“The Greeks - the most sensitive and intellectual race the world has ever known.”

Sir Herbert Read.

 
The Ancient Greeks
 

Raphael - The School of Athens
 

FANCY A DRINK?

Last time you travelled to Greece, you probably met a fun-loving waiter eager to share life's troubles over a glass of restina or after dragging you to the dance-floor against your will, the very opposite of what you heard at school about the most intellectual race who ever lived on this planet. In fact, if you mentioned the ancient Greeks to him, you would have been met with a shrug of the shoulders and "That's history...", rather than the seizing of an opportunity to expound on past glories. In everyday discourse with each other, modern Greeks often are disparaging about their ancient heritage, as if resenting its significance to modern life when confronted by, for example, the inevitable stupidities of ordinary fellow Greeks now, or the plethora of shortcomings in the modern Greek state.

And yet, if you are reading this in your home country at any time after early morning, you certainly spoke a little Greek already, without realising, no matter what your own language or where you live.

Greek words form part of almost every language on the planet. There are 80,000 Greek words in a standard English dictionary, for example, without counting medical or scientific and other specialist terms.

Quite apart from language, it is impossible to watch television in any country, any one day, without hearing some reference to the ancient Greeks, a people who lived two and a half thousand years ago among numerous other tribes, some long forgotten, lost or even unknown. If you live under a brutal dictatorship, you would still have heard lip service to democracy, or been told of your leader's philosophy, or seen directions to an academy of some sort, not to mention numerous other Greek concepts.

At school level (school also a Greek word), every child in the world will have studied the history of the Greeks and how their civilisation is reflected in that child's culture today.

Why do specialists still turn to Greek for new terms, even though English now is spoken everywhere, why do universities around the world still teach Greek, the Greek language, literature, history and culture?

The Greek words you just spoke represent highly sophisticated concepts, which have affected your thinking and the way you see the world, not just today but over your entire life. And it is because of such concepts that everything Greek is studied so widely.

This is extraordinary. Imagine the same thing happening but, instead of the Greeks, constant references being made to some isolated tribe in the Amazon forests today, living without access to the modern world - just as the Greeks were in those days - yet this tribe producing words, concepts and ideas later adopted in every language, culture and science, in every nation of the 21st century. That would be some tribe, and yet that is exactly what the Greeks were, and this is what is happening with the heritage of the Greeks. It must have been something not only unique, but also monumental, way beyond just significant; significant can be said about other ancient cultures, several of them. Additionally, throughout the centuries, almost every nation has produced gifted individuals, but you do not hear as much about them, so what is the difference? What was it about the Greeks, which still affects and influences our thinking and every aspect of our lives to this day, thousands of years later?

You get a first hint as to why, if you steal a glance at their 'school report.' The sheer scale, the sheer range of subjects where the Greeks had excelled is staggering. Not only excelled in, but were the first and often the only people to explore at the time, and for a long time afterwards. You will have heard that Greece was the birthplace of Western civilisation, but that is a simple cliché which includes almost everything, and not just Western but all human civilisation. Most students usually excel in one, two or three subjects. But this young pupil was so far above others - this is a phenomenon worth trying to understand.

SCHOOL REPORT

Marks out of ten, then, subject by subject:

Sport:

Even with something as physical as sport, the Greeks had a cerebral view of it. The Olympic concept took simple athletic competition and changed it into a complex system of ideas, which lasted beyond Roman times and was revived in the modern era. The Olympic Ideal meant people of all kinds putting their differences aside and seeking self-improvement through peaceful competition, promoting a unique view of the human being as a small god, with a perfect body and a perfect mind, always aspiring higher. Wars had to stop during the ancient Olympics. Athleticism was seen, not as part of our carnal dimension but of man's divine attributes, his struggle to rise above mere flesh.
Crucial to Greek civilisation was moral virtue and its embodiment in youthful, not necessarily young, athletic bodies. Hence such images in sculpture and pottery, a perfect example of how beauty was inextricably linked to truth for the Greeks. A beautiful body showed it was healthy, and therefore its owner had a healthy mind and pursued a healthy life, and therefore believed in virtue. Think of this next time you go jogging just to get fit.
Almost three thousand years later, what is the biggest regular event on the planet, if it is not the Olympics?

