Κοινότητα Αναγνωστών Βιβλίων - readers.gr

At the end of the summer of 431 BC, following the first campaign of the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, Pericles was deputed to deliver the Funeral Oration over the fallen Athenians. We shall never know precisely what Pericles said, but it is thanks to the historian Thucydides (460-398 BC) that we can read an imaginative re-creation of the Oration in his History (Book II, xxxv-xlvi). This Oration, besides being a eulogy to the dead, is also an impassioned and eloquent paean to Athenian democracy and all that it stood for. It was just a year earlier, in 432 B...

Everything Sappho's work which has come down to us gives off the same fragrance compounded of sunlight, love, the sea and women, the same intoxicating scent of feelings as that which perfumes a single half-obliterated word in the margin of her writings. It is on such words and fragments of verses that I have chiefly concentrated, since the mystery which surrounds them has the same effect as a transparent veil casually thrown over shapely limbs, or the last remaining patches of a masterly wall painting, allowing the vividest imagination free rein. On her dreamlike island of...