08/05/2023
ATHENS | This week marked the second beginning of our Master’s in the Humanities graduate program has begun again, this year centered around the theme of the “whole”.
It is difficult to conjure a more monumental structure that embodies this idea – physically, philosophically, allegorically, and historically – than the Parthenon itself, set on a rocky outcrop in the center of Athens.
In the funeral oration of Pericles (d. 429 BC), as recorded in Thucydides Book 2, circa ###V-XLVI, the connection is made both between Athens as a “whole” and the education of Greece itself (λέγω τήν πᾶσαν πόλιν τῆς Ἐλλάδος), and between the spirit of collective and individual liberty the Athenian cause represents, against the harsh disciplinary and military culture of Sparta; Athens, he insists, is the model or “paradigm” for Hellas.
One gets the sense that what Thucydides really means is that Athens and her dominions represent the “whole” and, indeed, what is “best” in humanity itself. In fact, it is indisputable, given the way his speech concludes as a defense of immortality. When you are willing to die for your country, itself a model of the true and good, you can be assured you are taking your own part in the whole—in the life of the divine itself.
Indeed, the fate of civilization was being weighed in the balance from within, during the Peloponnesian War. The Greeks had put down the external threat (Persia) and now had to stop the collapse of mankind’s last, best hope from within.
Our twenty-five incoming graduate students for 2023/24 will explore precisely how this pattern repeats itself in Western history. Of course, Athens ultimately lost the battle that was the war, but her spirit triumphed in the Western imagination. That is why our students are starting their journey here. The end is in the beginning; the “whole” is present in—and under! —the earth on which they are about to set foot.
