Greeks In History by Alan Samuel

Author:Alan Samuel [Samuel, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Greece, Ancient
ISBN: 9780888666390
Google: rewASkHBgv0C
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 1992-10-19T16:18:38+00:00

5 Civic Values

It is easy to see that when Greek cities looked outward and pursued objectives, they aimed either at mastery of others or at least protection for themselves against domination by others. Each city also had internal goals as well, goals that they sought to achieve within the walls, within their own territories and for their own citizens. These are not so easy for us to perceive, so distant in time as we are from them. They also differed from city to city, and with the paucity of information available to us, it is rare that we can make them out in places like Thebes or the island cities or the small cities of Phocis and elsewhere. Even in Athens and Sparta they are obscure because they were not always explicit to the citizens who acted to obtain them. Furthermore, the goals, or the means to reach them, may not have all been agreed upon by all elements of the citizenry, and political disagreement and even violent disorder may obscure or distort the nature of the goals which gave them rise. Finally, it is almost exclusively Athens for which we have information, and it is unwise to extrapolate too extensively from the Athenian evidence to the rest of Greece.

One major objective which we find in Athens seems, however, to have been common to all Greeks. The goal of social and economic stability, which was presumed as the desirable end of policy, is the basis of almost all political and economic thought and all writing of history. For us in the late twentieth century, thinking that we are turning away from from an ideology of expansionism, the goal of stability seems a good one at first glance, but a short examination of our real ambitions and values reveals how different we are from the Greeks.

A fundamental value of our culture is improvement. While we may debate whether bigger or smaller is better, we tacitly agree that we aim at better. We want better health care, better eduction, better music—whatever one may name. And we admire the new, aiming to promote our professors on the basis of their new ideas, not their faithfulness to what has been demonstrated to be good and reliable. Painters who are inspired to emulate their forerunners are “derivative” and authors who recall earlier literature are usually not published. We value invention and novelty, and the word “new” carries with it a sense of affirmation and desirability.

Not so among the Greeks. The Greek word “neoterizein” literally meaning “to do new things,” used in political or historical writing, carries the sense of “engage in revolution.” When Thucydides wrote the account of the Spartan hesitation to use the Athenian troops who had come to help them against the helots, the word Thucydides uses to describe what the Spartans feared of the Athenians is “neoterizein.” Newness, in other words, was not a good thing in itself, and may be said usually to have had a negative sense if otherwise unqualified.

The

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