GREEKS and THEIR NEIGHBOURS

Greek civilization differed in nearly every respect from the civilizations of Egypt and the ancient Near East, however much it may have owed to them. It occupied no clearly defined geographical area but spread across the Greek peninsula, over the Aegean islands and along the coast of Anatolia, with important outposts on the shores of the Black Sea, in Sicily and southern Italy, on the south coast of France and as far west as Spain. Dispersed, not centralized, maritime and linked only by the sea, not territorial and closely integrated, it lacked any political unity and even a common system of government. The Hellenic world was composed of numerous, small autonomous states often at temples, statues, paintings, pottery vessels, jewelry, arms and armour, all in much the same style in every Greek city.

Hellenes called those who did not speak Greek as their native language barbarians - because their speech was unintelligible and seemed to them to be little more than a succession of grunts,'bar-bar-bar'. Many Greeks thought themselves to be not only different from, but superior to, the rest of mankind - including the highly civilized Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Persians as well as the less sophisticated, but by no means uncouth, nomadic tribes of Thracians and Scythians, whom they encountered onthe borders of their states. Such was the thrust of their self-confidence that they even managed to impose this view on others. Romans and later inheritors of the Greek tradition came to believe that a standard of excellence, to which all art should aspire, had been set by Greek 'canonical' works. But with their emphasis on simplicity and structural clarity in architecture, their preoccupation with visual appearances in painting and with the convincing rendering of an idealized male nude in sculpture, the canon of beauty the Greeks created was very peculiar, much more peculiar than Europeans were subsequently able to realize.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 797