The ancient Greeks: Were they like us at all? - The New Criterion [via rogueclassicism]

"And yet the sophisticated maritime loans in the Attic orators, or the scurrilous attacks on promiscuity, sodomy, and effeminate men in Aristophanes’ comedies, or the prevalence of love among married couples in ancient Athens makes us wonder whether the Greeks really were all that different from us in their likes, dislikes, prejudices, and habits. Purportedly locked away in their northern European Victorian studies so far from the dust and stones of Greece, so ignorant of the new Cambridge anthropology, were our nineteenth-century classicists all that far off in thinking that the founders of Western civilization were familiar and approachable to us precisely because we as Westerners were their spiritual and intellectual successors? This feeling of a shared and common human experience is exactly what we receive from a wonderful new exhibition of classical Greek art depicting children and adolescents through gravestones, red- and black-figure vases, and terracotta miniature sculptures. "