/lit/ - Literature

>>19030931
noice2

needs more burckhardt desu

nothing new under the sun

>The Stoics taught the doctrine that Hellenes and barbarians were equal in that they were the children of the same gods. A hundred years after Alexander, Eratosthenes could say:
>"They are wrong who say that mankind is divided into Hellenes and barbarians; one had better distinguish men according to excellence or depravity, for many Hellenes are morally corrupt and many barbarians morally noble like the Indians and Aryans, and also Romans and Carthaginians with their remarkable political organization."

>From here it was but a short step to the glorification of the barbarians. This was in part motivated by a longing for inchoate conditions of life, a longing found at times in the late and highly refined periods of every culture, and it is significant that one expects to find such conditions in lands far away. At that time it was fashionable to single out the primitive people in Homer and Aeschylus, like the glorious Hippemolgoi, the law-abiding Scythians, or the Abioi, a fabulous tribe of the north and the most just of all peoples, for even in early antiquity men knew the central portions of the world so well that they sought goodness and happiness on its margins. Such notions gradually turned into rationalizations. The barbarians were supposed to have profound religious insight; in the temple of Asclepius in Aegium a Sidonian contended in the presence of Pausanius that the Phoenicians understood divine matters better than the Greeks did. Whereas formerly the fabulous Hyperboreans had been credited with a prodigious piety, now barbarians in general were praised for their piety, in contrast to the growing godlessness of the Greeks. Finally, the barbarians were considered to be morally superior; the late Greek thought of his own nation much as Machiavelli did of the Italians. And the inevitable conclusion was that if the barbarians were depraved, the Greeks had corrupted them.