Famous Greek Myths Quotes

Otrera led her warriors on tons of successful campaigns across Asia Minor and into Greece. They founded two famous cities on the western coast of Turkey – Smyrna and Ephesus. Why they picked those names, I don’t know. I would’ve gone with Buttkickville and Smackdown City, but that’s just me.

THE STAGE: The stage is empty, and you watch as the figure of Medusa steps into the gas-light. Her body is dressed in a crimson traversed by the golden branches of willow trees, colour and light held into shape by sharp black borders. Lifting languidly her hands, she reaches towards you. Her emerald vipers, in the cohesive movements of unseen mechanisms, weave loops about her head. Music is beginning, and from the shadows off-stage the narrator speaks. “Medusa had a beautiful name and a lovely voice, though no one cared to listen; seeking only the gaze of those famous eyes.” Perseus walks onto the stage, cloaked as though he were the blazing sun. Now what you have to understand is his voice – it is like nothing you could tie down. It feels peaceful to hear it, to see him flow into the song with his fine, clear looks and his finer, clearer voice. Is the head quite forgotten? Not quite but the horror exists alongside the beauty and they flow like twin rivers, and neither is able to wash the other from you.

Despite his earthbound approach and his preoccupation with scientific fact, Aristotle had an acute understanding of the nature and importance of religion and mythology. He pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts “but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.”35 Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth. The Greek tragedies, which originally formed part of a religious festival, did not necessarily present a factual account of historical events but were attempting to reveal a more serious truth. Indeed, history was more trivial than poetry and myth: “The one describes what has happened, the other what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.”36 There may or may not have been a historical Achilles or Oedipus, but the facts of their lives were irrelevant to the characters we have experienced in Homer and Sophocles, which express a different but more profound truth about the human condition. Aristotle’s account of the katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.

Although Zolla no longer associated with Julius Evola, he nevertheless arranged for me to meet Italy’s most famous crypto-traditionalist writer who was a very controversial figure because of his espousal of the cause of Mussolini during the Second World War. I had already read some of Evola’s works, many of which are now being translated into English and are attracting some attention in philosophical circles. But based on the image I had of him as an expositor of traditional doctrines including Yoga, I was surprised to see him, now crippled as a result of a bomb explosion in 1945, living in the center of Rome in a large old apartment which was severe and fairly dark and without works of traditional art which I had expected to see around him. He had piercing eyes and gazed directly at me as we spoke about knightly initiation, myths and symbols of ancient Persia, traditional alchemy and Hermeticism and similar subjects. While he extolled the ancient Romans and their virtues, he spoke pejoratively about his contemporary Italians. When I asked him what happened to those Roman virtues, he said they traveled north to Germany and we were left with Italian waiters singing o sole mio! He also seemed to have little knowledge or interest in esoteric Christianity and refuse to acknowledge the presence of a sapiental current in Christianity. It was surprising for me to see an Italian sitting a few minutes from the Vatican, with his immense knowledge of various esoteric philosophies from the Greek to the Indian, being so impervious to the inner realities of the tradition so close to his home.

The Greeks, on the other hand, were passionately interested in logic and reason. Plato (ca. 428–ca. 348 BCE) was continually occupied with problems of epistemology and the nature of wisdom. Much of his early work was devoted to the defense of Socrates, who had forced men to clarify their ideas by his thought-provoking questions but had been sentenced to death in 399 on the charges of impiety and the corruption of youth. In a way that was not dissimilar to that of the people of India, he had become dissatisfied with the old festivals and myths of religion, which he found demeaning and inappropriate. Plato had also been influenced by the sixth-century philosopher Pythagoras, who may have been influenced by ideas from India, transmitted via Persia and Egypt. He had believed that the soul was a fallen, polluted deity incarcerated in the body as in a tomb and doomed to a perpetual cycle of rebirth. He had articulated the common human experience of feeling a stranger in a world that does not seem to be our true element. Pythagoras had taught that the soul could be liberated by means of ritual purifications, which would enable it to achieve harmony with the ordered universe. Plato also believed in the existence of a divine, unchanging reality beyond the world of the senses, that the soul was a fallen divinity, out of its element, imprisoned in the body but capable of regaining its divine status by the purification of the reasoning powers of the mind. In the famous myth of the cave, Plato described the darkness and obscurity of man’s life on earth: he perceives only shadows of the eternal realities flickering on the wall of the cave. But gradually he can be drawn out and achieve enlightenment and liberation by accustoming his mind to the divine light.

A few years ago, a couple of young men from my church came to our home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, the conversation turned from religion to various world mythologies and we began to play the game of ‘Name That Character.” To play this game, you pick a category such as famous actors, superheroes or historical characters. In turn, each person describes events in a famous character’s life while everyone else tries to guess who the character is. Strategically you try to describe the deeds of a character in such a way that it might fit any number of characters in that category. After three guesses, if no one knows who your character is, then you win. Choosing the category of Bible Characters, we played a couple of fairly easy rounds with the typical figures, then it was my turn. Now, knowing these well meaning young men had very little religious experience or understanding outside of their own religion, I posed a trick question. I said, “Now my character may seem obvious, but please wait until the end of my description to answer.” I took a long breath for dramatic effect, and began, “My character was the son of the King of Heaven and a mortal woman.” Immediately both young men smiled knowingly, but I raised a finger asking them to wait to give their responses. I continued, “While he was just a baby, a jealous rival attempted to kill him and he was forced into hiding for several years. As he grew older, he developed amazing powers. Among these were the ability to turn water into wine and to control the mental health of other people. He became a great leader and inspired an entire religious movement. Eventually he ascended into heaven and sat with his father as a ruler in heaven.” Certain they knew who I was describing, my two guests were eager to give the winning answer. However, I held them off and continued, “Now I know adding these last parts will seem like overkill, but I simply cannot describe this character without mentioning them. This person’s birthday is celebrated on December 25th and he is worshipped in a spring festival. He defied death, journeyed to the underworld to raise his loved ones from the dead and was resurrected. He was granted immortality by his Father, the king of the gods, and was worshipped as a savior god by entire cultures.” The two young men were practically climbing out of their seats, their faces beaming with the kind of smile only supreme confidence can produce. Deciding to end the charade I said, “I think we all know the answer, but to make it fair, on the count of three just yell out the answer. One. Two. Three.” “Jesus Christ” they both exclaimed in unison – was that your answer as well? Both young men sat back completely satisfied with their answer, confident it was the right one…, but I remained silent. Five seconds ticked away without a response, then ten. The confidence of my two young friends clearly began to drain away. It was about this time that my wife began to shake her head and smile to herself. Finally, one of them asked, “It is Jesus Christ, right? It has to be!” Shaking my head, I said, “Actually, I was describing the Greek god Dionysus.

