In other words, the Greeks did not merely triumph in the dominance of history books, but their teachings still culturally resonate with simple, human questions and concerns that we ask ourselves as a society -- why do we love, why do we fight our family members, why does fate seem so inexorable? The Greeks do not just leave a legacy of myths and learning, they have created the intellectual and intuitive way we approach the world, and their narratives affect us in an invisible fashion, even people who try to reject them and create a new culture out of a blend of different civilizations or whole cloth are always responding to Greek ideals and ideas.
Thomas Cahill also stresses that we must study the ancient Greeks, not simply because of the strengths of their civilization's gifts, but also because of its weaknesses. The Greeks were also a highly militaristic society that embraced and trumpeted its victories when it was the underdog, as the Greeks triumphed over the Persians, but the warning Greek city-states also showed cruelty against one another during the civil, Peloponnesian wars. The ideal of Achilles, a brilliant and selfish warrior embodies the two-sided nature of the Greek ideal that continues to affect our own ideas of...
In understanding the Greek assumptions regarding the warrior-citizen ideal, Cahill believes we may better unburden ourselves of our own obsession with violence as a benchmark of a society's greatness. The presence of both Zeus and Demeter is there: "If Demeter takes us back to an agricultural way of life that imagined Earth and its manifestations as aspects of maternal nurturing, the strident gods of Olympus, challenging and overthrowing one another, males always primed for battle and sexual conquest, females seizing control only by wheedling indirection, are projections of a warrior culture that set victory in armed combat above all other goals -- or at least seemed to, for there are always, deep within any society, dreams that run in another, even in a contrary, direction from its articulated purposes" (Cahill 5). We cannot undo the negative effects of the Greek legacy if we do not strive to understand the complexities of Greek civilization, its obsessions and its gifts.
Works Cited
Cahill, Thomas. Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter. Random House,
