Why the Greco-Romans?

The ultimate answer to the question: why do we care about people from over two millennia ago?

Life in Ancient Rome, image from pedro-mundodebabel.blogspot.com, under CC license.

Why on earth did I end up devoting so much time of my life to the ancient Greco-Romans? Some would say that this was the predictable endpoint of a trend. After all, my first academic career was in science (evolutionary biology), which is “obviously” useful. Then I moved to philosophy, the equally obvious epitome of a useless field, they say. But at least I was doing philosophy of science, which didn’t remove me too much from what the truly important stuff. Then I discovered Stoicism and now not only my academic job, but also my outreach efforts and even my personal life are devoted to utterly useless things put forth by dead white men who lived two millennia ago or thereabout.

Well, to begin with, though the Greco-Romans are all definitely dead, and most of them were men (with several remarkable exceptions), they were definitely not “white.” But that’s a story for another day. What I want to explore here is why, exactly, do I and so many others think that it is not a waste of time to reflect on the Greco-Romans. On the contrary, it is one of the most useful things we could be doing.

First, let’s get clear on where the Greco-Romans are useful and were they are not. If your interest is in physics, say, I do not recommend you pick up the homonymous book by Aristotle. You won’t find anything useful there except in terms of the history of ideas.

The same goes for all the other sciences, from astronomy to biology. You will also not learn how to conduct a military campaign by studying the tactics of Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. And you will definitely not gain any insight into divination, astrology, and the like by reading ancient sources, because there is no such thing as divination and astrology is a pseudoscience.

You will, however, definitely learn a lot if you pay attention to ancient philosophy, especially moral and political philosophy, and of course history. Regarding the latter, George Santayana famously said:

“Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it.” (The Life of Reason, 1905)

Though a classic New Yorker cartoon wisely added: “But those who do remember history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.” Oh well.

I should also immediately add that the following considerations do not, of course, hold only for Greco-Roman history and philosophy. That just happens to be what I am (barely) competent to write about and teach, in great part simply as a result of the personal historical accident of having been raised in Rome. What I’m about to say would go for Buddhism, Confucianism, or Daoism, if you happen to be born in India, China, or Japan. As well as for a number of other wisdom traditions across the world.

(This doesn’t mean that I think all wisdom traditions are equally worthwhile. There are differences, and some of these differences are pretty important and consequential. But that also is a topic for another time.)

So here is the first reason why the Greco-Romans are so important: they were human beings just like us. Duh, you may be inclined to say. But hear me out. Our modern societies are superficially very different from theirs: we have science and technology. We have (mostly) abolished slavery. We treat women a bit better. Nevertheless, human nature hasn’t changed. At all.

We, like them, still want the same things and are worried by or afraid of the same things. We want peace and yet constantly engage in war. We want safety and yet may be the target of violence, random or organized. We want to love our partners and children, and we want friends. We’d like health and financial security. We wish to do something meaningful with our lives. So did Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and all the others.

Ancient philosophy will keep being relevant so long as human nature will remain about the same. Should we, at some point in the future, truly start messing around with our genetic inheritance, or engage in the creation of human-AI hybrids, then and only then we will need new philosophies. Maybe, depending on just how much we will be able or willing to change the fundamentals of human psychology. But we are not there yet, and despite continuous predictions to the contrary, I don’t think we are even close.