14 Quotes by Robin Waterfield

Reading Plato should be easy; understanding Plato can be difficult.

If I am in love, many things about the world, not just the immediate object of my love, seem lovable. To say 'I love X' is somehow really to say 'X inspires love in me', and that love then attaches itself to objects other than X as well. The expansiveness of love is a natural means of ascent between levels.

The rich wanted to be kaloi k’agathoi, the beautiful and the good – so let them use their graces in the service of the democracy.

On the strength of these successes, Alcibiades at last returned to Athens in 408. The Athenian people had short memories:.

Aristotle’s residence in Athens became untenable – he had, after all, been Alexander’s tutor – and he fled into exile, saying, with a reference to Socrates’ trial, that he was doing so “lest Athens sin twice against philosophy.

Philip had arguably created the first nation-state in Europe, with a population of perhaps a million. He would next create Europe’s first empire.

Ptolemy II’s far-famed parade, held in Alexandria perhaps in 278, included eighty thousand soldiers; even Adolf Hitler’s fiftieth birthday in 1939 was celebrated by only fifty thousand.

Six thousand Thebans died in battle, and another thirty thousand were sold into slavery. Alexander established his authority over the Greeks by an act of singular violence, and any chance he had in the future of trusting them was destroyed along with Thebes.

The most accurate criterion by which to judge if a man has good sense is to see whether he resists his heart’s immediate impulses towards pleasure and has proved capable of self-control and self-mastery. But the man who tends to gratify his heart’s impulses is the man who tends towards the worse, not the better, course of action.