"The extraordinary challenge to achieve self-knowledge – γνῶθι σεαυτόν 'know thyself', letters carved into the portico at Delphi – captures one of the things that is most exciting about ancient Greece: from the writings of its greatest thinkers and authors what stands out is an almost visceral need to question, to probe, to debate, to turn accepted opinion on its head."
[ Introduction ]

"The intellectual achievements of the ancient Greeks were quite simply extraordinary. They shaped the basic disciplines and genres in which we still organise thought: from poetry to drama, from philosophy to history, from natural history, medicine and ethnography to political science. We have been inexorably moulded by ancient Greece."
[ Introduction ]

"Reading the Greeks is a joy that is at risk of slipping quietly out of our grasp if classics continues its drift away from curricula and from the mainstream."
[ Introduction ]

"There is no more gripping, moving account of mortality, war and the human emotions than the Iliad; no better yarn spun than the Odyssey, surely the original novel."
[ Introduction ]

"Homer is the alpha and omega of this book: we shall begin and end with him, because to read Homer is to enter a world of unparalleled and wonderfully sustaining richness; and because Homer is the beginning of understanding so much else in Greek thought and writing."
[ Introduction ]

"It is worth thinking about ancient Greece because it brings us a perspective on the way we live now, from our politics to our sense of history. And reading the Greeks is also a source of unbounded enrichment and pleasure."
[ Introduction ]

"We will never completely grasp ancient Greece. An enormous wealth of literature, art, architecture and other artefacts have survived but, for every survival, there are a thousand losses. We have 20 dramas by Euripides, but we know that his complete works numbered 90 plays. For Aeschylus, we have 7 out of 90 extant. And for Sophocles, just 7 out of a staggering 123."
[ Introduction ]

"If you haven’t read them [the Iliad and the Odyssey], you have a wonderful, life-enhancing, enriching experience in store: you will be handed the key to a world of incredible storytelling, and profoundly beautiful poetry."
[ Ch 1: The Alpha and the Omega ]

"Homer is a rip-roaring read, he makes you laugh and he makes you weep like a child. Homer’s poems are (probably) the earliest surviving works of European literature: and they remain, to many people's minds, the greatest. You just can't do without them."
[ Ch 1: The Alpha and the Omega ]