Like fish who do not know they swim in water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they… - Thomas Cahill

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.

Though the poems of Homer and his successors were recorded, there will be no Greek reading public till we reach the fifth century B.C. ...There was instead, a hearing public that formed responsive audiences at festivals and contests.

For a century and a half—from the middle of the fifth century to the end of the sixth—there had been... no formal communication between Rome and the Christians of Britain, nor had there been any between Rome and Ireland...