books 5,6,7,8

pg.216/217 ch. 18
The city itself offered no resistance, save that of a small band of fanatics who occupied the high city, the Acropolis, whose precincts in ancient times had been bounded by a wooden palisade. These desperate defenders had fortified themselves in this site, placing, it seems, their faith in the oracle of Apollo which some weeks previous had declared, " the wooden wall alone shall not fail you."

pg. 262 ch. 23
A burnished wood plaque hung beneath each lamp, a snatch of verse carved upon it. I recall one: As at birth the soul steps intotyhese baths, releasing flesh into soul, reunited, divine. I remembered something my master had once said about battle fields.

pg. 279 ch. 24
One felt as if he were facing men from the underworld, from some impossible country beyond Oceanus where up was down and night day. Did they know something that the Greeks didn't? Were their light skirmisher shields, which seemed almost ludicrously flimsy consisted to the massive twenty pound oak and bronze, shoulder-to-knee aspides of the Hellenes, somehow, in some undeniable way, superior?

pg. 305 ch. 24
" Put the the steel to 'em boys!" one among the Spartans cried as the wave of allied ranks advanced ten deep from the rear and both flanks and closed into a massed phalanx before the warriors of Sparta, who at last dew up, limbs quaking with fatigue, and collapsed against one another and upon the earth.

pg. 363 ch. 30
This was the babe whose life the lady Arete had saved. That height before the krypteia; the child whose being had made Dienekies under Lakedaemonian law the father of a living son and thus eligible for inclusion among the Three Hundred. In the passage is was talking about how Arete had saved a baby. I asked this a lot of the time, why was that baby saved by lady Arete? Of course that was answered later in the book. This made me feel cofused along with who was the baby but it was all later on answered in the book.

pg. 379 ch. 31
They stink to the heaven, they make one sick within the heart. The noble invisible things feel different. They are like music, in which the higher notes are finer. It was interesting how they made death seem like it was okay and that it wasn't scary. The text made me question life a little and if we should fear it so much. This quote made made me feel so strange and it sort of sothed me.

pg. 419 ch. 36
That oracle of Apollo delivered earlier to the Athenians, which declared," The wooden wall alone shall not fail you," Had revealed its fateful truth, the timbered stronghold manifesting its self not as that ancient palisade of the Athenian Acropolis so speedily overrun by his majesty's forces, but as a wall of ship's hulls and the sailors and marines of Hellas who manned them so superbly, dealing the death blow to his majesty's ambitions of conquest. What amazed me most about this passage was how the wooden wall would not fail us. A question that I asked is what did the wooden walls mean but as I read on it makes more sense as they are refering to the ship's hulls.This was very interesting and I learned a little from the text.

pg. 439 ch. 38 Final pages
" Can you recall the epitaph upon the stone?" I inquired. "Or were the verses too long for memory to retain?" "Not at all ," the captain replied. "The lines were composed Spartan-style. Short. Nothing wasted." So spare were they, he testified, that even one of as poor a memory as himself encountered no difficulty in their recollection. O xein angellein lakedaimoniois hotie tede keimetha tois keinon rhemasi peithomenoi. These verses have I rendered thus, as best I can: Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie. What was interesting about this passage was the quote in greek and that it was a really meaningful quote. I really think that it was confusing at first to understand the qutoe but rereading it I understood it better.