The psychopathology of everyday life, Hellenistic edition

Political-cum-social alienation always leads to various private preoccupations, of which by no means the least important, or demanding, is the erotic, since it offers an (often deceptive) sense of being in charge of one's own life.

—Peter Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age, at 208.

... As in so many other respects, the modern era recapitulates Hellenistic sensibilities. Callimachus and Polybius could well have thought of themselves as "post-modern."