Greek Heritage Research Articles

Book Reviews

Religion and Culture in Medieval IslamRICHARD G. HOVANNISIAN and GEORGES SABAGH (Eds), 1999Giorgio Levi della Vida Conferences, 14Cambridge, Cambridge University Pressviii_118 pp., UK£32.50ISBN 0-521-623502This book contains the proceedings of a conference whose speakers and theme were chosen by Professor George Makdisi, recipient of the Giorgio Levi della Vida Award in 1993. Although the theme is quite wide, the tone and viewpoint of the book are consistent with each other and coherent with Makdisi's own position, which he summarises in the first chapter, "Religion and culture in classical Islam and the Christian West". Here, Makdisi gives an overview of the fascinating theory which he has expounded in several works over the past decades (especially his The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh, 1981) and The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (Edinburgh, 1990)), explaining how came to be interested in this subject and linking it to the modern-day American situation. Makdisi's view is that the European scholastic and humanistic movements had their origin in two equivalent movements that had begun some centuries earlier in the Middle East and, through Spain and Sicily, reached the West. This first chapter sets the tone of the whole book, which deals with several Arabo-Islamic subjects, making ample references to equivalent or parallel themes in the medieval (and occasionally modern) Christian (and occasionally Jewish) world. W. Montgomery Watt's essay on The future of Islam" compares Jewish reactions to Hellenism in Antiquity with contemporary Muslim reactions to the Western, Christian culture. It is a very stimulating piece, and the daring juxtapposition of past and present provokes important questions: to what extent can one think, today, of different parts of our globalised world simply Muslim or Christian, albeit with varying degrees of secularism? How can one deal with the fact that large portions of all societies do not identify themselves in any religion? Returning to a medieval subject, the following two chapters illustrate aspects the relation between religion and literature. Merlin Swartz writes on "Arabic rhetoric and the art of the homily in medieval Islam", pointing to the lack of secondary scholarship on this genre, whose Christian parallel has instead received great attention. Swartz begins filling this gap by describing in great detail the norms laid out in two handbooks for preachers written by Ibn al-Jawzý¯ (d. 597/1201). The fourth chapter, by Irfan Shahý¯d ("Medieval Islam: the literary-cultural dimension") reflects on the Qur'a¯nic idea of i'ja¯z (inimitability) and its consequences for the field of literature, from the times of Muh_ammad to the present day. This is followed by George Saliba's more specific illustration of how three prominent Ash'arite authors refute astrology ("The Ash'arites and the science of the stars"); the issue is placed within the context of the Islamic-Arabic approach to classical Greek heritage. Roger Arnaldez ("Religion, religious culture, and culture") provides an outline of the development of Islam from starting point as a religion containing ancient practices whose origins were forgotten,

The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardī and the Heritage of the Greeks

The Leaven of the Ancients: Suhrawardī and the Heritage of the Greeks

Beyond Nihilism: Kazantzakis and Plotinus on the Metaphysical 'One' That Does Not Exist

When Kazantzakis claimed at the end of Askitik� that "even this 'One' does not exist," his emphasis was not on a nihilistic concluding void but on the metaphysical 'One' or 'abyss' that lies beyond ('meta') the material realm. As this 'One' lacks any ontological reference point, it cannot be said to 'exist'. Furthermore, Kazantzakis drew on his rich Greek heritage--the neoplatonist Plotinus--in prioritizing this metaphysical 'One'. Examining the thought of Plotinus makes it possible to draw on and develop recent claims that Kazantzakis's thought may best be interpreted from the perspective of apophaticism or 'negative theology'. Indeed, the apophatic approach of Plotinus enables us to see how Kazantzakis could have asserted that "even this 'One' does not exist" without being a nihilist. Nevertheless, like Shestov's interpretation of Plotinus, Kazantzakis warns that ascent to the 'One' is both sublime and terrifying.

