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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austeritydi Johanna Hanink
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This is an ambitious book which aims to speak to a wide audience: to any and all who identify themselves as ‘Western’ or ‘European’, and especially to those of us who are involved in the study and teaching of the ancient Greek world, but also to modern political and social commentators. Hanink has two broad aims. First, to draw attention to the ways in which an idealised vision of ancient Greece was fabricated, initially by the Classical Athenians themselves, and then by the modern discipline of Hellenism. Second, to examine how that vision has been used by pundits and politicians on all sides as a way of addressing the financial, political and social crisis which Greece has suffered since 2008. Hanink reminds her reader that the popular image of ancient Greece—birthplace of democracy, philosophy, naturalism—was not discovered, but created by modern scholars, most of them non-Greek. What is most shocking is not that the likes of Johann Winckelmann, Charles Rollin and Adamantios Koraïs were able to create this image of what Greece must have been like, but that their creation has been so very enduring and powerful. Any teachers, students or researchers of the ancient world who have justified their subject by linking it to an ideal of Western civilisation are perpetuating this modern image of ‘the glory that was Greece’. This book seeks to make us aware of this fabrication, and question how it is being used in the popular media across Europe and the USA to sharpen attacks on the current Greek people and blame them for their country’s misfortunes.
Ever since the International Monetary Fund's first bailout of Greece's sinking economy in 2010, the phrase "Greek debt" has meant one thing to the country's creditors. But for millions who claim to prize culture over capital, it means something quite different: the symbolic debt that Western civilization owes to Greece for furnishing its principles of democracy, philosophy, mathematics, and fine art. Where did this other idea of Greek debt come from, Johanna Hanink asks, and why does it remain so compelling today? The Classical Debt investigates our abiding desire to view Greece through the lens of the ancient past. Though classical Athens was in reality a slave-owning imperial power, the city-state of Socrates and Pericles is still widely seen as a utopia of wisdom, justice, and beauty--an idealization that the ancient Athenians themselves assiduously cultivated. Greece's allure as a travel destination dates back centuries, and Hanink examines many historical accounts that express disappointment with a Greek people who fail to live up to modern fantasies of the ancient past. More than any other movement, the spread of European Philhellenism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carved idealized conceptions of Greece in marble, reinforcing the Western habit of comparing the Greece that is with the Greece that once was. Today, as the European Union teeters and neighboring Muslim nations disintegrate into civil war, Greece finds itself burdened by economic hardship and an unprecedented refugee crisis. Our idealized image of ancient Greece dangerously shapes how we view these contemporary European problems. -- Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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This recourse put them in a bind. Reliance on their ancient achievements in art, philosophy, rhetoric, science, and war (Persians) was thus of some assistance to getting help in the short term but had unfortunate consequences.
The underside of ancient Greece was downplayed, such as the frequent wastage of its youth in warfare, its imperialism, and its dependence on very many slaves. Indeed no little of what the ancient Greeks produced was clever propaganda in furtherance of imperial aims and standing. Modern greeks asking again for help then suffered all the more from unfair comparisons with their glorified past as it exists in the western mind, comparisons used against Greece, for example, in argument against their deserving forbearance in the recent debt crisis, which crisis is addressed tangentially.
Also western archaeologists and adventurers looted ancient Greek artifacts with the rationale that they were preserving them from the current citizenry. Many remain in the west, in part for the same given reason.
Recommended for anyone interested in the subject. ( )