We are all Greeks

On Ancient Athens and the invention of the Human

Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

I'm taken aback whenever the Nietzschean question of Judeo-Christian vs. Greco-Roman Classicism comes up:

You'll immediately get people reenacting the Sopranos Jewish Sub-plot and says like Areil the orthodox jew: "Yet here we are. Where are {Greco] Romans now?"

Umm... Look in a mirror.

Harold Bloom wrote a book "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human". The thesis is right in the title. That shakespeare invented so many psychological tropes, frameworks, and complex characterizations, that how people conceive of human nature and their own psychology fundamentally changed do to his works.

And indeed, if you think you might blak, merely read fiction written before Shakespeare like Le Morte de Arthur, The Greek Tragedies, or Beowulf, and compare those stories with works from the 18th century or late 20th century (and not the garbage coming out of woke publishers today)... there is no comparison, the types of characters they create the things they do with them, how those characters conceive of themselves, the subtle dramas that play out, the personal psychological tragedies and triumphs, the self-awareness... So much of it is precedented in Shakespeare and nowhere before him.

Did he invent "The Human"? Certainly for a good percentage of definitions people might offer if asked to define what makes a character or even someone else "Human" as opposed to a psychopath or basketcase or space alien.

The entire field of Psychology and psychoanalysis is basically one long game to try and trick people into giving a shakespearean monologue so that the contradictions and emotions they feel mid-monologue can be assigned Shakespearean significance. YES, your wife and daughter are paying through the nose so they can LARP an experience they could get at a community theatre class for free... and also so they can fry their brain with SSRIs instead of Alcohol and Cocaine like Dr. Freud would recommend.

But here's the thing... England produced one shakespeare that fundamentally reinvented the entire conception of human existence at a political, sociological, and psychological level (and probably several more but its hard to judge these things less than 300 years out)

The Greeks had a dozen within a little over a century, and disproportionately from one city state of 40,000 people.

Such that Not only are the works they put out more similar to fiction and non-fiction works being published today than anything produced before them many of these works written in ~400bc are more similar to a new book you'd pick up off the shelf than a lot of histories and works written in 800 or even 1300 AD! in Pre-Renaissance European states.

This is why there was such a premium on upper-class Ancient Romans learning Greek, because you could jump thousands of years in sophistication by being able to engage with greek texts...

This is also probably one of the Major Reasons why Christianity captured so much of the ancient world's lower classes, Galilee being know at the time as "Galilee of the Gentiles" specifically because so much of the priestly and Merchant class there was uniquely fluent in Greek. Indeed 70% of Jewish funerary inscriptions found in the region were written in Greek.

Indeed almost all the jewish characters of the new testament Jesus, the Apostles, Caiphas, Herod, the Pharisees are a unique subset of Greek-fluent Jews... largely at odds with the majority largely Anti-Hellenist Jews behind the Maccabean revolt and others throughout the period.

The oddness of the New Testament to modern readers compared to other Greek and Latin texts of the period is in many respects an affectation of older Hebrew and Aramaic style which you can see in the old testament. A pantomime of a tone whilst keeping it readable... Such a literary affectation will be familiar to anyone who's read the book of Mormon...

A work written by a 19th century New Englander from upstate New York, who never learnt Aramaic, but according to LDS doctrine, translated the Book of mormon from lost gold plates written in Aramaic with the help of sacred miraculous seer stones.

That's maybe an unfair comparison... The Apostles almost certainly individually spoke Aramaic and/or Hebrew... Although maybe accented or with Hellenic pretensions which might enrage a Maccabean.

But the point is much of the New Testament's awkwardness and alien biblical-ness... is actually an artifact of the Apostles trying to hold onto an Archaic Jewish style that even to them probably felt fairly awkward being so used to conducting themselves in Greek.

This is why I'm taken aback whenever the eternal discussion of Nietzsche, Hellenism, Christianity, etc. Comes up and someone plays Ariel from the Sopranos and says Judaism or Christianity outlasted Greece and Rome...

It's not Tony's response "you're looking at them Asshole" that's laughable, though it is a little funny (as if Italian American mobsters from Sicily are a special continuation of the spirit of SPQR)

It's Ariel's Question that's laughable! He's a Roman!

A larger percentage of Ariel's own dialogue in that scene, an orthodox Jew, originates Greek and Latin than Hebrew, Aramaic or indeed Yiddish... indeed all his dialogue that doesn't originates in Greek, Latin or a successor romance language, orginiates in Germanic languages...

Seriously go read A passage from the new testament, and then read One from Caesar's Gaelic Wars, or Thucydides history of the Peloponnesian Wars, or even Herodotus.

This effect will not have the power if you do not pick out the texts passages and translations yourself.

.

Here’s John 1 (70 ad) in the 2001 English Standard Version translation considered widely accurate, and accessible, whilst maintaining it’s poetry:

And here is Thomas Hobbes’s 1629 Translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (404 bc)

Yes Thucydides coined the term “Human Race” and Hobbes might have been the first to Translate it in that phrasing.

Again this is Thucydides translated by Hobbes, not Hobbes commenting on Thucydides…

I checked. I double Checked. I triple checked. EVERY DAMNED TIME YOU HAVE TO CHECK!

