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Cuts in education- especially in the humanities- are never intended to save money; they are meant to undermine dissident thinking.
Why Greece?
Pedro Olalla
Audiovisual lecture delivered to the Meeting of Classical Civilization of Sagunto, Spain, on November 17th, 2012
(in response to the proposed abolition of Greek studies in Spanish education)
To all teachers
When I was a child,
it seemed strange to me that Greece was in the first chapter
of every book;
whether it was about history, mathematics or whatever else,
Greece was always in the beginning,
on the horizon.
I imagined it was green,
with springs, forests and mist,
like the landscapes of my mother country,
Asturias.
These are the real landscapes of Greece:
a place, a name
which in one way or another
has carved its own landscape into the mind of every westerner.
For many people,
the Greek landscape
is the balanced and timeless outline of an ancient temple;
for others,
this landscape, rooted in fantasy,
is one of ruined columns,
the sea and the islands of Homer,
the meek and peaceful pastures of Arcadia,
or the magnificent silhouette of classical Athens.
But why Greece?
Why has Greece penetrated so deeply inside of us?
Why, again and again,
do all paths lead to her?
o one contests the existence of other cultures,
but it is certain that no other,
no other culture
has been reassessed
reinterpreted,
preserved and universalized
as has the civilization of ancient Greece.
In the Greek landscape,
the olive trees form a rhythmic and ancient geometry,
disturbed here and there by the sudden appearance of a cypress tree.
As a tree which lives for centuries,
each olive tree of this land
is an authentic natural monument
which brings the people of today in close contact
with their most direct ancestors,
who also grafted it
and pruned it,
beat its branches at harvest
and grew up eating its fruit.
It is a fascinating thought that most likely, since antiquity,
olive oil
has always had the same taste.
It is a dizzying thought.
Homer called the olive
“Chloera, [Green,]
aglaiokarpos, [adorned with fruit,]
tanyfyllos, [and narrow, dense leaves,]
kai telethoousa elaia.” [abundantly producing olive tree.]
Even before the alphabet appeared,
the inhabitants of these lands depicted,
in almost iconic characters
with eternal symbols that might be engraved today as well,
the words “olive tree”,
“olive”,
and “oil”.
And it is said that the goddess Athena,
who gave to man the flute, the plow
and the clay pot,
the yoke of the oxen,
the horse’s bridle,
the chariot and the ship,
and who taught them the science of numbers
and the arts of the kitchen and of spinning
who founded the court in order to unite justice and logic,
gave to mortals, as a symbol of complete divine benevolence,
an olive tree.
It is the tree that Athena made grow, once, on the sacred rock of the Acropolis,
around which was built, afterward, the Erechtheion.
The grapevine, also, was a gift of the gods.
Dionysus introduced it to human beings,
and initiated Ikarios and Oeneus into the processes and secrets of wine.
For their part,
Demeter and Kore, the goddesses of Eleusis
showed Prince Triptolemus how to cultivate wheat,
and gave him a chariot drawn by winged serpents
in order for him to spread this knowledge in the world.
Wheat, grapevine and olive tree:
bread, wine and oil;
the three components upon which the Mediterranean culture
sustained itself and has survived to this day.
And what do we know about these things before Greece?
Little,
almost nothing.
Probably other ancient peoples knew about wheat,
vines and olive trees,
before or contemporaneously with the Greeks,
but as in so many other cases,
it was the Greeks who
with their myths and works,
used these things to create
a civilization.
Every corner of this land is in reality the scene of a myth.
Here are the mountain peaks of Olympus,
the sacred abode of the gods,
the waters over which Charon crossed with the souls in his boat,
the beach on which Athena
made Odysseus realize that he had finally reached his homeland.
I have seen the January sky at twilight over the waters of the Elisson river,
where the Furies pursued Orestes with the whips of their fingers.
My footsteps led me to the distant cave
where Rhea tricked Cronus by giving him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes,
to the peak of Alifeira,
where Athena emerged as a fully-armored daughter from the head of her father Zeus,
to the lagoon where Alpheus fell in love with Aretousa,
and where Hercules defeated, with arrows and bronze gongs,
the fearsome Stymphalian Birds,
and to the lonely peak of Mount Lykaion,
where the Pelasgians worshipped Zeus and Pan equally.
