There will always be critics. Even when things are going pretty well, when the government is relatively stable, when more people than ever are living well, when the future looks promising - even at these times, there are those whose need to speak out overcomes their mute acceptance of the status quo. PLATO'S description of SOCRATES shows the grizzled sage to be one such critic.
Socrates is typically Greek in his relentless questioning - of himself, of authorities, of accepted traditions and practices. And Socrates' questioning displays another characteristic associated with the Greeks - a belief in the capacity of the mind (rationality) to apprehend the universe and a concomitant belief in the power of language to come to terms with that understanding.
Not all Greek critics chose Socrates' direct approach. ARISTOPHANES' play Lysistrata hilariously lambastes war-mongers. Despite its playful ribaldry, Lysistrata was written at a time of great duress, when the welfare of the fragile Athenian city-state was threatened from hostile forces both inside and out. Yet, the play's parody displays its profound critique of contemporary society.
Likewise, SOPHOCLES' play Antigone is an outspoken critique of absolute power and unenlightened rule. The play details the disasters that befall a society in the midst of change, when long-accepted traditions conflict with interests of a new era.
That all people should be morally accountable for their actions is characteristic of Greek thought. For this reason, Socrates insists on accepting the punishment his fellow Athenians have meted out to him. Socrates is, to the end, a believer in democracy and the will of the majority despite his grievous doubts about honest self-questioning on the part of his fellow citizens. His friend Crito makes convincing arguments for Socrates' escape, yet the sage remains clear-thinking, hard-headed, and true to his moral principles: he accepts the sentence that has been given him. These three criteria well describe the Greeks.
The art and artifacts from the Karanis excavation provide a useful, summary statement about the culture of ROME, the great imperial city.
Rome's greatness grew out of its imperial program of conquering others and establishing colonies. This military expansion at once brought great material benefit to the Roman state and guaranteed a pipeline of wealth for Rome, the imperial city. And Rome becomes a cosmopolitan capital where high-living and material wealth become synonymous with personal importance and success. Note how the Karanis exhibit displays extravagant wall paintings, which did not decorate the walls of churches or temples but rather the homes of wealthy citizens. The exhibit also includes coins, whose minting bespeaks the abiding concern for the tokens of wealth as well.
What the Romans also did was learn from other cultures. You might wonder why Aphrodite, a Greek goddess, was memorialized in a fantastic sculpture in Roman times (and in Egypt, no less!). To their credit, the Romans recognized the richness of Greek art and architecture, and they sought to emulate the Greek masters - and the Greek styles and themes - in their own art. To a large degree, it was the Romans who brought Greek (and Hellenistic) culture to world attention. Romans patronized Greek artists and artisans in the glorification of a vast world of their own, Roman creation.
It is no surprise, then, that the Roman poet VIRGIL (or VERGIL) turns to Greek mythology and to the Greek epics as he fashions his own description of the origins and destiny of the Roman state, The Aeneid. Virgil writes his extended poem, in part, to win the favor of Augustus Caesar, the new emperor who emerges from the conflict surrounding the death of Julius Caesar. His other aim is to situate Rome in line with what was considered the great literary tradition of the time - the Greek. Virgil's work thus is both polemic and propaganda: his blending of history and mythology provides a platform for the imperial agenda that Augustus will undertake.
Let's counter one of the precepts set up in the introductory comments and consider what makes ISLAM like JUDAISM and CHRISTIANITY. For Americans make much of the purported differences as we carelessly cast Muslim leaders as fanatics or terrorists and justify bombing their nations. These perceived differences reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes, whose influences are pervasive and dangerous, as Edward Said points out in his book Orientalism.
In the first place, Islam is an unflinchingly monotheistic faith. Even the readily-accepted notion that God could have a son (Christ) runs counter to this explicit monotheism. Like the Hebrew god, Allah is invisible, without material form; Allah is omnipotent, wrathful on occasion, yet eternally merciful. Like the God of the Genesis account, Allah has created the natural world and endowed humans with life among a world of divinely-created things. This human creature is regarded as free and individual; and the belief that individuality is good is shared among the Semitic faiths. The religions concur too on the presence and the nature of the soul, which lives on after the body has perished. The Koran describes both heaven and hell and forewarns that a Last Judgement will come when each person shall be judged for his or her deeds.
Muslims trace their lineage back through the Hebrew Scriptures to Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Hagar, Abraham's second wife. Later, as the story goes, Abraham's first wife Sarah conceived a son, whose name became Isaac. Isaac was the chosen one, while Ishmael and his mother were banished to the South and began their lives anew close to what is now the city of Mecca. Hundreds of years later, a child called Mohammed was born in the desert; he was a descendant of the Hebrew Ishmael.
