Each of the last three grew out of, or was designed to accompany, a television series. All are worthy contributions. Yet in readership and influence, none of this group could compete with the American Edith Hamilton. Hamilton came from a midwestern mercantile family.
After retiring in her fifties, she produced a succession of popularizing books and translations of ancient works. Generations of American students have been introduced to Greek myth by her sanitized Mythology.
But it was her first book, The Greek Way , that really made her name. First published in , it appeared in an expanded version in Its selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club in gave it a vast middlebrow readership, and it remains in print today. The Greek temple is the perfect expression of the pure intellect illumined by the spirit…. No superhuman force as in Egypt; no strange supernatural shapes as in India; the Parthenon is the home of humanity at ease, calm, ordered, sure of itself and the world.
The Greeks flung a challenge to nature in the fullness of their joyous strength. They set their temples on the summit of a hill overlooking the wide sea, outlined against the circle of the sky.
They would build what was more beautiful than hill and sea and sky and greater than all these. Nobody since Hamilton has enjoyed quite that kind of influence. In the US, the field has largely been left to the college textbook market on the one hand and to coffee table books on the other. Behind all these books lies the conviction that there is something special about the Greeks.
Hamilton did produce a companion volume on Rome—titled, inevitably, The Roman Way —but one senses that her heart was not really in it. This continuing fascination is all the more remarkable since many achievements we tend to think of as Greek were anticipated or matched by other ancient cultures.
The Babylonians predicted eclipses before Thales and discovered the Pythagorean theorem before Pythagoras. Most of the Greek alphabet—all but the vowels—was devised by the Phoenicians. It was the Lydians, not the Greeks, who invented coinage. His Works and Days is a type of wisdom literature that can be found from the Euphrates to the Nile. Plato tells a story of the Athenian lawgiver Solon talking genealogy with an Egyptian priest.
Ah, comes the retort, but it is the Greeks, not these other peoples, who made us what we are. They gave us the alphabet! Their thoughts and discoveries still affect us today! There were two things he was crazy about, the thirteenth century and Greek: if the thirteenth century had spoken Greek I believe it would have killed him not to have been alive in it…. Each of these ten characteristics, the introduction tells us, will be paired with a period of Greek history, from the Bronze Age to the fourth century AD.
The Macedonians, in the fourth century, with competitiveness. Fortunately the scheme is less rigid in practice; it is the chronological division that prevails, and any of the ten characteristics can pop up almost anywhere. The attempt to identify a canon of cultural traits is not new. Ambition, revenge, envy, jealousy, are his ruling passions…. He loathes the thought of coercion; and few of his race have ever stooped to discharge a menial office. A wild love of liberty, an utter intolerance of control, lie at the basis of his character, and fire his whole existence.
This emphasis on national or ethnic character overshadows more structural factors that surely influenced Greek development. Until the Roman period Greeks combined a common language and some common institutions their gods, the Olympics, the oracle at Delphi with a striking lack of political unity. Here are some of the ways ancient Greeks changed the world.
One of the many fields in which ancient Greece has had a deep influence is art. The first to develop the concept of aesthetic beauty, ancient Greeks created spectacular sculptures that have inspired artists from the Renaissance until today. Furthermore, Greek mythology was a major source of inspiration for many European painters, which depicts the many tales and myths in their works.
Divided into city-states, ancient Greece has been a source of inspiration for many political systems we know today. Democracy was invented in Athens and it was unique in the sense that every citizen read non-slave males had the right to vote and speak at the assembly, where laws and decisions were made. Ancient Greek architecture has influenced many architectural styles of today. The use of columns and pediments for example, is a direct legacy from ancient Greece and is omnipresent in modern-day public buildings, such as parliament buildings, museums and even memorials.
Come to think of it, the use of architecture as an art form, more than a utilitarian science comes from ancient Greek culture and is visible in constructions like the Acropolis of Athens or the sanctuary of Delphi.
The phenomenal sporting competition that we know today was actually invented around BC and held every four years in Olympia, in Peloponnese. These games lasted for over 1, years before they were abolished when Christianity reached Greece. Another visible legacy in the world of sports is the marathon. The race was actually not part of a sport competition but just the distance a soldier ran from the battlefield to Athens to announce the victory of Athenians against the Persians in BC.
As far as literature is concerned, the ancient Greeks were the first to create complex literature, which still influences us to this day. One of the oldest literature styles is poetry, and more specifically, epic poetry, mostly used to depict the story of a hero. Then there was that greatest of Athenian oddballs, Socrates. Never before or since have a man and a city been so perfectly matched.
Eccentric, barefoot, and stubborn, Socrates occupied that precarious position that all geniuses do, perched between insider and outsider. He was far enough from the mainstream to see the world through fresh eyes, yet close enough to it that his insights resonated. Socrates loved Athens and would never consider living—or dying—anywhere else. He chose the latter. Socrates is remembered as a great philosopher, but he was first and foremost a conversationalist, pioneering conversation as a means of intellectual exploration.
The Athenians were not foodies—most people, no matter their social stature, were satisfied with a hunk of bread, onions, and a small handful of olives. Overall, their caloric intake was remarkably low. Aristophanes, the satirist, credited the meager Athenian diet with keeping their bodies lean and their minds sharp.
And of course, no symposium was complete without wine, and lots of it. While the ancient Greeks enthusiastically endorsed moderation, they seldom practiced it. Moderation was considered an end, not a means; go to enough extremes, they figured, and eventually they cancel each other out.
Perhaps every place of genius is equally overzealous. Perhaps that is why they never last long. In , an anthropologist named Alfred Kroeber theorized that culture, not genetics, explained genius clusters like Athens.
He also theorized why these golden ages invariably fizzle. Every culture, he said, is like a chef in the kitchen. Eventually, though, even the best-stocked kitchen runs dry. That is what happened to Athens. Houses grew larger and more ostentatious.
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