3 ideas
| 7811 | Sophoclean heroes die terrible deaths when they oppose the new Athenian values [Sophocles, by Grayling] |
| Full Idea: Sophocles has Ajax (in 'Ajax') and Hercules (in 'Trachiniae') die terrible deaths because of the opposition they represent to the values which are the new values of Periclean Athens. | |
| From: report of Sophocles (Women of Trachis [c.430 BCE]) by A.C. Grayling - What is Good? Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: Presumably they are tragic heroes, who hence invite our sympathy, like Othello and Hamlet, who also die following an older moral code. It is only tragic if the code they follow has something 'higher' about it. |
| 1658 | In early Greece the word for punishment was also the word for vengeance [Vlastos] |
| Full Idea: Down to the last third of the fifth century, 'timoria', whose original and always primary sense is "vengeance", is THE word for "punishment". | |
| From: Gregory Vlastos (Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher [1991], p.186) |
| 1513 | The Egyptians were the first to say the soul is immortal and reincarnated [Herodotus] |
| Full Idea: The Egyptians were the first to claim that the soul of a human being is immortal, and that each time the body dies the soul enters another creature just as it is being born. | |
| From: Herodotus (The Histories [c.435 BCE], 2.123.2) |