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... Blessed are the Peoples who, turning back in time, can be inspired and thought out of their history. With the head high they will be able to look forward to the future ...

thebraintumorguy.

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"Every nation is proud of his spiritual possession. But the Greek race standing taller than any other, because it has the merit to be the mother of all civilization. "

Ulrich von Wilamowitz Mðllendorf, (1848-1931), German philologist, a leading interpreter of the ancient Greek civilization.

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Whenever we speak of ancient Greece and the achievements of their civilization, we inevitably find ourselves asking the question “Why the Greeks?” What was it that led this numerically small people of the Mediterranean to emerge first from the Archaic stage, in which all other ancient peoples were at a standstill, and strive towards the accomplishments of the Classical period?

To explain the singularity of ancient Greek civilization, we identify something that no other people had at the time as the baseline value of the ancient Greeks: the capacity to question. That is to say, while the predominant values of other peoples could be summed up in the view that “we must hand down to our children the world we inherited from our forefathers,” the ancient Greeks were the first to challenge this perception, by submitting to judgment those ideologies and convictions that had been passed on to them. This is the common starting point for philosophy and democracy.

But such questioning at the time, unlike today, was far from the norm; it could not have appeared on its own, as it presupposes an inner tendency of people to wish to surpass certain limits. And this disposition for transcendence goes hand-in-hand with the element of competition: the desire to be tested, to confront, change, overturn and improve. In such a context, extrapolating our thoughts, one could say that a key concept for understanding and explaining ancient Greek civilization isthe idea of agon (struggle, contest, competition).

Thus, questioning and agon were part of a single viewpoint, an overall life stance, which pervaded all manifestations of ancient Greek life, permeated all activities and was the driving force behind all expression of culture. In ancient Greek society, the concept of agon underlay the view that anything can be achieved as the result of effort, healthy rivalry and noble competition.

Often called the "birthplace of civilisation", Ancient Greece heralded numerous advances in philosophy, science, engineering and mathematics which have shaped our understanding of the modern world.

Western civilization has been influenced by many cultures, but his birth took place in ancient Greece. Apart from philosophers such as Aristotle and Socrates, Olympian gods, the beginnings of democracy and conquerors such as Alexander the Great, Greece brought as a contribution to mankind cool ideas that enriched the art of architecture and construction.

Our hearts have been moved by the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides.

Our minds have been opened by the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides.

Our understanding of the world and our place in it has been expanded by Socrates and Aristotle.

Most of all, we’re indebted to Greece for the most precious of gifts -- the truth, the understanding that as individuals of free will, we have the right and the capacity to govern ourselves. For it was here, 25 centuries ago, in the rocky hills of this city, that a new idea emerged. Demokratia. Kratos -- the power, the right to rule -- comes from demos -- the people. The notion that we are citizens -- not servants, but stewards of our society. The concept of citizenship -- that we have both rights and responsibilities. The belief in equality before the law -- not just for a few, but for the many; not just for the majority, but also the minority. These are all concepts that grew out of this rocky soil.

Of course, the earliest forms of democracy here in Athens were far from perfect. The rights of ancient Athens were not extended to women or to slaves. But Pericles explained, “our constitution favors the many instead of the few…this is why it is called a democracy.”

Athenians also knew that, however noble, ideas alone were not enough. To have meaning, principles must be enshrined in laws and protected by institutions, and advanced through civic participation. And so they gathered in a great assembly to debate and decide affairs of state, each citizen with the right to speak, casting their vote with a show of hands, or choosing a pebble -- white for yes, black for no. Laws were etched in stone for all to see and abide by. Courts, with citizen jurors, upheld that rule of law.

Politicians weren’t always happy because sometimes the stones could be used to ostracize, banish those who did not behave themselves.

But across the millennia that followed, different views of power and governance have often prevailed. Throughout human history, there have been those who argue that people cannot handle democracy, that they cannot handle self-determination, they need to be told what to do. A ruler has to maintain order through violence or coercion or an iron fist. There’s been a different concept of government that says might makes right, or that unchecked power can be passed through bloodlines. There’s been the belief that some are superior by virtue of race or faith or ethnicity, and those beliefs so often have been used to justify conquest and exploitation and war.

But through all this history, the flame first lit here in Athens never died. It was ultimately nurtured by a great Enlightenment. It was fanned by America’s founders, who declared that “We, the People” shall rule; that all men are created equal and endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.

