Front cover of Maragos’ book, The Teacher of Arcadia. Courtesy Thodoros Maragos Prologue: From Hellas to Greece My artist friend Evi Sarantea from the island of Euboea introduced me to the Greek cinematographer Thodoros Maragos. I watched several of his documentaries. They are political and philosophical. They are commentaries on the history and politics of the 200-year-old modern Greek state and society. They zero in on foreign influence, which shaped the politics and economics of Greece. The tragedy of this country in the third decade of the twenty-first century, tied to foreign debt and perpetual humiliation, is that it is the same country that, in the classical age of some 3,000 to 2,500 years ago and in the Alexandrian Era, 2,300 to 2,000 years ago, gave us the rule of law, democracy, philosophy, the Parthenon, beautiful arts, architecture, theater, the Olympics, Aristotle, science, Alexander the Great, advanced technology of the Antikythera computer of genius, and civilizat
Apotheosis of Homer by Archelaos of Priene, c. 225 BCE. BM. Public Domain. Prologue More than any other Greek, Homer (The Poet), Aristotle (The Philosopher), and Alexander the Great (the military genius and pillar of Hellenism), made Hellas / Greece equivalent to civilization. The epics of Homer The epic poems of Homer inspired the Greeks for millennia. [1] The first epic, the Iliad, tells the story of the Trojan War, according to which, about hundreds of Achaean / Greek ships from all over Hellas carried soldiers to Troy in Asia Minor in order to avenge the abduction of Helen by Paris, a prince of Troy. Helen was the daughter of Zeus and wife of King Menelaos of Sparta. This woman was so beautiful that all important leaders of Greece wanted her for wife. But Menelaos won the lottery. To maintain peace, the unlucky suitors of Helen promised that if anyone tried to take Helen away from Menelaos, they would come to his aid. The Iliad, however, is much more than a story