In history texts, medieval European history often goes by its older soubriquet, the Middle Ages. Typically, the period stretches from the collapse of IMPERIAL ROME to the coming together of the forces of the RENAISSANCE in Europe. It was the intelligentsia of the Renaissance that labelled the years preceding their own as middle - caught between the ethos of the archaic civilizations Greece and Rome and the revitalized learning of their own time. That the thinkers of the Renaissance were masters of hubris is not news; their less-than-generous characterization of the thousand or so years that separated them from Rome reflects their prejudices and their collective oversight.
For the Middle Ages were much less uniform and much richer than most Renaissance thinkers would allow. MICHELANGELO could sculpt a muscular David alive and full of motion though cut from stone; but it was a magnificent communal enterprise that designed and executed CHARTRES CATHEDRAL in the center of a sleepy town southwest of Paris some 800 years ago. The cathedral stands today as a symbol (for even such a cultural cynic as Henry Adams) of the extraordinary integration of religion and political life that characterizes the Chartres of the twelfth century and the Middle Ages in general. You can still see the spires of the cathedral rise out of the fields of grain as you approach on the train (no bullet train stops here), and the high-rise mentality of modern life is happily absent from the modern, burgeoning town, all of whose buildings bend low as if in homage to the heaven-reaching church. Then there was no division of Church and State: the Church became the State, and the city wore its cathedral like a holy badge of Christendom on earth.
DANTE ALIGHIERI was born a century after the completion of Chartres. His city-home Florence was racked with political struggle, and Dante had to flee. Exile from city life gave the writer time to create The Divine Comedy, an epic account of the poet's journey through purgatory and hell to heaven. And as can be seen in Chartres, the connection for Dante between the miry political world on earth and the spiritual world of after-life is clear: in The Inferno, the poet encounters those who have sinned on earth - politicians, liars, murderers, even those great people from history whose only misfortune was to have been born before Christ. His great work reifies the medieval integration of the religious and the social.
So, what have we learned about ancient cultures?
You could probably tally up a list of facts - the names of the families represented in The Bhagavad Gita, e.g., Mohammed's birth and death dates, the relationship of crime and punishment in The Inferno - though such a list would tell you little about how real people lived and how these "facts" influenced their lives. You might want to recall key concepts from this brief essay - the association of Hinduism with the illusory nature of the material world, the Greek belief in rationality, the Roman ability to organize and delegate. But these generalizations do not allow for minority opinions within the cultures, nor, most likely, do the generalizations say much about the people who were not gifted writers, powerful politicians, influential artists, successful interpreters of their social circumstances. On just about any given day in the midst of choking sand and blazing heat, what might some of those Egyptian stone-haulers have said in passing about their omnipotent pharaoh?
Oddly enough, culture includes all these people. Mikhail Bakhtin looks at cultures as heterogeneous groups of people whose conversations - the record of their poetry, their discord, and their babble - become an on-going dialog in a constantly changing, adaptive language. To his way of thinking, there is little of fixed or permanent status to any culture. A culture is always so much more than any given language can express, certainly more than what any icon could represent.
Recent ethnographers have expressed a number of concerns about cultural investigation - that is, studying and interpreting other cultures. The ethnographers warn that there is no neutral, objective investigation of another culture. One problem is that we are so formed by our own culture that we tend automatically to judge what we see in another culture by what we "know" from our own. So much for disinterested investigation. Another problem arises from the fact that the categories of our understanding - our criteria for organization - are, themselves, culture-bound. Westerners think like Westerners because their experience is in and of the West. As colonial authorities in India, the British tried to outlaw suttee, the ritual immolation of a wife who remained after the death of her husband. To the British the ritual was perverse, anti-woman; yet it was an accepted ritual, with a long history and a logic appertaining to a world-system different from that of the British (busy, it must be said, with colonizing and imposing their world-system on others). The British could not accept in others what their culture forbade for them.
But, happily, Americans can learn to listen to and love the music of the sitar (just as they may learn to listen to and love Mozart). And it doesn't take too long a trip through the concrete reality of strip shopping malls and pandering fast-food joints to convince many Americans that maybe we have erred on the side of the material.
At the same time, there's comfort in knowing that we were not the first culture to look upon the sobering wreckage of our wars or the changing forms of violence around us and wonder if there was not a better way to live - with greater tolerance for others, greater humility for ourselves, greater love for our shared world.
This may be what studying ancient cultures teaches us.