The basic longing to live with dignity, the fundamental desire to have control of our lives and our future, and to want to be a part of determining the course of our communities and our nations -- these yearnings are universal. They burn in every human heart.

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Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

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Damned Greek...

​​Every where I turn my thought,

every where I turn my soul,

I find you in front of me.

Should I long for Art, Poetry, Theater, Architecture,

you are front of me, first and unsurpassable.

Should I long for Science, Mathematics, Philosophy,

Medicin (you are) top and unbeatable.

​​​If I am thirsty for Democracy, Justice, Equality

​you are again in front of me unrivaled.

Damned Greek... damned Knowledge

Why should I touch you? To feel how shall I am, unimportant, unsignificant? Damned Greek, you found everything; Philosophy, Geometry, Physics, Astronomy... You left nothing to us. Why do not let me in my misery and my carelessness?"

...

Verdammter Grieche...

Wohin ich mein Denken drehe,

wohin ich meine Seele wende

Sehne ich mich nach Kunst, Poesie, Theater,

Architektur bist du davor, erster, unuberstroffen.

Suche ich nach Wissenschaft, Mathematik, Philosophie,

Medizin bist du fuhrend und unuberwindbar.

Durste ich nach Demokratie, Fairness und Gleichheit,

bist du vor mir, unachahmbar konkurrenzios.

Verfluchter Grieche... Verfluchtes Wissen

Warum soll ich dich beruhren?

​Um zu spuren, wie klein ich bin, unwichtig, unbedeutend?

..... Warum lassen Sie mich nicht in mein Elend und in meine Sorglosigkeit.

...

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Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

"Why do they hate the Greeks'

Nietzsche explains the European anti-Greek sentiments

More timely than ever is Friedrich Nietzsche, arguably one of the most important German philosophers, namely one of the first "existentialist" philosophers. His first book, entitled "The Birth of Tragedy" (1872), in particular Chapter 15, Nietzsche made a special reference to the Greek nation by showing that Nietzsche is far ahead of its time.

The attitude of certain circles in Europe toward the Greeks in conjunction with the mistrust that exists around the Greeks have made scepticals from time to time the most severe judges of Greeks.

"The Greeks are lazy and fraudsters" are just some decorative comments heard internationally in recent months by many to wonder why such a fury around people with a glorious history and an enviable culture.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche gives a unique answer ...

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"Proven in every period of its development, the western European culture has tried to rid himself of the Greeks. This work is imbued with deep disappointment, because whatever we create, seemingly original and worthy of admiration, lose color and life in comparison with the Greek mode, came to resemble a cheap copy, a caricature.

So again and again soaked in a rage erupts hatred against the Greeks, against this small and arrogant nation, who had the nerve to call it barbaric whatever that had not been established in its territory ...None of the recurrent enemies had the fortune to discover the hemlock, which could forever be rid of them. All poisons of envy, of hubris, hatred, have been insufficient to disturb the great beauty.Thus, people continue to feel shame and fear of the Greeks. Of course, occasionally, someone appears to recognize intact truth, truth which teaches that the Greeks are the charioteers of any upcoming culture and almost always as the chariots and horses of the upcoming cultures is very low quality compared to the charioteer, who eventually work out driving his chariot into the abyss, which are beyond the Achilles 'Leap'

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Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy chapter. 15, paragraph. 2:

Before we could recognize this fact, before we convincingly established the innermost dependence of every art on the Greeks, from Homer right up to Socrates, we had to treat these Greeks as the Athenians treated Socrates. Almost every era and cultural stage has at some point sought in an profoundly ill-tempered frame of mind to free itself of the Greeks, because in comparison with the Greeks, all their own achievements, apparently fully original and admired in all sincerity, suddenly appeared to lose their colour and life and shrivelled to unsuccessful copies, in fact, to caricatures.

And so a heartfelt inner anger always keeps breaking out again against that arrogant little nation which dared to designate for all time everything that was not produced in its own country as “barbaric.” Who were those Greeks, people asked themselves, who, although they had achieved only an ephemeral historical glitter, only ridiculously restricted institutions, only an ambiguous competence in morality, who could even be identified with hateful vices, yet who had nevertheless laid a claim to a dignity and a pre-eminent place among peoples, appropriate to a genius among the masses?