Military prowess:

Other nations that did not share such lofty ideals were seen as, and were called, barbarians by the Greeks. It was such 'barbarians' who kept trying to invade Greece and destroy its civilisation, just as the ignorant of today despise lovers of erudition, culture and civility. And yet, civilised, cerebral, erudite Greeks were not bookish softies, they defended their civilised world militarily, defeating vastly superior forces, mainly the invading Persians, for example at the battle of Marathon (490 BC), against overwhelming odds. If the Greeks had lost that one battle, the whole of Europe, North America, Australia, even Japan and all the democracies of the world today, would be living in awe of, and obedience to religious leaders, kings, emperors and suchlike. John Stuart Mill wrote that the battle of Marathon was more significant than the battle of Hastings to English history alone. In fact, the battle of Marathon changed the history of the world for ever, so that, today, most of the Western world, at least, lives in freedom. A victory of civilisation over barbarism fought against, to repeat, an overwhelming military force. No wonder the event is commemorated in 'Marathons' around the world.
This was no fluke. Ten years later (480 BC) the Greeks won the naval battle of Salamis, against vastly superior Persian forces once more, securing the history of the civilised world.
And then came Alexander the Great who also defeated vastly superior armies (around 300 BC), not just once but throughout the known world, as far as Asia and North Africa. The collective military genius of the Greeks over such a long period turned out to be a sign that they possessed extraordinary minds. And this was just the start.

Politics, Philosophy and Economics:

Everyone knows the Greeks invented democracy, a crazy idea where the most stupid and the illiterate have an equal say in government as the wise and learned, let alone the rich and powerful, and yet this crazy system remains the best known system of government to this day, replacing priests, dictators, and tyrants (Greek word, after rulers named Tyrants were removed.) But the Greeks also invented philosophy as a means of pursuing truth and morality, to replace dictums from priests or anybody else in authority; the inventors of democracy already knew that you cannot arrive at the truth through a democratic vote. And then they put the two together, democracy and philosophy, to create the concept of freedom for the individual, freedom to pursue his or her own goals in their own life, to pursue moral virtue, as well as intellectual or material wealth, as they chose. It was the Greeks who pursued organised, international trade in ships of the most sophisticated design without any of the tools of today. Not only were they academically bright, they operated a free market economy and became rich as well.

Law:

Freedom of the individual also gave rise to the rule of law, epitomised by Lykourgos of Sparta and Solon of Athens, who were first to establish laws that replaced arbitrary orders from the top down. The concept of citizens equal under the law was the strangest thing at a time when everyone else on the planet obeyed royal or religious pronouncements, sometimes on penalty of death at the whim of authority.

Medicine:

Hippocrates, still called 'the father of medicine', was the first ever to put medicine on a scientific footing, to replace magic potions or expelling spirits as the cause of illness, and he combined a sense of professional rather than religious duty towards one's patients - to do the best possible to heal or reduce their suffering through rational treatment, not sacrifices to the gods - hence the Hippocratic oath doctors still take today. Instead of prescribing prayers and incantations, he kept notes of symptoms and how they responded to treatments, diet or even the patient's state of mind.

History:

Herodotus, the 'father of history,' was the first to create objective records, as opposed to glorified self-tributes, yet another aspect of the freedoms the Greeks invented to pursue truth. Up until then, and often today, facts and information were at the mercy of megalomaniacs, or at the service of self-interest. The concept of on site researching, establishing and then recording what actually happened was invented by the same people who had the most extensive mythology, thus differentiating between the two. Thucydides' histories, just as factual when describing the Great Plague of 430 BC, were a masterpiece of literary virtuosity as well.

Science:

In 1933, at the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford, Albert Einstein said, "We honour ancient Greece as the cradle of Western science. Greece created, for the first time, the intellectual miracle of a logical system. This wonderful achievement of reason gave humanity the basis for future development. The man who is not enthralled by their work could not become a scientific theorist." You may have heard of one Aristotle (died 322 BC) in connection with this, biology in particular, and there were others. Aristotle was the great organiser of the sciences and invented a scientific terminology. Aristotle's pupil and successor at his Athens Lyceum, a certain Theophrastus, a Peripatetic philosopher (c. 372 BC - 287 BC), became known as the Father of Botany due to his major writings on plants. One of his books called "Enquiry into Plants" classified the plants based on their geographical ranges, sizes, uses and growth patterns. In physics, Democritus was the first to speak of the atom and developed the most accurate early atomic theory of the universe. More recent excavations outside Athens show tablets with calculations on nuclear physics by other ancient Greeks. Those Greeks were the first to make such discoveries without the tools of today, simply by thinking. The intellectual feat we are talking about is unimaginable.

