How the Greeks Gave Form to the West

Thomas Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization" was a surprise best-seller in the mid-1990s. Since then he has released three other highly regarded books in a planned seven-part work he calls the "Hinges of History" that chronicle the origins of the modern world. "They are The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels" (1998); "Desire of the Everlasting Hills: the World Before and After Jesus" (1999); and most recently "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter" (2003) all published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.

Cahill was recently in Denver and spoke about his latest book with Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages.

Cahill: Western Civilization is really fed by two great streams: the Judeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman. The Judeo-Christian gives us our values, the content of Western civilization. Not that we always live those values, but they are the values of our civilization, not the Greco-Roman values. What the Greco-Roman stream gave us is the form of our civilization and it really is the Greeks who provided this. The Romans are a conduit through which Greek ideas and cultural norms pass into the stream of Western civilization.

The Greeks give us our forms of discourse, our vocabulary, the intellectual filing system of the Western world. We have a logical mode of discourse that comes to us from them. Our university disciplines are Greek names, history, biology, philosophy and so on.

Carroll: Was the Greek way of seeing the world very distinctive in the ancient world?

Cahill: Yes. This book was in some ways the hardest one for me to write because the Greeks are the most distant from us. They're pagans and true paganism is really very different from what we're used to. The early Christians and ancient Jews are all much closer to us in feeling and perception than the Greeks, whose value system is in many ways quite remote. Their attitudes toward war, toward men and women, sexuality, the nature of the universe, the function of divinity — all of these things are quite different. Things like individuality and the nature of time that we find in the Jewish and Christian experience, those are much closer to us, even if you are neither a Jew nor a Christian, it's suffused through the culture and is part of us.

Carroll: Most people associate the origins of democracy with the Greeks. That is true enough. Right?

Cahill: Yes, and their democracy was a wonderful thing, even though it was partial and incomplete — only about 10 to 15 percent of Athenians could participate. The rest were women, slaves and minors, and resident aliens. You didn't get to be a citizen very easily, and if you were not the male heir of a citizen you were pretty much out of luck. But if you were, you could participate fully in the assembly, which was a freewheeling and completely open system. California's recall election had nothing on the Greeks. The Greeks recalled everybody they didn't like.

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.

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.

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Note: this topic is from 1/17/2004. Blast from the Past. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. Thanks quidnunc. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.