The Glory That Was Greece

What would the ancient Greek philosophers think of their modern counterparts, could they but look down from the heavenly Olympus and see what has befallen their ancient country, one wonders. Would they muse on the quality of moral values that they were so fond of expounding upon?

Would they laugh in derision or truly grieve at the seeming collapse of judgement and choices, the utter moral chaos that appears to have overtaken a people who were taught the beneficence and great utility of living by the Golden Rule?

The Athenians and the Spartans who held no great love for one another's great city states, their quite different but still similar values, no longer seeming to be upheld as a standard for living life to its greatest opportunities, would themselves surely have despaired and joined forces, could they but do so, to turn the tide of moral decline back to its true path.

Greek art and architecture, as well as its moral teachings informed the world and shone the light of reason and beauty for the rest of the world, both ancient and modern, to admire and attempt to emulate. Yet here is a country so suddenly beset by a chaotic, deadly drama by which nature and environment have been embroiled in a scheme to aid pecuniary interests of a few, happy enough to sacrifice the lives and properties of innocents.

Entire villages have been emptied of their residents. Forests, crops and livestock are consumed by countless fires, many of which have been deliberately set by arsonists. Arson in the name of clearing the way to provide the spaces required for the building of uncontracted-for and un-permitted tract housing whose developers are so anxious to pave the way into creation that they have imperilled the country.

From Olympia to the Temple of Athena, fire is raging, sweeping through the Peloponnese peninsula. Athens is covered in ashes, a fitting mode of grief for a bereaved city and a grieving country, in near memory of mothers and children burned to ashes, of desperate people attempting desperately to flee the deadly flames flaring their homes, only to have the fires catch and consume them in their vehicles.

All is in disarray. The politicians look to blame their adversaries. The people blame the inaction of their politicians to have taken a lead much earlier when the first sporadic, yet deadly fires were set. This is yet another kind of home-bred terror visited upon people, on civilizations which appear to have forgotten or perhaps temporarily set aside the values handed down to them from their honoured forbears.

Is this truly what we've been reduced to? That we are willing to sacrifice anything and everything for the opportunity to make greater amounts of profit available to prospectors? Nothing, it would seem, is sacred any longer. Not honour, not humanitarian concerns, not balance in pride of ownership and public responsibility.

Zeus would not approve, nor would the panoply of the Greek gods looking down from above. As poorly as were many of their own choices in instructing their human wards, one doubts they would take ownership of the crass materialism and lack of concern for others that now appear rampant everywhere.

Like God and gods everywhere, they sought to instruct. But as with all human constructs, our gods are only as vital and necessary, as humanely understanding and deliberate as the human creatures that created them.

Failures, all.