The Greek Miracle Exceptionalism in the Ancient World

Ancient Greece has sometimes been framed as the beginning of civilization itself, when Greek culture seemingly exploded out of nowhere in the classical period, and soon laid claim to be the foundation of everything good and civilized in western society. Democracy, humanism, rationalism, theater, philosophy, mathematics, architecture, the list is seemingly endless. It seems we were a bunch of superstitious barbarians before the Greeks came along and invented the civilized human as we know it. So what made the Greeks so different, so exceptional? The idea that the Greeks were a class of their own, and somehow better than others, known as exceptionalism, is like most things as old as history itself. You may have heard it called the Greek miracle, but this idea is just as misguided as modern forms of exceptionalism. Hey I'm Matt, you're watching Nothing New, and today we're going to pick apart the idea that the accomplishments of Ancient Greece came from some inherent nature instead of because of circumstance and necessity. One of the themes of this video series on Ancient Greece is to show how much of what the ancients claimed to have invented out of thin air, were actually adopted and innovated from their predecessors and neighbors, because as always, there really is nothing new under the sun. Anyways, let's get into it. But first, if you want to see more videos on Greek culture and ancient life, consider subscribing, we have new content coming out every week. In an interview with the Greek newspaper, The Daily, classical scholar Edith Hall pointed out how, the Greek miracle has nothing to do with racial superiority. Indeed, the Greeks themselves did not define their identity through blood. Herodotus defines it as, shared ancestry, rituals, a way of life and language. The Greek miracle has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time, to transform the achievements of other cultures in the surrounding regions, North Africa, the Levant, and Ancient Near East, into something radically new. Curiosity and love of innovation are two of the features that I highlight as being characteristic of Ancient Greek culture, along with love of travel and exploration. These characteristics were born out of harsh necessity. The poverty of the Greek environment forced the Ancient Greeks to travel, and colonize not only the Mediterranean, but also the Black Sea. Because they did not have huge fertile flood plains to cultivate as the Egyptians and Mesopotamian civilizations did, they had to leave home. And that diaspora was at the root of the Greek miracle. In their expansion, Greeks found themselves in new environments and had to adapt to them. And that is how science was born. The natural philosopher Thales, half Greek and half Phoenician, living in Miletus on the mouth of the Meander River on the western coast of modern Turkey, had to find a way to stop the estuary from silting up and separating the city from the sea. The Greek speakers living in Anatolia stopped explaining natural phenomena by divine intervention and looked for material causes. They were practical. The Greeks who colonized Olbia in the modern Ukraine had to develop sophisticated viticulture, including grafting and genetic manipulation, in order to grow grapes and make wine in the colder climate, because they considered wine so essential to their way of life. Some reviewers have criticized me for ignoring Athens and the Polis in favor of the sea and the horizon, but that is precisely my point. My perspective on the ancient Greeks is intended to emphasize the geographical and chronological spread of the ancient Greeks in their communities. Traditional classical scholarship puts the individual Polis, usually Athens or Athens in comparison with Sparta or Syracuse, at the center of the radar. Instead, I put the sea at the center of the radar. The sea is a meeting place across which Greeks constantly travel to talk to their fellow Greeks in other communities. Plato's frogs croaking at each other around a pond. As we begin to cover Greek history in upcoming videos, we will more fully explore this unique aspect of Greek civilization. But Plato's phrase that the Greeks were like frogs around a pond really is a perfect summation of what connected the ancient Greek city-states. Remember, this is long before the invention of the modern nation-state. Empires may have arose around major rivers, but otherwise life was still pretty tribal, being centered around small villages that would grow to the powerful city-states that would soon dot the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Like Edith Hall points out, Greek culture seems to have arose from the sea. For the earliest power to unify the culture of the Aegean was Crete, which cemented its power by securing sea travel from pirates. While I'm not as much of a geographic determinist as someone like Jared Diamond, the fact that Greece has the longest coastline of any country in the Mediterranean surely played a major role in the development of their culture. And just like Greece, with its seafaring nature sent out colonies far and wide. I think we can see parallels with the later flourishing of Europe as it began to colonize the world. Were Europeans exceptional people, or did they just have exceptional coastlines? Another thing to consider is, why have so many people, and not just lay people, but historians and scholars too been so eager to hold ancient Greek culture on a pedestal? Why have so many people uncritically repeated the idea that the Greeks invented everything civilized and ignored the Near Eastern roots of Greek culture? Well, it's the same reason I chose the Greeks to begin my exploration of culture and history. They're just the most accessible of all the ancient civilizations. The literary culture that flourished in places like Athens were some of the first to develop a coherent narrative about themselves, giving us a much richer picture of the Greek spirit than lists of forgotten kings and the boastful inscriptions of conquerors found across the Fertile Crescent. We also didn't decipher cuneiform or hieroglyphs until around the 1800s, missing a lot of important primary sources and literary works like the Epic of Gilgamesh until very recently. But even with the knowledge we've gained from the incredible work of archaeologists around the world, we still don't have personalities like Homer or Herodotus or thinkers like Plato and Aristotle who paint such vivid pictures of the life and mind of ancient Greece. While the ruins of Greece are incredibly impressive in their own right, if we didn't know the stories that surrounded them, they would be as mysterious as megalithic sites like Stonehenge. But just because the Greeks had a lot of self-confidence and were very proud of themselves, doesn't mean we should believe everything they say at face value. We must recognize their obvious bias when studying major events like the Persian Wars, because while Herodotus may want you to think that the Persians were all a bunch of slavish sissies, there's actually a lot to admire about the relatively tolerant Persian Empire. King of Kings, Cyrus II wasn't called the Great for nothing. In fact, he may have had more claim to be the Messiah than Jesus himself. I mean, he ended the Babylonian exile and allowed the Jewish people to return to Zion. And so, according to Isaiah 45.1, he is God's anointed one, which is what Messiah actually means. The idea of a Greek miracle is also misleading because it implies that something happened all at once, like a flash of lightning. Like we said in the intro, as we cover Greek thought, one of the themes of our videos will be the gradual progression of philosophy and how each thinker built on the ones that came before them. If classical Greece saw further than anyone, it was because they stood on the shoulders of giants. It is also very important to point out that Greek identity was based on shared language, customs, and culture more than shared genetics. They were all Greeks because they all worshipped the same gods and they all came together for shared cultural experiences like the Olympic Games. The first Olympics in 776 BC represents a foundational event that has been used in historiography to ground Greek history into a solid chronology. And in fact, the period between two Olympic Games, which you should know is four years, came to be called an Olympiad and was used as a dating system by ancient Greek historians. But I don't want to say too much about the Olympics, because that's the subject of our next video. Coming up next week, we'll be talking all about ancient Greek sports, athleticism, and their competitive spirit. I hope you're excited, and I'll see you then.