- Science, research, and the acquisition of knowledge itself are to remain apart from both political and religious authority.
- Military power operates under and is checked by civilian control.
- Constitutional and consensual government is a Western idea.
- Religion is separate from and subordinate to political authority.
- Trusting neither the rich nor the poor, the Greeks of the polis have faith in the average citizen (the spiritual forerunner of our faith in the middle class).
- Private property and free economic activity are immune from government coercion and interference.
- The notion of dissent and open criticism of government, religion, and the military is inherent among the polis Greeks.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Thursday, September 02, 2004
Core Values
In the second chapter of Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (1998; rpt. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath list the following core values of the ancient Greeks: