> I think at least as much credit is owed to the inheritors of Greek culture (Romans, Byzantines, the various Arabic empires), for preserving source material an

> I think at least as much credit is owed to the inheritors of Greek culture (Romans, Byzantines, the various Arabic empires), for preserving source material and references. That's what I'm saying, though. Preservation is the work of the preservers. Many of the great thinkers of Greece didn't preserve a single word. Someone else did. Often other Greeks, often Romans (who obviously spoke Greek as you say, because they believed it to be a superior language). > wide availability, accessibility of language and culture. In other words, "better dissemination". But B is a subset of A here. Not all of those facets that I mentioned are due to the Greeks themselves, not even indirectly. Sometimes, Western civilization sees "The Greeks" as a progenitor civilization because... we believe they're a progenitor civilization. It's a tradition to believe so, and it may well have started by mistake or for reasons of xenophobia or other bad motivations.