Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The Impact of Ancient Greece on Modern Culture 311
cannot fully be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence
must be re-visited: but with irony, not innocently” (quoted in Taplin,
Greek Fire, 25). In upstate New York, I reside between towns
called Ithaca and Ilion and less than thirty miles from another town
called Marathon—at the epicenter of the classical tradition, in other
words.
Nor is the influence of Greek culture an exclusively Western phenomenon.
Thanks to the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek
influence spread as far east as northern Afghanistan and the Indian
subcontinent. Sculpture from Gandhara in northwest Pakistan,
which laid the foundations for representations of the Buddha, was
profoundly influenced by the canons of Greek sculpture.
THE CRADLE OF DEMOCRACY
And yet we should be careful not to go too far. It is too easy—and
tendentious—to claim an unbroken tradition from antiquity to the
modern day. Consider the following editorial that appeared in a
center-left Greek newspaper called Ethnos in the summer of 1983:
In this land of ours, throughout the centuries, the foundations of democracy
were firmly laid by people determined to establish the right of the
majority to manage freely their thought and activity. For the first time in
the fifth century b.c. , democracy shone and the basic principles governing
society were established. Those principles were equality of rights, equality
of political rights, equality of speech, and freedom of speech. . . . These
four basic principles which have remained unchanged throughout the
centuries should govern today all democratic regimes.
Although the sentiments expressed in this passage are not in dispute,
we might question the accuracy of the claims. To begin with,
the fifth-century democracy to which the editor alludes but does not
mention by name is obviously that of Athens. Athens, however, was
just one of some fifteen hundred city-states, the majority of which
were ruled by oppressive oligarchies. It was not the case, therefore,
that democracy “shone” throughout the Greek world. Far from it.
As for “the right of the majority to manage freely their affairs”—
well, that is only true if one omits the slaves, metics, women, and
children—well over half the population. We might even raise questions
about the claim of freedom of speech, at least in the case of
Sokrates, who was accused of corrupting the youth. Although we
cannot know precisely what was meant by this obscure charge, it
evidently referred primarily to his teachings.