Re: What have the Greeks and Romans ever done for us?

Sigge wrote:
Christopher Ingham wrote on March 27 introducing the thread "
Classical antiquity to the Middle Ages: Continuity or Discontinuity?"
QUOTE
"This new thread is an attempt to stimulate a discussion in the area
of ancient history, as the threads in this NG recently seem to have
been overwhelmingly about religious, mythological, and supernatural
topics."
ENDQUOTE
He was absolutely right then! He is more than absolutely right now!
Alas! The situation is getting worse. New fanatics appear and at the
present there are only one or two threads in the area of Ancient
History. Recently the thread "Why was Jesus crucified?" attracted 99
authors and 806 contributions (so far?).
Whenever there is something about Biblical Archaeology, Canaan,
Semites, Jews, Jesus, Middle East Frauds there is an invasion of
fanatics trying to persuade us that jewish mythology belongs to
soc.history.ancient.

Several times a year that peaks. Crazies like David are everywhere. Trying to put the ideas on a sound basis in physical evidence is unthinkable to believers.

Going back to Ingham's thread, my spontaneous answer was
"Almost everything GOOD inside us and around us we owe to the
Classical Antiquity.
And all EVIL that de-civilized the West (and even threatens it
currently) during the Dark Ages is an import from the Middle East."
Even a totally innocent and unimportant group like
soc.history.ancient is suffering in 2008AD from the pathological
fanaticism imported from the Middle East.
A Mathematician (I am a retired one) answering Ingham's question would
use phrases like "It goes without saying", "It is trivial to see", ...
He would discard the question and go on to more interesting matters.
The Historians are a little bit different. Most of them would answer.
"It is obvious. There is enormous evidence that .. and point to the
evidence concluding with That's why we refer to Middle Ages as Dark
ages".

I see this as the strange problem humanists have. They appear to imagine the first is the only possible first and the same or similar thing cannot appear later or in more than one place. Thus Greeks are deified for a very modern idea of what they did start. And that is a very selective view of what they started, if we do not continue it like running around naked and shitting in public, it is relegated to trivia on the quirks of great thinkers.

And given the Greek propensity to credit the Egyptians for almost everything we attribute to them as starting either that was a Greek conceit or it is our error in not believing them.

What strikes scientists/engineers as an enduring question about those ancient discoveries is in fact how slowly they developed and in most cases never developed at all. A thousand years of stagnation in ancient times is the norm. They obviously had many 'dark ages' and got through them quite nicely if we impose our simplistic idea of dark ages on them.

But some modern "historians" surprise us. Without any new evidence,
Archaeological or other, make wild claims.
They tell me
"What you think you see is just the surface. I will disclose the well-
hidden truth for you. You are not as smart as I am. Forget all other
Historians. They were stupid. I am clever."

Obviously they do not think like scientists as they rarely have any physical evidence upon which to base these vast revelations.

Thus, Marcia Colish publishes "Medieval Foundations of the Western
Intellectual Tradition 400-1400". An eloquent and very telling title.
Pity I cannot find a Mathematician that formed the tradition I follow
in the above period.
Another writer goes even further. Friedrich Heer in the first chapter
of "God's First Love", claims in an italicized paragraph !

"Without the Psalms there would be no Europe, no Christian past, no
Christian future".
No Europe?!

Sometimes, I think that irony is the best answer to such wild claims.

Considering they are largely traceable to the Egyptians ...

Crediting modern science to Christianity is very common even though it was fought tooth and nail except where Protestants could promote it to piss off the Pope.

In Monty Python's "Life of Brian" there is a scene where Reg (John
Cleese) prepares the action of the jewish group against the Romans.
You can see it in youtube and read it in
http://www.epicure.demon.co.uk/whattheromans.html

The scene finishes with
QUOTE
Reg: All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation
and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads
and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the
Romans done for us?
Xerxes: Brought peace!
Reg: (very angry, he's not having a good meeting at all) What!? Oh...
(scornfully) Peace, yes... shut up!
ENDQuote

The Aztecs had just about everything on the list. Which leads some to claim Romans visited the new world and taught the backwards natives. The first
inventor is the only inventor idea rearing its ugly head. Or, they had to be taught to make pyramids by the Egyptians because making a pile of stones is such an elusive idea."

Now going back to Ingham, Classical Antiquity is not just Romans. It
is Greeks as well. Imagine adding to Roman genius of Administration
and Engineering the Greek genius of Political Thought, Science,
Mathematics, Philosophy, Art and put the question
What have the Greeks and Romans done for us?
How long would the list be?
Will you please contribute to such a list?
Not with the important well-known ideas as Democracy, Science,
Mathematics, Philosophy, Engineering, Art, Theatre, Vowels, Prose,
Administration, ....

Democracy was found in Northern Europe by the Romans among the Germans. Many American Indian tribes had a similar form of democracy. Plato, whose ideas became dominant, was totalitarian with philosopher kings something like the rule by technocrats which we have rejected for human nature. If anything the Greeks resurrected an old idea of democracy rather than invented it.

Their science while superficially appearing to be like ours rarely was. Take Democritus and atoms. Sounds modern until you read he thought there were an infinite number of different ones and they were of all different shapes. In that form it could not go any where as each different substance was made of a differently shaped atom. It was also viewed as leading to a purely mechanistic universe which is fine but no one stepped forward to separate the human from the mechanical universe to the idea was attacked. Christians knew of it an condemned it as promoting atheism.

These things are all like "fun facts of science" we read as kids in sources tailored to our age.

As to philosophy, look into all their ideas in that department and see just how many ideas are not credited as making us? The vast majority of them are better left ignored else the idea is ridiculous on its face.

but with small unexpected things, e.g.

Precisely the modernization of ancient ideas I am talking about.

1) Society Service (as an alternative to jail sentence ). My
grandfather told me Herakles was not sentenced to hard Labour as it
was thought because of the headline "The 12 Labours of Heracles" but
to Society Service (he used back in the 40ies the same word,
samhällstjänst, that was introduced a few years ago in Sweden)

2) Embedded Journalist (Michael Wood used the term characterizing
Callisthenes in his Alexander the Great)

3) Bikini (My wife, an artist and cloth designer, modified slightly
Atalante's bikini www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/AtalanteLouvreCA2259.html
in a collection sometime in the 70ies. It was rejected because it was
far too revealing!)

See also sights.seindal.dk/sight/477_Room_with_Girls_in_Bikini.html

4) BeachVolley. Nausicaa is playing with her friends volleyball in the
beach when she discovers shipwrecked Odysseus.

5) Elvis Presley. I couldn't help laughing when I read Armand d'
Angour's phrase
"... Pronomus of Thebe - the Elvis Presley of Antiquity - that "he
drove his audiences wild with his facial contortions and the gyrations
of his body"

page 272 in Rethinking Revolutions Through Ancient Greece.

6) ???

Or more recently, "Workhouses: The debt China owes to 19th c. English Jurisprudence."

--
Economics sanctions have never worked.
That is why they are so popular.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4000
http://www.giwersworld.org/israel/bombings.phtml a5
.

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