4 ms·

Well, people like St Augustine, Erasmus, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Gauss and so on also kinda matter, and even if there is no disputing that Ancient Greece wa

by patrec 7y ago

Well, people like St Augustine, Erasmus, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Gauss and so on also kinda matter, and even if there is no disputing that Ancient Greece was intellectually far more important than Ancient Rome, the fact that Ancient Greek has probably less of 100 years worth of really important stuff (ignoring Homer) whilst Latin was used by the world's foremost minds for centuries (as you note) also must count for something. Also I don't understand your point about Western Civilization barely surviving Roman conquest – surely much worse things could have befallen the Greek heritage?

kragen 7y ago
Indeed, we can imagine a past where Greece's learning was as lost as the Maya codices. But we could also imagine a past in which the Academy wasn't chopped down, where the Library at Alexandria wasn't burned but survived until the present day, where Chrysippus's works on logic weren't lost, where Archimedes's invention of the calculus (and whatever else he would have discovered if he hadn't been murdered by Roman soldiers) didn't have to wait until the 18th century, where there was never a Diocletian to condemn the peasantry of half a continent to serfdom for a millennium and a half, where perhaps we could read the literature of Carthage, where Egyptian hieroglyphics were never forgotten, where the Antikythera Mechanism wasn't a dead end but simply an early stage in a long line of calculating mechanisms that continued to develop for centuries. We could imagine Europe without a Dark Age, and we could imagine a world where the progress of European science did not end even before the Dark Age began. What would that world look like? I don't mean to suggest that it would be a matter of sweetness and light — Athens, too, had its share of slavery, wars of aggression, and political persecution, to say nothing of damned Lacedaemon — but what if intellectual and cultural progress in Europe hadn't halted and even gone backwards for more than a millennium? Too, Ancient Greek's heyday was not a mere century. Basilios Bessarion, who taught Johannes Argyropoulos in Padova, lived in the 15th century, around the time of the fall of Constantinople. The wrestler Plato was born around 428 BC; his Academy survived until Sulla chopped it down in 84 BCE. Ptolemy didn't live until the second century CE. From Plato's birth to the fall of Constantinople was almost 1900 years. I think that's substantially more than 100 years of really important stuff.
- UncleSlacky 7y ago
  Carl Sagan explored this possibility in "Cosmos", speculating that by now we'd have dodecahedral interstellar spacecraft.
- tremon 7y ago
  Also, Plato also didn't come into existence in a void. The exact creation date of the Iliad isn't known, but it's assumed to be around the 8th or 9th century BC. That means that Greece had a culturally stable society for some 500 years before Plato was born, even though it was mostly composed of interdependent city states rather than central rule. The first time that was achieved was under Alexander the Great, so well after Plato.

by patrec 7y ago

kragen 7y ago

Indeed, we can imagine a past where Greece's learning was as lost as the Maya codices. But we could also imagine a past in which the Academy wasn't chopped down, where the Library at Alexandria wasn't burned but survived until the present day, where Chrysippus's works on logic weren't lost, where Archimedes's invention of the calculus (and whatever else he would have discovered if he hadn't been murdered by Roman soldiers) didn't have to wait until the 18th century, where there was never a Diocletian to condemn the peasantry of half a continent to serfdom for a millennium and a half, where perhaps we could read the literature of Carthage, where Egyptian hieroglyphics were never forgotten, where the Antikythera Mechanism wasn't a dead end but simply an early stage in a long line of calculating mechanisms that continued to develop for centuries. We could imagine Europe without a Dark Age, and we could imagine a world where the progress of European science did not end even before the Dark Age began. What would that world look like? I don't mean to suggest that it would be a matter of sweetness and light — Athens, too, had its share of slavery, wars of aggression, and political persecution, to say nothing of damned Lacedaemon — but what if intellectual and cultural progress in Europe hadn't halted and even gone backwards for more than a millennium? Too, Ancient Greek's heyday was not a mere century. Basilios Bessarion, who taught Johannes Argyropoulos in Padova, lived in the 15th century, around the time of the fall of Constantinople. The wrestler Plato was born around 428 BC; his Academy survived until Sulla chopped it down in 84 BCE. Ptolemy didn't live until the second century CE. From Plato's birth to the fall of Constantinople was almost 1900 years. I think that's substantially more than 100 years of really important stuff.

UncleSlacky 7y ago
Carl Sagan explored this possibility in "Cosmos", speculating that by now we'd have dodecahedral interstellar spacecraft.
tremon 7y ago
Also, Plato also didn't come into existence in a void. The exact creation date of the Iliad isn't known, but it's assumed to be around the 8th or 9th century BC. That means that Greece had a culturally stable society for some 500 years before Plato was born, even though it was mostly composed of interdependent city states rather than central rule. The first time that was achieved was under Alexander the Great, so well after Plato.