| >> You can't just take Aristotle and Euclid and claim that they offer all of the keys to our modern civilization. Some - definetly. I won't really contest this. Yes, Greece is today and has been for the last few hundreds of years an intellectual backwater. That's the course of history, right? We've had our five thousand ish years of dominance. Who can ask for more? I also agree that many other cultures laid the ground for the Greek civilisation- the ancient Greeks themselves liked to say their civilisation came from Egypt. I say in another post that we should be really speaking of a human civilisation (and thank whatever deities, or blind luck, that we have it). Civilisation does not stop at national borders, fortunately. Also: big pinch of salt; I did say that at the very beginning. Still, I'd like it to be remembered that one particular people was very influential and went down in history not because they slaughtered thousands or millions, but because they produced a lot of knowledge. I'm proud of this as a Greek but we should all be, it's our shared heritage and we must remember that we are at our best when we build, not when we destroy. |
But ultimately, it's silly to have this kind of nationalistic association, because the Greeks of the golden period had a very different society to modern Greeks. Where is your Athenian direct democracy? Where is your Spartan warrior cult? Where are your slaves? Where is the widespread demand for Greek-educated workers? Where are your city-states, each having their own international relations and cultural aspects?
And, ultimately, where is the modern Greek's love of learning and knowledge, for which we lionise ancient Greece? As far as I can tell, the modern Greek is no more interested in education than any other typical modern European. I live in the biggest Greek-population city outside of Greece itself, in the Greek-est suburb, and my experiences are that modern Greeks love life and family most, and aren't so interested in higher learning, art, and music (no more than any other demographic). Yes, ex-pat Greeks are a little different culturally to native Greeks, but not that much. It's not like modern Greeks have a particularly notable reputation for education, like Jewish people do.
Ancient and modern Greece are two different places, as were the Greeces in-between, just like modern Italy is not Rome, even though they use the same alphabet.