It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy - and that is as well, for one could not bear it - whose grief is that the principals never met.

What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

Alexander, of whom men tell many legends, lived by his own. Achilles must have Patroklos. He might love his Briseis; but Patroklos was the friend till death. At their tombs in Troy, Alexander and Hephaistion had sacrificed together. Wound Patroklos, and Achilles will have your blood.

An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.