Male, Greek and naked
The Greeks on PBS. The age of the city-states went from the 800s to the 400s. The Golden Age of Athens and democracy was less than a hundred years in the 400s. The Mycenaean era that the Golden Age Greeks recalled in myths and stories had lasted much longer.
Other interesting things. Delphi was considered the center of the world and the most sacred of all Greek sanctuaries: so the holiest place was one that celebrated Apollo, god of the sun, not Zeus, king of the gods. And that thing the documentary said, that the Greeks, who celebrated all the beauty around them, created their gods in their own human image. Was the ancient world ready for Jesus and God as man because of the Greeks? That the Greeks contributed Platonic and neo-Platonic ideas (about “the ideals” and about eros as love and desire for the ideal) to Christianity I knew. But God as man and God in man: perhaps, ironically, that came from them with their pantheistic religion. Actually, the word I was looking for was polytheistic, but pantheistic works well too.
The other big element was sport, competition, and the Olympic and other games.
“You needed three things to compete,” the narrator says. “You had to be male. You had to be Greek. And you had to be naked.”
The various experts, in particular that lovely English woman with the long dark hair and an incredibly ample bust, the cleavage of which she is baring fully (and yet it’s motherly sexy, not sexy sexy, because she’s got something warm and teacherly about her), say that the Greeks worshiped the beauty all around them, and the male form as much as the female. (I would say the male form more!) Hence the games in which men competed naked—and oiled themselves with olive oil, although the reason given by the ample English woman in that case is “not just beauty and getting a tan, but also because they did sports like grappling, and it would make it hard for your competitor to get a hold of you.”
The documentary series makes much of how Greek culture and values arose from the harshness of their territory and from the strife they endured, and that the Greeks invented themselves in a way. Is this not our chance to do the same now in New York?