Items related to The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others (OPUS)
Who were the classical Greeks? Paul Cartledge examines the Greeks in terms of their own self-image, mainly as it was presented by the supposedly objective historians - Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon. The Greeks were the inventors of history as it is understood today, just as they are the cultural ancestors of the West in so many other ways. Yet their historiography remained rooted in myth. The mental and material context of many of the inventions of Greek achievement which are rightly treasured today - especially democracy, philosophy and theatre, as well as history - was often deeply alien to today's way of thinking and acting. The aim of this book is to probe fully that achievement, principally using a typical Greek mode of conceptualization - polarity or binary opposition. It explores in depth how the dominant - adult, male, citizen - Greeks sought, with limited success, to define themselves unambiguously in polar opposition to a whole series of "others" - non-Greeks, women, non-citizens, slaves and gods. Colin Burrow is co-editor of the "Key Themes in Ancient History" series.
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Review:
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. We've seen the ruins, read the philosophy and bought into the myths. The Ancient Greeks have become very much part of us; their legacy, Western civilisation. But the familiarity has tipped into over-familiarity and, as Paul Cartledge points out, we are in danger of ignoring the fundamental differences between them and us. There's the language for a start. Democracy, for example, meant something very different to the Greeks to the way we understand it now; the British and American systems would have been dismissed as oligarchies. Politics was not the media blood sport that it has become today, it was one of the central activities that defined the lives of the Greeks. Similarly, their pantheistic universe would be totally at odds with our monotheist or atheist world. For all their civilisation, the Greeks mostly lived a subsistence lifestyle at the whims of nature. Even the very rich had little concept of or confidence in passing on their wealth to future generations. The present was all that mattered and much of their thinking was shaped by inherently conservative notions of preserving the status quo; the present day reverence for progress would have been anathema. Indeed their thinking was dominated by the possibility of decline--which accounts for the idealised versions of the City state in Plato's The Republic and Aristotle's The Politics. That said, many of the achievements of the Greeks were little short of miraculous. Forget the Trojan war and the empire building of Alexander the Great, the cultural and sporting diversity alone--much of which we still celebrate today--would have been enough to guarantee their place in history. While no apologist for the Greeks, Cartledge is hardly their sternest critic either, but this does not detract from this elegant and readable history. He avoids the dryness of many histories by focusing on 15 key figures--from Homer to Alexander--and lets events unfurl around them as he charts the rise, fall, rise again and final collapse of the Greek empire. This is the ideal companion for every would-be know-all on holiday in the Med. --John Crace
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- PublisherOxford University Press
- Publication date1993
- ISBN 10 0192192663
- ISBN 13 9780192192660
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages247
- Rating
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