Echoing Jenkyns and Leonhardt, Edith Hall has concerns about Classics today. She opens her marvellous book, Introducing the Ancient Greeks, by looking at a recent trend among scholars for undervaluing Hellenic achievements. Did the Greeks invent anything at all? Or have generations of scholars simply been celebrating the "Oldest Dead White European Males" at the expense of the real innovators?
Many Greek achievements have parallels in other cultures, including Pythagoras's Theorem, which was known to the Babylonians hundreds of years before Pythagoras was born. But there was something special about the Greeks. Hall pinpoints ten characteristics which she believes informed the ancient Greek mindset, including inquisitiveness and suspicion of authority. Characteristics associated with their openness were perhaps the most important. The Greeks' eagerness to soak up the ideas of other peoples made them particularly enamoured of the sea, their conduit.
Wide-ranging and endlessly fascinating, Hall's book navigates across the sea-loving Mycenaeans of the Bronze Age, the Ionians, Classical Athenians (the Greekest Greeks, according to Hall's recipe for Greekness), and beyond. It is a fitting tribute to history that ought to be preserved, not for the sake of doing so, because it would, at the very least, enrich our conversation and range of comparison with events today. It would be nice, for example, if Boris Johnson weren't the only public figure who made a habit of quoting Pericles, the great Athenian statesman. Pericles's famous words, which Hall quotes in her book, could certainly lend themselves well to current debates on immigration: "We [Athenians] throw open our city to the world, and never expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything."
We must not be too pessimistic. Although there is work to be done, the ancient world is more fashionable today than it has been for half a century or more. As Leonhardt says of Latin in his book, the ancient past can live so long as people are willing to keep writing or talking about it, releasing it from its status as a relic of the past. If it is the pleasure of teachers and writers to set the process in motion, then it should be the pleasure of students and readers to welcome their words with all the open-mindedness that characterised the ancient Greeks. It was their inquisitiveness that made them great.
Many Greek achievements have parallels in other cultures, including Pythagoras's Theorem, which was known to the Babylonians hundreds of years before Pythagoras was born. But there was something special about the Greeks. Hall pinpoints ten characteristics which she believes informed the ancient Greek mindset, including inquisitiveness and suspicion of authority. Characteristics associated with their openness were perhaps the most important. The Greeks' eagerness to soak up the ideas of other peoples made them particularly enamoured of the sea, their conduit.
Wide-ranging and endlessly fascinating, Hall's book navigates across the sea-loving Mycenaeans of the Bronze Age, the Ionians, Classical Athenians (the Greekest Greeks, according to Hall's recipe for Greekness), and beyond. It is a fitting tribute to history that ought to be preserved, not for the sake of doing so, because it would, at the very least, enrich our conversation and range of comparison with events today. It would be nice, for example, if Boris Johnson weren't the only public figure who made a habit of quoting Pericles, the great Athenian statesman. Pericles's famous words, which Hall quotes in her book, could certainly lend themselves well to current debates on immigration: "We [Athenians] throw open our city to the world, and never expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything."
We must not be too pessimistic. Although there is work to be done, the ancient world is more fashionable today than it has been for half a century or more. As Leonhardt says of Latin in his book, the ancient past can live so long as people are willing to keep writing or talking about it, releasing it from its status as a relic of the past. If it is the pleasure of teachers and writers to set the process in motion, then it should be the pleasure of students and readers to welcome their words with all the open-mindedness that characterised the ancient Greeks. It was their inquisitiveness that made them great.
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