Comradeship // Freechat

Yeah, if I'm being totally honest I didn't use to think about it all that much either. It was only over the past few years I started really noticing Greece's place in "Western Civilization" and the history & culture of the West that I started realizing it doesn't occupy nearly the same place of importance as Rome, whom it's often paired together with. We follow Ancient Greece right up until Rome poofs into exist and then forget all about Greece thereafter. Even the Byzantine Empire barely gets mentioned outside of the Crusades and maybe the Great Schism. The absence of Byzantium from history was actually what got me interested in that civilization and the more I learned the more I realized how it was almost completely missing from the cultural mind of the West, despite essentially being a synthesis of both Rome & Greece - the alleged mutual forebears of "Western Civilization" - and began to wonder exactly why that was. It was kicked off a much broader trend of me looking at other civilizations that often get little mention or discussion by Western pop history, such as Scythia, Abyssinia, Persia, Armenia, Assyria, etc.

But what really got the gears in my head turning was when I realized there was a very common Orientalist treatment of Greek music and how often Westerners hear it and think it's from Arabia or Iran or whatever. That's when I really started forming all these ideas before, finally, Nolan's The Odyssey and the controversy it spawned made everything click, watching the Far Right speak so authoritatively on a work they didn't understand from a culture they know nothing about while claiming to believe in authenticity and how they tried to link their moral outrage to a diverse movie cast to the state of the modern West when many of these chuds have a hard-on for Rome, not Greece.

By the time I started typing it all up everything just fell perfectly into place.