Hades having diverse portrait art could never have created "representation". It's a game about literally one figure just wanging on room after room of monsters with a big hammer or a shield that...
Hades having diverse portrait art could never have created "representation". It's a game about literally one figure just wanging on room after room of monsters with a big hammer or a shield that does that "bounce" move. Nothing in this category of game will ever reflect a modern demographic, much less an ancient one.
A (probably too) long video that talks about representation, Greek representation, Hades, Dionysos, Quebec politics and tease about a second part that goes even deeper into Quebec politics. I...
A (probably too) long video that talks about representation, Greek representation, Hades, Dionysos, Quebec politics and tease about a second part that goes even deeper into Quebec politics.
I (Swiss, 2nd generation immigrant) rarely have any insight about Quebec politics, and often think of Greek culture and mythology as "basically Western" whereas it's its very own thing. A combination of the two is both unexpected but interesting nonetheless (the guy basically presents his problem with Greek (mis)representation through the frame of being a Greek minority in Montreal).
I haven't watched the video, but will, when I get some time. There's a very important distinction though, between modern Greek culture, and ancient Greek culture/mythology. The reason Greek...
I haven't watched the video, but will, when I get some time.
There's a very important distinction though, between modern Greek culture, and ancient Greek culture/mythology.
The reason Greek mythology and culture is considered "basically western" is that it kind of is. The Greek empire rampaged and subjugated people all throughout south europe, asia, and africa. Their descendants populated basically every single European country at least in part, and from that, the americas and australia. There's no part of what we consider western history that wasn't forcibly influenced in some way by the ancient Greeks.
Modern Greece or Greeks definitely do not have a monopoly on claiming an ancient Greek heritage, any more than any other modern country with an imperial past has a sole claim to their own history. When you pillage and force your culture on others, those others have just as much of a claim as the people who still live in that region geographically.
It was really more the Romans who did the rampaging and subjugation through the Western world. The Macedonians who did the rampaging mostly settled down to create Eastern Empires where the Greek...
It was really more the Romans who did the rampaging and subjugation through the Western world. The Macedonians who did the rampaging mostly settled down to create Eastern Empires where the Greek culture didn't anchor the way it did in the West. If anything, Greek influence in India and Central Asia was marked more by its impact on the development and spread of Buddhism than the Greek pantheon in particular.
The reintroduction of Greek culture into the Western canon came partly from Romans appropriating it and adopting much of it as their own and partly from the rediscovery of Greek philosophy by the West during the Crusades.
TL;DR the Greeks didn't force ancient Greek culture on many. The one phase where they did have a large, pan-national Empire it was one created by Macedonians, who the Ancient Greeks barely considered proper Greeks, and which was marked by its willingness to adopt the local political mores and religious customs of the territories they settled in rather than imposing their own.
Greek culture was more influential because they were accomplished mariners and traders across the Mediterranean and the other accomplished traders of the ancient world either got wiped out or got Islam and Arabized instead.
It depends on what you consider "actual Greeks". Pre Alexander, classical Greece did absolutely colonize a huge chunk of the area surrounding the Mediterranean, including parts of modern-day...
It depends on what you consider "actual Greeks". Pre Alexander, classical Greece did absolutely colonize a huge chunk of the area surrounding the Mediterranean, including parts of modern-day Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, turkey, Syria, Spain and France, and black sea regions like Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Georgia, Russia and Ukraine. Those conquered peoples went on to spread their culture further outward before the Macedonians or the Romans ever got involved.
After Roman involvement, that usurped culture which at its core is still very Greek gets pushed even further, by force again. That's why it strikes me as odd for a modern-day Greek to say something like "no, ancient Greece is my culture, and depicting it inaccurately is offensive to me", because that culture was forcibly imposed on virtually every single people that we consider part of "the west" 2000 years ago. It's all of our culture, and it became our culture at the point of a spear.
I'd say something similar to a protestant taking offense at a Christian Native American's interpretation of the gospel. Like, your ancestors abandoned your sole claim to the culture once they forced other people to adopt it.
I think at that point we're starting to get a little anachronistic about the time period by importing modern ideas about national identity and culture onto ancient peoples who didn't share them....
I think at that point we're starting to get a little anachronistic about the time period by importing modern ideas about national identity and culture onto ancient peoples who didn't share them.
