Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [86]
Yet the pinnacle of Greek civilization that produced those exquisite ruins on that hill in Athens was but a passing moment in human history some 2,500 years ago. It was a relatively brief episode in the march of humanity, but one that changed everything. Ancient Greece had a profound, unique, and lasting impact on the Western world. Like it or not, Western civilization was born in Greece.
As Greek-born writer Nicholas Gage described it in The Greek Miracle, “In the fifth century before Christ, an unprecedented idea rose from a small Greek city on the dusty plains of Attica and exploded over the Western Hemisphere like the birth of a new sun. Its light has warmed and illuminated us ever since…. The vision—the classical Greekidea—was that society functions best if all citizens are equal and free to shape their lives and share in running their state: in a word, democracy…. The concept of individual freedom is now so much a part of our spiritual and intellectual heritage that it is hard to realize exactly how radical an idea it was. No society before the Greeks had thought that equality and freedom of the individual could lead to anything but disaster.”
The Greek—or more precisely, Athenian—concepts of government by the people, trial by jury, and the first real notion of human equality (limited, to be sure; women and slaves, for the most part, didn’t count) mark the true beginnings of the Western democratic tradition. What we call science and the humanities—including biology, geometry, astronomy, history, physics, philosophy, and theology—were also essentially invented by the Greeks. In the spoken and written arts, these ancient people introduced and perfected epic and lyric poetry, as well as tragic drama. In their art and architecture, the Greeks created an ideal of beauty that has dominated the Western world. And these ideals of beauty were reflected in the mythology they created.
“The world of Greek mythology was not a place of terror for the human spirit. It is true that the gods were disconcertingly incalculable. One could never tell where Zeus’s thunderbolt would strike. Nevertheless, the whole divine company…were entrancingly beautiful with a human beauty, and nothing humanly beautiful is really terrifying.”
These are the words of Edith Hamilton, perhaps the greatest promoter of Greek myth in our lifetime. Largely due to generations of students having had her book Mythology on their school reading lists, many people instinctively think of Greek myths when they hear the word “myths.” Hamilton’s 1942 introduction to these classic stories provided the standard for a long time.
In those two words—“human beauty”—Edith Hamilton may have best summarized what we consider the Greek ideal. But Hamilton’s romanticized notion of Greek myth, as well as the traditional vision of Greek culture and history, have undergone serious revision of late. Recent scholarship has shone a light on some other aspects of the classical world. And Edith Hamilton’s worshipful tone ignores some nasty realities. The Greek gods of Olympus may have been “entrancingly beautiful,” as Hamilton wrote. But their stories were filled with as much cruelty, violence, incest, adultery, sibling rivalry, and venality as any of the earlier myths of Egypt or Mesopotamia—myths which the Greeks clearly borrowed and then revised to suit their needs.
The vision of idealized Greek marble figures, perfectly painted urns, and beautiful gods and goddesses delighting in cups of ambrosia is only part of the picture. It overshadows a more complex