Ancient Greek Civilization Resources

"Until [man] has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him. The tragedy of Greece lies not in the destruction of a great culture but in the abortion of a great vision." [Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi, 1941]

"[The Greeks] were the first Westernizers; the spirit of the West, the modern spirit, is a Greek discovery and the place of the Greeks is in the modern world." [Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way, 1930]

"A knowledge of Greek though and life, and of the arts in which the Greeks expressed their thought and sentiment, is essential to high culture. A man may know everything else, but without this knowledge he remains ignorant of the best intellectual and moral achievements of his own race." [Charles Eliot Norton, Letter to F. A. Tupper, 1885]

"Of all peoples the Greeks have dreamt the dream of life best." [Goethe, Sprüche in Prosa]

"Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens as you have it before you day by day, fall in love with her, and when you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in action. . . . So they gave their bodies to the commonwealth and received, each for his own memory, praise that will never die, and with it the grandest of all sepulchers, not that in which their mortal bones are laid, but a home in the minds of men, where their glory remains fresh to stir to speech or action as the occasion comes by. For the whole earth is the sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives. For you now it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy's onset." [Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 431-413 B.C.]

Resources
A History of Athens (Anagnosis Books)
Ancient Greece
Exploring Ancient World Cultures-Greece (Evansville)
The History of Herodotus (MIT)
Overview of Archaic and Classical Greek History (Thomas Martin)
The Perseus Digital Library
Prehistoric Archeology of the Aegean (Dartmouth)
Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War (MIT)