ANCIENT GREEK HOW TO
Other peoples provided the Greeks with crucial technological advances they learned the phonetic alphabet from the Phoenicians, and how to mint coins from the Lydians. Long before the Greeks appeared in the historical record, several complicated civilisations had existed – the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, the Hattians and Hittites. 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. Yet over the last two decades the notion that the Greeks were exceptional has been questioned. The Education of Achilles by Chiron fresco from Herculaneum. When the texts and artworks of classical Greece were rediscovered in the European Renaissance, they changed the world for a second time. This process of self-education was much admired by the Greeks and Romans of the centuries that followed.
ANCIENT GREEK SERIES
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. 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. 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. And what united them was never geopolitics. They tolerated and even welcomed imported foreign gods. 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. 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. The foundations of Greek culture were laid long before the arrival of Christianity, between 800 and 300BC. This is why, as I will go on to argue, I believe in classics for the people – that ideas from the ancient Greeks should be taught to everybody, not just the privileged few. But my constant engagement with the ancient Greeks and their culture has made me more, rather than less, convinced that they asked a series of crucial questions that are difficult to identify in combination within any of the other cultures of the ancient Mediterranean or Near Eastern antiquity. I am certainly opposed to colonialism and racism, and have investigated reactionary abuses of the classical tradition in colonial India and by apologists of slavery all the way through to the American Civil War. Those who maintain that there was something identifiably different and even superior about the Greeks, on the other hand, are often die-hard conservatives who have a vested interest in proving the superiority of “western” ideals.
Critics of colonialism and racism tend to play down the specialness of the ancient Greeks. J ust how special were the ancient Greeks? Was there really a Greek “miracle”? The question has become painfully politicised.