Maths:

How about Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Thales, Hipparchus, the founder of trigonometry (see also astronomy below), Menelaus etc., not necessarily in that order. Their mathematics, still studied today, were another manifestation of brains with a bend for the theoretical, hence it has been said of the Greeks, "They were a genetically superior race, at least in intelligence." Euclid was the first mathematician to prove the number of prime numbers was infinite. Apart from his famous axiom, Pythagoras, two and a half thousand years ago, proposed string theory to explain what the universe is made of. In our twenty-first century, string theory is the only 'theory of everything' that might explain both the behaviour of planets and galaxies under gravity, and that of elementary particles - bridging the gap between relativity and quantum theory by asserting that all kinds of particles are like different vibrations of the same musical string, producing different notes. It is extraordinary to think that the Greeks were preoccupied with such concepts at a time man knew so little about the natural world, thousands of years before computers, microscopes, telescopes, the periodic table or any other of the technological tools we have today, and when the rest of humanity mostly cared about the trivia of daily life.

Astronomy:

Hipparchus (190-120 BC) composed the first major Western catalogue of stars. Also a geographer and mathematician (cf. above), he discovered the equinoxes. Later (c.150 A.D.), the Greek astronomer Ptolemy published a book, The Almagest, which contained a catalogue of 1000 stars in the northern sky with estimates of their brightness, arranged, for the first time, into constellations. Aristarchos of Samos (c. 270 BC) was the first to propose a heliocentric view of the world, later supported by Seleucus (c. 190 BC), the first to assume the universe to be infinite, a view gaining ground now in our 21st century. Seleucus also used correct geometry, with incorrect data, to calculate that the sun was 18-20 times further away than the moon (actual c. 380 times) even though they looked exactly the same size in the sky. It took two thousand years for their heliocentric view to be confirmed by Copernicus, contradicting what seemed obvious to our senses. We talk more about discovering the superiority of logic and reason, as in science, over 'common sense' under Philosophy.

You might have thought from the above that the Greeks were rather 'heavy', but, in fact, they were a fun-loving people, they liked parties (symposiums), music and dance, as they do today. If you have been to a Greek restaurant in your own county, you know about Greek food and wine. At a time when other tribes were practising basic agriculture or none at all, Hesiod wrote the first cookery book. And did you know the ancient Greeks invented cheesecake? It is believed a form of cheesecake was served to the athletes during the first Olympic Games held in 776 BC to give them energy. The Greeks valued all aspects of life just as much, including the art of cookery and the fine arts; it was not just politics, maths and physics for them.

The Arts in General:

Nevertheless, the arts were not seen as decoration, entertainment or a bit of fun. And so the Greeks have left a heritage of artistic treasures unmatched by any other civilisation. The museums of the world are full of Greek treasures, not to mention it is impossible to dig a hole anywhere in Athens today without coming across some new artefact, big or small. The British Museum in London draws crowds to its many Greek galleries, and millions from around the globe visit the Parthenon or ancient Olympia in Greece every day. In addition, theatres around the planet still sell out when performing ancient Greek plays, despite so many brilliant writers in all languages since then.

Music:


Sadly, no CDs, cassettes or even vinyl records here. Pictures of musicians only. So you might have thought that Greek heritage in music would have been lost. Unless you are a musician, in which case you know better. French cellist / composer Paul Tortelier once said: "Our musical scales come from the Greeks who were not passionate; more like merchants - cool. They were great artists but cerebral, philosophical, cool. They are still." He probably meant the Ionian and Aeolian musical scales we still use today.

Dance:


A look inside any museum will show endless vases and sculptures depicting dancers in ancient Greece. Plato wrote, "Dance, of all the arts, is the one that most influences the soul. Dancing is divine in its nature and is the gift of God." Whether right or wrong about that, clearly dance was not seen by the Greeks as a bit of fun after a few drinks or at parties, but as an art. In the early 20th century, the principles of Greek dancing were incorporated in the methods of Isadora Duncan, often called the mother of modern dance. And to this day, dance is seen as an integral part of Greek life, whether religious, civil, or celebratory, and there are more than 350 traditional Greek dances practised widely.

