“… For thousands of years civilizations, as the Persians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, saw man as a hateful being who dragged in front of deities and rulers.
The Greeks, however, they took the man and put up his feet. They taught him to be proud of …
The world is full of wonders, said Sophocles, but nothing is more wonderful than man.
The Greeks persuaded man like Pericles placed it, it was the rightful owner and the master of himself and created laws to safeguard their personal freedoms.
The ancient Greeks encouraged the curiosity that had the man himself and the world around him, proclaiming with Socrates that a life without research is not worth it to live.
The Greeks believed in perfection in all things, gi’ what we inherited beauty, which reaches from the Parthenon and Greek statues, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, the poetry of Hesiod and Homer, by the painted vessels of a single household.
Without the Greeks we might never have realized what is government.
But, much more than even our language, our laws, our logic, our standards of truth and beauty, we owe them a deep sense of the dignity of man.
Of the Greeks learned to aspire without restrictions, to be, as Aristotle said, immortals up there we can … “.
(The New York Times, March 1975)
