An essay on European culture

The Eternal Charm of Greek Culture

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[Abstract] There has been in Europe and elsewhere an enduring excitement about classical Greek culture. Rediscovery of Greek Culture played a vital part in the Renaissance in Italy and other Europe countries. There three qualities to analyze the reason why Greek culture exercised an eternal charm.

[Key words]Greek culture, spirit, achievement, effect.

Greek culture was the cradle of European culture, the symbol of human beings’ wisdom and enjoyed great prestige all over the world with its eternal charm and supreme achievement. Greek culture played a prominent role in almost every field, such as art, architecture, philosophy, science, etc… After accumulating and precipitating for thousands of years, the Greeks created innumerable wealth of spirits and gems of arts. And the splendid achievements had profound and lasting influences on European civilization and even the world’s cultural development. Karl Marx, a lifelong devotee of classics, once wrote about the Greeks:“Why shouldn’t the childhood of human society—the stage at which it attained its most attractive development—exercise an eternal charm that will never return. As far as I’m concerned, the reasons are as follows.

Ⅰ.Ancient Greeks had the Spirit of Innovation

As we know, innovation is the soul of national progress. In the development of world history, its neighboring countries in West Asia and North Africa had already established highly developed slavery agriculture, when Greece was still in luxuriant vegetation. But in the 5th century B.C. Greece had far exceeded the former in every area including politics, economics and cultures. Why Greece ,whose land was relatively small and barren , had developed so rapidly in a brief space of time ？Of course, because the ancient Greeks were good at absorbing advanced culture of neighboring countries. What’s more important, it could be due to their spirit of innovation and sense of consciousness trained in the process of the establishment of historical culture. Whatever country and nation who was eager to develop and be strong could find valuable experience from Greek innovation developing history to spur itself, even they were in different historical background. As is know to all, ancient Greece was the source of European culture. But when it comes to the process of world’s history development, Greek was not the pioneer of history record. Greek history originates mythology and epics. They reflected that Greeks’ sense of primitive history was in the embryonic stage. There’s no doubt that Homer’s epics in the 9th century B.C. showed us the strongest power of creativity. At that time, human beings’ poor reason was still not able to tame the society consciously. But Homer’s epics showed us the Greeks’ senses, imagines and memories of nature and social conditions in that age with highly wisdom. In fact, the inattentive historical imagines memories could not comprise of a true history work. No matter the poet or the obsessed reader, they are concerned most with the touching plots of gods and heroes. It’s of no importance that when the strong did happen or whether it was told in the order of historical time. In the 5th century B.C. the writing type of rational critical history rose. Herodotus, who is often called “Father of History”, was one of the representative writers. It witness that human abandoned the mythical history and its rough form. Instead, miraculous history became common history .The wars between Greeks and Persians, which lasted for nearly half of the century, broadened Greek’s historical horizons and made them interested in ancient eastern culture. The most important thing was that they realized that it was human not god saved Greece. Slavery politics and economics, which developed rapidly after the war, lay a firm foundation for classical history. In the age of relative rationality, Herodotus started true history with his distinct sense of individual character of creativity. History writing was no longer filled with wizards, incantations or prophesies. Instead, it became the history of person’s deeds and their success and failure. Therefore, it’s said that although Greeks were not the first to record history, they are the first to criticize history. That is to say, they created history. The prosperity of Herodotus’ rational and critical history was only an epitome of the flourish and creativity of classical Greek culture. But it reflected the Greeks’ spirit of innovation and being unwilling to continue in the same old rut. However, creativity cannot be created in vacuum but presuppose some certain social cultural environment. The reason that Greek culture showed us the flourishing creativity was surely endowed with deep and extensive inner knowledge of social culture. Greek democratic politics provided people broad and free space to create. They valued the citizen’s individual character and guaranteed their rights of speaking out freely.

