Abbreviated notes taken from Dr. Daniel N. Robinson lectures on The Greek Legacy

As a society, we grudgingly take on Civic Buildings and monuments, with such minimal budgets in mind so much as to not think about our posterity and future as a society. I say that our heirs will look on us not in disdain but contempt, even revile us.

Yet we fail at the basics, as civil human beings, not in our buildings alone, but in being an educated, brave and meaningful society. We as a Polis do not know ourselves or question our relationship to the world.

"Know thyself."

Aristotle -- inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

Ask yourself what we will build tomorrow that will stand the test of time. Will we be singing hymns of our great warriors, leaders, athletes and potentates twenty-five hundred years in the future? Will our posterity look upon the monuments of our day and wonder? Or will the question arise in their minds as to why we had no one worthy of a monument?

In Aristotle’s Metaphysics book I: ALL men by nature desire to know.

An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight.

What Aristotle is recording here is the ancient Greek sense of the power of the seen, the power that appeals to us at the level of direct visual perception; as when Hecuba says to Menelaus, “If you’re going to kill Helen, when you raise your sword don’t look at her.”

This is awareness that what is seen molds thought, molds mind, molds character. The ancient Greek world took nothing visual for granted. The ancient Greek is, first and foremost, a spectator. The thing that he is looking at in a painstaking way is himself, so that he might know himself. What appeals to us at that level can have a controlling influence in our lives.

The Greeks were not perfect, they had suffered plagues, human deformities and the like, but what they depicted was perfection to a mathematical precision, the Golden Mean. When the gods are portrayed, they are portrayed as humans doing human things, but better. Why, we question, depict the Gods in such a way? They were discovering human potentialities.

The Greek Ideal continues to animate that which I consider perfection in civilized world. There can be no compromise. The polis is not always going to agree, Art cannot be determined by committee or a board. Contemplation of which we are…beauty harmony and proportion. Beauty is not an option it is a necessity. The classical ideal is that Beauty should be a source of pride and a show of power of who we are in the world. Beauty gives substance to a shared humanity.

To be beautiful is to be true, and to loose that is to live a mechanical and meaningless life.

Beauty as a source of virtue!