Our culture of illusion is, at its core, a culture of death. It will die and leave little of value behind. It was Sparta that celebrated raw militarism, discipline, obedience, and power, but it was Athenian art and philosophy that echoed down the ages to enlighten new worlds, including our own. Hope exists. It will always exist. It will not come th

The transcendent meaning of glorious myths and symbols was reduced to a farrago of miraculous or irrelevant, or quite unbelievable, "events."

Men understood that the gods no longer belonged each to a family or to a city, but that they all belonged to the human race, and watched over the universe. Poets went from city to city, and taught men, instead of the old hymns of the city, new songs, wherein neither Lares nor city-protecting divinities appeared, and where the legends of the great g