Hellenism, Americanism

There are certainly parallels here. Hellenism is dated to the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC); but Hellenism was, above all, a cultural invasion, not an ear when one state ruled extended geographies. Alexander’s realm fell apart soon after his death as his successors created contending states of their own. The Greek culture, however, came to overlay a vast region, its ways were absorbed; its language became the tongue of the educated; science suddenly emerged (link). The realms that Alexander conquered were—at least from the Greek perspective—backward and culturally passive, moribund kingdoms and empires.

Americanism began—let’s just say—with the end of World War II. It has the same character. It is the radiation of a secular culture (what Hellenism also was), its earmarks commercialism and democracy, its chief influence indirect.

How long did Hellenism hold its sway? And if the fundamental, functional characteristics of Hellenism are the same as that of Americanism, how long will the cultural radiation of Americanism last? The dates of Hellenism are shifting. Today’s endpoint is put at 146 BC, the Battle of Corinth, when Rome in effect conquered Greece. So make that 177 years all told. This dating is anchored in viewing history as political power. Those who take a wider, cultural perspective date the end of Hellenism to Caesar’s assassination or what comes to the same thing, Cleopatra’s death (30 BC). After that time democracy in Rome was effectively extinguished. I like this somewhat longer dating because Greek culture, as a form, was alive and well in Caesar’s time. The educated still all spoke Greek. So make that 293 years all told. Three centuries. And as empire gripped Rome, Hellenism as a culture was in process of hosting, and transforming itself, by a vast, and many-headed religious movement.

If we apply these temporal durations to Americanism, what do they suggest? The 177-year duration, added to 1945, points to 2162; the 293-year duration produces 2238. In neither of those years will anyone alive today still be breathing.

All right. But some—those who dream of a return to sanity, escape from the chaos secular culture is now breeding—suggest that things, these days, are moving much faster than they did back then. Aren’t they? Well, that seems to be the case—but the cause of this seeming speed-up is the use of fossil fuels. Things will certainly return to normal when oil, gas, and even shale run out later this century. Indeed, it might be argued, that with the earth’s currently huge population, that change in energy will produce a far more rapidly evolving disaster than the mere wear-out of the potentials inherent in secular culture. And yes, that seems to be the case as well.

But even the end of this century is safely far away to bother about—never mind the twenty-second or the twenty-third. It is always well to live with a highly extended personal time-line, thousands of years back, hundreds of years ahead. But the practical consequences of such exercises are absent—except to make us look, as it were, at a dimension placed 90 degrees to time itself. A worthwhile activity on one’s own birthday.

Hellenistic Science Rules

The best books come to me as gifts from my children. Michelle gave me The Forgotten Revolution, by Lucio Russo, for my birthday. It is subtitled “How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn.” The original in Italian appeared in 1996, the English version, Springer imprint, in 2004. Russo is an Italian historian of science, a physicist, and a professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.

This is a splendid and decidedly original work. Its thesis is that what we call modern science originated in full during the Hellenistic era and was essentially lost before that era ended thanks to the collision of Greek with Roman culture. The Romans had no interest in science; their focus was exclusively on power and administration. Science was reborn, and largely through the rediscovery of lost documents (many recovered only as Arabic translations from the Greek) beginning in the sixteenth century. One of his (for me) more fascinating observations is that our tendency to speak of the Graeco-Roman civilization as if it was a coherent whole is a coarse and ignorant blending of what were really opposites, an advanced civilization overcome and essentially buried under by a more primitive force.

Hellenism is typically dated from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the death of Cleopatra (30 BC), thus the onset of the decadent Roman imperial age. Russo thinks that the scientific era that began with Hellenism actually faded earlier, destroyed by Roman expansionism. He dates it to Rome’s conquest of Greece in the Battle of Corinth (146 BC —the same year that also saw Carthage destroyed). That date also roughly coincided with the Egyptian Ptolemy VIII’s rule (a monarch under Roman influence) who began the intense persecution of the Greek community in Alexandria (145-144 BC), a major center of Greek science.

Anybody interested in the history of science will find this book eye-opening. One of its valuable features is that it corrects a deeply rooted current view. It is that the ancients had discovered bits and pieces of science—but it required our genius to do the thing right. Russo’s view is that the Greeks had already done it—right, in other words. We are just now catching up with them. And in some ways some of our greatest (Newton) had still not caught the spirit of the thing and some of our more recent heroes (e.g. Niels Bohr) were again sliding away from the core insights of the Hellenists.