The Greeks not only face facts. They have no desire to escape from them. - Edith Hamilton

The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest, where all human things...have their beginnings; but the seed never explains the flower.

A silly man lies awake all night, Thinking of many things. When the morning comes he is worn with care, And his trouble is just as it was.

Saint Paul said the invisible must be understood by the visible. That was not a Hebrew idea, it was Greek. In Greece alone in the ancient world people were preoccupied with the visible; they were finding the satisfaction of their desires in what was actually in the world around them. The sculptor watched the athletes contending in the games and he felt that nothing he could imagine would be as beautiful as those strong young bodies. So he made his statue of Apollo. The storyteller found Hermes among the people he passed in the street. He saw the god “like a young man at the age when youth is loveliest,” as Homer says. Greek artists and poets realized how splendid a man could be, straight and swift and strong. He was the fulfillment of their search for beauty.