The Greeks were humanity’s most creative civilization. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are timeless classics, Plato’s The Republic continues to inspire, and Thucydides are still read by military officers in search of strategic insights.
Why were the Greeks so creative?
Jiang Xueqin explains to his Chinese high school students there are three main factors:
1.) the polis
2.) the alphabet
3.) Homer
After the destruction of Mycenaean Greece at the end of the Bronze Age, Greece became divided into thousands of diverse city-states that competed against each other. The alphabet marked a revolution in human cognitive abilities, combining the advantages of an oral culture (imagination, memory, and emotions) with that of a literary culture (logic, discipline, and reflection).
Finally, Homer’s Iliad marked an intellectual revolution. Homer taught the Greeks empathy and imagination, and thus a new way of being human.
