Searching for Ancient Greece - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 178

foundations of modern science (as Einstein said, God does not play dice with the universe).
Science rests on the logic of evidence, inference, and conclusion. The Greeks laid out lo-
gic's two basic forms, inductive and deductive reasoning.
The Greeks continue to disturb us with their questions, even as they force us to con-
front the great and small issues of our lives: What is justice? What is honor? What is free-
dom? What do the rich owe the poor? What does the citizen owe the state, and what does
the state owe the citizen? Is it permissible for our leaders to lie? Do women want different
things from life than men do? And what do each of us owe to ourselves? Is it true, as Plato
said, that it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied?
Through their statuary, the Greeks helped to define our sense of human beauty. Sculp-
ture is an Athenian glory, a one-hundred-year struggle to capture in stone the subtleties of
face, figure, and clothing. In the 600s BCE, sculpture merely suggested its human subject.
Faces were frozen in enigmatic smiles; clothes concealed the form beneath. By 500 BCE,
faces were individual and animated by expression; clothing was draped to reveal muscles
and movement, and humans and gods were joined in an opalescent beauty.
The symmetry of Greek architecture continues to be a model for public architecture
(The U.S. Supreme Court; The Madeline in Paris). Greeks invented the style of classical
columns: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. And by swelling each column near its center, Greek
architects created an illusion of symmetry when columns stand in a row.
WHO WAS HOMER?
The roster of Greek gifts goes on, but of this long list one more will have to suffice. So-
metime around 800 BCE, the poet Homer (said to be blind, said to come from the island of
Kos) recited gripping tales of war and adventure; his two most famous are now known as
the Illiad and the Odyssey . These two great epics speak of men and events of 1200 BCE,
the war between Greeks and their Trojan enemies. The Illiad sings of the war's last year,
the death of the mighty Achilles, the Greek ruse to capture the city with a “Trojan Horse,”
and the final destruction of Troy. The English writer George Steiner says that he can never
look at a photograph of a burning city, its inhabitants fleeing the horrors of war, without
thinking back to burning Troy. [153]
The Odyssey recites the adventures of Odysseus during his twenty-year journey to
reach his home and faithful wife, Penelope. As modern writers such as Ian Flemming love
to confess, the Odyssey is the model for every tale of adventure ever written since Homer
first spellbound his audience with tales of heroes and their seduction by women with ma-
gical powers, larger-than-life villains, and meddling gods, even as he offers penetrating dis-
course on his heroes' motives and values. Honor and excellence ( arete ) are the codes by
which they live. And many of us today, Americans especially, are fascinated by Odysseus's
qualities of mind. Metis is the word that captures his way of dealing with challenges: im-