To begin with, everyone knows a brilliant saying that everything new is forgotten old truths. The Greek civilization impresses by its originality and incontestability in the manners of people and in a number of philosophers who made a great impact on the further flow of scientific thought. Architects, painters, and people of art left many features of their execution while creating works. The scheme of political implementation is also a result of Greek culture and people due to whom it was done.
Western civilization should be thankful to ancient Greeks for their innovative approaches and views which made a splash of political, cultural, and humane development afterward. This paper is aimed to evaluate the most significant standpoints in today’s Western World due to the Greeks. The first point concerns the conception of politics and its development since ancient times. Greeks saw the significance in making masses of people controlled and felt a responsibility to keep a strict eye on the social issues so that to find solutions. Bruce Thornton in his book evaluates this statement in the following way: “The Greeks recognized that their conception of human flourishing—the achievement of virtue and the good life, which in turn create happiness—was dependent on living “politically.” (Thornton, p. 123) In fact, many contemporary terms originate from the Greek language, i.e. democracy, aristocrat, tyranny, etc. One of the most eminent philosophers of mankind, Aristotle, compared the extent of politics with a state of well-being for people and saw direct dependence of the word (polis – city) with “community of families and aggregations of families in well-being, for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life.” (Cited in Thornton, p.124).
The creation of Greek rationalism invoked many points on the emotional and perceptional peculiarities of a man’s soul in connection with rational thinking. Euripides in the fifth century began designating the limitations of reason and the strong impact of passion trying to enslave a man with the inner calling for vicious behaviors (Thornton, p. 159). The Greeks tried to look at the things maintained in the surrounding world in their diversity and wholeness as well. They contributed to the West by means of designation of all strong and weak points of a man in prospects of world’s context and conceptualization or, as once Thucydides called “the human thing” (Thornton, p. 190). Greeks also widely discussed the idea of freedoms in society and the most significant one which was loaned in the West concerned the gender conflict with regards to “insights of feminism or gender studies” observed in many artistic works of ancient Greeks (Haynes, p. 45).
The contribution to the cultural heritage of the world was also huge due to ancient Greeks, whose civilization created its own concept full of mystical features, i.e. mythology. A picturesque description of heroes in myths and divine support of them made great contributions to world literature and that of the Western World. W. Barksdale Maynard saw in the American architecture style many things borrowed from ancient Greeks and also believed that Greek Revival style has many things in common as of the political sympathy of American culture to provide a policy with that of Greek (Manca, p. 418+).
Thus, the vast majority of approaches towards politics, rationalism, freedoms, and arts were borrowed by Western civilization from Greek ones. This is not surprising due to the original interpretation and survey of Greeks on the global issues implemented in society.
Works cited
- Haynes, Katharine. Fashioning the Feminine in the Greek Novel. London: Routledge, (2002): 45.
- Manca, Joseph. “Architecture in the United States, 1800-1850.” Journal of Southern History 70.2 (2004): 418+.
- Thornton, Bruce. Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization. San Francisco: Encounter Books, (2000): 123, 124, 159, 190.