Unfortunately people were not lucky enough to find the cup of hemlock which could easily do away with such a being, for all the poisons which envy, slander, and inner rage created were insufficient to destroy that self-satisfied magnificence. Hence, confronted by the Greeks, people have been ashamed and afraid, unless an individual values the truth above everything else and dares to propose this truth: the notion that the Greeks, as the charioteers of our culture and every other one, hold the reins, but that almost always the wagon and horses are inferior material and do not match the glory of their drivers, who then consider it amusing to whip such a team into the abyss, over which they themselves jump with the leap of Achilles.

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To the philosopher, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. -- Emerson

If Greek civilization seems more akin and "modem" to us now than that of any century before Voltaire, it is because the Hellene loved reason as much as form, and boldly sought to explain all nature in nature's terms.

The liberation of science from theology and the independent development of scientific research were parts of the heady adventure of the Greek mind. Greek mathematicians laid the foundations of trigonometry and calculus; they began and completed the study of conic sections, and they brought three-dimensional geometry to such relative perfection that it remained as they left it until Descartes and Pascal.

Democritus illuminated the whole area of physics and chemistry with his atomic theory. In a mere aside and holiday from abstract studies, Archimedes produced enough new mechanisms to place his name with the highest in the records of invention. Aristarchus anticipated and perhaps inspired Copernicus; and Hipparchus, through Claudius Ptolemy, constructed a system of astronomy which is one of the landmarks in cultural history.

Eratosthenes measured the earth and mapped it. Anaxagoras and Empedoeles drew the outlines of a theory of evolution. Aristotle and Theophrastus classified the animal and plant kingdoms and almost created the sciences of meteorology, zoology, embryology and botany. Hippocrates freed medicine from mysticism and philosophical theory, and ennobled it with an ethical code; Herophilus and Erasistratus raised anatomy and physiology to a point which -- except in Galen -- Europe would not reach again till the Renaissance.

In the work of these men we breathe the quiet air of reason, always uncertain and unsafe, but cleansed of passion and myth. Perhaps, if we had its masterpieces entire, we should rate Greek science as the most signal intellectual achievement of mankind.

But the lover of philosophy will only reluctantly yield to science and art the supreme places in our Grecian heritage. Greek science itself was a child of Greek philosophy -- of that reckless challenge to legend, that youthful love of inquiry, which for centuries united science and philosophy in one adventurous quest. Never had men examined nature so critically and yet so affectionately; the Greeks did no dishonor to the world in thinking that it was a cosmos of order and therefore amenable to understanding. They invented logic for the same reason that they made perfect statuary; harmony, unity, proportion, form, in their view, provided both the art of logic and the logic of art.

Curious of every fact and every theory, they not only established philosophy as a distinct enterprise of the European mind, but they conceived nearly every system and every hypothesis and left little to be said on any major problem of life. Realism and nominalism, idealism and materialism, monotheism, pantheism, and atheism, feminism and communism, the Kantian critique and the Schopenhaurian despair, the primitivism of Rousseau and the immoralism of Nietzsche, the synthesis of Spencer and the psychoanalysis of Freud -- all the dreams and wisdom of philosophy are here in the age and land of its birth. And in Greece men not only talked of philosophy, they lived it; the sage, rather than the warrior or the saint, was the pinnacle and ideal of Greek life.

Through all the centuries from Thales, that exhilarating philosophical bequest has come down to us, inspiring Roman emperors, Christian Fathers, Scholastic theologians, Renaissance heretics, Cambridge Platonists, the rebels of the Enlightenment and the devotees of philosophy today. At this moment, thousands of eager spirits are reading Plato -- perhaps in every country on the earth.

Civilization does not die, it migrates; it changes its habitat and its dress, but it lives on. The decay of one civilization, as of one individual, makes room for the growth of another; life sheds the old skin and surprises death with fresh youth. Greek civilization is alive; it moves in every breath of mind that we breathe; so much of it remains that none of us in one lifetime could absorb it all.

We know its defects -- its insane and pitiless wars, its stagnant slavery, its subjection of woman, its lack of moral restraint, its corrupt individualism, its tragic failure to unite liberty with order and peace. But those who cherish freedom, reason and beauty will not linger over these blemishes. They will hear behind the turmoil of political history the voices of Solon and Socrates, of Plato and Euripides, of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Epicurus and Archimedes; they will be grateful for the existence of such men and will seek their company across alien centuries.

They will think of Greece as the bright morning of that Western civilization which, with all its kindred faults, is our nourishment and our life.

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We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.

The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek The Man Who Discovered Britain

by Barry W. Cunliffe