Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been … - Thomas Cahill

For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life.

The five-hundred-bushelers... were on average five, at most ten, times as rich as the thetes, the lowest grade of citizen. ...Today, the gap between, say, a municipal bus driver and a Fortune 500 CEO approaches infinity.

A century after the death of Patrick... there were few Romans left in western Europe. [By the mid sixth century] the whole subtle substructure of Roman political organization and Roman communication has vanished. In its place have grown the sturdy little principalities of the Middle Ages, Gothic illiterates ruling over Gothic illiterates, pagan or occasionally Arian—that is, following a debased, simpleminded form of Christianity in which Jesus was given a status similar to that of Mohammed in Islam.