Greeks

So let the fruit of Greek good-learning come forward for me.

Before the coming of the Lord, then, philosophy was necessary to the Greeks for righteousness;

Wisdom, then, who dwelt with the faithful man (and Abraham was reckoned faithful and just), was still barren and childless in that generation, having borne nothing virtuous to Abraham;

The law of Moses too, for the sanction of capital punishments, gives reasons which operate no less with other nations, than with the Jewish people.

In other nations, the civil laws, acting upon just motives, declare certain promises made by wards and minors to be void, not only among the Romans, but among the Greeks also, as it has been observed by Dion Chrysostom in his twenty-fifth oration.

The Egyptians embalmed, and most of the Greeks burned the bodies of the dead before they committed them to the grave.

Before the reign of Croesus, all Greeks were free:

But after this (the Persians say), the Greeks were very much to blame;

but the Greeks, for the sake of a Lacedaemonian woman, recruited a great armada, came to Asia, and destroyed the power of Priam.

Upon hearing these words Cyrus said:

The result was that most of the Greeks had no dinner;

and the men carried, besides their other weapons, Greek sabres.

As to their use of this power in general, I commend neither Athens nor Sparta;

And what benefaction could one mention greater than that which was able to save all Hellas?

The Spartans remained at the head of Hellas hardly ten years, while we held the hegemony without interruption for sixty-five years.

yet you, then, will become worse even than apes, clinging to little statues of stone and wood and gold and ivory, and to paintings.

For even if the Greeks, having got certain sparks of the divine Word, uttered some few things of the truth, they bear witness indeed to its power, that it is not hidden, but they convict themselves as weak, not having reached the end.

And how much better are the Egyptians, who, village by village and city by city, honour the irrational animals, than the Greeks who worship such gods?

Now Alexander, as they say, was of all men the most ambitious, and most enamored of glory and of leaving as great a name as possible among all Greeks and barbarians;

and when he had come to Corinth and received the embassies from the Greeks and settled the other affairs of the allies, he told those about him that he wished to have a little leisure, and went off—not to the door of Diogenes;

For formerly the common dignity was made up of many, and many exalted Greece — you, the Athenians, the Lacedaemonians, the Thebans, for some time the Corinthians, of old the Argives.

and, if we may judge them by the popular courts of Athens, of whose working we possess accurate knowledge, the Greek tribunals exhibited the strongest tendency to confound law and fact.

Very early in their history the Greeks explained the institution as grounded on the intellectual inferiority of certain races and their consequent natural aptitude for the servile condition.

The Latin language and the meagre Latin philosophy were quite unequal to the undertaking, and accordingly the Western or Latin speaking provinces of the Empire adopted the conclusions of the East without disputing or reviewing them.

Developing this theme, I show that Athens has been author of all the advantages which the Hellenes now enjoy.

In it I summon the Hellenes to make an expedition against the barbarians, and I dispute the right of the Lacedaemonians to take the lead.

whereas, if you would heed my words, you might direct the whole of Hellas with honor and justice and, at the same time, with advantage to Athens.

Has not Tyre, on which he set great store, been seized by his foes?

but grief among them is the present opportunity, which we must not throw away;

Should it not be they who many times bore, alone, the brunt of battle, and in the joint struggles of the Hellenes were awarded the prize of valor?

For the herald must not lie when he makes his proclamation in the theater before the Greeks.

do not in the presence of the Greeks convict the Athenian people of having lost their reason;

while you did not surrender him nor allow him to be brought to trial in the synod of the Greeks, he has betrayed you now, if current report is true.

—but also because, while all those are thought to be responsible for the evils that have befallen the Greeks through Philip and their enslavement, in consequence of which they are hated with good reason, you are seen to have struggled in defence of the Greeks at the expense of your lives, your property, your city, your territory and all you possess, in return for which you are entitled to glory an …

for be well assured, men of Athens, that, as things now are, the city is acquiring an evil reputation because of the way his sons have been treated.

For you must not imagine, just because no one reminds you of those times and occasions upon which I was of the greatest service to the city, that the rest of the Greeks are not aware of them or have forgotten what I have accomplished in your behalf.

LEADER.

HECTOR.

It shows they mean to fly:

Fustel de Coulanges was the first modern writer to bring into full light, in his brilliant book ‘La Cité Antique,’ the hitherto little observed importance of the private or family worship of the Greeks and Romans.

but the women and perhaps the children were spared for servitude, and this seems to be the point of the well-known exhortation of Greek generals to Greek soldiers on the eve of battle.

the societies open to their observation were not the mere waifs and strays of humanity, but people of the same ethnical stock with themselves and ourselves, lagging, however, far behind the Greeks in civilisation.

and the Greeks under their leader Agamemnon waged war against the king of Mysia on the ground that, as Baldus has said, high roads were free by nature.

Nor is there any better justification for the other pretext than the one alleged by the Greeks against the barbarians, to which Boëthius makes the following allusion:

And now that well-known pretext of forcing nations into a higher state of civilization against their will, the pretext once monopolized by the Greeks and by Alexander the Great, is considered by all theologians, especially those of Spain, to be unjust and unholy.

But we must not let our minds dwell on the day when we shall have to send away from us those who are nearest and dearest to us;

For my part, I believe that if this proposal were merely put in words and scattered broadcast among the Hellenes, our enemies would be thrown into utter confusion;

For my part, I do not think that our risk without their alliance will be as much more serious for us as it will be more glorious and splendid and notable in the eyes of all mankind;

How many embassies did we not dispatch to the great King to convince him that it was neither just nor expedient for one state to dominate the Hellenes?

But now I am addressing myself to you, not with the wish that I may prejudice you in the eyes of others, but with the desire that I may cause you to make an end of such a policy and that Athens and the rest of the Hellenes may form a lasting peace.

Let me ask, then, whether we should be satisfied if we could dwell in our city secure from danger, if we could be provided more abundantly with the necessities of life, if we could be of one mind amongst ourselves, and if we could enjoy the high esteem of the Hellenes.

A Greek it was who first opposing dared

Among the silly, not the serious Greeks

At midnight of a brood of the Hellenes.

The Greek and Roman laws were nothing like the Oriental codes, but still they were far more meddlesome and despotic than anything we have known in our day.

The Greeks, in the very height of their civilisation, prohibited unions between a brother and a half-sister, but they permitted unions between a brother and sister, and the marriage of the celebrated Cimon is an instance.

And in teaching these lessons he had also to train the boys to practise them upon one another, just as also in wrestling, the Greeks, they say, teach deception and train the boys to be able to practise it upon one another.

And again Cyrus ordered proclamation to be made that if there were any one from Media or Persia or Bactria or Caria or Greece or anywhere else forced into service as a slave in the army of the Assyrians or Syrians or Arabians, he should show himself.

Or when they send portents for warning to the Greeks, or to all the world?

Or take the Greeks, of whom you yourself are one;

if you are fain to win the admiration of all Hellas for virtue, you must strive to do good to Hellas:

The Greeks?

Formerly also the kite was ruler and king over the Greeks.

And when he was king, he was the one who first taught them to fall on their knees before the kites.

The deaconess who has committed fornication with a Greek is acceptable to repentance, but shall be received to the offering in the seventh year — that is, if she lives in purity.

And so both the dialecticians and the natural philosophers use words which are not known even to Greece itself;

And since I have often said — and that with some complaint, not only of the Greeks, but even of those who wish to be held Greeks rather than ours — that we are not only not surpassed by the Greeks in abundance of words, but are even superior in it, I must take pains to attain this not only in our own arts, but even in theirs.