The purpose of this essay is to discuss what specifically about Greco-Roman culture and civilization is worthy of study and elicits wonder in us.
Perhaps the most obvious place to start answering this question is by looking at Greco-Roman literature. One may note that the Great Books of the Western World set published by Encyclopedia Britannica includes the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Archimedes, Epictetus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, Virgil, Plutarch, Tacitus, Ptolemy, Plotinus, and Augustine. Any liberally educated person should know who these authors are and should have read at least some of their writings--and there are, of course, still other classical authors whose writings can be read with profit and enjoyment now.
Some people would want to argue that surely nothing in writings from 1500 to 2500 or more years ago could be relevant to modern society, but such an argument must founder on consideration of the easily demonstrable relevance of most of these works. HomerÆs epic poems are the oldest literature that has been preserved continuously in the West, although, of course, equally old poems exist in the literature of the East and even older ones have been recovered by modern archaeology, and these too are worth reading. HomerÆs stories of the Trojan war and the wanderings of the hero Ulysses, when translated into prose, turn out to be what we would consider novels, and are good entertainment at the very least.
The plays of the three major Athenian tragedians and of Aristophanes, the most important writer of comedy, are so good that they are still performed by serious theater groups today. SophoclesÆ Oedipus Rex is the one performed most often, and AristophanesÆ jokes, if translated into modern terms, are still funny.
Plato and Aristotle, his student, were not the first Greek philosophers, but theirs are t...