Greece was really something amazing...

Greece was really something amazing. Never has any single culture produced so much wonders and influenced the world in such a supreme scale.

You can start with they’re mythology. What a beautiful and awe-inspiring set of stories and characters. It indulges in the same creative exuberance as other polytheistic religious, but with even greater force, freshness, savagery, tenderness, pain, suffering and pleasure. These folk stories have some of the most well-sculpted, instigating, provoking, suspense-filled and taboo-braking structures on the world of human narrative. The most striking contrast with the Greek mythos, however, is with the monotheistic religions, the desert religions and the abstract and somehow-formless God of all that exists. The Greek supreme divinity have ancestry and descendants. They eat, they drink, they make love, they smell of streams and reeds, of magma and coal, of wine and honey, of sea-salt and algae, of crystal rocks and snow and field of grain, of leopards and goats and ivy, of blood and sweet and semen.

Now for their literature and language, what a feast. Greek is an amazing language to work with, flexible and sonorous, craving to be new-modeled by the user. Like we read in Memoirs of Hadrian:

>To my dying day I shall be grateful to Scaurus for having set me early to the study of Greek. I was still a child when for the first time I tried to trace on my tablets those characters of an unknown alphabet: here was a new world and the beginning of my great travels, and also the feeling of a choice as deliberate, but at the same time as involuntary, as that of love. I have loved the language for its flexibility, like that of a supple, perfect body, and for the richness of its vocabulary, in which every word bespeaks direct and varied contact with reality: and because almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek. There are, I know, other languages, but they are petrified, or have yet to be born. Egyptian priests have shown me their antique symbols; they are signs rather than words, ancient attempts at classification of the world and of things, the sepulchral speech of a dead race. During the Jewish War the rabbi Joshua translated literally for me some texts from Hebrew, that language of sectarians so obsessed by their god that they have neglected the human. In the armies I grew accustomed to the language of the Celtic auxiliaries, and remember above all certain of their songs… . But barbarian jargons are chiefly important as a reserve for human expression, and for all the things which they will doubtless say in time to come. Greek, on the contrary, has its treasures of experience already behind it, experience both of man and of the State. From the Ionian tyrants to the Athenian demagogues, from the austere integrity of an Agesilaus to the excesses of a Dionysius or a Demetrius, from the treason of Demaratus to the fidelity of Philopoemen, everything that any one of us can do to help or to hinder his fellow man has been done, at least once, by a Greek. It is the same with our personal decisions: from cynicism to idealism, from the skepticism of Pyrrho to the mystic dreams of Pythagoras, our refusals or our acceptances have already taken place; our very vices and virtues have Greek models. There is nothing to equal the beauty of a Latin votive or burial inscription: those few words graved on stone sum up with majestic impersonality all that the world need ever know of us. It is in Latin that I have administered the empire; my epitaph will be carved in Latin on the walls of my mausoleum beside the Tiber; but it is in Greek that I shall have thought and lived.

And the writers? Who would conceive that it was possible – had it not survived by the work of generations and generations of dedicated and love-for-knowledge-drenched copyists – for works like the Iliad and the Odyssey to have been written in 800-750bc? Who would have dreamed that so early the germs of narration, of character building, of simile, of dramatics, of thriller and suspense could already have bloomed into flowers, into perfect orchids of delicate detail and huge oaks of fictional-narration skeleton? To see the mastery of such works one need only to compare them with the Mahabharata and the Epic of Gilgamesh, who, in spite of their beauties, fail to achieve the same concentration, the same memorable characters, the same continuous presentation (in page after page) of vivid language? The earliest books of the Bible, with their dry, plain, almost civil-law-code-style-language, can’t compare with the beauty of Homer (or the different authors of the collected material): it’s like the dry bones of a whale put side by side with the actual animal, with its dark-blue flesh, its rugged skin covered with barnacles, its gigantic heart pumping rivers of blood, its vital jet ascending to the skies to splash in the cheeks of the clouds, its abyss-mouth swarming with plankton, sea flowers, and crustaceans.

And what to say about Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides? The practitioners of one of another of the supreme inventions of the Greeks: the Tragedy? To this day, if pressed, one will hardly find any other poet who dares as much in metaphoric language as Aeschylus (the world would have to wait a long time for such a successor, the great William Shakespeare). And all that amazing gallery of characters who were actually brought to live by actors, to discuss – under the pacific and safe disguise of the reanimation of the myths – the politics of the day, the glories and failures of the human race, the falsehood and hypocrisy of the established social institutions, the cravings and secret desires that creep like salamanders inside the swamps of our subconscious, perpetually ruminating, always waiting for the moment to ascend to the surface and morph into crocodiles (when finally the mother kills her children; the son beds his mother; the intoxicated women of the town, finally free from social convention and intoxicated with lust and madness, torn their king apart into rags of bloody flesh).

The very structure and architecture of the Theaters is amazing: their acoustic perfect. Let a coin fall in the middle of the Stage of the Theater od Dionysus and even the last members of the theater grandstand will hear the sound.

And where did we first find the strange political system of Democracy? In Athens, Greece. Admired by some, hated by others, never – even in the height of its powers – an unanimity, it is still the foundation for most of the modern civilized-world political system of government (although not quite in the same model as the Greek one, since we are not talking of a small city-State anymore, but of whole Nations).

And philosophy? Certainly one can say that other regions of the world had their equivalents (China, India, Persia), but not in the same style of the Greeks, whose influence would eventually led to the foundation of the Scientific Method. And what philosophers! One can mention only Plato, whose body of work (although today largely disproved) is sublime in its use of language, it’s imagery and allegories, it’s characters (Socrates is one of the most interesting characters in the world literature – although, of course, based on a real human being), in it’s bold and courageous will to try to beat Homer himself in his own game of literary achievement and poetical dialect.

Then we can mention the several Greek festival, the Olympiads, the celebrations of harvest, the culture of olive trees, the Dionysian mysteries, the rituals, the extremely modern realization that sometimes one needs to chain reason and indulge, in full flesh and spirit, in the bestiality of our nature:

>“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”

And how about the Greek sculptures, whose model to this day is seen as the supreme ideal of beauty and proportion, influencing all the artists in renascence, the modern concepts of fashion, still being used to decorate the house of the rich and powerful to this very day, still adorning libraries and courthouses and congress-houses and government building across the world?

There never was anything like Greek culture in the world before or since. They are not the only great culture; they were influenced by other world cultures (especially Eastern ones); they had the time to develop (the Golden Age was not the single lighthouse for all of the achievements of Greek history, like some say), however, they achieved so much in so many areas, and set so Olympus-high standards for what can be accomplished by human beings that one can’t help but admire them with all fibers of ones being.

>Never has any single culture produced so much wonders and influenced the world in such a supreme scale.
Except America.

nice bait

true. if not "wonderful" controversial the americans

No civilization compares with the Chinese. Can you comprehend the idea of a rich and unique culture that remains singular, consistent, and iterative over the course of millennia? Athens was a short flash in comparison.

Y'all know Hadrian did not actually write Memoirs of Hadrian?