The Underbelly of the Beast #330 (P)

The darker side of ancient Greece

Dear friends and supporters of Daily Philosophy,

I’m happy to be back with another post in our premium series on Ancient Greek Thought. Again this comes a little later than it should (I am aware that you wished to receive these on Wednesdays), but life has a way of derailing schedules. Last week, I spent one night in a Greek countryside hospital emergency room (nothing as serious as it sounds) and the two places we had stayed the past week at burned down to ashes due to hillfires. The one behind our holiday home was just extinguished today, and I spent last night getting up every two hours to see if the flames are coming closer and whether we’d need to pack our stuff and flee. It’s certainly an interesting holiday in the sense of the ancient Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times.” In the end, though, we were lucky on all fronts and nothing really happened to us. It was a week of near misses.

Anyway, here we are, late but ready to jump into ancient Greek culture and lore.

Last week, I felt that I might have given you the impression that the Greek world was that famed place of light, of harmony and balance, of serene temples and smiling statues. One reader commented:

The way you contrasted that world with the ominous Christian aesthetic and mindset that followed (and into which I was born), allowed me to more clearly see that light and airy Greek world.

Although, yes, in a sense, some places in ancient Greece do sometimes come across as light and airy, it would be misleading to assume that the whole of the Greek world was that happy place of democracy, equality and wisdom. And so today, let’s risk a look at the underbelly of the beast — the darker side of ancient Greece. What we today know and value as the best philosophy that the ancient world had to give us is still rooted in the murkier undercurrents of an ancient society: slavery, inequality, dark religious rituals, and a misuse of power of epic proportions.

Democracy and equality for all

One of the funnier misconceptions about ancient Greece is that their temples were this airy, bright, but tasteful cream-white colour — a colour that highlights both an almost modern minimalist aesthetic and points towards a world of perfection, visualised in the simple but powerful interplay of the white marble and the azure Attic sky.

Photo by Arno Senoner on Unsplash

In reality, Greek temples looked nothing like that. Imagine a Greek temple built by children with colourful Lego stones: that’s closer to what the Greeks aimed for:

Source: https://www.mayaincaaztec.com/ancient-greece/greek-art-and-architecture

And here’s a particularly horrible colour scheme:

Source: Oxford Classical Dictionary, entry: “Polychromy, architectural, Greek and Roman”

As amusing as it is to see what the serene, tasteful Greeks saw as a pretty temple paint job, other misconceptions about the ancient world can be much more important. For example, the idea that the Greeks invented democracy and equality for all.