Book Review: The Histories by Herodotus
“They are free – yes – but not entirely free; for they have a master, and that master is Law, which they fear much more than your subjects fear you.”
– The Histories VII. 104.
“They are free – yes – but not entirely free; for they have a master, and that master is Law, which they fear much more than your subjects fear you.”
– The Histories VII. 104.
“The veritable legislator among the ancients was not a man, but the religious belief which men entertained.”
– Fustel de Coulanges
“So it is that nothing is more sweet in the end than country and parents ever, even when one lives in a fertile place, when it is in alien country, far from his parents.”
– Odyssey IX. 33-36
“Fortunately, the past never completely dies for man. Man may forget it, but he always preserves it within him.”
– Fustel de Coulanges
“Against my will my eyes / Fill up with tears.”
– Phèdre I. iii.
“‘Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland’: this is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? How are we to gain the open sea? For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso — not content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense filling his days.
The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The Father.”
– Plotinus
“Those who seek gold dig up much earth but find little.”
– Heraclitus, (Fragment B22)
“And a vision was shewed to Paul in the night, which was a man of Macedonia standing and beseeching him, and saying: Pass over into Macedonia, and help us.”
– Acts 16:9
What they defended was the Catholic faith that we profess. We, who are the heirs of so great a tradition, ought to know at least something about the story of the long chain that joins us back to the first Whitsunday.