Is Ancient Greece overrated?

Falecius

LSCatilina said:
@Thanksforallthefish mentioned these schools too, but the point is not that they were being inexistant, but that they didn't really made it as the norm of Indian philosophy, which remained dominated by religious or, rather, semi-religious concerns. It doesn't mean they weren't practical of course, just that it never went to the same way than Greece or China.
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As mostly did Hellenic-derived philosophy from the third to the sixteenth centuries CE (if not more) in Christian, Jewish and Muslim contexts alike, yet nobody seriously says that it is not philosophy, or that it does not use a rational method. I am also not sure of how "secular" Ancient Chinese thought can be said to be, in comparison with Indian speculation. Chinese thought in its earliest phases tends to focus on ethics, while in India the focus appears to me epistemological (and arguably, ontological in Ancient Greece, but this is oversemplification anyway).
Then, there's the problem that we know relatively little of the presumable wealth of Chinese speculation in the Warring States period (a lot went lost when Daoism and Confucianism came to frame the system), while most Indian stuff we possess that can be securely dated is from a much later period.
However, the Nyaya school in India (which was certainly nothing like minor or marginal) and the Aristotelian one in Greece developed theories of logical reasoning to reach truth about the world rationally. These are presumably independent, or almost independent, developments, and I am not aware of surviving ancient Chinese texts showing something comparable.
 

Galba Otho Vitelius

Keep in mind that you can be pretty good/ important and still be overrated.

Still ancient Greek civilization is definitely overrated. At some point a narrative was constructed in Western Europe, or in Britain, where civilization started in ancient Greece (and Israel in some versions), got adopted by Rome, then was overwhelmed by barbaric versions, then rekindled in renaissance Italy, then brought to Britain where it reached its apotheosis before being taught to the Americans, or something like that.

Western Civilization became important because of the voyages of discovery/ Columbian exchange, and then the industrial revolutions. There were huge deals and led to total dominance by Europeans and Americans in the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century. The problem is that they occurred long past the heyday of ancient Greece. Before 1492, the western part of Eurasia was not particularly more developed or important than the other Eurasian civilizations, arguably less. Of course the Eastern Orthodox offshoot has as good or better claim to being the heir of classical civilization anyway, and the Muslims can put in a good claim (after all the ancient Creeks weren't Christian).

A good alternative history exercise is to imagine if the accomplishments of the ancient Greeks were done not by them, but by the Koreans, about the same time. A western civilization still develops using Etruscan and Celtic models. That should lead to a greater focus on what the ancient Greeks accomplished and how we view them.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
I don't think so it is fully overrated. Greeks did do many things others didn't do. But their contemporaries,Middle Eastern and Caucasian civilizations,Persia,Indian empires like Mauryas and Kushans,Egypt,etc should also be given rightful credit.
 
Gwrtheyrn Annwn

Gwrtheyrn Annwn

Albert.Nik said:
I don't think so it is fully overrated. Greeks did do many things others didn't do. But their contemporaries,Middle Eastern and Caucasian civilizations,Persia,Indian empires like Mauryas and Kushans,Egypt,etc should also be given rightful credit.
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Its worth noting that the Greeks themselves claimed cultural descent from the Ancient Egyptians, indeed going to great lengths to try and prove this connection.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
Gwrtheyrn Annwn said:
Its worth noting that the Greeks themselves claimed cultural descent from the Ancient Egyptians, indeed went to great lengths to try and prove this connection.
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Common genetic descent cannot be disproved actually. Before IE Greeks arrived,Europe,Levant,North Africa was populated by Basque like ethnicities. Ancient Egyptians spoke Afro-Asiatic and Greeks spoke Indo-European. But both are said to have mixed with the Basque like ethnicities I mentioned who were living there. So that's with the nearest common origin.
 
Gwrtheyrn Annwn

Gwrtheyrn Annwn

Albert.Nik said:
Common genetic descent cannot be disproved actually. Before IE Greeks arrived,Europe,Levant,North Africa was populated by Basque like ethnicities. Ancient Egyptians spoke Afro-Asiatic and Greeks spoke Indo-European. But both are said to have mixed with the Basque like ethnicities I mentioned who were living there. So that's with the nearest common origin.
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I can't comment in genetic descent but I do know that the Greeks regarded Egypt as the birthplace of civilisation and also regarded themselves as heirs to Egypt.
 
markus meecham

markus meecham

Banned
Gwrtheyrn Annwn said:
I can't comment in genetic descent but I do know that the Greeks regarded Egypt as the birthplace of civilisation and also regarded themselves as heirs to Egypt.
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not to agree or to disagree with your post, just bandwagoning;
If anyone cares to pay attention whenever Egypt is mentioned in the iliad and odyssey, they will see a treatment that's usually reserved to the magical islands visited by odysseus, both on scale and wonder. "The land where every man is a chemist".
 

