Haynes King Quotes

Because the Spartan king had lost his queen, a hundred queens lost their kings.

Kings are often arrogant men.' Clytemnestra said. 'It is what reminds the rest of us that they are kings.

It seems that Clytemnestra seals her own fate when she values her daughter’s life equally to the life of a king.

He cursed himself for the way he had tried to show the king he was a man, when he still felt like a child.

Whatever her reasons, she determines to try to use her death for someone else’s good – the defence of the Trojans. According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Priam, the king of Troy, offers her absolution for her crime.28 The word he uses is kathartheisa, ‘to cleanse’, from which we derive the word ‘catharsis’.

Agamemnon, she could see, was not. He spent a great deal of time telling everyone about his unparalleled importance, but he rarely wished to make the choices that a king must. How such a weak and petty man had risen to such a position of authority, she had wondered more than once. She had concluded that the Greeks’ selfishness was the cause: every man looked out for himself first and his men second, and the other Greeks after that, if at all. Merit was decided by what a man had, not what he did.

Oedipus is famously clever; that’s how he solves the Sphinx’s virtually-impossible riddle, and earns his right to become King of Thebes. But his cleverness is also his tragic flaw: his quick-wittedness shades into quick-temperedness. This is a man who can solve a puzzle that has baffled all who came before him. But that same quickness explains how a man (who had been warned by an oracle that he would kill his father and was trying desperately to avoid his fate) could be reduced to a murderous frenzy at a crossroads by what amounts to a minor road-rage incident.

And then Eteo might marry the following year and he would never be here again, splashing with me in the fountain in the warm summer evenings. He would be with someone else, a stranger I might not even like. And then there were further consequences to us having dual kings: whose son would take precedence? Polyn's, because he was older? Or Eteo's, if he was king when his son was born?

It’s not even that he is a serial rapist that makes me hate him so much here, although that certainly contributes the largest part of my contempt. But the finishing touch is the way he is so needy for the approval of a young woman he’s kidnapped and then assaulted. He has all the power in this relationship–he is literally king of the whole netherworld–and yet he is still wheedling and whining for approval. He’s the real victim here, don’t you see? Give me strength.

Neoptolemus was feared by Trojan and Greek alike: unpredictable and sulky, burdened by the knowledge that he could never be as great a man as his father. It was Neoptolemus who had cut down Polyxena’s father, Priam, as he clung to the altar in the temple of Zeus. What kind of man had so little fear of the king of the gods that he would violate his sanctuary? Her only certainty was that Neoptolemus would be cut down in turn for his blasphemous crimes. Thetis herself would not be able to save her grandson from the wrath of Zeus when it came.

It was the ultimate triumph of spin over reality – Octavian, now renamed Augustus, had seen the fate of Julius Caesar (his adoptive father), when he appeared to his contemporaries to be a dictator, almost a king. Augustus had no intention of being stabbed on the steps of any entertainment venue, so he cloaked his power with egalitarian names. He wasn’t a dictator; he didn’t have ideas above his station. He was simply princeps senatus – the chief man of the senate. He was primus inter pares – the first among equals; it would be almost 2,000 years before George Orwell’s pigs recognised the powerful truth behind this idea: some animals really were more equal than others. Augustus wasn’t trying to be king; he had no more power than any elected official might have. He just had the power of all the elected officials rolled into one: he became the first Roman emperor.

Ancient societies have some constants which horrify us, like the total acceptance of slavery. Very few ancient writers or thinkers questioned it; most assumed it was the natural order of things. And yet–though in the abstract slavery was considered natural for some people–no one wanted to be a slave, and even slaves might cling to a status that marks them out as essentially unslavish. So in the Odyssey, we see a distinction being made between those who were born into slavery and those who were just unlucky–on the losing side in a war, say–who were enslaved after an early life of freedom. Eumaeus the swineherd wants Odysseus to know that he was the son of a king until he was kidnapped by his nanny (herself a woman of high status enslaved by pirates) when she ran away with sailors. 58 In other words, he is not a slave by disposition, just by ill fortune. So where are the slaves who were just born for that life and no other? It seems that while ancient writers and thinkers could believe in an abstract sense that such people existed, there aren’t many of the enslaved–historical or imagined–jumping up to claim that status.

chess.’ ‘How so?’ John picked up a pawn. ‘I’m one of these, trying to cross the board—only my board is the ocean—and I’m trying to protect myself from being taken out of the game.’ ‘I see what you mean.’ Jed’s thoughts drifted to John Billington. ‘And I’m in danger of becoming a king in checkmate.

My dearest husband, Can it really be ten long years since you sailed from Ithaca to join Agamemnon and the other Greek kings in their ignoble quest to bring Helen back from Troy? Was it a thousand ships which sailed, in the end? That’s what the bards sing now. A thousand ships, all sailing across the perilous oceans in hope of finding one man’s wife. It remains, I’m sure you agree, an astonishing state of affairs.

He spent a great deal of time telling everyone about his unparalleled importance, but he rarely wished to make the choices that a king must. How such a weak and petty man had risen to such a position of authority, she had wondered more than once. She had concluded that the Greeks’ selfishness was the cause: every man looked out for himself first and his men second, and the other Greeks after that, if at all. Merit was decided by what a man had, not what he did.

I'm a crow. We don't have murderous kings. We just have...other crows.