POWER vs. HONOR, FORCE vs. LAW, SIZE vs. BEAUTY

An enjoyable aspect of blogging is when readers respond not only to a post of mine but also to comments of others on the blog. In this case, one of our readers, Robert Porter Lynch, a prominent author and consultant (http://www.warrenco.com/) in his own right, responded to the Latin phrase, “tantae molis erat” in the post of another reader…

I’ve dug around pretty deeply into the Greek and Roman cultures to understand the ancient wisdom embedded there, and it was substantial. My overall conclusion about Rome: A civilization that never truly defined itself and stopped asking questions about its essence once it found power. Unlike their Greek predecessors, the Romans created very few new innovations (most were built on Greek breakthroughs), produced very few thought leaders (most of that era were Greek), and were torn about ideals… (Power versus Honor, Force versus Law, Size versus Beauty, etc.) with the Romans ultimately making the worst decisions. Gibbon’s book: The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire cites the pinnacle of Roman thinking was with Marcus Aurelius, who tried unsuccessfully to introduce Greek values into the Roman world.

Comparing the Greek and Roman civilizations, one only has to see the time (Greek period was 300 years, Roman was 700) and the size of their capitals (Athens was 30-40,000 people, Rome 1 million people), and what was left for us to use for our modern civilization, and the picture comes into perspective. The Greeks left us with Law (Solon), Philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), Mathematics (Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes), Scientific Exploration (Alexander the Great conquest was the largest scientific expedition until modern times), Medicine (Hippocrates), and theatre (Aristophanes, Sophocles), along with the first computers, steam engine, and hydraulics. One has to ask themselves, “how could so few people produce so much?” and “how could a small town of 30,000 people produce so many great thinkers?” and ‘why can’t we do this now?” My exploration into those questions can be found in this link:

http://www.warrenco.com/How_the_Greeks_Created_the_First_Age_of_Innovation_V1.32.pdf

One of the important conclusions of this assessment of Greek Innovation was that the Greeks could TRUST each other, but the Romans could not. The Greeks had “creation-ships” (such as that between Socrates and Plato or Plato and Aristotle, but the Romans never could produce this type of synergistic relationships.

Since our mission is to build character based on our Judeo-Greco-Roman-Christian heritage, I truly value contributions from our readers, such as this one from Robert Porter Lynch.