Ⅱ.Greeks achieved supreme achievement

Of many lyric poets of the Greek time, two are still admired by readers today: Sappho and Pindar. Soppho was a woman poet noted for her love poems of passionate intensity. Pindar is the best known for his odes celebrating the victories at the athletic games, such as the 14 Olympian odes. Early in their remote past, the Greeks started to perform plays at religious festivals. Out of these origins a powerful drama developed in the 5th century B.C. Performances were given in open-air theatres with the audience sitting on stone benches and looking down at the stage from three sides . The outstanding dramatists of ancient Greece were Aeschylus, Sophcles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Herodotus is often called father of history. He wrote about the wars between Greeks and Persians. Thucydides told about the war between Athens and Sparta and between Athens and Syracuse, a Greek state on the island of Sicily. Pythagoras was the founder of scientific mathematics. To Pythagoras and his school we owe the abstract conceptions underlying mathematics --- point, line, magnitude, surface, body --- and the first theory of proportion. Heracleitus believed fire to be the primary element of universe, out of which everything else has arisen. He held the theory of the mingling of opposites and believed it was the strife between the opposites that produced harmony. Democritus speculated about the atomic structure of matter. He was one of the earliest exponents of the atomic theory. Euclid is even now well-known for his Element, a textbook of geometry, perhaps the most successful textbook even written, because it was in use in English schools until the early years of the 20th century. To illustrate the principle of the lever, Archimedes is said to have told the King: “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” The most famous philosophers are Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and later the thoughts divided into the Sophists, the Cynics, the Sceptics, the Epicureans and the Stoics. Greek art is a visual proof of Greek civilization. As we follow the advances of Greek civilization, we find how art evolved from the archaic period to the classical period which marked its maturity. Greek architecture can be grouped into three styles: the Doric style, Lonic style and Corinthian style. The most important of the temples the ancient Greek left us is Parthenon, which has always been a great tourist attraction for people all over the world and the most perfect of all the Greek temples. The most famous sculptures are Discus Thrower, Venus de Milo and Laocoon group. The flourishing of the Greek pottery was a result of domestic demands and demands for foreign trade.

Ⅲ.Greek culture exerted enormous influence on English literature

For instance, Pindar had imitators, such as the 17th century English poet John Dryden. A Freudian term “Oedipus Complex” of the 19th century originating from a Greek tragedy in which King Oedipus unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. In the early part of the 19th century, three young people Romantic poets expressed their admiration of Greek culture in works which had themselves become classics: Byron’s Isles Greece, Shelley’s Hellas and Prometheus Unbound and Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn. In the 20th century, there were Homeric parallels in the Irishman James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Ulysses.

In addition, Greek culture also took great influence on European and even world’s cultural civilization. The reasons are as follows .The Greeks love sports. They often took part in the contests of sports in Olympus Mount, thus the Olympic Games came into being. In political aspect, Greek democratic culture is the source of future European democracy. Athens was a democracy, where only the adult male citizens had the rights. The economy of Athens rested on an immense amount of slave labor. European historians said that democracy came from Greek while autocracy came from Rome. In fact, rediscovery of Greek culture deeply affected Renaissance in Italy and other European countries. And the limitation to the monarchical power was also influenced by ancient Greek democracy. In the aspect of art, we have no doubt that almost all the western philosophy and thoughts were the result of Greek culture. No matter Homer, Herodotus or Socrates, they were all the indispensable sources. And mythology is the source of Greek literature and European literature. Epics and tragedy were the two bright pearl of Greek literature. Homer’s epics were the earliest magnum opus of historical significance. Another great achievement was the tragedy in the 5th century B.C. in Athens age. There were three outstanding tragedians. Aeschylus was the first one .He is noted for his vivid character portrayal and majestic poetry. The Prometheus Bound was his most famous work. Sophocles was the most gifted tragedian of the three. His outstanding plays like Oedipus of the King, Electra and Antigone. The Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud’s term “the Oedipus complex” was also derived from Sophocles’s play. Euripides wrote mainly about women in such plays as Andromache, Medea and Trojan Women. He was considered as the first man to crease works about western family problems. Greek religion and mythology provided fertile topsoil to the development of European culture. The religion and mythology in the ancient Greece were in close contact with each other. Some religions in Europe were the derivatives of Greek religion .In the aspect of architecture, the site of Greek building reflected Greeks’ interest of arts. The three styles of Greek architecture remained distinctive and immortal features. If you want to study Greek history of art, you can set your foot on Greek architecture. Because they were not about how to build a building, but also about their appreciation of the beauty. Greek architecture is one of the great achievements of our development of history. It brought us classical works of art and deeply influenced the future styles of architecture. It almost permeated in the European activities of architecture for nearly 2000 years. Parthenon is the most important temple of all the Greek temples .if we say ,Greek culture is the souse of European culture .so we can also consider Greek architecture is the source and treasure of European architecture.

Ⅳ.Conclusion

Their works could still bring us an artistic treat. What’s more, to some extend, it could be a standard and an inimitable model. And philosophy and scientific ideas laid a foundation for human beings’ understanding of nature, society and way of thinking.

Reference

1.欧洲文化入门 王佐良等主编 北京：外语教学与研究出版社1992

2.希腊的遗产 芬利主编 上海：上海人民出版社2004

希腊神话的永恒魅力