The Possibility of Deterritorializing Democracy: Agonistic Democratic Politics and the APEC NGO Forums

Marc G. Doucet (*) Since leadership out of this mess does not seem to be coming from the traditional places anymore--not from politicians, political parties, the church, or academia--it is up to us--working people, the unemployed, young people, old people, people of color, first-nations people--to take up the mantle. We are going to have to form the citizen movements in our countries and across borders to take back democracy in their absence. Maude Barlow, opening the 1997 People's Summit on APEC Deconstruction is something which happens and which happens inside: there is a deconstruction at work within Plato's work, for instance.... I would say the same for although the concept of democracy is a Greek heritage. This heritage is the heritage of a model, not simply a model, but a model that self-deconstructs, that deconstructs itself, so as to uproot, to become independent of its own grounds. Jacques Derrida The increasing frequency and scope of organized popular opposition to components of governance,, (1) has raised new and profound questions about the meaning of and the democratic imaginary in an era of If we are willing to accept that forcing globalization's difference into traditional 'spatial' categories creates remainders and resistances that for political theory prompt renewed investigation of the concepts and scope of democracy, (2) then we need to address recent political events surrounding opposition to global governance with alternative theoretical vantage points. Such vantage points may provide us with a better understanding of what is made to work, and what is made possible, by the opposition to globalization and the state-sponsored international organizations that sustain it. In order to help develop such a theoretical space, this article will examine the opposition to one such state-sponsored component of global governance: Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). (3) For the better part of the 1990s, the APEC annual leaders' meeting was the site of opposition organized by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). One can perhaps draw from the history of organized opposition to APEC in order to better understand the possibilities that are opened in our political imaginary by other, similar, global social movements of contestation that have occurred in Quebec City, Davos, Prague, Melbourne, Washington, D.C., Seattle, and elsewhere. In the case of opposition to APEC, NGOs were concerned with such issues as economic globalization, human rights, gender, labor rights, migrant rights, sustainable development, and the environment. For most of the 1990s in whichever member country of APEC the heads of state met, NGOs organized parallel forums, or summits. (4) Why would APEC provoke such political opposition on such a broad range of issues? In answering this question, this article will argue that APEC, as a component of global governance, is not merely an interstate economic forum; rather, I argue, if we wish to understand the reason for the opposition we must view APEC as a political site where a particular discourse on the social is deployed. This discourse on the social contains particular resolutions of identity! difference that are, like all such resolutions, antagonistic. NGO opposition in the form of people's summits is in effect responding to this antagonism. This article will further argue that, in responding to this antagonism, the NGO discourse of contestation opens the possibility for a deterritorialization of democracy. This possibility is opened through the discursive articulation of the opposition that one can find in aspects of the final declarations or statements issued at the end of the NGO forums. Although these openings are generally few and cannot be exaggerated, they are of interest if we are looking for genuinely new ways of imagining politics and democracy in a world marked by globalization. …

Slimy stones and philosophy: some interpretations of tohu wa-bohu

The creation account in the first chapter of Genesis tells us how, from this state called tohu wa-bohu in Hebrew, God created and formed the world in the course of six days. To this is added a mythical statement, probably by a Babylonia Amora, Rav, about tohu as a green line encircling the world and bohu as wet stones immersed deep in water. During centuries, the Jews became exposed to philosophy and science which were built on Greek heritage. Almost a thousand years after Rav, Abraham bar Hiyya, a Spanish astronomer, presented tohu and bohu as identical to the Aristotelian matter and form. Jewish thinkers were sometimes discussing the physical reality, sometimes the divine reality, sometimes both. Tohu and bohu, which in the beginning were empty, without value and next to nothing, had grown to be the roots of being, the secret of knowledge both physical and divine.

Sacralising the Past

AbstractThe paper discusses the religious undertones classical Greek heritage is vested with in Greece. Drawing on the argument that nationalism and religion need to be seen as similar cultural systems, we show that classical antiquities have become powerful emotive icons for performances of national memory in the process ot imagining thetoposof the Hellenic nation. This process is open to all social actors and not simply to State bureaucrats and intellectuals. We offer an explanation of this phenomenon by examining the position of antiquity in the construction of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation, as well as the ways by which Orthodoxy and classical antiquity became enmeshed in the formation of Hellenic national identity.We finally explore some of the implications that this phenomenon has for archaeology as a discipline and as social practice.

