Excerpt

IT'S ALL GREEK TO ME

“It's all Greek to me,” shrugs a character in one of Shakespeare's plays, and it's a shrug many of us have repeated, often followed b y a subtle yawn, sometimes followed by a dramatic yawn to let the speaker know we really will fall asleep if they don't stop lecturing us about ancient Greece, Rome, Grome, whatever. Personally, I never much cared about ancient Greece and now after having studied it for several months (an unavoidable detour in my study of another topic), I still don't. This book is not even about ancient Greece – the central event of this study took place a thousand years before the bloom of “Greek” culture. And so as we begin, it may be helpful to take a trip backward in time, peeling away some layers of “Greek” cultural icons, associations and misconceptions.

There's a “Greek” architectural style that Americans generally equate with sophistication – all those columns around the White House and Lincoln Memorial, the prefab cement columns they wrap around middle-schools and museums, the Statue of Liberty which is not technically a column, but is definitely phallic and menacing (it's Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare adjusting her sleeve for an insanely painful cavity search). Greek marble statues tend to look pretty distinguished with their judgmental white eyes. Actually in classical Greece the statues were all painted in clownish brightly clashing colors, but weather-stripped and sun-bleached they've inspired the sculptural style we equate with heroes. A copy of Michelangelo's David loiters, languidly naked by a highway in Buffalo when it's eighteen degrees below zero. There's nothing Hebrew about that “David,” he's a Greek statue right down to his diminutive dingle.

We hear the word “Mythology” and automatically think of Greek Mythology, but many “Greek myths” have parallels in much older stories from Turkey, the Middle East, Egypt, Syria and northern Europe – Greece was a mythological melting pot, absorbing and adapting legends from surrounding cultures. We like the Greek versions better because we think the heroes looked like Brad Pitt playing Achilles. A few of them actually did, but most people of ancient Greece looked more like Duane “the Rock” Johnson playing Hercules (except much, much smaller and some of them female).

Hollywood loves heroes and monsters, and hates coming up with original stories, so once or twice a year the kaleidoscopic screenplay machines crank out a blockbuster to file under: Mythology. These will sometimes claim to give us the “real” story by downplaying the roles of gods. Others will soften the Greek deities, making them gloomy and emotionally needy. But then we lose the complexity of these deities who ruled with great power and no sense of responsibility or restraint, like toddlers helplessly driven by their appetites. The “love” of the Greek male deities was usually brutal and physical. Apparently the Greeks could believe in all manner of monsters and miracles, but could not imagine consensual sex. Rape is a constant recurring theme in Geek mythology, and will appear in some narratives contained within this book. If this is a sensitive issue for you, approach Greek mythology with caution - the Olympians were supernatural sexual predators on a rampage of deception and degradation.

How did “Greek” style from the ancient Mediterranean come to permeate modern America? Didn't the Greeks take over the world? Not really. About three hundred years before the common era, a young king known as Alexander the Great established a sprawling Empire. But Alexander himself was not really “Greek,” he was from Macedon, a backwoods redneck town. Alexander conquered Greece and adopted its fashions before spending a few years raiding the neighbors (and the “whole known world” he conquered was about 4% of the planet's landmass. ...Not that I've done any better).

Then Alexander's victories in Greece, Egypt and the Middle East were dwarfed about two centuries later by the Roman Empire, which enslaved most of what we now call Europe. But the Romans were not really “Greek” either – Rome began as a colony of fugitives and banished criminals banding together to bully neighboring cultures for their lunch-money. It was essentially a mafia, an extortion racket that grew more powerful each time another community fell into its grip. But these pirate-gangsters could not produce high culture, only steal it. They hit the jackpot when Greece exhausted its farmland: Athens had cultural capital but fell into ecological bankruptcy, and the Romans were happy to step in and loot the store of Greek culture, fashion and architecture. The Romans would then crudely copy Greek style for centuries while marauding and terrorizing most of Europe with their brutal mafia tactics.

Weren't the Greeks a powerful Empire before Alexander and the Romans? What we think of as a unified “Greece” never really existed. There were some common stories and customs in the ancient Mediterranean, but during most of “Greek” history the land was divided into rival city-states. These might band together for something like the Trojan War or Persian incursions, but when there were no great foreign powers to unite against, the Greek city-states were perfectly content to beat up on each other.

When we think of “Greek Culture,” the Parthenon and Academy, the philosophies of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the plays of Sophocles and Euripides, we're really thinking of Athens, the Manhattan of the ancient Mediterranean. With its cultural exports and mighty navy, Athens did manage for a time to amass significant political sway over the surrounding city-states, except for Sparta, the Texas of Greece (now familiar from Frank Miller's 300, Leonidas shouting “This...is...Sparta!”).

