Problems and Approaches

TLDR: A few years ago, an advertising campaign of the Greek national tourist authority strewed the pages of glossy magazines with pictures of nubile tourists cavorting amid Doric ruins over the slogan, "You were born in Greece".

Abstract: A few years ago, an advertising campaign of the Greek national tourist authority strewed the pages of glossy magazines with pictures of nubile tourists cavorting amid Doric ruins over the slogan, ‘You were born in Greece’. Taken literally, the words would have been obscure. Yet no reader can have had any difficulty in interpreting them as an allusion to the doctrine that ‘western society’ derives, by unbroken tradition, from Graeco-Roman origins. The doctrine may not be true; the terms in which it is commonly expressed may be misleading. Yet its influence is such that it forms part of the self-perception of almost every educated person in Europe and the Americas and much of the rest of the world today. Studies of periods of crisis in the transmission of the supposed legacy – in late antiquity or the early middle ages, when rival cultural traditions were received, or in the ‘age of expansion’ when western society is thought to have broken out of its heartlands – have concentrated, like Theseus in the labyrinth, on following as if it were a lifeline this single, tenuous thread.