Optical_Illusion

Banned
Very subjective question. I would say that, I could imagine butterflying away essentially any of the other cultures that have contributed to our cultural lineage, and still imagine people who in essence "think like us" (modern secular Western people) in terms of the parts of our culture we value and believe important. But we cannot really do this for the classical Greeks.

This is not to say the classical Greeks thought "like us"; they didn't, or that they were the moral superiors of other peoples at their time; they decidedly weren't. But I can tend to imagine people who think like us in the essentially important ways coming from timelines where the classical Greeks existed, whatever else happened. It's harder to imagine that in a timeline where the classical Greeks were absent, and we work simply from all the other cultural sources that existed at the time, and their place was not filled by other essentially parallel cultural movements that never happened in our time line (which is obviously well possible in an alternative timeline, but a quite different thing than the importance of a given culture in the cultural history of our time line!)

Of course this doesn't necessarily hold up for different cultural spheres. And I'd openly say my feeling of what the central ideas of culture are, are pretty subjective (committedly religious people would probably have quite different ideas, for'ex). (I'm also perhaps a little biased here by coming off a recent reading binge of a mix of fictional works that have tried to bring to life the world of ancient Greece (Soldier of the Mist) and which argue that the ancient Greek philosophical and cultural tradition really was a big deal!).
 

RousseauX

Donor
Byzantine fanatic said:
The Classical Greeks are so important that entire sections of bookstores are dedicated to them, while coverage on other (arguably more important) civilizations such as Persia, India, the Arab Caliphates, the Turks, etc. is minimal and perfunctory at best. Not to mention Chinese and Japanese history, which is virtually non-existent.

Is this reputation really deserved? Or are the Ancient Greeks, for all their achievements, simply rather over-inflated by a self-serving western culture that wants a convenient foundation myth?
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only in western media, which are the heirs of greek civilization more so than chinese

if you go to asia nobody knows shit about greece either, but will know an awful lot about the glories of chinese history
 
GameBawesome

GameBawesome

My opinion: Yes, Ancient Greece is overrated. The Government system, the Mythology, and the Culture. I just don’t like how Ancient Greek legends has to influence everything. I would say the Romans are as Overrated as well. I respect both Cultures, and like their legends, but I still find them overused and overrated.

I’m a personal fan of Celtic.
 

Dingus Khan

The focus on Ancient Greece/Rome is mostly due to Eurocentrism I think. Arabs, Indians, or Chinese people would probably not see them as being so relevant in the grand scheme of ancient history.
 
9 Fanged Hummingbird

9 Fanged Hummingbird

Dingus Khan said:
The focus on Ancient Greece/Rome is mostly due to Eurocentrism I think. Arabs, Indians, or Chinese people would probably not see them as being so relevant in the grand scheme of ancient history.
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As I recall the Arabs were just as keen on claiming the legacy of the ancient Greeks as their European counterparts, if not moreso.
 

saint polype

Generally speaking, a lot of civilizations in antiquity are treated as if they existed in a vacuum, shining cities on a hill in a sea of barbarians/cavemen.

I remember one documentary who made the case that during the centuries of ancient Rome, there were certainly vast differences in development among different cultures - but ultimately, Rome was just one incredibly powerful nation, not necessarily more "advanced" than all of its neighbours (I think it was compared to the USA in a not-so subtle way)
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
9 Fanged Hummingbird said:
As I recall the Arabs were just as keen on claiming the legacy of the ancient Greeks as their European counterparts, if not moreso.
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Precisely! The Arabs built and developed the things acquired from others who lived in their large Empire be it Greeks,Jews,Persians,Egyptians,North Africa,Greater Iran,India and Europe then as well as parts of Europe both in the West and the East were still doing well. Not to say Arabs didint contribute but a lot of their contribution was salvaged. Coming to India now,Indian philosophy too has a lot of philosophical and scientific elements but that doesn't mean Greeks took it from India. That's just something propogated by many in the modern generations of India who suffer tremendous and infamous Indian inferiority complex. The Indians in my opinion were almost equal to Persian,Mesopotamian/Anatolian and Chinese Civilizations but saying everyone else got it from India is crossing the line into fantasy. What Europen civilizations got lucky was that they had perfect resources, opportunity to travel to all civilizations and such things which too cannot be looked down. So I say Greeks were great undoubtedly! Persians,India,Middle East,Egypt are also great and there were mutual exchanges between these.
 

Max Sinister

Banned
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (who's from Lebanon, but has a Greek mother) says that western Europe isn't really the successor of Ancient Greece. We westerners copied some of their things, but that doesn't make us Greek.

https://medium.com/east-med-project...ordic-supremacists-will-not-like-44d99e8a4188
"So, if white supremacists want to claim a genetic link to ancient civilizations in order to get some “lettres de noblesse” and improve the “European” pedigree, they need another route. They would either need to abandon their link to Western Civilization or abandon their antisemitism. You, simply, cannot have both."
 
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