Again: Real life seems likesciencefiction?Re:1834!

~
Countries
which are great plains
or which have as a chief means of transport some great river
like the Euphrates or Nile
tend to become united under some
common
rule ...
~
The cities of Egypt
and the cities of Sumeria,
for example,
ran together under one system
of government?
~
But
the Greek cities
were cut up among islands
and mountain valleys;
both Greece and Magna Graecia
are very mountainous;
and the tendency was all
the other
way!
~
When the Greeks
come into history they are divided up
into a number of little states
which showed no signs of
coalescence.
~
THEY
are different
even in 'race'.
SOME consist chiefly of citizens
of this or that tribe,
Ionic, Aeolian, or Doric;
some have a mingled population
of Greeks and descendants of the pre-Greek "Mediterranean" folk;
some have an unmixed free citizenship of Greeks
lording it over an enslaved conquered population like the "Helots"
in Sparta .............
~
IN SOME the old leaderly Aryan families
have become a close aristocracy;
in some there is a democracy of all the Aryan citizens;
in others there are elected or even hereditary kings,
or usurpers and tyrants ........
~
AND the geographycal conditions
that kept the Greek states divided and various,
also kept them small!
The largest states were smaller than many Dutch provinces,
and it is doubtful if the population of any of their cities
ever extended a third of a million?
Few came up even to 50,000 ...
SO instead there were temporary unions of interest and sympathy
but no coalescences .............
Cities made leagues and alliances as trade increased,
and small cities put themselves under
the protection of
great ones?!
~




YET all Greece
was held together
in a certain community of feeling by two things:
by the EPICS and by the custom of taking part every fourth year
in the athletic contests at
OLYMPIA!
~
This did not
prevent wars and feuds
but it mitigated something of the savagery of war between them,
and a truce protected all travellers to and from
the Games ..........
~
AS TIME WENT ON
the sentiment of a common heritage grew
and the number of states participating in the Olympic Games increased
until at last not only Greeks
but competitors from the closely kindred countries of Epirus and Macedonia
to the north were admitted ..........
~
The Greek cities grew in trade and importance,
and the quality of their civilisation rose steadily in the seventh and sixth
centuries B.C.
THEIR SOCIAL LIFE
differed in many interesting points
from the social life of the Aegean and river-valley
civilisations ........
~
THEY had splendid temples
but the priesthood was not the great traditional body it was in the cities
of the older world, the repository of all knowledge,
the storehouse of ideas?
~
THEY HAD LEADERS and noble families,
but no quasi-divine monarch surrounded by an elaborately organised court.
RATHER their organisation was aristocratic with leading families
which kept each other in order ........
EVEN their so-called 'democracies' were aristocratic;
every citizen had a share in public affairs
and came to the assempbly in a democracy,
but everybody was not a citizen!
THE GREEK DEMOCRACIES
were not like our modern myDi-democracies
in which everyone has a vote!
Many of the Greek democracies
had a few hundred or a few thousand citizens and then
many thousands of slaves, freedmen, and so forth,
with no share in public
affairs ...
~
GENERALLY in Greece
affairs were in the hands of a community of substantial men {BUSHmen?}!THEIR KINGS AND THEIR TYRANTS alike were just men set in front of
other men or usurping a leadership {SADdamn?}; anyway,
they were NOT quasi-divine overmen and overlords
like Pharaoh or MINOS or the monarchs of
Mesopotamia .............
~
BOTH THOUGHT and government therefore
had a freedom under Greek conditions such as they had known until then
in none of the older civilisations?!
~
The Greeks had brought down into cities
the INDIVIDUALISM, the personal INITIATIVE of the wandering life
of the 'northern parklands' ..............
THEY were the first republicans of importance
in our myDi-history?
~
AND we find that as they emerge
from a condition of barbaric warfare a new thing becomes apparent
in their intellectual life?
We find men
who are not priests
seeking and recording knowledge
and inquiring into the mysteries of life and being,
in a way that has hitherto been the sublime privilege of priesthood
or the presumptuous amusemnet
of kings ........
~
WE FIND already in the sixth century B.C. -
perhaps while Isaiah was still prophesying in Babylon -
such men as Thales and Anaximander of miletus and Heraclitus of Ephesus, who were what we would now call independent gentlemen,
giving their minds to shrewd questionings of the world in which we live,
asking what its REAL NATURE was,
WHENCE it came and
WHAT its destiny might be,
and refusing all ready-made or
EVASIVE answers!
~
Of
THESE QUESTIONINGS
of the universe by the Greek mind,
we shall maybe have to say more a little later
in our myDi-stories?
THESE Greek inquirers
who begin to be remarkable in the sixth century B.C.
are the first real philosophers, the first 'wisdom-lovers,' in
'our' virtual AND realistic
myDi-world!?!
~
AND it may be noted here
how important a century this sixth century B.C. was in
our myDi-history of humanity!
FOR not only
were these Greek philosophers
beginning the research for CLEAR ideas about 'our' universe and man's place in it and Isaiah carrying Jewish prophecy to its sublimest levels,
but as we have seen before and shall repeatedly tell later
Gautama Buddha was then teaching in India and
Confucius and Lao Tse in China ...
~

FROM ATHENS
TO THE PACIFIC THE HUMAN MYDI-MIND
WAS ASTIR!
{Are we?}
vrolijkknipoogverliefderg vrolijkcool!
liefdesverdrietverdrietignahnahbah!gaap!verwardgemeenliefdesverdriet
engel
03 jul 2004 - bewerkt op 09 jan 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 81 jaar
   
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