Book Smart

You have met the ancient Greeks, and they are you.

Culturally speaking, anyway. In his general study of the ancient Greeks, Powell says that 21st century readers will find his answers to the questions that the new book asks quite surprising.

“Who were these people? What did they think? Where and how did they live? What did they do well — what did they do poorly? What became of them?” he says.

The quick answer to that last question is, of course, that the Romans conquered them in the second century B.C. Powell says that one important reason for the conquest will resonate for many members of the modern population.

“The ancient Greeks absolutely would not give up their right to live as they wanted, as individuals. They prized personal freedom too much to submit to the kind of regulation needed in the Roman military,” he says.

However, Powell adds that an avowed commitment to doing your own thing is far from the only aspect of ancient Greek culture still thriving in modern Western culture.

“They invented the alphabet you are using, which eventually made it possible for women to achieve literacy and a measure of political power,” he says. “Before the Greek alphabet, learning to read and write was a lengthy, intensive process because of the complicated forms of writing that ancient societies used.”

Powell is convinced that the Greeks devised their alphabet to record Homer’s stories, originally available only in the spoken word. Indeed, it was literature that led Powell himself to ancient societies in the first place.

“In my teens I was reading contemporary literature, as well as Shakespeare and Milton. I wondered where those works came from, and the next thing I knew I was in ancient Greece,” he says.

In addition to philosophy and literature, modern science also can thank the ancient Greeks for its genesis, Powell says.

“Every other society in the ancient world saw natural phenomena as the result of a random whim of one of the gods,” he says. “The Greeks were the first civilization to interpret the world according to a set of natural laws. It didn’t rain because a god was unhappy but because of a predicable set of naturally occurring circumstances.”

During his more than 30-year career, Powell has seen exciting changes in his field, particularly in archaeology.

“The progress we’ve been seeing has brought to light new information about the ancient world,” he says. “Troy, for example, usually has been characterized as a city on a hill, but my colleague William Aylward and others have shown that there was a large lower city to the citadel, so recently our understanding of Troy has changed dramatically.” Powell is currently at work on a screenplay set in ancient Troy.

Meanwhile, he also is teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in the Greek language. He will use the new book again in his popular course in Greek mythology, offered next in spring 2006.