The passions that reading the Greeks continues to arouse

The enduring value of a cultural legacy. This is the emblematic case of classical Greek culture. What riches does its legacy convey to us? What currents of ideas or beliefs rub against our skin with warm intensity even today? This is the answer to this question in the book Why Read the Greeks? by Hugo Francisco Bauzá , published by Luz Fernández Ediciones, a collection of lectures given in 2024 at the ArtexArte gallery. A PhD in Philosophy and Letters (Paris IV, Sorbonne), Bauzá was a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, a philologist, and a specialist in the classical world and mythology.

In the 19th century, a previously subjugated Greece emancipated itself from Ottoman Turkish rule. Shortly before this, in 1822, the Romantic poet Percy Schelley, in the preface to his lyric drama Hellas (Hellas), declared: “We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their roots in Greece.”

Bauzá's book embraces the contemporary relevance of Greek literature through various chapters that focus on Homer between myth and history; and a contemporary look at Aeschylus's Oresteia ; Euripides' Bacchae ; the tragic figure of Oedipus ; Aeschylus's The Persians ; the invocation of Piso's villa in Herculaneum, flooded by the infernal lava of Vesuvius; and the discovery of the manuscript of Lucretius's De rerum natura in the 15th century and its contribution to the opening of modernity in the West.

Those initiated into the study of Greek philosophy are dazzled by its metaphysics, its epistemology, and its ways of understanding the dynamics of knowledge; however, the core of the Greek legacy emerges from observing, as the author points out, that "such knowledge is worthless if actions are not based on ethics." Examples include the Socratic attitude captured by Crito or Plato's duty of the citizen.

Socrates was condemned to drink hemlock under false charges. Crito, one of his disciples, then visited him. He proposed that he escape. Escape was possible. But the philosopher, who preached by his life example and left nothing in writing, argued that he would never disobey the laws, even if they were manipulated for perfidious purposes. Crito 's key teaching is that actions are insubstantial if they do not emanate from ethical vigor, "which is the norm that should guide our conduct, as Socrates argued some two millennia before Kant universalized this norm."

Classical antiquity also overflows, among others, in Cesare Pavese, Albert Camus, Robert Graves, the author of I, Claudius , and Paul Valery; and the Greek universe revives with refined words in Konstantinos Kavafis.

As part of its philosophy, Greece cultivated the art of persuasion. Thus, "persuasion is basically the driving force that energizes its assemblies and, therefore, the starting point of its democracy, from which the Greeks inherited it." Later, Rome conquered the Greeks, but the latter enchanted them with their philosophy, art, rhetoric, and architecture. Thus, the Eternal City was Hellenized. Several prominent Greeks, such as Polybius, were educators of the Roman aristocracy; and the Epicurean Philodemus directed a great library at Piso's villa in Herculaneum. Augustus, the first emperor, catalyzed Roman Hellenization, which was continued by other philhellenic emperors, such as Titus and Hadrian, elevated to literary fame by the beautiful words of Marguerite Yourcenar 's Memoirs of Hadrian .

The so-called "Greek miracle" was the revolution of rational thinking, in contrast to cultures shaped by the mythical worldview. Reason and argument yearned to think about what really is; therefore, "the search for truth is key to the Greeks; in that sense, unlike other peoples who understand it as a product of divine revelation, the Greeks strove to find it for themselves through rational procedures." From this intellectual matrix, Western philosophy was born in Ionia, on the west coast of present-day Turkey, then part of Hellas. Later, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle embraced life and the universe with meticulous reflective breadth.

The legacy of classical Greece still permeates the etymology of the vocabulary of modern science and knowledge; in architecture and its classical orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian); in art and its philosophical reflection ; in traits such as moderation and prudence; in respect for the law; in democracy and isonomy as the equality of civil and political rights for citizens; and in the concept of humanity, already present in Homer "when, faced with the suffering of human beings, he makes no distinction between Greeks and Trojans."

Acceptance of destiny is emblematic of the Greek hero, even in the face of the greatest adversity. Tragedy in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides prevented the reduction of life to pure, naive rationalism, oblivious to the darkness of existence. And Odysseus, in his confrontation with Poseidon, god of the sea, and in his perilous return to his home in Ithaca after the Trojan War, symbolizes adventure as an affirmation of life.

And these and other traces of Greek heritage are still recognizable in the digital deserts of the present.

Esteban Ierardo is a philosopher. His cultural website, La mirada de Linceo (Linceo's Gaze) , is www.estebanierardo.com.