Sailing the wine-dark sea

Western-imperialist propaganda.

1) "Demeter's hair was yellow as the ripe corn [sic] of which she was mistress, for she was the Harvest Spirit, goddess of farmed fields and growing grain."

2) "These conflicting forces—all the rages and outrages of gods and men—seemingly balanced in an endless seesaw, will in the end produce a result, the fall of Troy. In the view of the ancients, however, to which Homer is here giving expression, this result is but another swing of the seesaw, which will eventually be balanced in its turn by an opposite result. This view of the ancients, then, is a true worldview, that is, an attempt to see the reality of human experience as a totality, both psychological (in its assessment of human motivations) and theological (in its assumption that heaven intervenes in human affairs). The results of human motivations and heavenly interventions make for preordained results, but preordained only in a way so complicated and with so many conflicting strands that no one but a seer or prophet could sort it all out beforehand and identify in the present the seeds of future results."

3) "Hanson's interpretations of ancient military history are much in favor among those, such as Dick Cheney, who are influential with George W. Bush. These advisers have signed on to the Greek view of war as 'terrible but innate to civilization—and not always unjust or amoral if it is waged for good causes to destroy evil and save the innocent,' as Hanson puts it in An Autumn of War."

4) "For the strutting aristoi of the symposia, the nature of life was obvious: you gave it or you got it. To represent ancient Greece as a homosexual society is to miss the central lesson. It was a militarized society that saw everything in terms of active and passive, swords and wounds, phalloi and gashes. Aristocratic boys were courted by aristocratic men as part of a puberty ordeal, the last step before adulthood, during which the man was to act as a model and help the boy achieve bristling manhood. He could masturbate between the boy's thighs but was not allowed to come in his mouth or sodomize him. He was not, therefore, allowed to make him into a passive partner. Of course, he—and any male citizen—could do whatever he liked to anyone else, male or female, adult or child, so long as his object was not another citizen or a properly married woman. If she were divorced, as Medea was about to be, she was as fair game as anyone. The Homeric insights into longtime love between two people—Hector and Andromache, Odysseus and Penelope—are never spoken of again in Greek literature after the close of the Odyssey. Sappho's expressed preference for love of an individual—'black earth's most beautiful thing'—over the beautiful cavalries, infantries, and navies that entranced most Greeks remains a solitary preference, never again voiced after her death in the early sixth century. Rather, the Greeks became ever more striving, ever more competitive, ever more bellicose. Sometimes, all they seemed to be left with was fucking or getting fucked."

5) "What faced them every day, however, was not the eternal but the mutable—all the multiplicity, diversity, motion, and change they perceived in individual beings that go from nonexistence to birth and life and, finally, to death, decay, and nonexistence. Likewise, the earth beneath their feet and even the sky above their heads presented them with panoramas of constant change. It is not possible, they reasoned, to make sense of what is mutable, what is becoming, what passes so fleetingly into existence and then is gone forever. But because there is also in our experience a quality of permanence—individuals die but humanity remains, the crops return each year, the orchards bloom once more, the zodiac comes full circle—we do not live in an arbitrary universe but a patterned one. If this is so, there must be an underlying... thing that never changes, never has changed, and never will change, the uncreated material out of which all the mutable things spring."

6) "There is a difference between being realistic about sexual passion—admitting its existence, naming it openly, enjoying it blatantly—and giving it pride of place in the agora. An orgy could therefore be the very thing for a drinking goblet or lovemaking be prized as an apt subject for a boudoir mirror, but neither belonged in a public space, where only ideal dignity should reign. Better to draw and sculpt male genitals with a certain reticence—retracted against the groin as they might appear in combat or during a hard workout or emerging from what Joyce, parodying Homeric epithet, called the 'scrotum-tightening sea.' Athletes were even known to tie up the foreskin as if it were sausage casing, so as to prevent the comedy of an involuntary erection in the course of exercise."

7) "There was nothing the ancient Greeks did not poke their noses into, no experience they shunned, no problem they did not attempt to solve. When the world was still young, they set off at the first light and returned early from the agora, their arms full and their carts loaded down with every purchase, domestic and foreign, natural and artificial, they could lay their hands on. 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 there before us, and we meet them on their way back."