Undoubtedly,
Greece owes a large part of the impact
she has on our hearts to the charm of her myths.
The Greeks bequeathed to us their myths,
the most ancient stories of our civilization.
Their pictures unite us with the people of every era;
their symbolism
has repeatedly enriched and strengthened the expressions of our culture,
and their position in the collective memory
can no longer be replaced with any other story,
neither past nor future.
In reality, we are still ignorant of the amalgam which constitutes
these strange stories of gods and people,
but there is one thing which is very clear:
Greek myth managed to accomplish
the delicate operation of blurring the boundaries
between man,
nature
and divinity.
Thanks to the myths,
the geography of Greece is unique in the world,
because there, natural history
is also human and divine.
Situating the birth, development and adventures of the gods
in the same places where the people lived,
the myth was able to establish a place for man in relationship to nature and divinity,
creating a shared function and harmony between them.
In this way,
the ancient Greeks invented a method of understanding the world,
rather than a na?ve way to explain it.
They were born and grew up as a people
in the fantasy of myths,
which at the same time gave them consistency in their identity as an ethnic group,
gave expression to their religion and civilization,
and cultivated a relationship
of inclusion and respect toward nature.
And they were not only the creators of their myths,
but also their first interpreters and critics.
The same Greeks who passed on their myths to us
wondered repeatedly about their meaning,
and defined the field of logic in regard to them.
For other peoples and other religions,
the exploration of nature
and the approach to the human, physical and mundane
signaled a dangerous distancing from the divine;
however, for the Greeks
this conflict did not apply.
For this reason they also bequeathed to us a position foreign to dogma
and open to wonder and knowledge.
Later,
Europe discredited this attitude
during centuries of obscurantism and religious fundamentalism,
and when she tried to regain it, she did so looking again to Greece.
Favored by the open and unifying language of myth,
the Greeks enjoyed a faith without dogma.
Their religion
did not consist of a belief,
but in an attitude toward mystery,
and an attitude
of the most apparent humility.
“Zeus, whoever you may be”
-Aeschylus has the chorus say-
“if by this name it pleases you to be invoked
by this name I call to you”.
“As I weigh all things in the balance, I have nothing to compare save you,
if in truth I must cast aside
this vain burden from my heart…”
This attitude
counseled the Greeks not to leave out of their worship the gods they did not know.
For this reason, the apostle Paul,
ascending these rocks to the Areopagus [Hill of Ares],
came upon an unusual altar,
dedicated “to the unknown god”,
and he was thus able to say, to these people who were open to anything new,
that about this god, whom they worshipped without knowing,
he was coming to speak to them.
Everyone listened to him:
some believed him, others did not.
In contrast to the holy wars which have filled the centuries with blood,
in contrast to the religious intolerance which still manifests in the world we live in,
such a humble attitude
continues to be revolutionary.
The absence of unquestionable dogmas,
openness to new ideas, admiration and doubt,
made up the ingredients of a creative and brave attitude
which the Greeks called philosophy.
Philosophy,
as a free and critical act,
as knowledge which does not come from above
but is constructed through reflection and dialogue,
is a specialty which was born and cultivated in this land.
In other places as well there were wise men, talents and enlightened people,
but not intellectual companions,
enthusiastic accomplices in the search for truth.
This place,
the Agora [marketplace] of Athens,
was for a long time the meeting place of those who
amicably shared the name of philosopher.
These pioneers
made their own thinking the object of their reflection;
they practiced and analyzed incessantly the capabilities of argument,
they taught themselves and others debate,
and re-thought the establishment,
without fear of being attacked in a vacuum.
Anaxagoras, Protagoras,
Hippias, Gorgias,
Critias or Socrates:
they were not exactly wise,
they were friends of knowledge,
philosophers.
From Socrates,
there has remained for us the portrait of the most genuine seeker of virtue,
the existence of which he proclaimed,
but never claimed to possess;
from Plato and Aristotle,
what remains are the greatest and busiest structures of the world’s thought,
but all of them together,
Sophists, Academics, Peripatetics, Epicureans, Stoics and Cynics,
left a bequest truer and more subversive than their conclusions:
their attitude.