Algunas consideraciones sobre estética musical árabe

At the beginning, the poetry was considered as the genesis of the arabic art, and after then the prose of adab, both of them appeared with the idea of the "beauty science". This idea would be projected on the music. On the other hand, the greek heritage of the classic arabic philosophy legacy was reflected during the first manuscripts of the arabic philosophers and musical theoreticians as al-Kindf (s.IX) and al-Farabf (s.X), as a result appeared a new conception of the "beauty" and "aesthetic". By this way, taking as a point of reference the greek classical world, the new parameters would appear as an result of this own reality and idiosyncrasy. Their poetry and musical legacy, joined to the philosopher and religious mind would complete the work of the "aesthetic musical art". The study of the arabic middle music prove that the harmony in the poetry, lingüistic and rhitmycal contents, go in parallel with the melodic content until it reached a harmonic relation and in definitive cosmic, and as a result an "aesthetic ideal". This ideal was based on "beauty" and the "aesthetic emotion" produced by the art and all that as reflet to the harmonic until the corp and the spirit and oriented to the spherical work and to the divinity.

Many Happy Returns? New Contributions to the Repatriation Debate

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticleMany Happy Returns? New Contributions to the Repatriation Debate Heritage Recovered: The Lydian Treasure. By Ilknur Özgen and Jean Oztürk. The Aidonia Treasure: Seals and Jewellery of the Aegean Late Bronze Age. By Katie Demakopoulou. Mycenaean Treasures of the Aegean Bronze Age Repatriated. Proceedings from a Seminar Sponsored by the Society for the Preservation of the Greek Heritage and Held at the Ripley Center, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. on January 27, 1996. By R. H. Howland. The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece?. By Christopher Hitchens. The Gold of Troy: Searching for Homer's Fabled City. By Vladimir Tolstikov and Mikhail Treister. Golden Treasures of Troy: The Dream of Heinrich Schliemann. By Hervé Duchêne. The Spoils of War. World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property. By Elizabeth Simpson. The Return of Cultural Treasures. By Jeannette Greenfield.Ellen HerscherEllen Herscher Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 102, Number 4October 1998 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 8Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/506100 Views: 8Total views on this site Copyright © 1998 by the Archaeological Institute of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Made in America: Historical and Contemporary Recordings of Middle Eastern Music in the United States

Although Americans of Middle Eastern origin—be they of Arab, Turkish, Armenian, Sephardic Jewish, Assyrian, Greek, or Central Asian heritage—comprise one of the fastest growing groups in the United States, their music may seem invisible to the American musical connoisseur. Many of the recordings of Middle Eastern American musicians are produced and distributed within community networks. Walk into an Armenian grocer in Watertown, Massachusetts or into a Lebanese audio-video store in Dearborn, Michigan, and you will find hundreds of hours of music by Middle Eastern Americans for your listening pleasure. Walk into your public library and you may not find a thing. Middle Eastern music made in America is simply not widely available on the major or alternative recording labels to which we habitually turn for our fare of world music.

Hellenism and empire: language, classicism, and power in the Greek world, AD 50-250

Hellenism and Empire explores identity, politics, and culture in the Greek world of the first three centuries AD, the period known as the second sophistic. The sources of this identity were the words and deeds of classical Greece, and the emphasis placed on Greekness and Greek heritage was far greater now than at any other time. Yet this period is often seen as a time of happy consensualism between the Greek and Roman halves of the Roman Empire. The first part of the book shows that Greek identity came before any loyalty to Rome (and was indeed partly a reaction to Rome), while the views of the major authors of the period, which are studies in the second part, confirm and restate the prior claims of Hellenism.

