We Are Not the Greeks :: Argumentative Persuasive Argument Essays

Shelley once said, We are all Greeks, a sentiment which was echoed by many of his contemporaries who shared his belief that theirs was an age of achievement similar to the Greeks.1 Even beyond that era, people today hold a widespread belief that, although we arent quite Greek ourselves, we are quite assailable of judgment them, and that we have an innate familiarity with the Greek tradition. Our claim of an affinity to Greek books can be found almost anywhere in late society the intelligentsia sprinkle allusions to all things Greek in books and films the adduce to Homer is considered the calling card of academic legitimacy. We are the consumers of a dominant culture that is rife with references to Greek literature. Consumerism does not lead to understanding, however. Anyone could justifiably discharge the argument that people experience the same contests and emotions no matter what years bookend their lives and regardless of what gadgets or people fill up the space between them. However, to say that an emotion finds expression equally well on a Greek face or an American face leads to a foolish sense of our affinity to the Greeks. The point is not whether we share the same execute of human experience, but whether we are capable of understanding the same doer of expression. Just as much as we accept that Greek is a language foreign to us, we must accept that cultural differences exist that rent most of those familiar names and quotes merely accessible parts of a culture that is largely inaccessible to the masses today. The average American is isolated from the Greek epic. Although the lowest man is as capable of tragic struggle and feeling as any Greek hero, he is not capable of comprehending the scale and scope of the epic in his own life. We have no way of grasping the gargantuan undertaking of an epic. The epic poem is innocent in modern literature, and the number who read epic poems is decreasing apace as well. We may read excerpts or quotes about famous works, and from those remarks be able to afford remarks of our own, but this is a form of Cliffs Notes to cultural fluency. The detail that these facile and passing acquaintances serve as the bulk of our cultures understanding reveals the imperfectible nature of what we assume we know. We feel qualified to claim a community with the Greeks, through with(predicate) no proper understanding of our own, but rather through an opinion about an interpretation of a translation.