by Mordecai Plaut

(Page 2)

What is the Relationship Between Modern Culture and Society and the Classical Greeks?

Moses Hadas was the Chairman of the Department of Greek and Latin at Columbia University. This is how he explained the continuity of modern culture with classical Greek culture: "From late antiquity to modern times there has been no absolute break in the stream of European culture. The whole Mediterranean and its appanages were more or less thoroughly Hellenized, and outsiders who impinged upon the main stream, . . . had themselves been tinctured with Hellenism." (Hadas, p. 103)

Even today, the content of modern Western society is along a line that begins in ancient Greece. According to Hadas, "If a stranger to our world should wish to understand the motive forces of European society, the premises and the objectives of our ways of life, he could learn most economically by studying the Greeks." (Hadas, p. 15)

Although nowadays few people study the classics of Greece directly, it is clear not only to Professor Hadas but to all those who are familiar with them and with the history of Western thought that modern society, culture and learning is based on the Greek foundation. Moreover, after a break of about a thousand years in which Christianity had been dominant and had largely excluded the pagan works, the leading thinkers of the Renaissance made a self-conscious effort to go back to the Greek and Roman classics. From that time, through the Enlightenment and up to the beginning of the twentieth century, the works of the Greeks and Romans were the core of all learning. They made up the bulk of the curriculum by which children were educated.

From the time of Isocrates (a pupil of Socrates, an orator and teacher in the fourth century BCE), "education is . . . familiarity with a traditional library of books -- the same library, in effect, which continued to be the mainstay of liberal education in the Hellenistic world, in Rome, and, with vicissitudes of fortune, in Europe to this day." (Hadas, p 89)

If the movers and shakers of our day do not themselves read the classic Greek and Roman authors, the writers that they read were steeped in the classics. "I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier," wrote Thomas Jefferson. (HtDSCaIPbPS, p. 207) Woodrow Wilson, whose presidential orders were said to have the character of great literature, read Demosthenes. (HtDSCaIPbPS, p. 205) Countless influential (and non-influential) people of recent centuries (such as Abraham Lincoln) have read and drawn extensively from Shakespeare, who was in turn vastly and deeply familiar with the Greek and Roman classics.

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