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Ancient Greek Virtrues and Modern Film

rary. Important about the Greek contribution to culture was that it was a deliberate and self-conscious exercise in values and society formation. Whitehead says that Greece, Palestine, and Egypt are the direct ancestors of our modern civilization (103), but whereas Egypt may have perfected technical craft and Palestine may have arrived at a final religious cosmology, Greece fostered Western culture, providing the clear-cut generalizations leading to philosophy and science. This logical lucidity also tinges the remaining legacy from Greece, its art and imaginative literature (104).

Religion was undoubtedly part of the Greek culture, but its lucidity and rationality were more decisive in shaping values. It was in Ionia, unlike in other ancient seats of civilization, that there arose the idea that there might be a way to know the world without the god hypothesis (Sagan 176). Along the same lines, Hamilton says that the Greek mind was free to think about the world as it pleased, to reject all traditional explanations . . . unhampered by any outside authority [and so] . . . laid the foundations of our science today (29). The impulse to exercise rational faculties in the service of speculative thought by no means pushed superstition and religion out of common experience, as the sacral character of surviving classical architecture vividly demonstrates. Nor was Greece an ideal civilization: Greece was a slave-owning culture whose benefits were enjoyed by aristocrats; Greece or some part of it was in a perpetual state of war, whether between Athens and Sparta or between Greece and Persia; and of course the Greeks who asked all those probing questions hardly settled on answers.

But even such material faults do not distract from the complex of general ideas forming the imperishable origin of Western thought (Whitehead 104). The habit of mind honoring reason that emerged in ancient Greece never entirely receded from Western consciousness. Wel...

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Ancient Greek Virtrues and Modern Film. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:51, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1689210.html