That convention of narrating in the third person will get you Every. Single. Time. it is UNCANNY. Like something out of House of Leaves designed to mess with the reader and screw up your sense of time and space.

No matter the Greek or Latin work I CONSISTENTLY have to stop and check that I'm actually reading the translation instead of a preface, or introduction, or article written by some Englishman in the 19th century or 1970s or 2005. I often have to check that I’m even reading the right book, and that in some slightly changed title “The Anabasis of Alexander” vs. “The Campaigns of Alexander”, “Thucydides’ History of the Peloponesian War” Vs. “The History of Thucydides”, I haven’t picked up the wrong book and now am reading a work written by some professor at Stanford.

The Greeks are us. We are Greeks. We’ve always been the Greeks… That’s the Twilight Zone twist!

You don’t get this effect reading even early English lit like Beowulf or Le Morte De Arthur, which still feel alien, whilst this foreign culture in a foreign tongue that predates both by 1500 plus years reads like a modern goddamn textbook.

This effect goes deep, In the Anabasis Xenephon and a Spartan Captain share dad jokes. Most of France still has the names it had in the time of Caesar… He talks about marching to geneva and Maneuvering around the Seine river, the Territory he refers to only as the Roman province… The French now call it Provence.

Indeed the closest effect I can think of is when you get into Shakespeare and get used to the 16th-17th century verse… And then Discover Shakespeare invented the “Your Moma” joke AND the “The baby is Black” twist:

I swear this is Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, not BET or 4Chan

Indeed, The Thomas Hobbes 1629 translation of Thucydides is MORE READABLE and accessible than Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan" (1651) (which I adore, and wrote my thesis on, but the first read is a steep lift)

An ancient text written in Greek in 400bc is MORE readable translated by an Englishman in the 17th century than the Englishman is on his own! (and indeed is a translation that often ranks as a great work of English Literature in it's own right)

That the New Testament, written 400 years later and translated 2 decades ago is so much less familiar to modern readers, despite 2000 years of faith… than a pagan historian maybe 1/100 have even heard of, translated by most long winded english philosopher from the most impenetrable era of english prose…

i’ve already said it: We are the ancient greek.

In some respects we are closer culturally, and even institutionally and socially, to Ancient Athens than we are even to the early modern Europe of 300-400 years ago (who likewise had bizzare marriage practices, slavery, laws around class distinction, and did not have republican values or political conflicts, etc.)

If Shakespeare Invented the Human and how we conceive of our own Subjectivity, such that indeed all western neuroses are to some extent us subconsciously play-acting Hamlet or Ophelia...

Then Ancient Athens invented Reality and Fact. The world! Indeed i find myself stretching for some word as suitably dramatic "the Human"... because if I merely said Philosophy, or History, or Science, or Reason, or the west” you would merely think "oh ya that was on a history test, everyone knows that" as opposed to being scandalized that i was implying the Athenians, a city state of 40,000, invented Thinking about things, or events occuring, or the physics of nature, or cognition, or 25% of the Compass... or any of the other things you'd normally think someone would be scandalized to hear was "invented" by non-magical historical individuals with names and published works. As if I were implying the Wizard of Oz not only was revealed to be simply an ordinary guy behind a curtain, but that then he ACTUALLY gave the Scarecrow a Brain, the TinMan a Heart, and the Cowardly Lion Courage... in a way nigh indistinguishable from magic.

.

Jerusalem wasn't conquered by Rome only to surprisingly reconquer it... It was subsumed by Rome and outside the Islamic world it’s artifacts have been sharing in it's fate ever since. Even the works written by Jews fluent and culturally immersed in Greek are now strange and alien, our varied global cultures have been so totally conquered by the Greek.

The cultural test of Mutual Intelligibility has so thoroughly and acceleratingly swung in the Greek’s favour… In Hobbes’s time, hell in my older grandparent’s time I’m not sure the cultural contest would have been this decisive… My Grandfathers both owned exactly one book: The Bible. And my grandmother always insisted she had no patience for history if the subject came up.

Yet whatever cultural attachment they had was wiped out by the time it reached my generation, ironically by my grandmother’s own efforts: She was a public School Teacher.

Presumably not aware that all “secular education” (from the Latin) in western world is implicit cultural inculcation in the culture the greeks made… indeed, it’s doubtful many of the blue haired academics howling in anguish about white males and historical oppression understand the culture and values their beloved academic universities must inevitably propagate… even in their non-binary death throes.

.

Of course The rare artifact of Jerusalem's culture that survives as a living cultural force is of course Jesus of Nazareth's great invention, that of Good and Evil.

However that question, and the question of whether anything is beyond them... Is an essay a better writer has already written.

Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

Tip:

BITCOIN: bc1qdhj7637sgcssxgxygjaa3ddljwy8tzg5mzw325

MONERO: 8AhA3g9hbtDcAJE5MPmeQsFwwGsf3H9fq9tC6giQ4a6vKnTXv4J4MivKXrPKDpXyEeNc9mfFejbq84kSWkC8pjuj18rAEij

---

Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak