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The ‘Greek Man' or the Weight of the Roots
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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When I was preparing a paper about the problem Greek studies have with globalization of culture on the threshold of the twenty-first century, I was asked who the Greek man was, considered as a separate entity, and how future decades would see him. The question had all the appearance of a trap. The very idea of ‘the Greek man’ is disturbing, even though it is so commonplace that it is hard to trace it back to its origins. Of course it contains a well-established but ill-defined consensus around the Greeks as the first free, rational human beings to found a free polity, who furthermore presided over the creation of a literature without equal in Antiquity and an exceptional and innovative body of art. A more precise answer could also echo the prestigious and much discussed title of Werner Jaeger's indispensable and troubling volume: Paideia. Die Formung des griechischen Menschen (1934), and even become, rather insidiously because of its date and the last few words of the sub-title, a parasitic echo of the period when a mythical discourse evoked Aryans and non-Aryans. But we must take care not to place the thesis of Werner Jaeger, to whom I will return, in that company, since the title is less a reflection of a suspect mode of thought than a simple coincidence of choice of language. And the reason it turns up here is that Jaeger and Dodds, whom we shall meet later, are the two opposite poles of this paper, standing in Greek studies on either side of the bloodstained struggle that transformed Europe and the West's relationship with the rest of the world for ever.
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- Copyright © ICPHS 1999
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Notes
1. It deals with an aspect of a speech that I was invited to give at the recent Naples colloquium ‘The human ities at the crossroads of the 20th and 21st centuries', which commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the UNESCO International Philosophy and Humanities Council. This article draws on part of that paper, which can be found in the proceedings of the colloquium.
2. We should not see in this any animosity towards a milieu which is also that of Dodds the scholar. At the time his book was published, the Classical Association was preparing the impressively scholarly round-up of Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (Oxford 1954, first ed), in which the first article, on Homer, is by E. R. Dodds. And the preface to this first edition took as the epigraph for the collection a quotation in French from Anatole France: ‘Chaque génération imagine à nouveau les chefs-d'oeuvre antiques et leur communique de la sorte une immortalité mouvante' (Each generation has a fresh vision of the ancient masters and so gives them a kind of shifting immortality).
3. A convenient synthesis and exegesis can be found in his preface to his collection La démocratie grecque vue d'ailleurs (Greek Democracy seen from Elsewhere, 1990).
4. Published in Diogène, no. 124, pp. 3-33, and reprinted in Diogène. Une anthologie, Paris, Gallimard 1998, pp. 211-241.
5. L'invention d'Athènes: histoire de l'oraison funèbre dans la ‘cité classique' (The Invention of Athens: history of the funeral oration in the ‘classical city'; 1981).
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