The Divine and Human Map of the Argonautica

R. Hunter: The Divine and Human Map of the Argonautica 13 The Divine and Human Map of the Argonautica Richard Hunter Epic poetry seeks to map the world, both as a physical and as an ideological construct. Just as Homer was the source of all literature, all philosophy, and all political science, so epic is the all-encompassing literary embodiment of all that is known. If it was the Shield of Achilles—itself both microcosm and macrocosmwhich was for later ages the most obvious epic site where spatial and cultural dispositions were clearly inter-dependent,1 it was the Odyssey which taught for all time how geographic and cultural maps could never be totally distinct entities. The persistence ofdiis pattern of thought in later Greek science (especially medicine) and ethnography has often been documented. Recent years have explored to excellent effect the consequences which diis aspect of the Greek heritage had in Roman epic and in the Aeneid in particular, one need only think of the complementary, though very different, books of Philip Hardie and Claude Nicolet.2 It is now well understood that the Aeneid does not merely plot the foundation of Roman imperial power, but also marks out the space of that power, geographically, morally, and politically. A fundamental technique in Vergil's project is the interplay of "epic time" and "historical time:" the institutions and ideology of Augustan Rome are retrojected into (or, perhaps, mapped on to) the epic past, thus confirming that the new order, far from being "new" in an absolute sense, is of pristine antiquity. In seeking to understand the earlier history of this process, the Argonautica of Apollonius seems an obvious starting-point. The Argonautica-oi so I have argued elsewhere~was a crucial text in the development of Vergil's strategy, both because some of Apollonius' concerns are similar to those of Vergil, and because the Roman poet chose to read the Greek epic 1 Cf., e.g., P.R. Hardie, "Imago mundi: Cosmological and Ideological Aspects of the Shield of Achilles," JHS 105 (1985) 11-31. 2 PJl. Hardie, Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford 1986); C. Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the early Roman Empire (Michigan 1991) translating L'inventaire du monde: géographie etpolitique aux origines de l'Empire romain (Paris 1988). There is also much of interest on this subject in D. Quint, Epic and Empire. Politics and Generic Formfrom Virgil to Milton (Princeton 1993). 14Syllecta Classica 6 (1995) in such a way as to fashion the prior text to his own purpose.3 Moreover, there are good reasons to dunk diat the Argonautic story had always been a narrative in which the boundaries of "history" and "myth" were available for negotiation; the aetiological dimension was fundamental to the whole narrative, not merely a casual offshoot of it.4 More specifically, the Argonautica of Apollonius yields close parallels to some of Vergil's techniques of "mixing time." Thus, for example, it is now generally accepted diat the account, in the mouth ofLykos, of the history of the Mariandynoi reflects recent events and, in particular, the political aspirations of the people ofHeraclea Pontica (2.774-810);5 whatever the details, it is clear diat mythic history is in this passage accommodated to recent history in a way diat becomes very familiar in the Roman epic. Moreover, Apollonius lived in a period of considerable interest in geography and geographical writing, some of which is doubtless reflected in his epic.6 There are, therefore, reasons to hope that wider enquiries concerning the relation between the Argonautica and the political and social world in which it was written may not be fruitless, although this relation has, until recently, attracted remarkably little critical attention.7 In diis paper I shall examine two different aspects of the Argonautic "map," in both of which, however, we can see how the geographical and the moral or cultural parameters of the poem run together. In Section I, I shall deal briefly with the passage of the Argo through the Symplegades and the voyage along the southern Pontic shore, and in Section II, I shall be concerned with the religious horizons of the epic. I Much...

Can There Be a Science of Action? Paul Ricoeur

Essential to the Greek heritage of Western Culture has been its determination to be delivered from the vagaries of mere opinion through the search for certain knowledge. Greek philosophy, and Western philosophy in its wake, was at great pains to distinguish clearly between what could be known with certainty (episteme) and what could be accepted as a more or less vague opinion (doxa). This distinction between episteme and doxa, first articulated by Plato, may have rested on the popular distinction between what can be known by sight and what can be known from hearing. What I know from having seen personally is considered more secure as a knowledge than what I obtain from hearsay. Sight involves personal presence and experience whereas hearsay relies on the witness of others, on the authenticity or veracity of others. As a consequence knowledge from hearing is second-hand knowledge. I am not as personally present or engaged in what presents itself to my hearing as I am to what presents itself or is present in my seeing. The aftermath of the distinction between episteme and doxa, between certain knowledge and opinion, is to be found in the progressive refinement of the paradigm towards the eye of reason, and in our time in Dilthey's split between the empirical and human sciences and of C. P. Snow's distinction between the two cultures. The dominance of the visual paradigm in Western philosophy is shown in the preference of the epistemic over the doxic. In this essay I want to explore the epistemic-doxic status of the knowledge of human action. I do so guided by the recent work of Paul Ricoeur particularly in his masterly Oneself as Another.2 In Oneself as Another as well as in two other major texts, Time and Narrative and From Text to Action,4 Ricoeur has elaborated a hermeneutical approach to a theory of action with a specific emphasis on its epistemological status. His position is unique inasmuch as it safeguards both an ontology of human action and an epistemology. For Ricoeur, understanding and explanation are not unbreachable opposites. There can be no understanding without explanation and no explanation without understanding. Both are required for a proper application of action to the various spheres of life where action is at stake. At issue in this essay is the type of explanation that in Ricoeur's view is available to the understanding of human action. Before delving into Ricoeur's analysis of the epistemological status of the theory of action, it is worthwhile to paint the larger picture within which Ricoeur develops this theory of action. His venture into practical philosophy must be seen in the light of his perception of the current crisis of Western civilization. For Ricoeur, a pivotal event marks our era, which calls for a new thrust in philosophy. He identifies this event at the level of human consciousness as the shattering ofthe Cartesian cogito. Nietzsche and the Deconstructionists of this century perpetrated this humiliation of the human subject.5 The overevaluation and exaltation of the human subject as primary certainty and ground that played such an important role in the idealist rendition of the human subject in a dominant strand of interpretation of Descartes (Kant, Fichte, and Husserl) lost its force through the critique of Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, philosophy's claim to give certitude and to ground science seemed only a rhetorical strategy, one that ended up in the illusion of a solid foundation. Ricoeur's practical philosophy is an attempt to forge a new space for the human self beyond these epochal movements of the undue exaltation of the subject by the Cartesian tradition on the one hand and the declared rhetorical emptiness of the human subject by the deconstructionists on the other hand. But with the demise of foundationalism, the purely rhetorical position is not an acceptable alternative. If foundationalism promised too much certainty, deconstructionism holds out too little. …

