By Victor Davis Hanson
For generations, students have fascinated about the increase of the Greek city-state and its fabulous cosmopolitan tradition because the final resource of the Western culture in literature, philosophy, and politics. This passionate booklet leads us outdoors town partitions to the nation-state, the place nearly all of the Greek citizenry lived, to discover the genuine resource of the cultural wealth of Greek civilization. Victor Hanson indicates that the true "Greek revolution" was once now not purely the increase of a unfastened and democratic city tradition, yet particularly the old innovation of the self sufficient kinfolk farm.The farmers, vinegrowers, and herdsmen of historic Greece are "the different Greeks," who shaped the spine of Hellenic civilization. It was once those tough-minded, useful, and fiercely self sustaining agrarians, Hanson contends, who gave Greek tradition its particular emphasis on inner most estate, constitutional executive, contractual agreements, infantry conflict, and person rights. Hanson's reconstruction of old Greek farm lifestyles, proficient through hands-on wisdom of the topic (he is a fifth-generation California vine- and fruit-grower) is clean, finished, and soaking up. His exact chronicle of the increase and tragic fall of the Greek city-state additionally is helping us to know the consequences of what could be the unmarried most important development in American existence today--the impending extinction of the kin farm.
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Additional resources for The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization
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Until recently, although some archaeological data from the late eighth to fifth century was available to the historian, nearly all of it was shrouded in controversy and without clear reference to chronology. Lately, however, our knowledge of the early polis has expanded greatly. html [06-02-2009 16:04:26] page_19 < previous page page_19 next page > Page 19 A multitude of comprehensive accounts of the emergence of the Greek city-state appeared in the late 1970s and 1980s. Ostensibly this new interest and reexamination revolve around the literary sources and the discovery of more archaeological data.
And the tragic demise of Hellenic society was in large part a result of the very contradictions of the Greeks' own agrarian notions of egalitarianism, which became more and more inflexible in an increasingly complex world. 2 The original Greek polis is best understood as an exclusive and yet egalitarian community of farmers that was now to produce its own food, fight its own wars and make its own laws, a novel institution that was not parasitic on its countryside but instead protective of it. html [06-02-2009 16:04:21] page_4 < previous page page_4 next page > Page 4 and food production, nor even as a war between the propertied and the landless, much less a saga of the intellectual brilliance of the urban few.
Both exist for, and are at home in, the university. Few have left the cloister of academia. Fewer have any desireor abilityto do so. 4 The "new" ancient world is too often the old ancient world. It is still a story of city-people written by city-people. There is little hope that the present generation of revisionist classicists in the United States will ever come to terms with Greece as an agrarian society of pedestrian hardworking yeomen. D. candidates in Classics can still review the difficult odes of Pindar or the dry poetry even of a Callimachus.