“It was not until 1948 that Cambridge University stopped requiring a knowledge of classical (ancient) Greek as a prerequisite for admission. This requirement was based not only on the intrinsic merits of ancient Greek literature and philosophy. Knowledge of Greek was a screening device to keep out the less affluent, who attended British state schools, where Greek was less likely to be taught than in private schools.”

“When historians and literary scholars talk about the classical heritage, or the legacy to Western civilization from antiquity, they are primarily thinking of four worldviews that were written in Hebrew or Greek among the body of religious, philosophical, and literary texts created before 250 B.C. These are the Hebrew Bible, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and Hellenistic, or Alexandrine, literature.”

“What the Acropolis in Athens looked like, including the Parthenon of the gods, is best told today at the British Museum in London, which houses the marble statuary removed by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to Constantinople in 1801-05, and sold at a knockdown price (only 23 million dollars in our money) to the British Museum a couple of decades later. Although Elgin had or bought the permission of the Turkish sultan then ruling Greece, some contemporaries, including the poet and pro-Greek activist Lord Byron, already denounced the Elgin Marbles as 'pillage.' So the Greek government has claimed since the 1970s, but the British won't return them.”

“The classical heritage as shaped by and filtered through Roman culture had two great flaws. First, it prevented the very rich oral cultures of the ancient Mediterranean from surviving from antiquity into later times. All that was left as creative forces were Greek philosophy and Roman law. These were very substantial cultures but they represented a great narrowing of what could be passed on from antiquity to later centuries..."Second, another deficiency of classical culture was its lack of social conscience, its obliviousness to the slavery, poverty, disease, and everyday cruelty endured by more than half of the fifty million people who inhabited the empire. The classical heritage represented a narrow and insensitive social and political theory reinforcing a miserably class-ridden and technologically stagnant society.”

“While many Greeks (although not Thucydides) thought that history moved in circles, repeating itself infinitely, the Jewish idea that each event was singular and proceeded along a straight line had a great impact on European thinking.”

“Christian legend later claimed that Peter also went to Rome and there became head of the Christian community, that is, a bishop. Both Peter and Paul, according to the Catholic version, died as martyrs in the Eternal City. Paul definitely went to Rome, and may have been martyred there. But that Peter, a very devout, timid Jewish fisherman, uneducated, and knowing little or no Greek, and no Latin, would have ended in Rome is most unlikely. Thus the whole claim of later bishops of Rome (the popes) that their authority in the Church was derived from its alleged first bishop, Saint Peter, was likely wishful thinking, if not an absolute hoax, that developed in the late second century A.D.”

“There was some kind of cultural cause for the decline of the ancient world. It was neither corruption of public spirit nor Christianity. It was due to the rise of the logocentric culture rooted in written text. This engendered, in general, a conservative, backward-looking frame of mind, hostile to critical military and technological innovation. It widened the gap between the highly literate elite and the still-illiterate masses. It aroused social strains that the imperial government would not, or perhaps could not, confront. Once the Visigoths had won a lucky battle or two, a general pessimism, docility, and privatism settled in."The ancients had a phrase for this. They said the world was 'growing old.' It was a mature culture. The Roman in late antiquity needed social and intellectual restoration, not more intensive cultivation of the classical heritage.”