The historical frameworks of modern nationalist narratives only really make sense if you solve backwards. The Greek people today identify with specific aspects of a Greek culture from back in the day and weave those together into an ethno-linguistic story of their people. But the Ancient Greek people had self-conceptions and senses of identity based more on their tribes and regions and their culture formed sort of a cultural continuum across the Mediterranean. A lot of the heart of Greek culture, including people like Herodotus, lived in what's considered Turkey today.
It's much more cut-and-dried who is what in modern times because states are so much more powerful and mass media has a homogenizing effect on culture within its area of influence (which happens to coincide with nation state borders usually). But in the ancient past lines weren't so stark. There was very rarely a coherent sense of a single culture outside of a specific city or polis. And even if a polis went and colonized some other area that city would develop its own culture and identify itself differently within a generation. The settler colonial framework just didn't happen in the same way back then. It couldn't because communication and travel were so much more burdensome. People didn't encounter radically different groups of people that often and, when they did, they borrowed extremely liberally from each other when they weren't killing or enslaving each other. (And when they did that, they still borrowed or stole cultural mores from each other).
In fact that's kind of my beef with the video essay. A modern Greek sees themselves in the Ancient Greeks, but that relationship does not work the other way. In the same way an ancient Indian and an ancient Roman would probably get along with each other better than they would with any of us, the idea of a national identity only really makes sense when you look retrospectively. The characters and Gods in the Homeric epics wouldn't really be that recognizable to modern Greek people at all. I get the desire for representation and the frustration that opportunities for representation are tossed out to put Lliam Neeson as Zeus, but that's separate from claiming that present day Greeks own representations of Ancient Greek religion.
Yeah, I agree with you. I can understand indigenous groups like native American tribes, Māori, or Aboriginals claiming sole ownership of their ancient ancestor's culture, but when you're talking...
Yeah, I agree with you. I can understand indigenous groups like native American tribes, Māori, or Aboriginals claiming sole ownership of their ancient ancestor's culture, but when you're talking about a culture as both expansionist and old as classical greece, that claim rings a lot more hollow.
Macedonian's might not have been considered "Greek", but they absolutely spread Hellenistic culture. Indo-Greeks had contact with ancient China and even fought the Han Dynasty before 100 BC. Greek...
Macedonian's might not have been considered "Greek", but they absolutely spread Hellenistic culture. Indo-Greeks had contact with ancient China and even fought the Han Dynasty before 100 BC. Greek culture reached much of the known world after Alexander the Great, and then again in some sense by the Roman Empire, and again in another, more distant relation by the Eastern Roman Empire.
Yeah but it just wasn’t an imposition from above to the extent it was with the Romans in their provinces and especially not the extent of complete cultural re-engineering that European/Christian...
Yeah but it just wasn’t an imposition from above to the extent it was with the Romans in their provinces and especially not the extent of complete cultural re-engineering that European/Christian colonialism or Islamic expansion generally brought with them.
Hades having diverse portrait art could never have created "representation". It's a game about literally one figure just wanging on room after room of monsters with a big hammer or a shield that does that "bounce" move. Nothing in this category of game will ever reflect a modern demographic, much less an ancient one.
A (probably too) long video that talks about representation, Greek representation, Hades, Dionysos, Quebec politics and tease about a second part that goes even deeper into Quebec politics.
I (Swiss, 2nd generation immigrant) rarely have any insight about Quebec politics, and often think of Greek culture and mythology as "basically Western" whereas it's its very own thing. A combination of the two is both unexpected but interesting nonetheless (the guy basically presents his problem with Greek (mis)representation through the frame of being a Greek minority in Montreal).
I haven't watched the video, but will, when I get some time.
There's a very important distinction though, between modern Greek culture, and ancient Greek culture/mythology.
The reason Greek mythology and culture is considered "basically western" is that it kind of is. The Greek empire rampaged and subjugated people all throughout south europe, asia, and africa. Their descendants populated basically every single European country at least in part, and from that, the americas and australia. There's no part of what we consider western history that wasn't forcibly influenced in some way by the ancient Greeks.
Modern Greece or Greeks definitely do not have a monopoly on claiming an ancient Greek heritage, any more than any other modern country with an imperial past has a sole claim to their own history. When you pillage and force your culture on others, those others have just as much of a claim as the people who still live in that region geographically.
