Our debt to Greek culture

Harry Eyres:

A conversation over lunch with the violinist Leonidas Kavakos - maybe Greece's most gifted classical performer since Maria Callas - made me reflect more generally on the relationship between Greece and gifts. The most famous saying about Greeks and gifts is of course the line from Virgil's Aeneid, "I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts" (timeo Danaos et dona ferentes), but nowadays this might be reversed. The Greeks have good reason to fear the gifts in the form of bail-outs - designed to bail out creditors, not Greek citizens - that have reduced the country to a province in the European empire controlled, at least as to its purse strings, by Germany.

But Kavakos is not disposed to self-pity à la Grecque. He seems a rather tough-minded character who believes Greeks deserve much of the punishment they are getting. What he finds most unforgivable is the way Greece, or its political class, has betrayed its incomparable legacy of culture, philosophy and art. He reserved especial scorn for a certain Greek politician who decreed that the Greek language should be reduced from 6m words to 600,000. That was an entirely avoidable form of self-impoverishment.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at April 1, 2012 2:26 AM
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