Thursday, October 20, 2011

Ancient Greek Values

Some of the most important values in the Ancient Greek civilizations were ingenuity, hospitality, loyalty, and respect. I believe they're also considered important in our time, because we meet them in our daily life basis (I hope.) Most people would say; "WOW! It's amazing how from around 3000 B.C.E., such qualities evolved among us and still exist today!" Well it's not. These are important values so of course we have them at our time. What is amazing is how they had it in their time, not how it lasted.
Ingenuity means 
skill or cleverness in devising or combining; Inventiveness, this is important because it helps us think of new ideas and make us "genius". In the story of Odysseus, ingenuity is the most common quality found along his journey, and his many adventures. He thinks of all these how to keep himself away from death, and how to help his sailors and crew get home safely. For example, when he met the Cyclops, he called himself 'Nobody' and when the Cyclops screamed "Nobody's escaping!" to his guards after he got stabbed in his eye, the guards didn't know he actually meant someone is escaping. So that part was filled with many exciting and creative ideas and secret plans of escaping, which represent ingenuity.

Another very critical Ancient Greek value shown in the excerpts is hospitality. Hospitality means kindness in welcoming strangers or guests (My definition of the word.) Circe greets them with a very nice manner, but then she changes them into pigs, and erases their memory from home, so that they don't know where their desire is to go, and where exactly their home is (in general, the spell made them forget about everything they were attempting to accomplish.) Although, it is very common in the Ancient Greek times to be very kind/neighborly, even if the people are your enemies, you still had to greet them nicely. All of this represents hospitality.
Loyalty and respect were also extremely important in those times, and the Greeks would always value their family and friends. 

In modern society, one can find ancient Greek values in many places in the world. The positive side of peoples always present the values.  Besides athleticism of course, not everyone is athletic, but the rest all people have. For example, hospitality, it relates much to being caring and friendly these days. You don't have to help every single homeless or poor person that walks by, because back then, there weren't really that many people that actually needed help.
Another Greek value that is very common today, is ingenuity. Many people think of ways to avoid a problem or to solve it, by being 'genius'... basically lies or just helping.

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