Who doesn’t love Greece? Incredible beaches, delicious food and fine wine, friendly people, and hot sun. But we have begun to forget that Greece is also the cradle of culture, the source of innovation and technology.
It’s hard to imagine what would happen to modern society, or rather to its culture if there were no Greece. It was the birthplace of almost everything we love and care about: mathematics, literature, the Greek alphabet, comedy, drama, painting, democracy, theater, and the Olympics. And even prostitution.
It was Greece that gave the world beliefs and ideas that have vividly influenced the development not only of its people but of all societies, in every corner of the world.
Even modern computer technology must pay tribute to Ancient Greece because it is difficult to imagine what would have happened to science without Pythagoras and his Pythagorean school, modern theaters and movie theaters, actors and actresses, must be grateful to the first actors who went to the first arenas and acted out comedy and drama in homage to the god Dionysus.
It was here that those materialistic, spiritual, and aesthetic values were laid down, which in one way or another have found their development in almost all medieval European peoples, hence in the whole modern world.
Since the Renaissance, artists, and sculptors have drawn extensively from the stories of the ancient Greeks.
In the first half of the twentieth century, borrowed ancient themes reinterpret, fill them with new content, and reflects in the works of different types of art. The second half, especially the last decades of the twentieth century, finds a reflection of these phenomena especially clearly and fully expressed in the art of postmodernism. Modern foreign cinematography still uses plots and characters from ancient Greek myths.
In modern astronomy the names of many planets of the solar system, fixed stars, and entire constellations are taken from ancient mythology: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Pluto, stars Castor and Pollux, the constellations Perseus, Pegasus, Orion, Andromeda, Cassiopeia. Since the beginning of the 17th century, many military ships of various European countries were named after deities and heroes of ancient mythology.
The letters of the Greek alphabet are widely used in geometry and physics, and some of them are familiar to American college students through the names of fraternities and sororities.
Friedrich Engels once remarked that without the cultural foundation laid by ancient Greece and Rome, there would be no Europe as we all know it. Ancient Greece had a tremendous influence on political and religious thinking, literature and the arts, and on the philosophical and legal views of all the peoples of Europe and the world at large.
So the next time you sprinkle your Greek salad with Greek olive oil, think also about the influence this beautiful country has had on modern culture. And everything will taste even better.
