Sublime

Causes and explanations

Oral poetry was not simply a way of telling lovely or important stories, or of flexing the imagination. It was, argues the classicist Eric Havelock, “a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment

nous

According to Nietzsche, Socrates had started us off on a dangerous path, causing us to value reason and enquiry over the instinctual, creative urge. The new type of hero he posits would connect us once again with the rich, intuitive realm of Dionysus; one to which Greek Tragedy had once connected us, but we have since left long behind.

The birth of liberty

The transformation of local culture in the East was nothing like as radical as in the West, but sophisticated Greeks did not necessarily look down their noses at brutish Roman blood sports. There is clear evidence that Greek theatres and stadia were adapted for both gladiators and wild beast hunts; traces of the fixing for the nets intended to keep

that it’s describing.

In a way, Nestorius’s anxiety is not unlike Elizabeth Costello’s: a worry about how communication exposes a person to a desire that gets away from her.

Josef Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’,