From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance Mark Vessey N. G. Wilson . From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 200. $49.95 The subtitle of Nigel Wilson's new book could be thought misleading, did he not immediately qualify the work as a sequel to his Scholars of Byzantium (London: Duckworth, 1983), which "described the preservation of the classical heritage and the use made of it by the intellectuals of Byzantium" (ix). For Wilson, "Greek studies" means primarily "classical scholarship" applied to Greek texts. As the earlier book excluded early Christian writings unless they happened to bear on the literary curriculum or attract the attention of a classicizing writer like Michael Psellos, so this one treats only obiter of Greek patristic studies in the Italian Renaissance. As we should expect, Wilson draws special attention to Leonardo Bruni's pioneering translation (c.1403) of Basil's protreptic Ad iuvenes, emphasizing both the continuing power of that text as a sanction for the predominantly pagan literary curriculum of Christian Byzantium and its new-found utility in the West "as a weapon in controversy with opponents brought up in a less liberal tradition" (14). There is brief mention of the important patristic translations of the Camaldolese monk Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439), already the subject of a major study by Charles L. Stinger, and some discussion of the activity of Cardinal Bessarion as a textual critic in the tradition of Jerome. Valla is remembered for his version of Basil's Nineteenth Homily as well as his work on the Greek New Testament. Evidence that Pope Nicholas V (1397-1455) was concerned with the question of the authenticity of the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite serves to remind us that "for all his humanistic interests [sic!] both he and his successors up to and including Sixtus IV (1471-84) attached importance to [the patristic] part of the Greek heritage" (80). The suggestion that humanist and Christian ideals were somehow at odds with each other, consistent with the older view of Italian [End Page 509] humanism as a basically secular phenomenon, surfaces again in Wilson's commentary on Aldus Manutius' record as a publisher of Greek texts. Noting that a 1501 volume contained poems of Prudentius with the hymns of John Damascene "and some lesser authors," he protests that "[w]hen so much remained to be done for the central areas of Greek literature the choice of such texts can only be characterised as eccentric" (142, emphasis added). Since Aldus presumably knew his market, the charge of eccentricity must recoil on the historian who knows better than he did where to place the center of Greek literature. Another problem is raised by the statement that Marcus Musurus' edition (also for the Aldine Press) of selected orations of Gregory of Nazianzus revived a Byzantine pattern of study, those texts having "made little impact" in Italy, where "other patristic literature had greater claims on scholars' attention" (155). So it may be. But the point is hard to grant when neither the claims of patristic literature nor the scholarly attention accorded it have been any part of the foregoing account. Wilson draws his book to a close in 1515. That was the year in which Raffaele Maffei of Volterra (1451-1522), formerly the translator of Homer, Xenophon and Procopius, published his Latin version of the works of Basil the Great, the basis of all subsequent Latin editions of the Opera omnia (see now Iréna Backus, Lectures humanistes de Basile de Césarée: Traductions latines (1439-1618) [Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1990], 15-27). Maffei's role in the adaptation of humanist ideals to the Roman ecclesiastical and theological milieu has been skilfully documented by the late John F. D'Amico (Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983], Ch. 9). His name does not appear in From Byzantium to Italy. Readers interested in the textual tradition of the Church Fathers will once again be grateful to Nigel Wilson for supplying, conveniently and elegantly, so much of the philological, curricular and bibliographical context of their subject. They should beware...

