Do YouThink the Greek concept of the Polis after centuries has bering?

[Ichingcarpenter]

II've been taking iPod university courses from Yale on Greek history ,

Its only a 101 type course.

Anyway, the Greeks thought that the city, poiis, was more important
than the individual, the community made them whole and important.
Not their ego and they created their society on that.
Very Foreign to Individualism, even though they created
the first DEMOCRACY.


Many wonder why the Greeks achieved what they did.
i think if you look at the Greeks we might learn
something again.


iTunes gives you free University Access to Knowledge at the Yale
level and its free.

[Orrex]

1. Does it have bering? Damn strait!

[Davis_X_Machina]

2. You are, I'm afraid..

....Russian to a conclusion of a complicated question, one that is Vitus to this day.

[blogslut]

5. Ha!

[]

[Ichingcarpenter]

4. Hubris was discussed more than Wikipedia could ever supply

And what it really meant to the Greeks.
I got Educated by a Yale professor, 4 hours on my ipod touchd
during work

Its never too late

TO LEARN

[Orrex]

6. I've got more humility than any 10 people here.

And I'm inordinately proud of it.

[Davis_X_Machina]

9. Get David Blight's...

...Civil War and Reconstruction lectures next...

We had a 28-hour round trip this summer -- ME > Pittsburgh and back -- and it was aces.

[Tuvok Obama]

13. I found this excellent audio resource on ancient Greece at the library...

It's an 8-hour, 7-CD set called "The Modern Scholar: History of Ancient Greece."

The link below takes you to the MP3 version. The CD set is apparently out of print, but your local library might have it as The Modern Scholar series is very popular.

http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Scholar-History-Ancient-Greece/dp/B001EI3IW4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285438441&sr=1-1

In this intriguing series of lectures, prolific researcher, author, and George Washington University professor Eric H. Cline delves into the history of ancient Greece, frequently considered to be the founding nation of democracy in Western civilization. From the Minoans to the Mycenaeans to the Trojan War and the first Olympics, the history of this remarkable civilization abounds with momentous events and cultural landmarks that resonate through the millennia.

Ancient Greece, indeed, lives on in modern culture, evidenced by an ever-present fascination with the tales of Homer, Greek drama, and the spectacular stories associated with Greek mythology. In the rise of Sparta and Athens, and the origins of democracy in Greek society, people today find a wealth of relevant material for understanding not only ancient Greece, but the modern world. And there is no greater fount of learning than that supplied by the immortal philosophers of Greece: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

[Davis_X_Machina]

15. A man's gotta eat... and pay his student loans

....but Cline's on the Discovery Channel a wee bit too much for my taste. But then he debunked the Noah's Ark 'discovery'in Time this spring.

As he is a Bronze Age specialist, and an ancient-Middle-East guy, my only concern is that he might be prone to downplay the possibility of Greek originality v. 'they borrowed everything from Egypt/Phoenicia/the Hittites/Babylon'. That's a real live argument, and doesn't have An Answer yet.

[rug]

14. Hey, it's a vitul question.

[gateley]

3. Wow that's cool about the free courses -- thanks!! And we could certainly

learn a lesson from the Greeks. It sounds almost idyllic.

[mix]

7. For a city perhaps, where direct democracy is possible,

but not in a large nation-state.

[Ichingcarpenter]

11. Democracy can only exist

when the numbers are equal to the memory of man.


Maybe 20 thousand is the limit like the Greeks said
though only about 5 thousand males counted, but
the size they choose to exclude females and children
would put it around 20 thousand or more.

They thought anything above those numbers wouldn't work.

[Davis_X_Machina]

8. A very mixed bag.

The Greeks in a polis -- and not every Greek lived in one, Sparta, eg.) expected every free white (that goes without saying) male citizen to take an interest in public life. The English word "idiot" comes from "ιδιωτης", someone interested only in his own affairs. The big sin wasn't ignorance, it was disengagement. (Wait, that's the teabaggers!)

On the other hand, with no public provision to speak of except in defense and religion, the family was frightfully important. You had a prosperous family, you prospered. If you didn't have a prosperous family, you didn't. And since 90% of the population was directly engaged in peasant subsistence agriculture, most people were too busy to do anything except feed themselves, and cast an occasional vote.

Athens gets all the attention, because Athens has a rich written record. But Athens, in its size, its prosperity, its trans-Mediterranean reach, was an anomaly.

Victor David Hanson is a crappy RW pundit, but his book The Other Greeks: the Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization, is worth a look. He's in love with his own (subsidized) mythic yeoman-farmerhood, but on the Greeks, it's worthwhile.

[Ichingcarpenter]

10. David Hansen is this Yale Professor's love

Although the Yale Professor liked him he still gave me information
that I didn't know. I disagree with Hansen.

This Yale Professor didn't believe in Climate Change or even
think it had a major implication on the the loss of the Mycenae
civilization and the attack of the Greeks from Northern Tribes

Why did they have to move?

What do I know........ I don't teach a YALE.

[Davis_X_Machina]

12. Hanson's decent...

on most things Greek. It's on present-day politics that he's a disaster. Ed Luttwak is the same way -- good on Roman grand strategy, but don't ask him what to do in Afghanistan.

Whether climate change had anything to do with the collapse of Mycenaean high culture and what we used to call the Doric invasion is a very open question. Dendrochronology suggests climate change. How much? How bad? How disruptive? How much is a knock-on effect from developments further east? Urbanization is brittle -- we saw that in New Orleans -- and it always is ready to fail.

Plagues do as much damage as climate change -- the Black Death killed 1/3 of Europe during a time when we have much better documentation -- and whether and to what extent that was caused, abetted or even affected by climate, not weather, is an open question.

In general, in history, and especially in ancient history, cultivate the habit of rejecting reflexively the One Big Answer to any puzzle. Most times you turn out to be right.