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The Oldest Dead White European Males: And Other Reflections on the Classics
The Oldest Dead White European Males And Other Reflections on the Classics Author:Bernard Knox In this illuminating book, Bernard Knox raises questions both fundamental & timely: Should the ancient Greeks--"the oldest dead white European males"--& all they stand for be kept alive in our collective memory? Is their legacy at all relevant to the way we live now? Multiculturalism & its accompanying reevaluat... more »ion of Western history & culture have brought with them a heightened sense of the strangeness, the otherness, of the Greeks. Modern scholarship has relentlessly exposed the blind adoration of earlier generations & concentrated, in his words, on "the dark underside of what the Victorians hailed as the Greek Miracle." So much of what the Greeks were & did seems, today, positively alien at best. (The title essay explores sacrifice ritual, the Greek sense of self, slavery & the inferior position of women) Yet for all their flaws, the ancient Greeks literally invented philosophy, the theater, the concept of a national literature, competitive athletics, political theory, rhetoric, oratory, biology, zoology, atomic theory etc.. Thru the Sophists they invented the very idea of the humanities, a group of studies that came into being "as an education for democracy, a training in free citizenship." We cannot simply discard what the recent critical examination of the ancient Greeks has unearthed. But we cannot at the same time forget --& Knox brings his immense learning & crystalline prose to bear in helping all of us remember-- their originality, their central importance & all we've learned & continue to learn from them.« less