■ Starry Eye Reading / Wen Xing, Reading Promoter
Goddess Athena
Ancient Greek civilization, without a doubt, is the most important source of modern Western civilization. Many Chinese read ancient Greek mythology as children, Zeus, Apollo, Venus, Athena... These names are probably one of the most mysterious and foreign memories of our childhood.
Mythology is a kind of culture and an important part of the civilization system.
So, what kind of origins did Greek culture and civilization have? What kind of transmutation has it been? What kind of influence did it have on the later West and the world?
The three-volume "Enlightenment: The Ideals of Ancient Greek Culture", recommended by this issue of Star Eye Reading, systematically sorts out and clarifies this huge and complex problem.
The author, Professor Werner Jaeger, is a world-renowned classical scholar in Germany. The famous New York Times published a book review praising it as the "most illuminating work" about Greece.
Although I support this set of works, in fact, I am still a little hesitant when writing this issue of the book list review.
Because, since last year, I have noticed a particularly frightening historical view - the ancient Greek civilization is fictional, it is fabricated, it is a pseudo-history of deception!
I have friends around who believe in this argument, and often recommend relevant articles, thanking him for helping me open a strange skylight.
The representative of this view of history in China is Mr. He Xin, a well-known scholar who has been a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference for many years. His book "Greek Pseudoscience", just looking at the table of contents, is enough to subvert the common sense and three views of too many people. I haven't read the book directly yet, I just searched for multiple of his articles, I can't believe it.
Here, I don't want to try to make a difference, and I don't want to get caught up in unnecessary debates and disputes that are doomed to be difficult for any faction to convince the other side. I only introduce this topic, interested friends, you can go and retrieve it yourself.
At the same time, I would like to firmly recommend this set of "Indoctrination: The Ideals of Ancient Greek Culture." Perhaps, it can also provide a reference for friends to judge the authenticity of ancient Greek civilization.
Indoctrination: The Ideals of Ancient Greek Culture
Author: [de] Werner Jaeger
Translator: Chen Wenqing
Publisher: East China Normal University Press, Six Points Branch
Werner Jaeger (1888–1961), German classical scholar. In 1914, he became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel. In 1921, he succeeded his teacher Wilmowitz as a chair. In 1936, he was forced to immigrate to the United States, taught at Harvard University, and devoted his life to the annotation of classical works and classical studies, and "Indoctrination: The Ideal of Ancient Greek Culture" is one of his masterpieces.
Chen Wenqing, born in 1968, is a native of Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Doctor of Philosophy of Peking University, Associate Professor of School of Marxism, Lingnan Normal University, mainly research directions for ancient Greek philosophy.
The word "paideia" comes from the Greek word for "the upbringing of young children", but in fact it also has the meaning of civilization, culture, tradition, literature or education in modern terms. Judging from the whole book of Indoctrination (three volumes), the main meaning of the word "paideia" is to shape or cultivate the character of the Greeks according to a certain ideal paradigm, and paideia shows the true spirit of ancient Greek culture.
The Three-Volume Indoctrination established a new approach to understanding the Classical Tradition of the West, making a particularly prominent contribution to the rethinking of the Classical Tradition, to a large extent forming the Greek concept understood by later generations, the core of which was "paideia" (enlightenment).
The first volume of "Indoctrination", divided into two parts: "Greece in the Age of Ancient Winds" and "Spirit of Athens", takes Homer's epic poem, the works of Hesiod, the Greek drama and harmonics, the treatises of the sorcerer, the history of Thucydides, etc. as the documentary basis, and takes the life of the city-states of Sparta and Athens as the social background, explores the formation, development and crisis of ancient Greek civilization and the political form of the city-state, and describes the historical, social and cultural basis for the formation of paideia and its practice in Greek culture and society. It attempts to elucidate the entire process of the ideals of ancient Greek culture, from the gradual perfection of the spiritual and spiritual level, to the political ideals of the city-state, and finally to the end of the defeat and demise of the Athenian Empire and its alliances.
The second volume, starting from the historical, cultural, and social background of ancient Greece, analyzes Plato's dialogues in detail, especially in nearly half of the pages of which gives an in-depth interpretation of Plato's "Kingdom" (also translated as "The Republic"). Taking philosophy, the ripe fruit of Greek intellectual culture as the core, starting from the ideas of Socrates and Plato, the author deeply explores the basic aspects of the Greek spirit such as education, virtue, intellect, and the cultivation of citizens, focusing on revealing how the paideia conceived from the ancient wind era was transformed and matured, how it was embodied in the all-round shaping of Greek morality, intellect, body and beauty, and realized into the norms and ideal forms of life and social interaction in the Greek city-states, making paideia the basic source of shaping the Greek spiritual form.
The third volume, in the broader context of Greek culture, uses the political indoctrination and sacred concepts embodied in Plato's "Doctrine" as a reference, conducts an in-depth comparative analysis of ancient Greek medicine, rhetoric, the political culture of the panhelian city-states, and radical democratic politics, and focuses on Isocrates' rhetorical education and demosthenes' political practices, thus revealing the complex social reality and multicultural ideals of the late Greek classical era, and its contribution to the Greek spirit, Pluralistic conflicts caused by culture and even the ideals of paideia.
【Recommended by all walks of life】
Jaeger's profound and profound learning is fully demonstrated in the "Indoctrination", and the overall picture and grandeur of the Greek spiritual world jump on the paper, and the book becomes the crowning work of reinhardt's "third humanism", and thus the epitome of the fate of this humanistic movement.
——Bai Gang (Secretary-General of the Research Center for Intellectual History, Fudan University)
Indoctrination is written for the masses, and perhaps as a gift to educators, because it conveys to the reader in a clear and engaging form the author's understanding of the main ideas of ancient Greek society and culture.
—Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker
This is the most enlightening book I have ever read about Greece!
—Edith Hamilton, New York Times Book Review