The English poet and essayist John Addington Symonds
said that all civilized nations and all
that concerns the activity of the
intellect our colonies of Greece, and the
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in
a similar spirit of hyperbole and
compliment said that all of Western
philosophy is nothing but a footnote to
Plato.
Now what these two men are talking about
is probably the fact that the ebb and flow
of Western civilization seems to involve
our perpetual rediscovery of our debt to
Greece, and it's in that spirit that Jean
August Dominique Ingres painted the
Deification of Homer, showing him as the
font of all poetry and music for Western
civilization.
Likewise on the Albert Memorial in
London poets are hovered around the
chiefest of the poets and musicians
Homer, Pythagoras representing the
musicians and Chaucer, Shakespeare and
Dante representing the poets who owe
their debt to this man.
The Romans who of course conquered all
of the Greek cities and kingdoms realized
their immense debt to Greece and that
that was no more better poetically put
than by Horace who wrote Graecia capta
ferum victorem cepit, that is captive
Greece has seized her ferocious
conqueror, that being Rome. And it is of
course our knowledge that our knowledge
of ancient Greek sculpture comes in
large part from the copies that the
Romans lovingly made of the ancient
Greek originals. What little we know
about ancient Greek painting actually
come from mosaics that the Romans made
of the most famous of the paintings, and
although the Romans would go on to great
works of architecture the font of their
knowledge of classical architecture
comes of course from what they borrowed
from Greece. Likewise in law, politics and
philosophy Rome's debt to Greece is
immense and the same can be said of
literature and the theater. In the early
Middle Ages in Western Europe it was a
churchman Boethius who wrote the
Consolation of Philosophy which is what
we might call a Neoplatonic Aristotelian
ism that gave to the Western Middle Ages
what little we knew of ancient Greek
learning at that time, because as you
know when their empire began to fall
apart it essentially divided into a
Latin speaking western part and a
Greek-speaking eastern part. And so
little translation had been done of the
works of the Greek philosophers into
Latin that when the Empire collapsed all
the ancient Greek learning was
well-preserved in the East but basically
unknown in the West. For those of you
took the course on the history of
Christianity you remember it was a very
torturous process by which Plato and
more importantly Aristotle came back
into the ken of Western philosophy and
theology, a long torturous task through
translations in from Greek into Arabic
and eventually into Latin where it
finally got into the hands of Thomas
Aquinas. But once Aristotle made his way
back into the minds of Western
theologians and philosophers Aristotle
reigned supreme.
Dante and this is a painting of
Aristotle contemporary with the time of
Dante Dante spoke of Aristotle saying
that he was in the maestro de tomar
cassano the master of all those who know
and the father of Renaissance humanism
Petrarch realized that to truly
appreciate the ancient spirit he would
have to learn ancient Greek. He made a
noble attempt at learning the language
but ultimately failed in his attempt. The
West in the Renaissance would eventually
come to know the works of the ancient
Greek philosophers and our Founding
Fathers were well-versed in Greek
political history and Greek political
theory. In the early 19th century during
the Greek war of independence from the
Ottoman Empire there was a wave of phil
hellenism
that swept over Western Europe and
America that manifest itself most
vividly in the neoclassical revival that
swept over Western countries and of
course at the end of the 19th century we
have the first great excavations by
Europeans and Americans into the sites
of ancient Greek history.
Well where is ancient Greek history now:
Unfortunately its study has been more
or less marginalized and thrown into the
dustbin of history labeled dead white
men and what they did and that's
unfortunate because there are many
many poignant lessons that we can learn
from ancient Greece. One of the most
important being about how the Greeks
created abused and destroyed one of the
most brilliant inventions and that was
democracy, and we'll trace that story in
the first five lectures and the second
five lectures.