Architecture:

A British art historian once said on television that the Parthenon (built between 447 and 432 BC) was at the level of Stonehenge. Such ignorance. Two thousand years later and still the Greeks are shown to have been far more sophisticated than educated specialists of the modern twenty-first century - too clever for us, still. Did he know, for example, that the Parthenon columns are sculpted to bulge outwards in the middle so as to appear straight? This is called entasis. For the same reason the base or floor of the temple curves upwards at the centre of its four edges, so as to appear straight. In fact, there is not a single straight line anywhere. Also, the columns at the corners are the only ones silhouetted against the sky, which makes them seem thinner, so the Greeks made them thicker to counter this effect. Did he know why the number of columns at the front was eight? This was the maximum it could be without seeming cluttered and therefore inelegant, while any less, from seven downward, the human eye can number instantly, without counting, which would look prosaic and less majestic. The length of the temple is proportionate to the front, to follow the famous Greek ratio, the Golden Mean. In fact, mathematical analysis shows that all parts of the temple, follow that rule in proportion to each other (https://www.goldennumber.net/parthenon-phi-golden-ratio/ ). And all sides lean slightly inwards, so if the columns extended upwards, they would meet one mile up, to form a pyramid. These are just examples of numerous refinements the Greeks made to make the Parthenon look as light and beautiful as possible, a level of sophistication still lost on lesser mortals today. They did not aim for size, like the Egyptians before them, but sophistication. They did not aim to impress you by making you feel small, but lift you up by making you feel free, intelligent and divine. It is no wonder that this ancient architectural style has been adopted in modern buildings around the world. Almost everywhere you look you see attempts to mimic Greek temples, none with the same success.

Painting and Sculpture:

In the twentieth century, Auguste Rodin declared he always tried to put himself in the state of mind of the Greek sculptors in terms of their artistic aims. He meant men like Polykleitos (500-430 BC), Phidias (488-431 BC), Praxiteles (395-330 BC), Lysippos (390-300 BC), Skopas, Myron, or Leochares. Even though I have produced sculpture myself, this is no place for an appraisal of their work or its significance; eminent scholars through the generations have written entire libraries before me. Herbert Read wrote, "With the synthesis of vital form and formal beauty which marked the birth of Humanism, the Greek sculptors of the Fifth Century BC opened up a new dimension of human consciousness… In the Fifth Century BC the Attic sculptors finally achieved this synthesis of the vital image of man with the geometric abstract of beauty, which they had been seeking. It was this achievement of a true idealism in art which gave the world Humanism, and which was the unique achievement of Greek culture." So, instead of my own quick appraisal, what I would prefer to mention about those Greek sculptors is the fact that, thousands of years later we know so much about them as individuals, not just their work. They were ordinary citizens in other respects, but the Greeks valued genius and geniuses in a way unique to them. Quite apart from their achievements, the greatest gift of the Greeks to others, including us, was the importance of the individual. If you had merit in whatever field, you deserved keeping a record of your name and recognition, something reserved only for kings and emperors in most other nations at the time.
In the same context, what is interesting about Greek painting and their mosaics is not what they depict, but what they do not. No totalitarian restrictions here as to what would be appropriate subjects for art, for example the glorification of rulers or gods, no rallying cries to national pride as in Nazi or Soviet so-called art. What is striking was how much more freedom they show, compared also with the religious art of more recent centuries. Nothing was off limits. Phidias, Apelles and their likes were two and half thousand years ahead of the French Impressionists who, in the nineteenth century, had to face prejudices the Greeks had discredited millennia before them.