Rethinking Islam: common questions, uncommon answers

Imagining Islam Islam and Muslims Church and State secularism nationalism revelation the Qu'ran exegesis Muhammed Hadith tradition the ideal community women dogmas sacerdotal power authority Judaism, Christianity and paganism the Greek heritage Islam, science and philosophy Sufism the person human rights ethics and politics Mediterranean culture.

Koraes, Toynbee and the modern Greek heritage

At first sight it is nothing more than an accident of history that brings the names of the Greek philologist and patriot Adamandios Koraes and of the English historian Arnold J. Toynbee together: in 1919, Toynbee was appointed to be the first holder of the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College in the University of London. The third component of my title introduces some rather more substantial common ground. The ‘heritage’ of the Modern Greek people from the ancient past plays a large part in the work of both — explicitly and at length in the writings of Koraes, less conspicuously but scarcely less fundamentally, as this paper will argue, in Toynbee’s mammoth investigation of the forces at work in shaping world history.

Classical antiquities as national and global heritage

The current campaign to return to Athens the Parthenon sculptures that have been in the British Museum since the early 19th century highlights the profoundly dual nature of Greek architectural and sculptural heritage, as emblems of both Greek and global attachment. Classical relics in particular have become symbols of Greek attachment to the homeland; underscoring links between past and present, they confirm and celebrate Greek national identity. Other elements of Greek heritage – language, literature, religion, folklore – likewise lend strength to this identity, but material remnants of past glories, notably temples and sculptures from the times of Phidias and Praxiteles, assume an increasingly important symbolic role (Cook 1984; Hitchens 1987).

Components of Desirable Schools

In this issue of Western European Education some components of what many people regard as a desirable school are presented. Historically, Western education has been shaped by the Greek and Roman heritage; the need of the Church to spread and perpetuate Christianity; the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther's insistence that all people should read the Bible; the medieval guilds that developed the apprenticeship system to train their helpers and successors; and philosophers, political figures, behavioral scientists, and educators themselves. In our time we view these influences against the backdrop of contemporary social, political, and economic problems. How is education to be altered in response to them? What can we ask of our schools as they try to educate children and youth to meet these problems? What should schools be like if they are to aid the young to become knowledgeable, self-confident, socially responsible, ready to prepare for a career and to shape their lives in today's world?

Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States

Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States

Two Types of Universal History: The Cases of E. A. Freeman and Max Weber

By his life work William H. McNeill has demonstrated that universal history remains an essential expression of our twofold Jewish and Greek heritage. It may therefore not be inappropriate to offer him a contribution to the analysis of this intriguing product of the historical imagination. I shall try to examine two related, yet diversifying, trends in the writing of universal history during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to indicate some of their implications. As universal history cannot be total in the sense of including the totality of past events, we may start from the assumption that all it can do is to isolate types of events and to attribute a meaning to the replacement of one type by another type. A golden age may be followed by a silver age: the Assyrian Empire by the Persian Empire. Polytheism may be succeeded by monotheism, slavery by feudalism, sailing ships by steamers. The universal historian isolates and defines types of events and tries to make their appearance or disappearance meaningful. By giving more importance and therefore more attention to certain types of events than to others he will provide his own universal history with a characteristic line of development. So far, I believe, our definition of universal history may apply equally to Hesiod and to Daniel, to Bossuet, Marx, and Toynbee. But in the nineteenth century universal historians began to breach in one respect what had previously been the commonly accepted conventions of their literary genre. Far more than in previous centuries they recognized the possibility that their typology, rather than providing criteria for the description and classification of successive ages of mankind, would lead to the partition of mankind into several coexisting groups or races, each with its own permanent features. Consequently, the problem arose whether the members of one group or race, being conditioned in their mental equipment by the culture to which they belonged, were qualified to pass judgment on the members of another group or on other groups as such. Universal history as a history of coexisting human groups-that is, as a history of concurrent and competing permanent groups, each with its own permanent characteristics-seems to be a new feature of the nineteenth century. It is, therefore, no accident that toward the end of the same century doubts should multiply about the objective validity of judgments passed by members of one group on the ways of life of other groups. The eighteenth-century game of having the Europeans described and judged by imaginary Persians, Scythians, and American Indians was turned into the serious operation of

Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States

Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States