This paucity of actors on the stage reflects the liturgical roots of Greek theater, which continued to stick close to its religious origins. … [A] ma… - Thomas Cahill

If we could save one word from Greek civilization, it would have to be aretē, excellence. The aristocrats gave themselves their name, the aristoi (the best). It is an open question whether anyone considered himself a member of the kakoi (the worst, the craven, the dumb shits). though this put-down prances everywhere in the surviving literature. ...that shame—the paralyzing fear of being numbered among the kakoi—is the hidden engine that ran Greek life.

In another of history's terrible ironies, the barbarian influence on Western Christianity enlivened it beyond anything the diluted Greeks of Byzantium were now capable of. The mad barbarians pushed Western Christianity into retaining some of the plastic abundance, the inventive plasticity, the fathomless versatility that had once been incomparably characteristic of the Greeks.

The Greek world will continue in almost constant cultural revolution from the time of Homer to the day Rome brings Greece to its knees in the second century B.C. ...the longest trajectory of fluid development in any society known to history.