Even though it was a political and territorial domination of the Romans over Greeks, it was an intellectual and cultural domination of Greeks over the Romans. They began to seriously encounter the Greeks in Magna Graecia (“Great Greece”, the southern coastal areas of what is now Italy) around 280, give or take. Originally the Romans were not great story makers, but they came to have, probably, the highest appreciation of the Greeks. His sudden death then opened the door for the Romans. The Greeks, I think, did that really well, and so did Alexander the Great, whose favorite work was Homer’s Iliad and who is responsible for Hellenizing (or Greek-izing) most of the known world east of Greece and Macedonia. I could simply or merely impart knowledge, let’s call it dry knowledge, and you may learn something, but if or when I could wrap it in story - even better, a beautiful story - then and there we find abiding knowledge, or transformative knowledge.
So, I think, looking back - we would point to the power and vehicle of the story, because it’s within stories that we find this rich context of characters, settings and plot that allow for both the profundity of thought but also beauty. Beauty, and its link to the emotive, in my opinion, is what transforms human beings. The stories, then, in their various modes and genres became the vehicle that catalyzed profound individual, cultural and political change. Or more specifically, the stories and their profound beauty instilled some Greeks with a strong, intrinsic belief in the self, which ultimately led to their transition from monarchical to democratic rule, not to mention a flourishing society that continued to foster humanistic arts and refinement.
Later, Greek storytellers began to engage with, adapt and riff off of these early epic stories to create new meters with some adapted content. Some of these new poems we can call lyric poetry, and it is in this poetry that we first find subjects of the first person. These lyrical poems were often sung by choruses, and eventually help form the genre of drama, and there for the first time, it’s in one of these choral songs within one of Aeschylus’ dramas that we hear the chant Demos-Kratia, which means “people power.” His short answer was “storytelling”:Įarly, in various Greek city-states, great storytellers and singers birthed what we call myths. These myths, or stories, represent how they and their ancestors both perceived and related to the world. Sloan, associate professor in the Wake Forest Department of Classical Languages, was asked what made the Greeks special.
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