Many Americans think of democracy as being Greek (and it's true that “democracy” is a technically Greek word). For a couple centuries, the Athenians did briefly attain a democracy something like the Founding Fathers' democracy – an electorate of landowning patriarchs controlling a population comprised mostly of voiceless women, landless laborers and slaves. The pseudo-Greek word “Plutocracy” is far more accurate for classifying both Classical Athens and America. The old idea that the Greeks were the first to experiment with democracy can now be easily corrected: the Greeks were the first white people to try it – brown people all over the planet had been happily practicing “government of the people by the people for the people” since the human species emerged. Even a brief study of any aboriginal tribe in Africa, Australia or America will reveal a social system a lot more democratic than Greek or American “democracy.” Saying the Greeks invented democracy is like saying Elvis invented rhythm.

We may also think of the Greeks as the inspiration for our educational system, hence the columns we use to decorate our schools. But I don't recall my public education as a series of fascinating interviews with philosophers sitting under trees, the freedom to walk away from any teacher too tired to inspire. Our education system owes more to Henry Ford's automotive assembly line than the breezy Athenian Academy. Not that we should imagine all ancient Greeks being Vassar graduates – only a tiny minority of Athenians had the freedom, money, time and interest. I don't stroll through Pennsylvania expecting everyone I meet to be a Vassar graduate – just because liberal arts education is an available commodity in the modern world doesn't mean everybody buys it. Most working-class Americans assume that critical thinking is some kind of fungal brain infection, and the same was true of ancient working-class Athenians.

I didn't learn anything about Plato in high school except the word “Platonic,” which meant the girl you liked wanted to have long deep talks with you, then go make out with some other guy who didn't listen to her. That expression, “I just want to be friends” was the Platonic Bomb. The Athenian Academy's greatest educational gifts to us were not the Philosophers' theories and statements, but the questions: does the physical world operate according to fixed laws? Does might make right, and if not, what does? Why are women so scary sometimes?

From the Greeks we get the '-ology' words we still use for classifying divisions of specialized study: biology, anthropology, theology, etc. We can also thank them for the 'phobia' words we use in psychological analysis: agoraphobia, arachnophobia and, ironically, homophobia. Another major Greek educational contribution was abandoning a hieroglyphic alphabet (in which a symbol represents a word) and spreading a phonetic one (in which a symbol represents a vocal sound), but they did not invent it - their alphabet was actually borrowed from the Phoenicians, from whom we get the words “Phonics” and “Phonetics.”

We've been looking at the spread of “Greek” style and culture in reverse chronological order, from America to Rome to Macedonia to classical Athens, because the story of Theseus and the Minotaur takes place before all that. Mythographers usually present Theseus as a civilized Athenian busting up a savage den of bestiality and cannibalism in Crete. But archaeologists are finding very much the opposite: the Theseus story is set a thousand years before the blossoming of “Greek” culture, when Athens was a barbaric backwoods, and Crete was a highly sophisticated and technologically advanced civilization. Among scholars there is a growing consensus that the most admirable elements of what we call “Greek” culture were borrowed or stolen from the metropolitan island of Crete, and the myths of Minos and Theseus might be garbled recollections of the takeover.

It's true that history is written by the winners, but anyone who studies history will know that “the winners” don't necessarily make the best cultural role-models. The brightest candle won't be the last one still burning. The Greeks beat up the Cretans, but then Greek culture collapsed through destructive infighting and unsustainable agriculture. Then the Romans beat up the Greeks, but they too collapsed from infighting and over-farming. The Cretans practiced sustainable agriculture on a small island for almost six thousand years with barely a trace of infighting, even though the island contained several separate kingdoms. So instead of applauding the bullies who tore it all down, I'm really wondering – what was it about Cretan culture and religion that held their society together? A first glance reveals exhibitionist sex, psychedelic drugs and human sacrifice, which don't sound like a recipe for cultural stability. And yet heaps of archaeological evidence demonstrate that this culture was perfectly harmonious for a thousand years until a volcanic eruption and barbarian invasion destroyed it.

The Biblical Epistle to Titus quotes an old saying that “Cretans are always liars,” and I'd thought that the derogatory term “Cretin,” meaning mentally deficient, originated as an insult to Crete. But it turns out the defunct medical term “Cretin” has a Latin or French origin unconnected with the island's name. So in this book I'm using the word “Cretan,” and we'll all just have to forget those old cartoons of the Ninja Turtles' nemesis, Shredder, hissing “you Cretins” at his minions when his schemes fell apart (really, man, if your foolproof plans keep getting foiled by pizza-scarfing teenaged pot-heads, who's the real “cretin?”). Our best chance of understanding ancient Crete is to start with the material remains.