In opposition to those who so often believed they possessed the truth
or had the ambition to impose what was right,
Greek philosophy suggested a humble and flawless attitude:
seeking knowledge,
practicing freedom.
Above the Agora of Athens
rise three rocky tree-covered hills:
the Hill of the Muses,
the Hill of the Nymphs,
and the one which is called
the Hill of the Pnyx.
This last,
the naked summit of which regards the Acropolis opposite,
is the most emblematic cradle of another great legacy from the Greeks:
democracy.
Contemporary historiography
usually cites that the euphoria of the Athenian victories against the Persians
and the following economic and ethical blossoming
opened the way for the appearance of democracy.
What simplicity!
We all know that in the history of the world
there have been many victories which have brought material wealth
and feelings of security and supremacy,
but which, for all that,
did not even begin to create something similar.
Democracy emerged from the soul of the Greeks
who from the time of Homer had become conscious of the idea that the life of each person
-“andros psyche-”
is unique, and more precious than any treasure or ambition.
It was born from the wish to define what is innate in humanity,
from the incessant search for the universal,
and from the belief that the idea of justice
and the impulse of the will
exist naturally within each human being.
2500 years ago now, within the short time of only a few decades,
a unique creation took on flesh and bones on the stage front of this square:
for the first time
a people was inspired by the lively feeling of a society of citizens
who were active, free, responsible
and democratic.
Throughout the era of Pericles
in this open space, the following individuals met:
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes,
Herodotus,
Thucydides,
Phidias, Ictinus,
Callicrates, Aspasia, Anaxagoras,
Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Antiphon
and Socrates.
How easy it is to say it!
From all of these figures
and from all of those who came later
we inherited civil society.
Until that time
in the history of humanity, a human being was not a citizen.
There were civilizations of the peak,
of power concentrated in a god-king, or power shared among members of a caste;
but not, however, civilizations of societies of citizens.
Democracy was created on the basis of the “demos”:
a people with consciousness of its own dignity
and willing to exercise it.
The experience of the Greek “polis”-cities-
whatever failings they may be marked with,
conferred on the society of that time feelings of freedom,
justice,
equality,
responsibility,
and of participating together in defining and defending the “Common Good,”
which was unknown then, and unfortunately,
in the times which followed as well.
Greek democracy
had as its supreme ideals freedom and equality,
ideals which, from this tribune,
the citizens defended
through the power of speech.
On the one hand, freedom of speech, in private or in public;
freedom to take part in politics,
and freedom to live according to one’s own desires.
On the other hand,
“isonomia”
or equality before the law;
“isopoliteia”
or equality in political rights,
“isegoria”
or equality in the use of speech.
And together with these rights, one virtue:
“parrhesia”,
the virtue of participating, using language to defend the truth.
The brilliance of these ideas,
now that we call them to mind in their purity from the height of this rock,
reveals to us how fragile and unclear it still is today,
democracy in the world.
Not only Athens
but also the islands and other places of the Greek peninsula
labored to cultivate the project of democracy.
On both sides of the waters of the Corinthian Gulf
spread the territories of two of the most important
confederations of ancient Greece:
on this southern side,
that of the Achaeans;
on the opposite shores,
that of the Aetolians.
Although in the rest of the world monarchies were dominating,
and the authority of the established power,
the Greek federations
were driven by assemblies of free citizens, committed to the identification
of the Common Good.
This fragile system,
based on the political virtue of the individual,
survived through many generations
despite conflicts
of interest among Greeks.
If finally it gave way
it was due to the very difficulty of the undertaking,
the greed of some traitors,
or the arrival of invaders from outside.
In these beautiful waters at the entrance to the Ambracian Gulf,
the famous Battle of Actium took place;
the complete military destruction of Mark Antony and Cleopatra
which anointed Octavian as the first Roman emperor.
It seems unbelievable
but from the distant Octavian Augustus until the independence of the USA,
the French Revolution
and the subsequent civil revolutions,
no country in the world was governed by a system
with completely democratic and constitutional claims.
The representative democracies of today,
inherited more from the Roman “Res publica” than from the Athenian democracy,
are nothing more than oligarchies which seek a legal status
through controversial popular support.
