2024 NaPM 17 April

[dukealien]

Living In Greatest Greece


Greeks of what we call
the Classic era
thought little about
being Greek: it’s what
they were, and what
they spoke and wrote.
They did think much
of themselves
for being Greek, of course,
which however did not halt
their bloody feuds among
those who inhabited
that rocky cut-up land
(including Greater Greece–
Sicily, east Italy,
the coast of Asia Minor and
a chain or two of islands
spilled like jacks across
the Central Sea).

Not a few of them
thought much about thinking
and those thoughts
a spreading tree which bloomed
in all the sciences–
history, geometry,
engineering, politics,
philosophy itself–
inform all humanity
(like them or not)
long after that self-confident
contentious people
changed into something else
from what they had before that
changed into.