subject: The Modern Life - the obsessive pursuit of affluence, exotic tastes, and eroticism: Discover The Beginnings of Modern Living Through History [print this page] The Modern Life - the obsessive pursuit of affluence, exotic tastes, and eroticism: Discover The Beginnings of Modern Living Through History
Let us go down history - the history of the human race - and discover an age long, long ago that looked very familiar, very similar with our modern times. One thing I like very much about history is that it gives you a sense of solid judgment and perception - the reference to the past is an inspiration for today and offers valuable lessons to the future.
Philip the King of Macedonia (Macedonia was part of Greece) wasassassinated in 330 BC before he carried out his lifelong grand plan of conquering the powerful Persian Empire. Alexander the Great was only twenty years old when he succeeded his murdered father Philip. He was a pupil of Aristotle. He read Xenophon and he knew what could be done and what could be won in Persia. So in 334 BC he led the Greek and Macedonian forces across theHellespont in Asia Manor. He then overthrew the Persian Empire. He went on to conquer all the land from Libya to Afghanistan. He then created the Greco-Macedonian Empire that could spread Greek andHellenism culture all over the east and he did all these in only eleven years. After which he died of a fever in Babylon aged 32 or 33.
Alexander was truly the greatest general of all time and a megalomaniac of genius, and he sought greatness in everything he did. People who knew him thought that he was more than a hero - he was a god.
The subsequent period called the Hellenistic Age spurned the three eventful centuries between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC. This period was an age that looked remarkably similar to our modern times; starting from representative state institutions.
It had the same psychological and aesthetic fragmentation, the same entire rationalistic trend. The same self absorbed interest in the self. The same obsessive pursuit of affluence, exotic tastes, peculiar fads - astrology, magic and eroticism. The same preoccupation with bigness, the same detachment from the home town with the concomitant but not very comfortable feeling that the whole cosmos is your polis or city. The same social conflicts and class wars and colonization and wars of national liberation designed to expel foreign oppressors and to allow the locals to oppress each other. The same bureaucracies which are more interested in making rules rather than making things productive or more efficient, the same retreat from political involvement by people heartily sick of politics, the same cringing cynicism in the big cities or mega polis. And so on