The Greek democracy fell into oblivion;
even the word “democracy”
was delayed two thousand years before it came into western languages,
and the exact idea of what this form of government signifies
was reconstructed by historians and scholars
just two centuries ago,
based on the texts of Thucydides,
Isocrates,
Demosthenes
and Herodotus.
The investigation of the past in a critical and reflective manner
was itself, in its conception, a Greek initiative.
Leading this undertaking
was Herodotus of Halicarnassus,
an eager traveller
born in a Greek city which was under the control of the Persians.
Herodotus did not have an intention to carve a mythical genealogy
nor to compose an epic,
but to understand the causes that had given shape to his era,
and the reason which led him to exile:
to become conscious, in other words, of the real origin
of the clash between Greeks and “barbarians”.
For that reason
he began to travel in the Mediterranean,
ardently seeking direct testimonies from eyewitnesses of the events
and their successors.
In his research he traversed
the islands of the Aegean,
the shores of the Black Sea,
Egypt, Babylon, Tyre,
Southern Italy,
and almost all of Greece, in order to reconstruct what had happened in the world
during the epochs of the last four Persian kings:
Cyrus, Cambyses, Darius and Xerxes.
With his long and conscientious work,
Herodotus invented something new:
History
a word
which appears for the first time in his work
and means, precisely, “research.”
Intellectual toil gave Herodotus practice in tolerance.
This is the famous bay of Marathon,
the scene of the great battle between Greeks and Persians recounted to us by the historian.
The story bequeathed to us by Herodotus
is recounted without hatred, and with empathy.
It is the fruit of a viewpoint of respect and tolerance toward all peoples
and toward their customs,
the fruit of an open spirit.
On the other hand,
he steadfastly condemns war
while he sympathizes with the sufferings and the misfortunes of both sides.
In this reed bed
more than six thousand Persians died, trapped;
beneath this tomb in Marathon
lie the remains of the one hundred and ninety-two Athenians who fell in that battle.
“In peace, the sons bury the parents;
in war
it is the parents who bury their sons”.
This sentence of Herodotus, which has been repeated so many, many times
condenses anti-militarism and prudence,
tools with which History started to be written.
The protagonists of the Histories written by Herodotus,
Thucydides, Xenophon and Polybius
are not isolated heroes,
they are not even the Greeks as a whole:
they are the people,
all of the people.
In this
the historians followed this universal line which Homer had carved,
and which will never be eclipsed from the Greek spirit.
In this universality,
History
identifies itself with still another great find of the Greeks:
Tragedy.
This is the Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus,
the first stage of the great tragedies.
The word “theater” means “place for viewing”;
consequently, theater
is not an act which is understood from the stage or from the representation,
but from high up here,
the tiers from which the spectators watch.
From the 5th century B.C.
Greece filled up with theaters.
The stories which were represented in these theaters
were arrangements of ancient, well-known myths.
The plot probably did not contribute something new;
what was meaningful
was to see the heroes alone in the moment of their decision,
to see, from these silent seats, how the hero evaluates his acts internally;
to feel enchanted by this call to bravery
beneath the inexorable strength of fate and the disobedient and unpredictable materials
with which the gods made us.
Tragedy presents the conflict
but does not solve it;
for this reason it was a school for deeper thinking and democracy.
Other peoples arranged the narrative material of their myths,
but they did not manage to extract from them
the ethical conflict of the tragedies.
In other words:
other peoples could undoubtedly understand the agony of a person
who kills his mother to avenge the death of his father,
but none of them wrote the Oresteia.
The Greeks left us tragedy,
but also comedy,
and lyrical poetry,
and epic poetry,
and history,
the treatise, the short story,
the dialogue,
the epigram, the encomium,
the nuptial poem,
interpretive [hermeneutics] and preparatory [educational] writing,
chorography [geographical description].
All of the literary genres in which our civilization has expressed itself
and continues to express itself
are inherited from the Greeks.
The great value of these people
consists in the fact that in every area
they codified what they imagined
and they did so masterfully.
That is why as many as have followed
had to refer to them,
to try to make progress in relation to them.
This is an unshakeable truth
which characterizes world civilization.
Literature, history, politics, law and science
were developed in written form by the Greeks;
but this point of departure would never have become possible
without the miraculous gift of the first complete phonetic alphabet,
the instrument which made it possible to transport the voice to the silence of the glance.
