February 29, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 15 of secular literature that resembles Homer. “The Iliad” is remarkable because it describes brutal and savage events from a civilized and humane perspective. Achilles, having lost his own best friend, drags the corpse of Hector behind his chariot in revenge, but when Hector’s aged father shows up to ask for the body, Achilles is deeply moved and returns to decency. Both sides are recognizably human and both sides number both heroes and cowards in their ranks. The monsters in “The Odyssey” were fictional, but the emotional responses of the people in the stories were intensely human. These are major works for all humanity. They are truly international. I recently noticed a license plate that read 480 HET. Having just come off the computer for some clarifications of my next book, I realized just for a moment that what I was looking at could allude to the downfall of Western civilization. HET is “nyet” in Russian Cyrillic and 480 B.C. was the date of the Greeks’ defeat of the Persians, which, we were all told, saved Western democracy from Asian despotism. That could be a little simplistic: The Persians were ruled by an arbitrary monarch, but they practiced a monotheistic religion, Zoroastrianism, which offered a clear distinction between good and evil and the prospect of personal immortality. The Persians also sheltered the ultimate monotheistic religion, Judaism, which formed the matrix for Christianity and Islam. These three beliefs, separately or together, contributed far more to the development of civilization and human rights than Athenian-style democracy, which was based on outright slavery of foreigners rather than Persian-style serfdom. Greek democracy was about personal popularity rather than universal human rights. Athens functioned on a level like that of the barbarian Germanic tribes or the heathen Vikings, not George Washington and James Madison. The degree of human rights in ancient Greece was questionable. People who were unpopular in Athens could be exiled simply for their opinions, like Plato, and in extreme cases, like that of Socrates, they could be executed. In Sparta, lower-class helots who showed too much fight while serving side by side with their free-born owners were routinely executed to deprive revolutionaries of their possible leadership. The Spartans never had a democracy, and Athenian democracy only lasted about two centuries, while the Roman Republic lasted three times as long before it imploded into an empire. Conversely, the Carthaginians, who practiced an ugly religion that included infant sacrifice, were far better sailors than the Greeks, far better farmers, and far better at running an economy. Carthage never collapsed as Greece and Rome did. Carthage was eradicated. We don’t know what kind of literature the Carthaginians produced, since the Romans burned it, but we do know that the literature of the Greeks in the era just after the defeat of the Persians, and their art and architecture, led to a Golden Age that was far more important to the world than their politics. One would have to be incredibly imaginative or incredibly dense to imagine a world without Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides, and without the Parthenon. Their political contribution may be overrated, and their allergy to “Asia” could be the bane of 21st century foreign policy, but their literature and art earned the Greeks a pinnacle in the development not just of Western culture, but of world culture. Athenian economics is another story. Unlike the Romans, the Greeks looked down on agriculture and cultivated trade. Slaves did the hard work. Foreign craftsmen, or metics, whence the word meticulous, produced the trade goods, and the Greeks sold those products. This produced a boom economy that paid for the Parthenon. However, it also produced economic predation that turned the Delian League – the Athenian dominance over the loosely confederated Greek city-states – into a hostile debating society and a matrix for civil war. Greek culture was shattered by the protracted war between Athens and Sparta. When the Spartans won, they spared Athens and its citizens for their superb artistic contributions, but continued and exacerbated the Athenian tendency toward mismanagement. The Macedonians and the Romans mopped up and the Greeks became scholars of no political importance. Yet their language, in the form of the New Testament, led to another and more permanent civilization that still exists, and hopefully will continue to exist. We should honor and revere the art and architecture and literature of the Greeks, but we should avoid their economics as practiced then and now. What the modern Greeks have done was to conceive of a lifestyle that would make the average citizen happy, without realizing that their economy couldn’t pay for it. Greece went potentially broke by paying for services the economy could not afford, and had to borrow money, mostly from Germany. The United States has gone deep into debt by paying for social services the economy could not afford, and had to borrow money, mostly from China, but also from Japan. The Germans are getting tired of bailing out Greece. While I am not privy to the inside story of what the Chinese think, the Japanese are extremely concerned that the United States stay afloat, and hope we will get a grip on our domestic spending. Since the standards of living and the social programs in both the creditor nations are nowhere near ours they, too, may get tired of bailing out a nation with a magnificent past, and a very questionable future. The European Union just appropriated a last-ditch $172 billion to bail out the Greek economy, partly, I suspect, in gratitude for the immense contributions ancient Greece made to the world during the glory days of Athens, and partly in a pragmatic attempt to keep Greece from going bankrupt and taking the rest of Europe down into the sinkhole after the birthplace of Western European democracy. This could happen. A week before I started to write this column, the bailout was considered iffy and controversial. An analyst for a major newspaper pointed out that those European countries that know how to run an economy are getting tired of bailing out those European nations that do not know how to run an economy. He said the modern Greeks got into trouble by paying more for social programs than they were earning through manufacturing, agriculture, and tourism, and that constant borrowing from foreign sources to cover domestic expenses was running their economy into the ground. Greece is not the only country in Europe to have these problems. Spies tell me that the Germans are now quietly urging customers to pay for purchases only in Euros that were printed in Germany. The tacit argument is that the German government may actually back its own Euros, but may not be able to cover anybody else’s Euros – or simply may not feel like it. I hope they are just being provincial and paranoid, but there aren’t many other countries in Europe that are fiscally solid, and the patience of the solid countries for endless bailouts may be getting a little thin. As Aristotle – actually a Macedonian, but a functional Greek – wrote some years ago, true friendship demands equality, because people need to function on the same level. Aristotle also said good people always get along, but bad people never do, because every good person is satisfied with having as much as his or her neighbor, while every bad person wants to have more than his or her neighbor. Economics today is a lot more complicated than in Aristotle’s day, but the principle appears to be unchanged: Americans have long been tired of sending money overseas, and have said so, but the government just keeps on sending it. Our humanitarian aid programs cost about one percent of the economy. We all know, or think we know, about the glory that was Greece. Nobody who went through any serious college was allowed to escape the astounding list of books produced in classical Greece, and with good reason. Even the minor Greek writers were so much better than anybody else outside of the Bible that their writings were as inevitable as they were enjoyable. Homer, whose identity is the subject of endless scholarship and debate, gave the world its first extended war story, “The Iliad,” and its first science fiction story, “The Odyssey.” These were redoubtable works. The earlier war stories of Pharaoh So-and-So bragging about how many people he had hit over the head was a lapse into self-serving savagery from an otherwise benign civilization that produced beautiful hymns and superb art and architecture – but nothing The glory that was Greece and the lesson for America Ridgewood Creative outreach Representatives from Christ Episcopal Church in Ridgewood stood out at the Ridgewood Train Station on Ash Wednesday (Feb. 22) to accommodate those seeking imposition of ashes before beginning their work day. The mark of ashes is a reminder for Christians of the reflective season of Lent, the 40-day period leading up to Easter.