The Greeks, according to Cassius:
“They are an arrogant people, I’ve always found. I remember one of them telling me they had invented everything, from gods to sex. I pointed out that Romans took their ideas and improved upon them. Ares became Mars, Zeus became Jupiter. And of course, although we could not improve on sex, we are the ones who thought of trying it with women.”
That zinger is from the fictionalized Cassius of Conn Iggulden’s Emperor: Blood of Gods, a novelized treatment of the power struggle in Rome following Julius Caesar’s assassination.
Related: On the Greek development of philosophy, the episodes on Arachne and Athena and Thales and Homer in the Philosophers, Explained series:
Hahaha!
At a recent business meeting, another agent named Paul Achilles was taunted because he knew no Latin, i.e. “caveat emptor.” “But,” he shouted, “I’m Greek…we invented Latin!” The ancient Greeks were the most remarkable of all peoples. Today, we think of them as vendors of cheeseburgers and fries, back then they produced virtually every man of genius, from Homer (the greatest of poets) to Aristotle to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides…Socrates…Euclid…Herodotus…Thucydides…to the man who determined the earth’s circumference within 10 miles. There is some evidence that Romans were a Greek colony via Troy, another Greek city-state and Cassius rightly points out that Romans adopted their peasant-soldier culture to Greek precedents. I am learning Attic Greek and it is one of the Great Languages — highly musical, which Latin and English are not. Again I recommend Edith Hamilton’s THE GREEK WAY for a shortcut to appreciating that wonderful era. Macedonian Greeks conquered the world, militarily and culturally. Greek is a major component of English, directly, not like Latin, through Norman French and the Church liturgy. When we look at the core of Western Civilization, we are, therefore, obliged to say “It’s Greek…to me.”