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Join Wunderry Plus in the Wundery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hi everybody from Wundery welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick

Wyman. Thanks so much for being here with me today.

We're often told that Classical Greece lies at the root of quote unquote Western civilization.

If we dig all the way down into our intellectual and cultural past through the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment to antiquity,

maybe we skip the inconvenient Middle Ages along the way, then we'll eventually wind up in Athens in the 5th century

BC. Whether that particular formulation of a civilizational genealogy is valid in any sense,

it's absolutely undeniable that the classical Greeks exerted and continued to exert a strong influence in a variety of different ways.

Philosophy, literature, art, architecture, political theory.

In all of these ways and more, we're still living with the legacy of that age.

But there's a problem.

Whenever we step back into the past we're entering something fundamentally foreign

in which people thought about themselves and the world in ways that differ fundamentally

from our own preconceptions and assumptions. So how should we understand ancient Greece and the people who

inhabited it? Can we really dig into their worldview?

When we make those assumptions about their place in our cultural genealogy and their enduring influence,

how does that distort the reality of their world?

There is nobody better to help us answer those questions than today's guest.

Greg Anderson is professor of history and courtesy professor of comparative studies at the Ohio State

University. He is a specialist on ancient Greece and the author of one of my favorite

books that I read on that period and history more generally when I was preparing my episodes, entitled

The Realness of Things Past, ancient Greece and ontological history.

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