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Introduction: Gifts From the Greeks
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11737 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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2 / 1994 |
939 Words |
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The obvious retort to the claim that Christopher Columbus found America is that we didn't know it was lost.
The claim is clearly ethnocentric--from a European point of view America needed to be discovered, while from that of the Hurons or the Narraganset Indians it obviously did not. Claims of discovery--of lands, of seas, of industrial processes, of art forms, and of scientific facts or principles--have had a strong tendency to be used for chauvinistic purposes, and the self-esteem of a people or nation is supposedly enhanced when they are the putative originators of this, that, or the other Good Thing. Our perspective is changed when we inquire into how America found Christopher Columbus, or the Incas "stout Cortez."
Everybody knows that during the communist regime in the old Soviet Union, some Soviet stalwart was found to have invented everything from the phonograph to corn flakes. The political reasons for such claims are transparent, and we do not take them seriously anymore. But while we need to purge the chauvinism from claims of discovery and invention, the fact is that we are indebted to our forebears--individual and group predecessors--for most of our prized possessions, from domesticated animals to knowledge of the stars, from weaving cloth to the symphony orchestra.
This month, in three articles, the contribution of the ancient Greeks is explored and put into some perspective. The first of these articles, by Francis J. Greene, compares the art--specifically the sculpture and architecture--of Egypt and Greece in an attempt to elucidate the intellectual concerns and suppositions of these powerful ancient peoples. The Egyptians, as Plato, among others, reports, always thought of the Greeks as children--youngsters with no history behind them. While it is true, as the master of an Oxford college reminded a somewhat brash young fellow, that "none of us are infallible, not even the youngest of us," nevertheless youth dares and does things that the elders have forsaken or never attempted. The young want to know the reasons why. They want to know how to make life better, more intelligible, and how to avoid the mistakes of their forebears. They speak all the time of justice and beauty and the like--ideals, no less--and the world would be a sorrier and sadder place without their idealism.
The Greeks had a word for what the elders thought of as youthful prating--adoleschia, meaning gossiping, talking to no purpose--and from it we get our word adolescent. In the ancient world, the Greeks were the perpetual adolescents, impatient
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