14 Quotes by Barry S. Strauss

The greatest poet who ever wrote about rowing is Virgil, the greatest historian is Thucydides, but the greatest imagination ever to turn its attention to the sport is that of painter, Thomas Eakins.

There is a place where cerebral an corporeal meet: they call it rowing.

It’s the quintessential Greek sport: harmonious, competitive, agonizing, nautical, and above all, intelligent. It combines Odysseus’s brains and brawn and love of the sea with the tactical precision of the Spartan pikeman.

Rowing was not simple for me. I nodded whenever the instructor made a point, as if I understood, but I could as easily have assembled the space shuttle as have repeated the moves she was explaining.

Eakins rejected gentlemen athletics as his theme. Instead, he took a subject that had been the stuff of illustrated weeklies and the penny press and turned it into fine art. Eakins celebrates not fire from heaven but honest sweat, not genius but hard work.