It was really more the Romans who did the rampaging and subjugation through the Western world. The Macedonians who did the rampaging mostly settled down to create Eastern Empires where the Greek culture didn't anchor the way it did in the West. If anything, Greek influence in India and Central Asia was marked more by its impact on the development and spread of Buddhism than the Greek pantheon in particular.
The reintroduction of Greek culture into the Western canon came partly from Romans appropriating it and adopting much of it as their own and partly from the rediscovery of Greek philosophy by the West during the Crusades.
TL;DR the Greeks didn't force ancient Greek culture on many. The one phase where they did have a large, pan-national Empire it was one created by Macedonians, who the Ancient Greeks barely considered proper Greeks, and which was marked by its willingness to adopt the local political mores and religious customs of the territories they settled in rather than imposing their own.
Greek culture was more influential because they were accomplished mariners and traders across the Mediterranean and the other accomplished traders of the ancient world either got wiped out or got Islam and Arabized instead.
It depends on what you consider "actual Greeks". Pre Alexander, classical Greece did absolutely colonize a huge chunk of the area surrounding the Mediterranean, including parts of modern-day Italy, Tunisia, Algeria, turkey, Syria, Spain and France, and black sea regions like Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Georgia, Russia and Ukraine. Those conquered peoples went on to spread their culture further outward before the Macedonians or the Romans ever got involved.
After Roman involvement, that usurped culture which at its core is still very Greek gets pushed even further, by force again. That's why it strikes me as odd for a modern-day Greek to say something like "no, ancient Greece is my culture, and depicting it inaccurately is offensive to me", because that culture was forcibly imposed on virtually every single people that we consider part of "the west" 2000 years ago. It's all of our culture, and it became our culture at the point of a spear.
I'd say something similar to a protestant taking offense at a Christian Native American's interpretation of the gospel. Like, your ancestors abandoned your sole claim to the culture once they forced other people to adopt it.
I think at that point we're starting to get a little anachronistic about the time period by importing modern ideas about national identity and culture onto ancient peoples who didn't share them.
The historical frameworks of modern nationalist narratives only really make sense if you solve backwards. The Greek people today identify with specific aspects of a Greek culture from back in the day and weave those together into an ethno-linguistic story of their people. But the Ancient Greek people had self-conceptions and senses of identity based more on their tribes and regions and their culture formed sort of a cultural continuum across the Mediterranean. A lot of the heart of Greek culture, including people like Herodotus, lived in what's considered Turkey today.
It's much more cut-and-dried who is what in modern times because states are so much more powerful and mass media has a homogenizing effect on culture within its area of influence (which happens to coincide with nation state borders usually). But in the ancient past lines weren't so stark. There was very rarely a coherent sense of a single culture outside of a specific city or polis. And even if a polis went and colonized some other area that city would develop its own culture and identify itself differently within a generation. The settler colonial framework just didn't happen in the same way back then. It couldn't because communication and travel were so much more burdensome. People didn't encounter radically different groups of people that often and, when they did, they borrowed extremely liberally from each other when they weren't killing or enslaving each other. (And when they did that, they still borrowed or stole cultural mores from each other).
In fact that's kind of my beef with the video essay. A modern Greek sees themselves in the Ancient Greeks, but that relationship does not work the other way. In the same way an ancient Indian and an ancient Roman would probably get along with each other better than they would with any of us, the idea of a national identity only really makes sense when you look retrospectively. The characters and Gods in the Homeric epics wouldn't really be that recognizable to modern Greek people at all. I get the desire for representation and the frustration that opportunities for representation are tossed out to put Lliam Neeson as Zeus, but that's separate from claiming that present day Greeks own representations of Ancient Greek religion.
Yeah, I agree with you. I can understand indigenous groups like native American tribes, Māori, or Aboriginals claiming sole ownership of their ancient ancestor's culture, but when you're talking about a culture as both expansionist and old as classical greece, that claim rings a lot more hollow.
Macedonian's might not have been considered "Greek", but they absolutely spread Hellenistic culture. Indo-Greeks had contact with ancient China and even fought the Han Dynasty before 100 BC. Greek culture reached much of the known world after Alexander the Great, and then again in some sense by the Roman Empire, and again in another, more distant relation by the Eastern Roman Empire.
Yeah but it just wasn’t an imposition from above to the extent it was with the Romans in their provinces and especially not the extent of complete cultural re-engineering that European/Christian colonialism or Islamic expansion generally brought with them.