Why ancient Greek studies matter to Western citizens today

¶ … Ancient Greeks matter to the citizen of the West in the twenty-First century?

Do the Ancient Greeks still matter? The civilization of ancient Greece is present in our language, in the way we conceptualize beauty, and in the way we tell myths and legends as stories of heroes and wanderers. When we speak seriously or in jest of someone having an Oedipus complex, we are referencing the Greeks, even though it may "shed little light" on what fate and parental authority meant to the Greeks (Cahill 96). When we call an idealized version of something a Platonic ideal, we are harkening back to Socrates' idea of the material world as a poorer reflection of the ideal world, like shadows on the walls of a cave. When we use geometry, we touch upon the learning of Euclid, and our system of government reflects the Greek ideal of democracy -- even our buildings in Washington D.C. are intentional replicas of ancient Greek structures.

However, this love of Greek civilization has a danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy -- we study the Greeks because of their omnipresence in our culture, and our culture is haunted by their ideas because we as a civilization constantly study the Greeks. 19th century poets like Yeats and 20th century poets like Auden refer to the Greeks to embody ideals like the wanderer because classical training alone was equated with having a 'good' education even in Victorian England, centuries after the glory and world dominance of Greece had long been eclipsed by other powers (Cahill 40-42). The influence of the ancient Greeks has grown more controversial in America today, as many students and scholars alike believe that a more balanced representation of the ancient world in history books is necessary to reflect the changing community of the 21st century and to change the literature that century will produce.

However, Thomas Cahill would argue in his book Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter that it is necessary to study ancient Greece, not merely because so many people have done so before, but also because their civilization justifies the attention it has received in the past. He suggests that Greek culture embodies archetypal ideals that continue to affect our literature, in the form of the wanderer and sailor Odysseus, the politician and lawgiver Solon who embodied the ideal of democracy that Western civilization as a whole aspire to create, the playwrights Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides who encapsulated family tensions and dramas and the struggle of being human, the poet Sappho who gave voice to love, the philosophers like Epicurus, the Stoics, Plato, and Aristotle whose ideas have affected and continue to affect how we see ourselves, and the artistic ideals of men such as Praxiteles who define what we see as beauty, the spaces we live in and the ways we move through the world.

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 what makes a nation and a man great and strong.