“Look, Corinthian columns!” Not exactly the sort of excited whisper one would expect to hear from fifth graders on a trip to the state Capitol building. However, in the fifth grade Waldorf curriculum, students study ancient Greece and the 50 United States. Not natural go-togethers? Not so fast.
Most of us are aware on some vague level that much of modern Western architecture, government and language has been influenced by the ideals of ancient Greece. However, few of us credit that influence on a daily basis. In It’s All Greek to Me: From Homer to the Hippocratic Oath, How Ancient Greece Has Shaped Our World, classics scholar and journalist Charlotte Higgins makes a compelling case for the linkage between ancient Greece and a trip to a seat of government.
Zeus once let fly two eagles from the ends of the world: one from the east and one from the west. They soared high over oceans, mountains, forests, and plains, until they met at the very center of the earth, its omphalos or navel. On this spot, a temple to Apollo was dedicated, the home of the Delphic oracle, where those who wished for insight into their past, present, or future might come to consult the god … as the inquirer passed under the temple colonnade…he would have seen some letters carved into the portico: gnothi seauton — "know thyself.”
Higgins portrays her book not as a “love letter to ancient Greece,” but as a “love letter to the act of thinking about ancient Greece.” She contends that “by looking at the Greeks, we can understand more about ourselves.”
Higgins does not pretend to be writing a comprehensive guide to the classics, rather “a bluffer’s guide.” With a scholar’s penchant for accuracy, she leads with the acknowledgement that the term “ancient Greece” is shorthand for a more complicated group of civilizations and a broader range of time than most of us realize. The “Greek world was made up of hundreds of politically independent, often disputatious city-states, each with separate systems of government, locally distinct religious cults, even different calendars and names for the months of the year.” She points out that what we generally term “ancient Greece” tends to be Athens in the fifth century BC.
Article comments
1 - Eric Daams
Ancient Greece is one of those subjects I've spent far too little time learning about, let alone how it impacts our lives today. Sounds like a fascinating read.