Reading History: The Birth of Greek Civilisation

There would appear to be two main reasons for our continuing fascination with the ancient Greeks. The first is that they are the fountainhead of what we are pleased to call Western civilisation or culture: to know the ancient Greeks is to learn more about what, and the ways in which, we think and see, as Sir Kenneth Dover has well shown inThe Greeks (BBC Publications, 1980, Oxford University Press paperback, 1982). The second reason is precisely the opposite. For institutionally speaking, Greek society and culture – or rather societies and cultures, since there were well over a thousand separate and often very diverse communities – are desperately foreign, irreducibly alien to our own. To comprehend the modes and concepts of ancient Greek democracy, for example, is to discover the unbridgeable gulf between them and any modern interpretations of that sorely abused term – but also to gain thereby a less distorted perception of both.

These two reasons why the ancient Greeks should continue to be a primary focus of our scholarly and general historical interest are explored in a collective volume edited by Professor Sir Moses Finley, The Legacy of Greece .A New Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 1981); historians of ideas who have enjoyed Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Blackwell, 1980) might profitably compare this with the original Legacy edited by Sir Richard Livingstone in 1921. A similar function will be served rather differently by another collection, Greece Old and New , edited by T. Winnifrith and P. Murray of the University of Warwick (Macmillan, 1983). The latest bout of controversy over the proper home and label of the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles makes such comparative essays unusually topical, and it is fitting that History Today will be devoting three of its 'Reading History' features to the ancient Greek world.