Friday, November 7, 2008

And now, a word from Protagoras.

Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.

7 comments:

Ann Forstie said...

I love it! I'm going to have to write that down somewhere...

kStyle said...

There are other good agnostic quotes from the ancients. Maybe I should start an agnostic quotes web page.

Narya said...

Not completely unrelated: Have you read "Ilium" yet? Your classics education would've helped me . . .

kStyle said...

Narya, I have not. What is it? My classics education may be of less help than you would suppose. I'm reading "Creation" (Gore Vidal) and painfully discovering how much I've forgotten!

kStyle said...

Ah, just looked up Ilium. I realize this is a strange/ignorant thing to say, but I generally dislike science fiction. It is up there with country music, roller skating, and kim chee for me.

Narya said...

Eh; I know what you mean. The space operas do not entertain me in the least. Some stuff I love, other things not so much. This one was LOOOONNNNNNGGG, and parts of it were dependent on characters in the Greek original, i.e., it could have been way shorter, but I kinda liked it. It's worth giving it a try; you can skip the boring bits and not miss major plot points.

kStyle said...

Maybe...The Iliad is a sacred text to me. It is such gorgeous literature. Andromache's speech to Hektor on the walls of Troy makes me weep buckets no matter how many times I've read it. I don't know how I feel about someone setting it on Mars.