Literature / Mythology:

Every nation has produced myths and legends but the sheer volume, actually volumes, of mythology from the Greeks is staggering. This outpouring of creativity and the sheer detail of those stories suggest that most ordinary Greeks of that time, the consumers of the material, were not preoccupied with just the daily mundanes of carnal existence, but had an intellectual craving for the cerebral, only found to that degree in a handful of individuals today, and en masse in no other people. So when we talk about the ancient Greeks, this was not just a group of privileged academics we are talking about. Their collective imagination was rampant, inventing stories as a means of understanding themselves and the world, which in turn gave rise to fiction as we know it, and to all literature. "Know thyself," a famous Greek aphorism, was a primeval urge for all Greeks as a nation, it was a genetically inherited hunger for truth and thirst for knowledge, not a trivial bit of advice on daytime television. What they meant was, spend your whole life getting to know yourself, this being your primary goal and preoccupation, and a means of understanding others and the world you share with them.
Contemporary comments also suggest that most Greeks, certainly the intelligentsia, did not believe those myths as literal for the most part. Socrates often referred to God rather than the gods, and claimed to be guided by an inner divine voice, rather than Pallas Athene. And yet all those thousands of myths were recorded and preserved at a time when writing even a shopping list was quite a challenge, technically - no biros and no paper notepads.

And they did not stop there. They went up a level when Homer (between 800 and 700 BC) wrote the Odyssey, a literary masterpiece and probably the best novel ever written, voted recently one of the 100 most influential books of all time - followed by Aeschylus (523-456 BCE) Sophocles (496-406 BCE) Euripides (480-406 BCE) and others. If you are not Greek, have you ever wondered why you are so familiar with those names or with Antigone, Oedipus, Prometheus, Medea? Does your choice of television ever include comedy, satire or tragedy? All of these are ancient Greek forms of literature and performance.
Children in the English-speaking world today study Shakespeare plays and think they are really old, yet these Greek classics are two thousand years older but are still being taught to the same children and at universities around the world. Myths, then fiction, poetry, drama, tragedies and comedies, dominating the lives of ordinary citizens meant minds innately striving towards the cerebral, and the urge to participate in universal excellence as a group, the exact opposite of cultures today embracing even the lowest. And the construction of those ubiquitous amphitheatres where large numbers could see plays being performed, the size and sheer number of them everywhere Greeks settled, suggests this was not a pastime for the elite, but engaged the general Greek populace; and the depth of meaning of the plays performed suggests a certain intellectual level for the audience, the common Greek, not just for the writers. It is interesting to consider how such plays compare to modern television soap operas, the nearest modern equivalent, going by the proportion of the population attending.

Which just about covers everything.

WHAT IS INSIDE A MAN…

The unprecedented flourishing of the arts in ancient Greece was a direct result of the discovery of the individual. Up until then, people were seen as more or less the same, there to be shaped by the environment they had been born into, then told what to believe, what to do and what to make, how to live their lives or how to serve the state, the gods or their masters.

Freedom for the individual is something most of us take for granted today, but it did not always exist, and is not universal even today. Think of Nazi or Soviet art, think censorship and of all the prohibitions and restrictions on intellectuals in so many countries around the world even now. Think also of the prohibitions people impose on themselves, on the basis of religion, for example, a kind of slavery, without an rationale from what is supposed to be a rational creator.

But the Greeks' freedom for the individual had allowed differences, even non-compliance, between individuals to blossom, liberating the true capabilities of the human brain, and gifted brains in particular. Surprisingly, two thousand years later, even in free countries, this appreciation has been lost to political views or social correctness, in favour of beliefs like nurture over nature, teamwork and other substitutes to innate talent and intelligence, which implies suppressing inborn ability - messing with nature.

The latter is partly due to a change in the kind of projects we undertake in our modern world. You cannot build tunnels or rockets without teamwork, nor compile encyclopaedias, run a business, or edit newspapers. But, even today, the greatest achievements of mankind have not come through group discussions, but through gifted individuals working alone, often defying known wisdom or going against all norms, to invent rockets or the jet-engine in the first place, to compose a Beethoven symphony or design an Eiffel Tower.

This put-down of natural talent is a form of prejudice and it persists in one form or another, either in organised societies or in the minds of many. The British insistence on teamwork is one example, their preference for effort over intelligence, and their bias for practical tasks as the measure of comparison are other examples, when in fact not all human achievement is about tasks. Long before we know what practical task we need to perform, we need vision, far-sightedness and imagination, all of which involve abstract thinking; and only afterwards do we need to persist and to put in the teamwork and the effort, otherwise we waste lives, even centuries trying and failing or achieving the wrong things. The ancient Greeks discovered and invented concepts which only two thousand years later did we find practical applications for. And the Greek civilisation, which accomplished more than any other, is proof of the superiority of the theoretical over the practical, if ever there were a conflict between the two.