This process would never have been put into action
without those tiny and fragile little twigs
without those “gifts with voice and soul” which Cadmus gave to Greece.
If Latin stopped, one day, being an unwritten language
it is owed to the fact that they took the letters from the Greeks who came out of this port of Euboea,
and if the western languages began one day to be written and developed,
it is owed, as well, to the fact that they received the inheritance
of this alphabet.
An incalculable number of words and abstract meanings with which we express ourselves today
were used for the first time in Greek:
idea,
logic,
problem,
method,
theory,
analysis,
system,
symbol,
phrase,
dialogue,
dialectic,
ethics,
politics,
machine,
energy,
mystery,
meter,
music,
melody,
rhythm,
harmony.
How would the world be if this language had never existed?
Undoubtedly more brutal and dark than it is today,
as difficult as it is to imagine.
Greece gave us the first material of our thought,
because “I think”
means nothing more than that I correlate a world of images, sensations
and words;
I combine without limit a vast collection of little pieces
which strangely bear the imprint of the Greek stamp.
The language which for 3500 years
reverberates without interruption in these landscapes
is the mother tongue of abstract thought,
the mother tongue of all our phonetic alphabets,
the first “lingua franca”,
the oldest of those still alive in spoken and written tradition,
the first in literary and historical influence,
the language with the first grammar and the first metalinguistic reflection.
And if we must judge by the enormous influence which it has exercised
and continues to exercise over the rest,
the Greek language
is the most vital language in the world.
Probably
the Greeks weren’t the first in everything
but certainly they were the first who told us systematically about everything.
Their writings
are the oldest and most complete recording of human thought and knowledge,
an entry which still has not been completely understood
and which, besides the fact that it inspires the present,
will someday shed light on earlier stages of the world,
on further knowledge of which the Greeks
were simply the carriers.
Medicine, physics, science and technology
left their first indelible testimonies in the writings of the Greeks.
This is the fatherland of Pythagoras,
of Hippocrates, Archimedes, Euclid,
Eratosthenes and of so many others
who accepted the challenge of trying to understand
the whys of nature.
Today, we continue to name the plants and the animals
with the same names which were put into categories by Aristotle, Theophrastus
and Dioscorides.
Four hundred years ago
Copernicus and Kepler
supplanted the so-called “geocentric system of Ptolemy”
which had dominated for fifteen hundred years,
substituting for it a different system, a heliocentric one, which paradoxically
resembled the one Aristarchus of Samos had described
in the 3rd century B.C.
On this mountain near Epidaurus
was born Asclepius,
the healing hero,
and in the sanctuaries of Asclepius was born the science of medicine,
connected with the search for harmony with nature and the divine.
The first to compose a complete group of scientific treatises
confronting disease as a physiological phenomenon
was Hippocrates,
a restless spirit from this island of Cos who paved the way for a new art,
“long for a short life”.
Of the names of those who followed him
we remember mostly Democedes,
the doctor of the Persian king Darius;
Diocles,
the great student of anatomy,
Praxagoras,
pioneer in the study of the vascular system;
Herophilos,
researcher in the physiology of the brain, the eye and the genital organs;
Erasistratus, who studied the functions of the nerves
and the circulation of oxygen in the blood;
Dioscorides, father of pharmacology;
Aristotle himself
and the unrepeatable Galen.
It seems unbelievable
but for more than two thousand years
the history of medicine
was nothing more than the uninterrupted process of reading, commenting on,
translating and experimenting on the knowledge of this handful of Greeks
who considered man as nature accessible to reason.
The medicine of the Roman Empire was Greek,
and Greek the pagan knowledge which reached this far away city of Harran,
the famous hospital of Gundeshapur,
the House of Wisdom of Baghdad,
and the exemplary “Civitas Hippocratica” of Salerno.
Ibn Batriq,
Ibn Isaaq
and Ibn Qurra
were Greeks in both descent and in spirit
who translated into the Syrian and Arabic languages
the works of Hippocrates, Dioscorides and Galen,
and the works of Euclid, Aristotle and Ptolemy
which later reached Cordoba and Toledo.
