Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 42

Classical is another historical label that can have different meanings in different contexts. The classical period in European music, for example, was about 1750 to 1820, but people who study the Maya civilization of the Yucatan Peninsula refer to a classical historical period of about 250–900 AD.

One of the best-known uses of the term classical applies to the years 479–323 BC in the southern Balkan Peninsula of Eastern Europe. That period was a particularly influential era of Greek culture: Classical Greece (with a capital C).

Traditionally, many historians have hailed the Classical Greeks as being the founders of Western civilization’s core values: rationality, freedom of debate, individuality, and democracy. These concepts did arise and gain acceptance during that time, yet the Greece of the time was hardly an ideal society. Greek cities often fought wars against one another, and in addition to creating enduring ideas, they hatched some notions that sound quite peculiar today. In Aristotle’s time (the fourth century BC), for example, one could argue that women were “failed men,” a lesser rendering of the same biological pattern as males. Yikes!

The Greek city–state Athens is often cited as a model for modern democracies, but there are huge differences between the Greeks’ notion of democracy and today’s. In Athens, maybe 30 percent of the population at most were citizens, and all citizens were men.

Historians constantly reevaluate the past. As scholars reinterpret the period, the term Classical may no longer be helpful for understanding the years 479–323 BC in Greece. And you know what? That’s okay. You can look at the Greeks from any number of angles, and they don’t get any less fascinating.

As H.G. Wells said of history, “The subject is so splendid a one that no possible treatment … can rob it altogether of its sweeping greatness and dignity.”