In the middle ages, when humanity was searching to find its lost soul again, they looked back to the Greeks and rediscovered the fact that 'What's inside a man can be a whole world,' resulting in the Renaissance. That is, what's inside just one man, an individual. Once again, the arts, and later science, flourished and reached a higher level because the individual gifted brain was set free to innovate and experiment as it saw fit, rather than follow directions and conventions as to purpose from some authority, or defer to one's team-mates.

What a primitive tribe, then, those Greeks would have been to chance upon while strolling through ancient footpaths (not even Roman roads as yet), forests, mountains and valleys on a small peninsula with a tiny population, thousands of years before print-presses or other communications, certainly no internet and no transport.

WINNING THE BIGGEST LOTTERY

How could such an isolated tribe be so different from all others and what was the common denominator in all this, if it was not their genes? It is way beyond coincidence that all this could have been achieved by such a small group of people, in a small place, in a very short space of time, in such diverse fields of human endeavour. This explosion of creative thinking in every possible area of our world was, without question, unparalleled, and no other people, place or time comes anywhere near. It just so happened in ancient Greece, through a concentrated gene pool, that they produced an extraordinary number of extraordinarily gifted individuals, with a particular bend of mind for the theoretical and the abstract over the practical and mundane, a unique way of thinking which sought after the essence of all things, whether in sport, military strategy, maths, poetry, science etc. More like extraterrestrials than a tribe. In fact, very earthly, but different, just like a single lottery ticket out of millions wins the jackpot, the jackpot of brainpower in this case, with a unique combination of genes. It was a genetic phenomenon due to the gene pool they were lucky to start with, compounded by intermarriage, creating a virtuous circle, a kind of unintentional eugenics. Bright people tend to marry other bright people, further reinforcing this unintended elitism, their compounded intelligence then creating an elitist culture, mostly positive. Negative aspects of such elitism fortunately were rare, as in the legendary euthanasia of weak babies in Sparta - a cruel practice, if true, not universal in Greek culture - and Sparta certainly was a unique phenomenon even by Greek standards, more like a military state than democratic like Athens, hence the perpetual wars between them.

It is important to stress that none of the above geniuses had been to university to do a PhD and become 'qualified'. Nor did they have the technology we do. Nobody had taught them about the atom, maths, or the meaning of art, literature, or architecture. They were one-off independent thinkers who happened to have been born with a certain kind of brain, their mental powers heightened and exaggerated by such aforementioned inbreeding, if you like. They were the first to make all those discoveries simply by thinking.

Just as different ethnic groups share external characteristics, like colour of skin, hair, stature, and facial features in varying degrees, while still different from each other as individuals, ethnic groups also inherit internal characteristics, such as ways of thinking, hardwired, which characteristics are then reinforced within a cultural climate, itself produced by those brains. Humans, of course, have the ability to reshape their brains, but only up to a point. In medical research today, identical twins often are subjected to different treatments, with their consent, in order the test objectively which one works best when the genes are the same, difficult to test otherwise because a number of factors play a part and various genes are involved in any one characteristic. Eight have just been discovered to be involved in having red hair, several hundred play a role in intelligence, and we all know how difficult it is to match six numbers to win the lottery, let alone hundreds of numbers. Genes might have gone a different way for the Greeks and produced a different people, a little more ordinary or even inferior, just that the odds fell randomly in favour of a certain kind of brain for them.

The one thing the Greeks did not discover was the scientific explanation for their own uniqueness - they did not know about DNA back then.

It is ironic that political correctness often recoils at such discussion, just when the enormous significance of genes is being discovered by 21st century science. This is especially so in the Anglo-Saxon world, our predominant culture of today, where civility, in itself desirable, has come to be equated with a liberal (small L) all-embracing attitude to the lowest forms of ordinariness, and the insistence that anyone can be trained to do anything, which is patently false. No amount of group discussion can change the fact that our genes differentiate one kind of brain from another, and we often speak of innate talent but then deny that the same applies to things like intelligence itself and the different forms it can take, or alternatively that this is of some considerable importance. (Cf.A letter to Professor Al Khalili)

HOW CIVILISED ARE YOU?

