Personally, I thought your first defense was better than your Durant defense.
When I hear people talk about the "Greek mind," I cringe. There is no such thing. There were a number of Greek thinkers -- almost all of them Athenians, who comprised just a minority of Greeks -- who expressed what they thought in writing, and some of that writing has [fortunately] been preserved. But not only did they not agree between themselves, but just about all of them were severe critics of Athens itself. That is why, for the most part, they wrote--to criticize. That isn't the only reason they wrote, and some also found reasons to praise Athens.
I haven't studied Milton, but I have studied Dante, and don't find him any more or less difficult to study/understand than Plato or Aristotle or Aeschylus or Euripides. There are books in the Bible--i.e., Judges, both books of Samuel, to take two examples, but there are plenty of others, including the more familiar stories in Genesis and Exodus--which are also sophisticated analyses of politics, but they aren't analyses in the same way as either Greek theater or Greek philosophy. They are a blend of both philosophy and literature, teaching indirectly through parables, stories and various types of shorthand. That doesn't mean that some of them weren't sophisticated thinkers, just as some of the Greeks were. But most of them weren't--they were uneducated and just as silly, fearful, petty, greedy, vain and irrational as anyone around today. The people who wrote and whose writings survived over time were the exception, and many of them wrote because they were disturbed by what they saw their fellow citizens doing, by how they were living, wasting their own lives as well as ruining the lives of others (or at least making those lives more difficult than they should have been). |
