Thucydides : Athenian historian, considered greatest of Greek historians: wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War, between Athens & Sparta.
... mournful and untimely doom. As we read the passage of that Titanic personality over a world too small for it, we seem to be listening again to the thunder-scene in Lear , or to some tragic piece out of Thucydides or Gibbon narrating the fall of majestic nations or the ruin of mighty kings. No sensitive man can read it without being shaken to the very heart. Even after his death Page 114 Madhu ...
... for a new searching of human hearts and mortal fortunes. To deal with a Greek theme is not to be antiquated or obsolete. Much depends on the inner substance of the theme. When we open Herodotus or Thucydides, Plato or Aristotle, Aeschylus or Sophocles, we often light on "modern" figures, situations and attitudes, for the world-drama has many motifs common to its several acts. Besides, we must not forget ...
... which involve the representation of Adam as one of his own sons and Eve as one of her own daughters, owes also to Latin as well as Greek. Grammarians call it "the inclusive superlative". Thucydides in his Peloponnesian War 29 calls that contest "the most worthy of mention among all those which had preceded it", as if it were itself one of those preceding contests. A Latin poet speaks of ...
... The intellectuals, “the grammarians”, would win the day and develop the “natural philosophy” we call science. There was also a third component in the Renaissance movement, the “emotional”. In Thucydides, Demosthenes and Pericles, as in Caesar, Cicero and Tacitus, the Renaissance men rediscovered the pride and glory of belonging, of patriotism, of “the general weal”, of the heartening inspiration ...
... walks of life Socrates, the founder of Greek philosophy, Pheidias, Myron, and Polycletus, the sculptors, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, the painters, Pericles, the great orator and statesman, Herodotus and Thucydides, the historians, and Euripides and Sophocles, the tragedians. This empire, however, did not last long; a conflict with the Greek city-state of Sparta, Athens' rival throughout Greek ...
... would give place to him. His crown of wild olives was set beside the prize of the tragedian. Splendour attended him, processions, sacrifices, banquets, songs the greatest poets were glad to write. Thucydides, the brief, the severe, the historian of that bitter time, the fall of Athens, pauses, when one of his personages has conquered in the games, to give the fact full place of honour. If we had no other ...
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