Hellenic studies

Hellenic studies (also Greek studies) is an interdisciplinary scholarly field that focuses on the language, literature, history and politics of post-classical Greece. In university, a wide range of courses expose students to viewpoints that help them understand the historical and political experiences of Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Greece; the ways in which Greece has borne its several pasts and translated them into the modern era; and the era's distinguished literary and artistic traditions. Quotes If you take away from the Latin, German, and Slavic nations of our day on both sides of the ocean that which they owe to the peoples of Greece and Israel, a great deal would be gone. But we can’t even finish this line of argument; it is simply impossible to deprive these nations of that which was borrowed and to separate it from their very being. It has so permeated their blood and sap, that it constitutes part of the organism itself, which in turn has become its carrier and transmitter. It was the ladder by which these nations ascended to the top, or even better: it was the electrical current which unleashed the slumbering forces within them. Hellenism and Hebraism or — to speak without affectation — Judaism, have together created an atmosphere of ideas without which civilized nations would be unthinkable.... The part played by Hellenism in the rebirth of civilization is acknowledged freely and without envy. It dispersed the flowers of art and the fruits of knowledge. It unveiled the realm of beauty and illuminated it with an Olympian clarity of thought. And a regenerative power continues to pour forth from this literature and the legacy of its artistic ideal. The classical Greeks are dead, and toward them deceased posterity behaves properly. Envy and hatred are silent at the grave of the dead; their contributions are, in fact, usually exaggerated. It is quite different with that other creative nation, the Hebrews. Precisely because they’re still alive their contributions to culture are not generally acknowledged; they are criticized, or given another name to partially conceal their authorship or to dislodge them entirely. H. Graetz, “Introduction tro Volume One of the History of the Jews,” in idem, The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Ismar Schorsch (New York, 1975), quoted from Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire_ Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009) One presupposition, which in this matter has been of great harm and continues to do harm, is the separation between oriental and Greek studies and [the Greek and oriental] mind; [this] is increasingly concocted and arbitrarily applied, as if this grand difference had foundations in reality. In the history of humankind the inhabitants of Asia and the Europeans are to be seen as members of one family, whose history ought never to be divided, if one wants to understand the whole. Friedrich Schlegel, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, 1808. quoted from Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire_ Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009) Interest in the Greeks was again partly theological; the world of the church fathers was one suffused with questions about relations between the Greeks and the Jews — after all, the earliest extant version of the Old Testament — the Septuagint — was in Greek, as were the writings of Saint Paul, and Greek is the language of the New Testament. Suzanne L. Marchand - German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship-Cambridge University Press (2009) See also Greece Greek proverbs Greek language Greek myths External links Category:Greece