Steven Pressfield Quotes

That period of history has always fascinated me - Greek history, Greek mythology.

I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.

There's a reason you can still read Thucydides, and it still makes sense to you thousands of years later.

I love Greek history. I love Roman history.

I wanted to know if the 'Iliad' in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages!

The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies.

In many ways we are all sons and daughters of ancient Greece.

I have a long view of history - my orientation is archaeological because I'm always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt.

I didn't study Greek mythology in school and I wish I had.

I loved the myths of ancient Greece and Egypt.

'The Odyssey' is the great tale, and I was really taken by 'The Iliad,' so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn't. You've gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate.

I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.

Greece – the mother of all democracies

Jews, instead of being stationary like other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the most progressive people of antiquity, and, jointly with them, have been the starting-point and main propelling agency of modern cultivation.

I had been a college teacher. I had taught Greek mythology.

Many scholars are not used to perceiving natural knowledge expressed in mythological language. If the study of fossils was not mentioned by Aristotle or Thucydides, and it wasn't, then it just didn't exist for many classicists and ancient historians.

When I was In high school, I became interested in Greek mythology. I had to know all about the exact dates of all the history.

You make learning fun. Like a children’s book or after school special. Tell me about your…um, Athenian women.

I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier.

It's a shame to be called "educated" those who do not study the ancient Greek writers.

The great thing about writing about the ancient Spartans or Athenians is that so much knowledge is no longer extant that no one, except maybe a Cambridge or Oxford don, can call you out and prove you wrong.

Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.

I suppose I'd have to say that my favourite author is Homer. After Homer's Ilaid, I'd name The Odyssey, and then I'd mention a number of plays of Euripides.

All ancient history was written with a moral object; the ethical interest predominates almost to the exclusion of all others.

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, he began at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, and more memorable than any that had preceded it.