Greeks

"For not only for the Hebrews and those under the Law," according to the Apostle, "is it reasonable to become a Jew, but also, for the sake of the Greeks, a Greek, that we may gain all.

Such a winning of souls is worthy of trust — by which lovers of learning receive the truth in veiled form — so that neither do they seem to think philosophy corrupts life, being the maker of false things and base deeds, as some have slandered it (whereas it is a clear image of truth, a divine gift given to the Greeks), nor are we ourselves drawn away from faith, as though bewitched by some deceitful art;

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

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.

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

This Croesus was the first foreigner whom we know who subjugated some Greeks and took tribute from them, and won the friendship of others:

Next, according to their story, some Greeks (they cannot say who) landed at Tyre in Phoenicia and carried off the king's daughter Europa.

When, however, the Greeks learned that the King and his forces were in their baggage train, and the King, on the other hand, heard from Tissaphernes that the Greeks were victorious over the division opposite them and had gone on ahead in pursuit, then the King proceeded to gather his troops together and form them in line of battle, and Clearchus called Proxenus (for he was nearest him in the line) …

At length the opposing lines were not three or four stadia apart, and then the Greeks struck up the paean and began to advance against the enemy.

At this time Cyrus called together the generals and captains of the Greeks, and not only took counsel with them as to how he should fight the battle, but, for his own part, exhorted and encouraged them as follows:

Now our ancestors will be seen to have preserved without ceasing the spirit of concord towards the Hellenes and of hatred towards the barbarians which they inherited from the Trojan War and to have remained steadfast in this policy.

And after this, they founded many great cities on both continents, swept the barbarians back from the sea, and taught the Hellenes in what way they should manage their own countries and against whom they should wage war in order to make Hellas great.

And so it resulted from the policy which we pursued that Hellas waxed great, Europe became stronger than Asia, and, furthermore, the Hellenes who were in straitened circumstances received cities and lands, while the barbarians who were wont to be insolent were expelled from their own territory and humbled in their pride;

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.

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

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.

I do not pretend to offer any summary explanation of this, but it does not seem an irrelevant suggestion that neither the Greeks, nor any society speaking and thinking in their language, ever showed the smallest capacity for producing a philosophy of law.

Then again you will find associated with them either men who are themselves in evil case or who want to ruin others, while in my company are those who of all the Hellenes lead the most untroubled lives.

and they ought, furthermore, to appreciate the fact that while any number of men both among the Hellenes and among the barbarians have been able to lay down laws, there are not many who can discourse upon questions of public welfare in a spirit worthy both of Athens and of Hellas.

I, you will find, have never invited any person to follow me, but endeavor to persuade the whole state to pursue a policy from which the Athenians will become prosperous themselves, and at the same time deliver the rest of the Hellenes from their present ills.

But from this point on some take us to task, urging that after we succeeded to the sovereignty of the sea we brought many evils upon the Hellenes;

But I believe that all men are of the opinion that those will prove the best leaders and champions of the Hellenes under whom in the past those who yielded obedience have fared the best.

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?

and we have an article upon the genealogies of the Arabs published in the twentieth number of al-Hilāl of the fifth year, in which we set forth the genealogies of the extinct tribes, besides those of the surviving tribes, upon the authority of the Torah and of the historians of the Arabs, and harmonised the two with the discovered remains and with the texts of the historians of the Greeks.

Then it became clear to them that they are not devoid of established fact, from what they found of mention of them in the books of the historians of the Greeks or of their ancient geographers, such as Strabo and Ptolemy and others.

As for Thamūd, it is mentioned repeatedly in the books of the Greeks and the Romans;

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.

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;

—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 …

Observing, however, that the present occasion, if you but choose the right course, is capable of securing for you at one stroke glory and safety and freedom, not for yourselves alone but for all the rest of the Greeks as well, but that, if you act in ignorance or be led astray, it would not be easy to secure the same opportunity again, I thought I ought to place before the public the state of my o …

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.

Enter a crowd of Thracians running in confusion, in the midst of them ODYSSEUS and DIOMEDE.

These Greeks that face thee, are they not their best?

Toward Agamemnon’s tent the whole

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.

and, furthermore, that the Hellenes who rank first in wealth and stand foremost in reputation and who desire the best of governments, even though they have not yet allied themselves with us, are with us at least to the extent of wishing us well, and that upon them we have good reason to rest great hopes for the future.

For we shall find that as a result of dictating to others they lost repute with the Hellenes, while by defending themselves against insolent invaders they won fame among all mankind.

But, monstrous above all things would be our conduct if, knowing well that the Athenians abandoned their country to preserve the freedom of the Hellenes, we should lack the courage to give up our city even to preserve our own lives, and should refuse, when it behoves us to set the example for others in such deeds, even to imitate the conduct of the Athenians.

and while they liberated the cities of Hellas and lent them their aid and so were adjudged worthy of the hegemony, we seek to enslave these cities and pursue a policy the very opposite of theirs and then feel aggrieved that we are not held in like honor with them— we who fall so far short of those who lived in those days both in our deeds and in our thoughts that, whereas they brought themselves t …

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.

Among the silly, not the serious Greeks

A Greek it was who first opposing dared

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?

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

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

And the sage of the Greeks wrote to al-Iskandar:

So powerful were the birds that the kings of Grecian cities, Agamemnon, Menelaus, for instance, carried a bird on the tip of their scepters, who had his share of all presents.

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

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