"The foundations of Greek culture were laid long before the arrival of Christianity, between 800 and 300BC. Greek-speakers lived in hundreds of different villages, towns and cities, from Spain to Libya and the Nile Delta, from the freezing river Don in the northeastern corner of the Black Sea to Trebizond. They were culturally elastic, and often freely intermarried with other peoples; they had no sense of ethnic inequality that was biologically determined, since the concepts of distinct world “races” had not been invented. They tolerated and even welcomed imported foreign gods. And what united them was never geopolitics. With the arguable exception of the short-lived Macedonian empire in the later 4th century BC, there never was a recognisable, independent, state run by Greek-speakers, centred in and including what we now know as Greece, until after the Greek war of independence in the early 19th century.
What bound the Greeks together was an enquiring cast of mind underpinned by a wonderful shared set of stories and poems and a restlessness that made them more likely to sail away and found a new city-state than tolerate starvation or oppression in a mainland metropolis. The diasporic, seafaring Greeks, while they invented new communities from scratch and were stimulated by interacting with other ethnic groups, made a rapid series of intellectual discoveries that raised the Mediterranean world to a new level of civilisation. This process of self-education was much admired by the Greeks and Romans of the centuries that followed. When the texts and artworks of classical Greece were rediscovered in the European Renaissance, they changed the world for a second time.
Yet over the last two decades the notion that the Greeks were exceptional has been questioned. It has been emphasised that they were just one of many ethnic and linguistic groups centred in the eastern end of the ancient Mediterranean world. [...] It has become a new orthodoxy that the Greeks were very similar to their Ancient Near Eastern neighbours, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Persia and Asia Minor. Some scholars have gone so far as to ask whether the Greeks came up with anything new at all, or whether they merely acted as a conduit through which the combined wisdom of all the civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean was disseminated across the territories conquered by Alexander the Great, before arriving at Rome and posterity.
I do not deny that the Greeks acted as a conduit for other ancient peoples’ achievements. But to function successfully as a conduit, channel or intermediary is in itself to perform an exceptional role. It requires a range of talents and resources. [...] The Greeks, more even than the Romans, show us how to question received opinion and authority. [...] To stay free also requires comparison of constitutions, utopian thinking, fearlessness about innovation, critical, lateral and relativist thinking, advanced epistemological skills in source criticism and the ability to argue cogently. All these skills can be learned from their succinct, entertaining, original formulations and applications in the works of the Greeks."
Read (much!) more here. When you do, I would encourage you to try to filter from it what a modern Hellenist could learn from the Classics. Which behaviour is inspired? Which political, social, financial and ethical behaviour is encouraged? What life's lesson can you learn? Feel free to debate or reply in the comments.
This shows how leftists can also be as Eurocentric as their conservative, right-wing counterparts. I commend Hellenic literature, yes, but I don't encourage it anymore than any other work not just in the Western canon but from human literature in general. In fact, in this globalized society, we should start to actually expand our horizons and realize there are other cultures aside from Europe. Why can't people recommend such works like the Indian Mahabharata, the Chinese Journey to the West or the Mayan Popol Vuh? European and Western literature is not the only literature that exists, you know? And Greek literature (I refuse to call them "classics", not that I think they aren't great works because this can't be denied, but because this term makes them seem superior to the literature of non-Hellenic cultures, which is completely false).
ReplyDeleteAlso, the Guardian article does a great job in overestimating the Greeks. The Phoenicians also created a major seafaring society and technological innovations even before the Greeks, who arguably imitate the Phoenicians in this. Neither weren't they racist. Having no concept of biological race or genetics doesn't mean you can think other nations and peoples are inferior, which was a common attitude among the intellectual elite of the Greeks who even thought the barbarians were natural slaves.
And they weren't as critical thinking as the author says, at least not any moreso than other ancient Near Eastern societies, which the author tries to minimize. For instance, many of the pre-Socratics, like Anaxogoras and Protagoras, were persecuted for their philosophical ideas, and Socrates was executed for them. They also were far more intolerant of other gods, which is why you barely see non-Greek gods in Greek mythology. For instance, where are the Celtic gods of the Spanish and French colonies the Greeks made there? The Romans did allow certain level of local worship for the Gaulish Celts, sure, but this was limited and they suppressed the Druids in a bloody manner anyway.
In other words, people, especially Westerners, have to stop overrating the Greeks and the Romans. Just because they were the start of Western civilization doesn't mean they were more special than the rest of cultures of the ancient world. If Western culture has become the dominant model of society, it's not because of anything superior in it but simply because historical chance allowed it to impose itself over the rest of the world. If it had been Iran, for instance, we would be talking about Zoroaster instead of Aristotle and about the Shahnameh instead of the Iliad. I highly respect Hellenism, but I don't think there was anything unique about it. At most, it only extended already existing ideas, but the innovations are far smaller than this author wants to make them seem.