by Will Durant
* Except in certain additions to terminology, like the word logic itself. Zeno’s pupil Aristo likened logicians to people eating lobsters, who take a great deal of trouble for a little morsel of meat concealed in much shell.53
* We are relieved to learn that some of the Stoics were not quite certain on this point.
* Wars, said Chrysippus, are a useful corrective of overpopulation, and bedbugs do us the service of preventing us from oversleeping.58
† Chrysippus proposed to limit the care of dead relatives to the simplest and quietest burial; it would be still better, he thought, to use their flesh as food.60
* He argued the point so eloquently that a wave of suicides rose in Alexandria, and Ptolemy II had to banish him from Egypt.66
* Italian archeologists in 1929 unearthed at Butrinto (the ancient Buthrotum) numerous architectural and sculptural remains of Greek and Roman civilization, including a Greek theater of the third century B.C.
† The strongest of Rome’s enemies in Italy.
* We may arbitrarily date this at A.D. 325, when Constantine founded Constantinople, and Christian Byzantine civilization began to replace the “pagan” Greek culture in the eastern Mediterranean.
† Increased knowledge of Egyptian and Asiatic civilization compels extensive modification of Sir Henry Maine’s classic hyperbole: “Except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.”2
* Copernicus knew of Aristarchus’ heliocentric hypothesis, for he mentioned it in a paragraph that disappeared from later editions of his book.3