The libraries of the Middle Ages
were born from the desire of generating a civilization capable of opposing paganism,
and from the enlightened attempts of some people
to preserve the knowledge of the Ancients.
The academies of the Renaissance
were born from the memory and rivalry of the Athenian Academy and the Athenian Lyceum.
If theocentrism, obscurantism and dogma
had not undermined the foundations of the Greek spirit,
science would today be at least a thousand years ahead,
and millions of people
would not have died at the hands of fanaticism and ignorance.
The attempt to understand life and nature
sprang up in Greece from the love of both.
From the most ancient times
the Greeks celebrated, in contact with nature,
the inexhaustible energy of life.
This very ancient stadium,
forgotten today on the top of Mount Lykaion in Arcadia,
transports us to a faraway epoch in which young women and men in the bloom of youth
competed for a symbolic prize of plant origin.
Those primitive celebrations,
in which the elect embodied the reviving power of nature,
constituted the seed of the athletic competitions and the Panhellenic celebrations,
the faraway origin of our contemporary and controversial competition.
For those who ran in these stadiums
or for those who watched, seated on the grass,
the body was not yet “the hideous garment of the soul”
as the great Saint Gregory concluded,
perhaps forgetting
that the god of the Christians incarnated in the flesh.
The Greeks praised beauty, 0:30:53.779,0:30:56.360the body, love and eroticism,
and far from puritanism and humiliation,
they acquired a civilization which was cheerful and innocent.
Among the ruins of the temple of Hera in Olympia,
beside the ancient stadium,
covered by the mud of the Alpheus river,
there appeared, a century or so ago,
Hermes of Praxiteles,
the masterpiece of the Greek sculptor
whose work had incited such admiration among generations of artists,
only through clumsy Roman copies.
Beside these houses of the village Klima
a plow one day brought to light the famous Aphrodite of Milos.
Both sculptures, freed from the mud,
speak to us of our own body with an admiration and subtlety
which the long centuries following the disappearance
of these statues would not know.
Parallel with sculpture,
the great Greek architecture was born from the desire
to submit materials and space to a conceptual framework.
As did the mythology,
it also undertook to integrate, in its creation,
human beings, nature and divinity.
And it developed, for this purpose, a tool
with as much precision and refinement as music,
but more enigmatic, if nothing else,
because it found expression in silence:
geometry.
The Greeks lifted geometry up from the empirical rope which measured the fields
to the ultimate mathematical abstraction.
Every segment of a Doric column is proof of this attainment.
In its proportions, each one of these tambours
contains the whole temple.
The whole temple could take form again on the basis of one segment,
thanks to the geometry which inspired it,
and which reflects back the same harmony
which is also present in the human body,
the structure of plants,
and in that of the universe.
Euclid and his school
formulated these principles systematically
and so persuasively
that his work was passed down intact until the 19th century AD
and was only fully integrated in the 20th.
Architecture, engineering,
mechanics,
physics, astronomy,
topography,
cartography,
nautical arts and many other fields
developed on the elements of Euclidean geometry.
Modern hyperbolic geometry and elliptical geometry
are now expanding the scope of this science,
but they have not stopped being defined in relation to Euclidean geometry.
These fallen capitals and large stones,
these columns which are lying in the mud today or planted among the undergrowth
were not then monuments,
but living spaces,
public places in which beauty was a value which sought expression
through architecture,
sculpture and painting.
These columns supported and formed harmonious colonnades [stoas];
and on these pedestals
once rose beautiful statues.
The reason that in subsequent dark times
the temples were destroyed,
the paintings erased
and the statues turned to quicklime
is that they reminded us of the human measure,
that they cultivated knowledge concerning humanity in the world.
Many Greeks,
who were scornfully called idolaters,
were expelled or martyred
simply because books or statues were found in their possession.
Today, however, the words of Pericles to the Athenians
seem to us good and blameless:
“we love beauty without abandoning simplicity;
we love knowledge without it making us soft”.
In such a way might the attitude of the Greek spirit be summarized.
Thus, or in the two axioms which for centuries have been found carved here,
on the temple of Apollo in Delphi,
to serve present and future generations:
“Nothing in excess”;
“Know thyself.”