The concept of all Greeks being one single nation emerged at Delphi, later than the Athens of Pericles. The Governing Council at Delphi wrote: "It was the Athenian people, being the fonts and origins of all things beneficial to humanity, who raised mankind from a bestial existence to a state of civilisation." A number of things I find interesting about this: 1) Their concept of what constituted civilisation (more below), 2) The early realisation that Athenian civilisation had benefited not only themselves and other Greeks but all humanity, and 3) What the writers imply, not about the Athenians they are talking about, but about themselves. This willingness to admit the superiority of one particular group over themselves was the exact opposite of the universal tendency of inferior minds to put down anything and anyone better than you. Thus, the writers show themselves, fellow-Greeks, a) to be truly civilised, raised above a bestial existence, as they say, and b) to share the classic Greek aspiration towards a higher state of being and the desire towards excellence. And despite the differences, even wars, between the various Greek city states, this was what united all Greeks, from Athens, to Delphi, to Sparta and Olympia and Macedonia, this culture of excellence, their universal disdain for the mediocre in favour of a higher state of being, what Delphi called "a state of civilisation."

To say that Greece was the cradle of Western civilisation is, therefore true but inadequate. Even today we use the word liberally, as in Chinese, Egyptian, or the Maya, Inca, Aztec and later the Arab civilisations, and this is not wrong; the Vikings also, like the ancient Greeks before them, later travelled all over Europe and had a huge influence on many countries, from Great Britain to Russia and down to the Mediterranean. It is just that those Greeks at Delphi had a different definition of the word civilisation, they did not mean just a set of cultural expressions and accomplishments, they meant what they called, to repeat, the raising of mankind from a bestial existence to a higher state, in other words a life for the common masses much more spiritual or cerebral than savage, earthy or carnal. For all Greeks, concepts and ideas had to be complex, refined, multifaceted and sophisticated to be worthy, and therefore much more important and powerful than pyramids, great walls, vases, including their own, that could be destroyed or become obsolete, or any one-off isolated discoveries.

That is why theirs became the civilisation of the world. They had this hunger for the truth - to know just for the benefit of knowing. From politics to philosophy, from architecture to literature, to sculpture, to theatre, to the life sciences, astronomy, mathematics and even sport.

This was the most productive time in the history of human thought.

HOW IS YOUR TASTE IN MUSIC?

The Greeks of today share a range of attributes with their ancestors, although such attributes have been diluted greatly over the millennia because the population has grown, genes have diversified, there has been greater mobility and intermixing, etc.. Even so, such characteristics are diluted but not extinct, and they remain recognisable. A peculiar preference for logic, reason and originality of thought in ordinary conversation, for example, including astonishing arguments between pre-school children and their parents. And you still find deep philosophical discussions in the Greek cafes by uneducated farmer-villagers. Greek popular songs, those for the greatest mass consumption, can be about any of the complex issues of life in equal measure, where the equivalent Anglo-American commercial music is simple lyrics, mostly about being in or out of love, although musically either lot can be good, bad or indifferent.

And there are more styles of Greek music today than in the rest of the West put together, music written by modern Greeks. Their love of music embraces all styles, including other Western and some Eastern, in addition to their own, whether classical, jazz, rock, pop, English, American, French, Italian, all played as one, often on the same radio station, even on the same radio 'show.' You will not find such a wide range of musical interests among the common people of any of today's other nations, and it is interesting to compare it with the BBC arrangement of classical only Radio 3, popular only Radio 1, etc. In the West we are allowed to choose our taste and stick to it, for the most part, whereas ancient Greeks in particular were genetically disposed to find every intellectual pursuit of equal interest.

Did you know that modern Greece has produced over 350 traditional dances (I taught 120 of them as a hobby, at Imperial College London), each with its own name, style, music and variations, or more than 350, if you count regional differences, with specialist clubs and courses around the world, especially at universities - compared to just one or a few dances in other countries. Greeks also have some of the richest variety in their home cuisine, some 300 national dishes today, requiring considerable expertise, yet all cooked universally in even the poorest homes, and familiar to every Greek child.

Dance, music, philosophy, cookery, this longing for excellence and creativity comes from the genes. So, contrary to our Greek waiter's opinion, not all of that intellectual heritage is in the past.


© John K Smyrniotis
London 2019

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