Ionia Quotes

For thousands of years humans were oppressed— as some of us still are— by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. Then, 2,500 years ago, there was a glorious awakening in Ionia: on Samos and the other nearby Greek colonies that grew up among the islands and inlets of the busy eastern Aegean Sea. Suddenly there were people who believed that everything was made of atoms; that human beings and other animals had sprung from simpler forms; that diseases were not caused by demons or the gods; that the Earth was only a planet going around the Sun. And that the stars were very far away.

The scientific world view works so well, explains so much and resonates so harmoniously with the most advanced parts of our brains that in time, I think, virtually every culture on the Earth, left to its own devices, would have discovered science. Some culture had to be first. As it turned out, Ionia was the place where science was born.

Call that a wonder,   Cretan-born woman? 9970 Never listened when poetry   Sang its sweet lessons?   Ionia’s and Hellas’s   Ancientest legends   Of a gods-and-heroes abundance,   Never heard them?   Nothing that’s done today’s   More than a pitiful   Echo of glorious   Ancestral days; 9980 Nothing, your story is,   Compared with the lovely lie,   More trustworthy than truth,   That is sung about Maia’s son.

It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia, Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts, That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus' wanderings, Placard "Removed" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus, Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa's gate and on Mount Moriah, The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles, and Italian collections, For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you. - Song of the Exposition

There is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all things, but all things are not fit subjects for poetry. Into the secure and sacred house of Beauty the true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives pain, nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue. He can steep himself, if he wishes, in the discussion of all the social problems of his day, poor-laws and local taxation, free trade and bimetallic currency, and the like; but when he writes on these subjects it will be, as Milton nobly expressed it, with his left hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and not in a lyric. This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron: Wordsworth had it not. In the work of both these men there is much that we have to reject, much that does not give us that sense of calm and perfect repose which should be the effect of all fine, imaginative work. But in Keats it seemed to have been incarnate, and in his lovely ODE ON A GRECIAN URN it found its most secure and faultless expression; in the pageant of the EARTHLY PARADISE and the knights and ladies of Burne-Jones it is the one dominant note. It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a clarion note as Whitman’s, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. Calliope’s call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended; the Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry. For art is very life itself and knows nothing of death; she is absolute truth and takes no care of fact; she sees (as I remember Mr. Swinburne insisting on at dinner) that Achilles is even now more actual and real than Wellington, not merely more noble and interesting as a type and figure but more positive and real.

the canvases which Mr. St. Jones referred to with a paintbrush that was long and slightly bowed: for the most part interiors, or undergrounds, of pocked and craggy holes, rock vaults with mossy floors and slimy walls, or narrow scenic vistas that skinny silver streams squirmed through like sidewinders flipped on their backs, beneath downward grasping tentacles of roots, stalactites dagger-sharp and dangling by threads of stone, stalagmites teetering, all doused, frozen in molten electric white that suggested what a glimpse of hell might be, too beautiful, some still lifes too, great bulbous beets, hoary legumes, giant scallions, white carrots, tomatoes, berries, squash in huge radiant bowls, and portraits, signed by Ionia, of shadows, from which gleamed eyes and teeth and nails and, here and there, a glowing bubble, or scrotum, caught the eye. Near the door a counter clacked but rather quietly.

IRAN AND PERSIA Despite the Iranian conspiratorial theories cited above, it was not a conspiracy for the British to call Iran ‘Persia’, the French ‘Perse’ the Germans ‘Persien’, and so on. When the Greeks (from whom European civilizations descend) first came across the Iranians, Persian Iranians were ruling that country as the Persian empire. It was therefore no more of a conspiracy for them to call it ‘Persis’ than for the Persians who first came into contact with Ionian Greeks to call the entire Greek lands ‘Ionia’. To this day Iranians refer to Greece as Ionia (i.e., Yunan) and the Greeks as Ionians (i.e., Yunaniyan). Indeed, some scholars, such as Gnoli, have doubted if the Achaemenid Persians described their empire as Iran (or a variation of that term), but this is a generally unresolved question which need not detain us here. The cultural and intellectual menace of the word Farsi needs a brief mention. In recent western usage the word Farsi has been used alternatively for the Persian language. Farsi is the Persian word for ‘Persian’ just as Deutsch is the German word for ‘German’ and Français for ‘French’. But no one would use Deutsch for German or Français for French when speaking English, even though those words are more familiar than Farsi to the English-speaking peoples. Unlike Persian, Farsi has no cultural or historical connotations, and hardly any English-speaker would have heard of ‘Farsi literature’, or would be able to locate it if he or she did. To many Europeans, Persian is known as a language of culture and literature, but very few of them would know the meaning of Farsi even as a language.

