[Khurkris]

.....Ouzo....

[Eala]

Another excellent read (despite the wretched title) is: How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It, by Arthur Herman.

[Cicero]

I have mixed feelings about Cahill. The Irish really did save civilization, but there are severe problems with his book because he has little or no understanding of religion. He is tone deaf to Christianity. And it was the Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries to England, the Carolingian court, and Germany, who did it.

I would recommend "The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany," edited by C. H. Talbott, which tells the story through the early lives of SS. Wilibrord, Boniface, et al.

[dr_who_2]

Quite a history hustler, isn't he? How kids take a western civ course in high school or college these days?

[JmyBryan]

Greeks said they got most from the Eqyptians.

[Polybius]

The Romans are a conduit through which Greek ideas and cultural norms pass into the stream of Western civilization.

I would argue with that.

By the time of the Punic Wars, the Greeks were a rather decadent bunch of squabbling cities on Mainland Greece and Imperial tyrants in the Seleucid and Ptolemeic Kingdoms.

Meanwhile, the Roman Republic was building an Italian nation state with Conservative values and a Consitution, whose description by the Greek historian Polybius, was used as an example for his fellow Greeks as to why the Romans were a succesful nation while the Greeks fell short. Polybius' description of the Roman Constitution was also an influence on our own Founding Father's when they crafted the American system of checks and balances. ((Polybius and the Founding Fathers: the separation of powers))

Polybius (a Greek himself) wrote in his chapter which contrasted the Greek and Roman culture of his time:

"Among the Greeks, men who hold public office cannot be trusted with the safe-keeping of so much as a single talent, even if they have ten accountants and as many seals and twice as many witnesses, whereas, among the Romans their magistrates handle large sums of money and srupulously perform their duty because they have given their word on oath."....(Polybius, Book VI, Chapter 56)

Cato the Elder was correct that allowing the influence of Greek decadence to erode traditonal Roman Conservative values would eventually bring the ruin of the Roman Republic.

The America of World War II, a great nation of E. Pluribus Unum under the rule of a respected Constitution and peopled by a virtuos people has more in common with the Roman Republic than with Greece.

It must be admitted, however, that America, like the Roman Republic is sliding down path that Cato the Elder warned about.