Man was the centre of Greek life and thought. Not God. In this, they were vastly different from Hindus.
The Greeks were not a religious people. They had no sense of ethics. Their gods were not much different. ?Homer and Hesiod?, says Xenophanes, a student of Socrates, ?attribute to the gods all the acts which among men are culpable and shameful.? A stage came when the Greeks ridiculed their gods.
Faith in God was thus snapped. A new class of people arose, the Sophists, who asserted that might made right. ?Upon the whole,? writes Daper (Intellectual Development of Europe) ?we must admit that Greek mythologies indicate a barbarous social condition.? The idea of Law was foreign to Homer.
It was at this time that Greece produced its greatest moral teacher?Socrates. He said virtue lay in knowledge. Reminds us of the jnana marga.
The Greeks argued over everything. They were less prone to take anyone as an authority. The same can be said of the Hindus. They were argumentative. They believed in reasoning.
The Greeks also believed in logic and reason. They were, therefore, adept in the art of persuasion?in rhetoric and oratory. Eloquence was a gift they valued. According to them, the supreme cosmic reason is immanent in human reason. The Hindus were the first to develop nyaya (logic).
The Jews, Christians and Muslims are men of books. They have God'sown words, they claim. With what consequence? No further enquiry was permitted. Islam called upon men to surrender before God. They developed neither logic nor oratory. Violence, not persuasion, become the way of the Christians and the Muslims.
The Greeks gave the world the gym, stadium, theatre, Agora, Stoa, Acropolis and Council House. Parthenon set the pattern for architecture. For these alone, they will be remembered for eternity.
The Greeks loved beauty and strength. There was much nakedness among boys and girls. No wonder the Greeks were the greatest sculptors of the human body.
Every Greek city had a theatre. Greece produced some of the greatest dramatists. They preferred tragedy. Aristotle says of tragedy that ?it purges the soul of its passions.? Hindus preferred comedy. Their gods attended the theatre. Viswakarma built the stage.
The Greeks kept the population under control by exposing the girl child. Contrast this with the Hindu wish: ?May you have a hundred children!? The Greeks did not encourage ostentation or asceticism.
The Greeks, like the Hindus, burnt their dead. They made no tombs. Social rank was based on wealth. This had the sanction of Solon, the Greek law-giver. It gave rise to perpetual rich-poor conflict.
The Greeks were for republics. Hippocrates says that a citizens has a larger stake in the republic than in any other form of government. In India, almost all states were monarchical. Which explains the indifference of the citizen to his state. It also explains why the invaders were able to conquer India with a few horsemen.
The Greeks were opposed to the cyclic theory of history, for they saw no ?progress? in it. The Hindus made the cyclic theory into a system of repetitive yugas.
Time was not important to Greeks. Space was. To the Hindus it was time which was important. To illustrate, the Greeks needed a big stage for the ballet, while the Indian stage is invariably small. What mattered here was time and rhythm.
Greek philosophy did not soar as high as Hindu philosophy. But the Greeks were never concerned with the eternal as the Hindus.
Greek and Roman societies were built on slave labour. But they went too far with their cruelty, provoking revolt among the slaves. The caste system was no less bad, but it was less cruel. How? Because untouchability prevented much of physical violence so common among Greeks and Romans. In any case, high caste Hindus never employed men of the lower orders as domestics.
Slavery destroyed both Greece and Rome. But the caste system, being less oppressive, saved Hindus from destruction.
The mantle of Socrates fell on Plato, who was influenced by Vedanta. His concept of the divine as the ?supreme intelligence, incorporeal, eternal and immutable? was essentially Vedantic. His theory of transmigration of souls was yet another Hindu concept. Plotinus carried these ideas into neo-Platonism.
Internecine conflicts exhausted the Greeks. The slaves invited the tyrants to rule over Greece. The Greeks were first conquered by the Romans (147 BC) and, then, by Christianity. Which is a pity, for the Greeks were far far ahead of Christianity.
