Paul Cartledge
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By: Oxford University Press, USA
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2
Average rating: 3.0 of 5
Misses the Overall Picture 2 out of 5 stars.
4 of 19 people found this review helpful.
Mr. Cartledge is a good researcher and he has a respectable writing style. But the problem with this work is that it fails to grasp the overall picture of the Ancient Greeks and their vast contribution to Western Culture. Opting instead to focus on their human faults instead of the inspiring ideals that they passed down to us Westerners; even if both the Greeks and us fall short in achieving them. Reading Cartledge's tome I sensed that he was not being fair to these people and their contribution to human history. Sure the Greeks were at times in their history weary of some of their neighbors and even of each other. Then again most people would be if they had been invaded as often as the Greek city states were. This doesn't mean that they were xenophobes. If they were, ancient Greek trade and learning would not have flourished as it did because successful trade and learning involve human interaction.
The ancient Greeks were the first Western cosmopolitans, not xenophobes. They were unique, in that they were willing to consider what other cultures had to offer because they thought that they could potentially learn and benefit from them. The Ancient Greeks were in fact the first to recognize a common humanity in all people and had a critical introspection of themselves that distinguished them in their times. And we can still learn much from them today.
I did not get a sense of any of this from Mr. Cartledge. He misses the big picture in this book, even siting that the language of these ancients is dead. ??? I beg to differ. Modern Greek has evolved from proto-Greek and the katharevousa or formal Modern Greek is a revival of Classic Greek. Almost 20% of English comes from Greek and 43% of modern English medical terms also come from Greek. The language of these ancients is very much alive.
I got the impression that Mr. Cartledge wants to debunk the ancient Greeks and their ideals and that's a shame. There is still so much we can learn with and from these people today. Their insights into democracy, war, human nature and so much more can still benefit us today - considerably.
For a more accurate portrayal of the Ancient Greeks, I recommend, "Greek Ways: How The Greeks Created Western Civilization" by Professor Bruce Thornton.
Editorial Review:
Who were the Classical Greeks? This book provides an original and challenging answer by exploring how Greeks (adult, male, citizen) defined themselves in opposition to a whole series of others (non-Greeks, women, slaves, non-citizens, and gods) as presented by supposedly objective historians of the time such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. Cartledge looks at the achievements and legacy of the Greeks - history, democracy, philosophy and theatre - and the mental and material contexts of these inventions which are often deeply alien to our own way of thinking and acting. This new edition contains an updated bibliography, a new chapter entitled "Entr'acte: Others in Images and Images of Others," and a new afterword.
