In his Instructions, Lavisse [Ernest Lavisse 1842-1922] declared that what secondary-school pupils need to be taught, without their realising it, is that ‘our history begins with the Greeks’. Our [French] history begins with the Greeks, who invented liberty and democracy and who introduced us to ‘the beautiful’ and a taste for ‘the universal’. We are heirs to the only civilisation that has offered the world ‘a perfect and as it were ideal expression of justice and liberty’. That is why our history begins – has to begin – with the Greeks. This belief was then compounded by another every bit as powerful: ‘The Greeks are not like others’. After all, how could they be, given that they were right at the beginning of our history? Those were two propositions that were essential for the creation of a national mythology that was the sole concern of traditional humanists and historians, all obsessed with nationhood.
It is commonly believed not only that both the abstract notion of politics and concrete politics one fine day fell from the heavens, landing on ‘classical’ Athens in the miraculous and authenticated form of Democracy (with a capital D), but also that a divinely linear history has led us by the hand from the American Revolution, passing by way of the ‘French Revolution’, all the way to our own western societies that are so blithely convinced that their mission is to convert all peoples to the true religion of democracy.
Marcel Detienne of John Hopkins University in Baltimore
—Marcel Detienne, The Greeks and Us: A Comparative Anthropology of Ancient Greece, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2007
Comments