Comment by roughly
2 days ago
One interesting thread here is the long shadow of Greek and later Roman statuary and architecture on Western European self image - the marble statues, columns, and architecture of the Roman empire were taken as the origin story for Western culture - "we were an empire built on philosophers and artists, and look at the (gleaming white) purity of their works."
It turns out, of course, that all those gleaming white statues were vibrantly colored back when their creators were around, and the Greeks and Romans were not cultures of conformity or austerity - quite the opposite, but the seeds of the philosophy sank in hard, and here we are.
(Ironically, both stoicism and Christian asceticism were responses to that Roman excess, but they've somehow been merged with the white marble to produce a "purity" aesthetic to be lionized whenever someone gets the mildly uncomfortable notion that their neighbor is not exactly like them.)
> the Greeks and Romans were not cultures of conformity or austerity - quite the opposite, but the seeds of the philosophy sank in hard, and here we are.
I don’t think anyone thinks they were. They are usually assumed to be hedonistic in popular culture
With Romans, at least, the typical (and incorrect) popular narrative is that they were initially austere - and that period is when their civilization achieved its peak - and then became decadent and ruin followed.
I think you really start to see the fetishization of the Greeks and Romans in the Neoclassicism movements in the 18th century as an aesthetic, and I'm actually not sure how much was known about the actual Greek and Roman lifestyles (Roman, in particular - a big lot of this is tied up with the notions of Empire) at the time.
Kids are taught about them as about super serious no fun civilizations. Then I associate it woth fetishisation of military conquest and such.
I would see God's as hedonistic but not greeks. Honestly, my bias is that they were very boring amd sort of artificial.
Maybe not “the Greeks” broadly, but Spartans specifically are equated with austerity to the extent that “spartan” is adopted as an adjective meaning “showing indifference to comfort and luxury”.
Do people associate the Greeks with the Spartans more than the Athenians though?
Heh, not in Southern Europe. They are like the spark of the Western Civilization from Law to Arts to Mathematics and Science.