[NaughtiusMaximus]

The ancient Greeks had a healthy suspicion of authoritative government and valued individual worth at a time when their contemporaries were licking the toes of god-kings. The "stories" of their high culture still resonate for us. A century ago English youths set out to rule a worldwide empire with little more preparation than a grounding in Greek and Roman languages and literature, and they succeeded. Conservatives wisely respect them. Academic liberal "hubris" does not. The liberals say that the Greeks have nothing to teach them. "Those whom the gods would destroy they first make proud." There will come a day of reckoning and we will see who was the wiser.

[an amused spectator]

The ancient Greeks had a healthy suspicion of authoritative government and valued individual worth at a time when their contemporaries were licking the toes of god-kings. The "stories" of their high culture still resonate for us. A century ago English youths set out to rule a worldwide empire with little more preparation than a grounding in Greek and Roman languages and literature, and they succeeded. Conservatives wisely respect them. Academic liberal "hubris" does not. The liberals say that the Greeks have nothing to teach them. "Those whom the gods would destroy they first make proud." There will come a day of reckoning and we will see who was the wiser.

Excellent post, NM.

[RobbyS]

Classicists UASED to say thatr the value of studying the old Greeks and Romans was that we got to study them in the round, since their story is done and already told in their literature. So much has been loss, of course, that the picture is incomplete, a magnificant ruin rather than a living organism but at least we know how the story ended.