With moderation, and with their searching,
those brave spirits tried to build a new world,
freed from dogma and the object of debate
of ethics, of aesthetics,
well-governed and free.
And we can say that they did not manage to do it completely,
that they were not perfect,
but equally justly we can say that they never failed
because they never abandoned the search.
Of course
not everything in Greece was always bright and cloudless.
Her history
like that of all peoples’
is full of gestures of arrogance,
of absurdity,
even barbarism.
However, from this mist it managed to raise a spirit capable of fascinating
the most strong-souled and conscientious human beings of all periods:
the Humanist Spirit:
concern for the human being in the world,
trust in his capability and conscience
to freely choose what is good,
and the effort to defend the dignity of each individual
against even the natural lower instincts of his kind.
This humanistic attitude,
which naturally is not exclusively Greek,
which certainly has been betrayed repeatedly by Greeks themselves,
undoubtedly, however,
was invented,
cultivated,
was supported and recovered,
again and again in the course of history,
having recourse, above all, to the Greek element.
This humanistic attitude owes much to Greece,
but it is also true that the image of Greece owes a lot
to this humanistic attitude.
Greece as an ideal
is a spiritual homeland which is eternally youthful,
a creation in the making,
an open challenge,
which traverses history like a permanent revolution,
or even more,
like a constant fascination with the better.
“ÁÉÅÍ ÁÑÉÓÔÅÕÅÉÍ”,
Homer has his heroes say:
“try always to give your best”.
As follows,
this was, from the beginning, the attitude of the few:
an act of resistance in an adverse and barbarous environment.
That said,
each time it has shone, throughout the passing of time, in the midst of an arbitrary act
of extremism and obscurantism,
humanity
took a step toward wisdom,
toward moderation,
toward the dignity of man beyond interests and beliefs.
Naturally
it isn’t certain that this laborious humanistic attitude
will ultimately triumph over arbitrary and barbaric behavior.
It is, however, absolutely certain
that arbitrary and barbaric behavior
will prevail with greater difficulty among those who have adopted this attitude,
as opposed to among those who ignore or scorn it.
These things Greece has left to us,
together with the challenge that we be not only heirs
but also continue the tradition:
that we not be captives of the footprints of the Ancients
but continue to seek that which they were seeking.
Sometimes, walking among the olive trees and the ruins of this country,
I have wondered what would be left of our own civilization
if the Greek element was erased from it,
how we would be if we were deprived not only of this immense legacy
but also of this valiant push
which always moves one to be interested in humankind.
And I face, then, an enormous void.
The ruins alert us to the unavoidable fragility of civilization;
they remind us that its victories are ephemeral,
and deserve to be defended on each day that dawns,
and that the only possible
civilization worthy of its name
is that which unites human beings against barbarism.
All of the above urges us in some way to comprehend
what we would lose if we were to renounce the Greek element that we carry within us.
And for whoever thinks that it is not something important,
seeking to lighten our “nostalgic load”,
I ask them:
If we renounced the Greek element
what would we gain?
Would it be possible for this loss
to be justified and offset by the prospect of some possible profit?
In the name of what
do you propose the burial of Hellenism?
Sincerely,
I believe that what makes a civilization great
is its ability to evolve and inspire something new.
And that is exactly what Greece has left us.
Greece had the most inspiring civilization,
the most completely and best codified civilization.
She gave the shape of civilization to natural truths;
she left us with mythology,
teaching us a humble and tolerant attitude toward mystery.
She invited us to the conquest of democracy
and the ideals of freedom and equality.
She left us the society of citizens,
politics, ethics,
history and literature.
She left us the alphabet and the basic structure of our thought.
She educated us in beauty.
She left us the scientific perspective,
the humanistic standpoint,
and the spiritual homeland.
She chiseled the soul of the just and free human being,
and showed us, well, that road.
Greece as an inheritance, as a challenge and as will,
always pushes us to become better.
And forgetting her,
removing, from the generations to come, the opportunity to know her legacy and attitude,
we will minimize the possibility
of a different world being built in the future,
something that is not simply the perverse product of oppression and falsehood.
For this reason, Greece.
For all of these riches, Greece.
And because every step that man has made toward civilization,
he has established, indebted to Greece.
Translation from Greek original: Eva Johanos