8 Quotes Tagged: ancient-greek

How strange, that bad soil, if the gods send rain and sun,
Bears a rich crop, while good soil, starved of what it needs,
Is barren; but man's nature is ingrained - the bad
Is never anything but bad, and the good man
Is good: misfortune cannot warp his character,
His goodness will endure.

Well, when do we act like sheep: when we act for the sake of the belly, or of our sex-organs, or at random, or in a filthy fashion, or without due consideration, to what level have we degenerated?

To the level of sheep.

What the spirit of man can aim at achieving is a dignity which remains when the gods have withdrawn or joined the side of evil, a serene despair which knows that the world contains no higher hope than the human spirit can find within itself.

Streams of the sacred rivers flow uphill;
Tradition, order, all things are reversed:
Deceit is men's device now,
Men's oaths are gods' dishonour.
Legend will now reverse our reputation;
A time comes when the female sex is honoured;
That old discordant slander
Shall no more hold us subject.

... Misfortunes in the end
Grow tired of plaguing; storms in time blow themselves out.
So luck will change from man to man; and everything
Yields place to something else. Despair is cowardly;
The brave man holds fast to confidence and hope.

The men of old times had little sense;/If you called them fools you wouldn't be far wrong./They invented songs, and all the sweetness of music,/To perform at feasts, banquets, and celebrations;/But no one thought of using/Songs and stringed instruments/To banish the bitterness and pain of life.

O Zeus! Why have you given us clear signs to tell
True gold from counterfeit; but when we need to know
Bad men from good, the flesh bears no revealing mark?

Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. She's paper, too. A paper poet for a paper boy. People claim to be translating her but they don't, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos but they're duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldn't sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history.