As the modern scholar Alan Cameron has put it: ‘In 529 the philosophers of Athens were threatened with the destruction of their entire way of life.’ The Christians were behind this – yet you will search almost in vain for the word ‘Christian’ in most of the writings of the philosophers. That is not to say that evidence of them is not there. It is. The miasmatic presence of the religion is keenly felt on countless pages: it is Christians who are driving persecutions, torturing their colleagues, pushing philosophers into exile. Damascius and his fellow scholars loathed the religion and its uncompromising leaders. Even Damascius’s famously mild and gentle teacher, Isidore, ‘found them absolutely repulsive’; he considered them ‘irreparably polluted, and nothing whatever could constrain him to accept their company’. But the actual word Christian is missing. As if the very syllables were too distasteful for them to pronounce, the philosophers resorted to elaborate circumlocutions. At times, the names they gave them were muted. With a masterful understatement, the present system of Christian rule, with its torture, murder and persecution, was referred to as ‘the present situation’ or ‘the prevailing circumstances’. At another time the Christians became – perhaps a reference to those stolen and desecrated statues – ‘the people who move the immovable’. At other times the names were blunter: the Christians were ‘the vultures’ or, more simply still, ‘the tyrant’. Other phrases carried a contemptuous intellectual sneer. Greek literature is awash with hideously rebarbative creatures, and the philosophers turned to these to convey the horror of their situation: the Christians started to be referred to as ‘the Giants’ and the ‘Cyclops’. These particular names seem, at first sight, an odd choice. These are not the most repellent monsters in the Greek canon; Homer alone could have offered the man-eating monster Scylla as a more obvious insult. That would have missed the point. The Giants and the Cyclops of Greek myth aren’t terrible because they are not like men – they are terrible because they are. They belong to the uncanny valley of Greek monsters: they look, at first glance, like civilized humans yet they lack all the attributes of civilization. They are boorish, base, ill-educated, thuggish. They are almost men, but not quite – and all the more hideous for that. It was, for these philosophers, the perfect analogy. When that philosopher had been beaten till the blood ran down his back, the precise insult that he hurled at the judge had been: ‘There, Cyclops. Drink the wine, now that you have devoured the human flesh.

Sometimes you will hear people try to make this obsession with means into a virtue: “It’s not about where you’re going, it’s how you get there.” But if you dwell on these claims long enough, the best you can do is say with Albert Camus, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”8 In his famous essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus suggests that human life is much like the fate of Sisyphus from Greek mythology, who was damned to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll down again. Life, then, is an endless, arduous, meaningless existence. Also, to be clear, Sisyphus is in Hades. If all society can promise us is a life in Hades pushing the boulder of the Responsibilities of Self-Belonging, then it’s not much of a promise.

The Alexandria universities were also the home to many famous mathematicians such as Apollonios, Euclid, and Archimedes. Famous inventors also underwent their studies there, such as Ktesibios (who created the water clock) and Heron (who designed the model steam engine).

Ancient Ways The Greek Isles are divided into several major chains lying in the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and the Ionian seas. The Cyclades chain alone includes more than two hundred islands clustered in the southern Aegean. In the southeastern Aegean, between Crete and Asia Minor, there are 163 islands known as the Dodecanese chain. Only 26 of these are inhabited; the largest of them is Rhodes, where the world-famous Colossus once stood. The Ionian chain of western Greece (named for the eponymous sea) includes the large island of Corfu. Cyprus lies in the eastern Mediterranean, south of Turkey. Today, Cyprus stands politically divided, with Turkish rule in the north, and a government in the south that remains independent from Greece. However, the island has always been linked culturally and linguistically to Greece, and it shares traditions and ways of life with the smaller islands scattered to its south and west. In the Greek Isles, history blends myth and fact. Historians glean information about the early days of the Greek Isles from the countless ancient stories and legends set there. According to Homer, battleships sailed from the harbors of Kos and Rhodes during the Trojan War. A well-known legend holds that the Argonauts sought refuge from a storm on the island of Anafi in the southeastern Cyclades. The lovely island of Lésvos is mentioned throughout the Homeric epics and in many ancient Greek tales. Tradition has it that the god Helios witnessed the island of Rhodes rising mystically from the sea, and chose it for his home. The ill-fated Daedalus and his son, Icarus, attempted to soar through the skies over the magical island of Crete, where the great god Zeus was born in a mountaintop cave. Villagers still recount how Aphrodite emerged from the sea on a breathtaking stretch of beach near the village of Paphos on Cyprus. Visitors must actually lay eyes on a Greek island to gain a full appreciation for these ancient stories. Just setting foot on one of these islands makes you feel as if you’ve stepped into one of the timeless tales from ancient Greek mythology.