Thus did African American men at Ionia [Hospital] develop schizophrenia, not because of changes in their clinical presentations, but because of changes in the connections between their clinical presentations and larger, national conversations about race, violence, and insanity. And thus did the men develop schizophrenia not because of symptoms, but because of civil rights.

Ford was still in full support of the Shelby Mustang program, which had recently relocated from Los Angeles to A.O. Smith in Ionia, Michigan. The 1971 Shelby Mustangs never materialized

the great maritime city of Asiatic Ionia, was of old the meeting-place of the East and the West. Here the Phoenician trader from the Baltic would meet the Hindu wandering to Intra, from Extra, Gangem; and the Hyperborean would step on shore side by side with the Nubian and the Aethiop.

Ionia was one of the most important Greek regions. It was located on the Aegean shore in Anatolia.

The Greeks colonized Ionia around 1000 BCE

One historian who went through fifty years of police reports about knife-fights in nineteenth-century Ionia discovered that virtually every one of them began when one party publicly suggested that the other’s wife or sister was a whore.

There were, in any case, strong sentimental links between Athens and the Greeks of Ionia.

Science, drowning in the great darkness of its own processes and now in danger of coming to a complete halt, can only be redeemed by minds willing to reclaim and internalize the approaches of the ancient Ionian thinkers, those who turned to nature itself. To Thales’ water and magnetism. To Anaximenes’ breath. To Anaximander’s apeiron. To Anaxagoras’ ordering mind. And to Xenophanes of Ionia, his critical awareness, his mythology, his poetry. Today, we need them more than ever.

[S]ome Ionian exiles and the Lesbians who were on board the fleet recommended that, if this enterprise appeared too hazardous, he should occupy one of the Ionian towns or the Aeolian Cymè: having thus established their head-quarters in a city, the Peloponnesians might raise the standard of revolt in Ionia. There was a good chance of success, for every one was glad of his arrival; they might cut off a main source of Athenian revenue; and although they themselves would incur expense, for the Athenians would blockade them, the attempt was worth making. Pissuthnes might very likely be persuaded to co-operate. But Alcidas objected to this proposal equally with the last; his only idea was, now that he had failed in saving Mytilenè, to get back as fast as he could to Peloponnesus. (Book 3 Chapter31)

He [Alcidas] then put into harbour at Ephesus, where a deputation from the Samians of Anaea* came to him. They told him that it was an ill manner of liberating Hellas, to have put to death men who were not his enemies and were not lifting a hand against him, but were allies of Athens from necessity: if he went on in this way he would convert few of his enemies into friends, and many of his friends into enemies. He was convinced by them, and allowed such of the Chian prisoners as he had not yet put to death and some others to go free.They had been easily taken, because, when people saw the ships, instead of flying, they came close up to them under the idea that they were Athenian; the thought never entered into their minds that while the Athenians were masters of the sea, Peloponnesian ships would find their way across the Aegean to the coast of Ionia. *cf. Book 3 Chapter 19, Book 4 Chapter 75 (Book 3 Chapter 32.2-3)

On returning to Lesbos, Paches reduced Pyrrha and Eresus, and finding Salaethus, the Lacedaemonian governor, concealed in Mytilenè, sent him to Athens. He also sent thither the Mytilenaeans whom he had deposited in Tenedos, and any others who seemed to have been implicated in the revolt. (Book 3 Chapter 35.1) When the captives arrived at Athens the Athenians instantly put Salaethus to death, although he made various offers, and among other things promised to procure the withdrawal of the Peloponnesians from Plataea, which was still blockaded. Concerning the other captives a discussion was held, and in their indignation the Athenians determined to put to death not only the men then at Athens, but all the grown-up citizens of Mytilenè, and to enslave the women and children; the act of the Mytilenaeans appeared inexcusable, because they were not subjects like the other states which had revolted, but free. That Peloponnesian ships should have had the audacity to find their way to Ionia and assist the rebels contributed to increase their fury; and the action showed that the revolt was a long premeditated affairs. (Book 3 Chapter 36.1-2)