describes a passage...

Next morning they crossed the Zab—it was the dry season—but had not advanced far on the other side when they were overtaken by a small force of horsemen, archers and slingers un...

On the fourth day the Persian fleet succeeded in entering the Pagasaean Gulf. Then Xerxes ordered the attack. His Persian bodyguard, the ten thousand “Immortals” who were his be...

A matter of this delicacy will mock at a rigid handling. There is no rule to be laid down at all save the rule that is above rules, the instinct of the artist. The limits of exa...

You would guess none of these things from Herodotus. What has happened to the myth that it is transmuted to the exquisite and piteous tale he has related? We can only say that i...

Arnold immediately proceeds from this to a passage in which the Celtic writer describes the dropping of blood as _faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-gras...

Half a century later, when the Ionians revolted against the Persian rule, they chose for their admiral a Phokaian called Dionysios. Later they regretted their choice, considerin...

Antigone had two brothers, Eteokles and Polyneikes. After their father had been driven from Thebes the brethren disputed the succession to his throne. Polyneikes lost, and took...

This high tension is the natural reaction of a spirit, finely and richly endowed as the Greek was, to the pressure of strong alien forces. If the tension relaxed or broke, the r...

In calling this story Barbarian, I feel as if I ought to apologize to the Barbarians. Nevertheless it is clearly more in their way than in the way of the Greeks. It excellently...

There is a play of Euripides, called _The Suppliant Women_, which deals with the episode of the unburied dead at Thebes. The fragmentary Argument says: _The scene is Eleusis. Ch...

Now hear Herodotus amplifying and explaining Aeschylus. _For though they are free, yet are they not free in all things. For they have a lord over them, even Law, whom they fear...

Well, that was the kind of world in which Greek civilization was born. Do not say I have been describing a remote barbarism. Remoteness is relative to more than space, and to th...

“Noteworthy, not only for the author’s intimate knowledge of Greek literature and art, but also for a range of vision and breadth of knowledge. The book as a whole is scholarly...