## Metadata - Author: [[Bryan Doerries]] - Full Title: The Theater of War - Category: #books ## Highlights - The word for fate in ancient Greek—moira—means “portion.” In Greek antiquity, Fate was worshipped in the form of three goddesses: Clotho, the “spinner”; Lachesis, the “allotter”; and Atropos, the “unturnable.” ([Location 184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=184)) - Fate refers to the cards we were dealt, the portion we were given at birth. Tragedy depicts how our choices and actions shape our destiny. ([Location 212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=212)) - Fate and free will are not mutually exclusive in ancient Greek tragedy. Fate always requires human action—or inaction—in order to be fulfilled. Perhaps by cultivating a heightened awareness of the forces that shape our lives and of the pivotal role our choices and actions play in realizing our destiny, Greek tragedy was designed to promote the possibility of change. ([Location 261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=261)) - The ancient Greek word kharakter, or “type, nature, character,” comes from a verb that means “to engrave.” Drawing upon this metaphor, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus is known to have said, “A person’s character is his fate.” In other words, our destiny is etched or engraved upon us by our thoughts and choices. ([Location 301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=301)) - In ancient Greek from the classical period, there are two words for time—chronos, or chronological, everyday time, and kairos, the right moment, the moment that should be seized, or that seizes you. I can count on my fingers the number of instances I have experienced a true kairos, a moment in which the impulse to act is coupled by an immediate, intuitive understanding of precisely what to do. In each instance, the experience has heralded something life-changing on the horizon. ([Location 332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=332)) - Rumor had it that Dr. Kullmann knew as many as twenty languages, and according to an apocryphal story, at one point in his career he had taught eleven classes over the course of a single semester in five different departments—classics, psychology, philosophy, German, and religion. Of course, to Dr. Kullmann these academic distinctions were laughably arbitrary, and he often spoke about the importance of playing the “grand piano” of all humanistic disciplines. ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=371)) - In Greek, “to speak well,” or euphemi, from which we derive the word euphemism, also means “to be silent.” ([Location 396](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=396)) - “What is the job of the philologist?” he once asked, and then before I could respond, he answered, “When W. H. Auden was asked by Barbara Walters in a 20/20 interview why he wrote poetry, he replied: ‘To save the words.’ That is also the job of the philologist.” ([Location 416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=416)) - At Dr. Kullmann’s home, reading meant working methodically, patiently through a text, forging connections across languages, cultures, religions, and time. However, it also meant stepping back from the text to digest what it said. “What is the secret to reading?” he would often ask, with a slightly mischievous smile. “In the olden days, we would read a passage from a text, then close the book, and smoke a pipe or a cigarette and think ‘What have I just read?’ But you do not smoke, do you, Dr. Bryan?” he would playfully inquire. “The secret of reading is to close the book.” ([Location 432](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=432)) - take Aristotle’s catharsis to mean “the purification of potentially dangerous emotions, such as pity and fear, of their toxicity,” rather than “the complete eradication of these emotions.” ([Location 454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=454)) - Dr. Jonathan Shay, the MacArthur Award–winning psychiatrist who has spent his life working with Vietnam veterans, has advanced a theory that storytelling, and Greek tragedy in particular, arose and evolved in the Western world from the need to hear and tell the veteran’s story. Sophocles was a general in the Athenian army, and the actors in his plays would undoubtedly have been combat veterans. The Trojan War, roughly dated to 1200 BC, likely seemed as distant in memory to fifth-century Athenians as those Athenians now seem to us. Seen through this lens, Sophocles’s plays emerge as a powerful tool, an ancient military technology designed to help those who’d been to war make meaning out of their fragmented memories and to evenly distribute the burden of what they brought back from battle upon the shoulders of all Athenians. ([Location 918](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=918)) - I saw firsthand that these ancient plays possess the power to disrupt rigid hierarchies, at least temporarily, and to give warriors of all ranks permission to bear witness to the truth of the experience of war. Tragedy was not simply a matter of entertainment. It was an ancient technology. ([Location 1070](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00RKO0KUE&location=1070))