Beowulf grappling with the monstors was a type of Christ grappling with Satan. - Thomas Cahill

As... Greek philosophy split into scores of yip-yapping schools, the Greeks became more and more puzzled. They had lost their way philosophically—and the Romans, who were just aping them, had nothing original to propose by way of saving them all from their dilemmas.

Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic.

These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society always at war—"the father of all, the king of all," "always existing by nature," as the Greek philosophers expressed it.