SERIFOS—There’s no high life here, only family life, so I’ve been hitting the books about great Greeks of the past, and they sure make today’s bunch look puny. Philosophers, playwrights, statesmen, artists, poets, orators, sculptors—the ancients had them all. In 2,500 years they’ve never been equaled. I was once at the New York Met walking around the Greek wing and I ran into Henry Kissinger, whom I knew slightly. He asked me what ancient Athens’ population was. “About twenty to thirty thousand citizens,” I answered. He shook his head in amazement. “And they produced all this,” he said.
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Key word- citizens. The slaves did all the hard work.
ReplyDeleteThere is a reason the founders kept books like Greek and Roman histories right along side their Bibles. I'd recommend "Greeks & Romans Bearing Gifts" (How The Ancients Inspired The Founding Father's) by Carl J. Richard.
ReplyDeleteTaki is worth reading. His revamped website is a disaster, it used to be much better. He hires some very interesting characters to write for him, and again, his own commentary is well written and authentic. As for Greek history, no one compares to Victor Davis Hansen, and his book A War Like No Other is a masterpiece of detail and insight into the mindset of the times.
ReplyDeleteThat book by VDH is good, nay, excellent, but it needs its companion volumes - "The Other Greeks" and "The Western Way of War".
DeleteIf you read nothing else of the article read the first sentence of the last paragraph.
ReplyDelete...and as always ""The Spartans do not inquire how many the enemy are, but where they are." AGIS II 427 B"
Nemo
Thanks, Ken, for this great post. I urge people to follow the link and read this excellent article. It is both uplifting, and also depressing, because it tells the true story of how America used to be a couple hundred years ago, and it also tells how America is now. I don't think that we can ever go back to the principles upon which we were founded, that of self existence, and fighting wars only for the defense of hearth and home.
ReplyDeleteWhile I don't really like Thomas Friedman, his book The World is Flat is descriptive of the era that we all exist in now. He basically explains that since the dawn of the 21st century, due to the technology boom, it has become easier for nations, individuals, and corporations to reach around the world, and connect with others in all corners of the globe, making capitalism easy for the entire world, and opening markets that in the past were mostly impossible to reach.
Because of our now global reach, corporations in America no longer are content to make a decent return on their investment, by targeting the people in America with their goods and services, and thus being forced to compete with each other to continually improve their product, and capture a larger market share, they can simply move their product offshore, to places like Africa, South East Asia, and other untapped markets, where they are able to sell their products just the way they are. The result is, that America gets short changed on innovation, which is now often done in the places that the corporations are marketing to, due to the cheaper labor costs.
So instead of being defeated by some other nation, who is stronger and more determined, we have defeated ourselves, by our hubris, and our innate laziness.
pigpen51