The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Wielding the Gorgon’s head, Perseus saves a beautiful maiden from a ravening sea-monster.
Polydectes, King of Seriphos, has sent young Perseus to get the head of Medusa the Gorgon, the very sight of which will turn any man to stone. His hope is that the boy will never come back, clearing the way for him to marry Perseus’s mother, Danaë. But Perseus is on his way home even now...
Artemis, goddess of the hunt, pursued a bitter and relentless vengeance upon a king who carelessly slighted her.
Calydon was an ancient city in Aetolia, on the west coast of mainland Greece near modern Missolonghi. The tale tells how Artemis, goddess of the hunt, took spiteful revenge on a king who slighted her.
When he caught his wife with her lover, the ugly blacksmith of the gods showed that he was not without his pride.
While Odysseus is in the court of King Alcinous, a court musician entertains them with the story of Hephaestus. He was the lame and ugly blacksmith to the gods, whom Zeus instructed Aphrodite to marry so that the other gods would stop fighting over her — a solution which did not solve anything at all.
As the Persian Empire’s grip tightened by land and sea, it fell to one man to unite Greece in a last desperate bid to break it.
The Battle of Salamis in September 480 BC was the turning point in the Greco-Persian Wars. By comparison with the small city-states of Greece, Xerxes’s highly centralised Persian empire was clumsy and backward, and the Greeks were ready to defend their superior civilisation to the death.
The blessing of trade free from political interference was one of most important insights in British, indeed world history.
In his day, Richard Cobden (1804-1865) was regarded as Britain’s answer to Karl Marx. Where Marxism stands for State control, bloody violence and political oppression, Cobden showed that the free market led to prosperity through peace, cooperation, and freedom.