James Baquet

In 1845, in his poem “To Helen,” Edgar Allan Poe refers to “the glory that was Greece, /And the grandeur that was Rome.”

For Poe and most educated Westerners until well into the 20th century, Greece and Rome were the models for almost everything. It has been called the “cradle of Western civilization.”

The modern scientific worldview is based on Greek rationalism. The U.S. political system derives from Greek democracy. Alfred North Whitehead wrote in 1929 that “the European philosophical tradition” can be characterized as “a series of footnotes to Plato,” the Greek philosopher whose main character is Socrates. Western drama (including our movies) derives from Greek playwrights, and, of course, our literature begins with Homer.

Ancient Greece was an amalgam of city-states, Athens and Sparta being among the most famous.

Though located in Europe, Greece is situated in near proximity to Asia and Africa. Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria are to the north; Turkey is to the east. The Aegean Sea lies on its eastern shores, the Ionian Sea on the western, and the Cretan and Mediterranean Seas to the south. Due to its many islands, Greece has the 11th longest coastline in the world.

Two-hundred and twenty-seven of its islands are inhabited, and many are attractive to tourists, including Corfu, Delos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Rhodes. Some 80 percent of the mainland is mountainous, including the famed Mount Olympus, said to have been the home of the Greek Pantheon.

Its nine geographic regions include Macedonia (home of Alexander the Great); the Peloponnese, a large peninsula in the south of the country; Thessaly, the former Aeolia, described in Homer’s “Odyssey” as the home of Aeolus, Keeper of the Winds; and Crete, locus of the historical Minoan civilization, where the mythical story of King Minos, Theseus and the Minotaur, as well as that of Daedalus and Icarus.

Modern Greece is democratic and developed, and has a strong economy and high standard of living. Athens is its capital.

Vocabulary:

Which word above means:

1. way of seeing the universe and our place in it

2. comments, as added at the bottom of a page, usually with numbers

3. group of gods

4. people who write for the theater

5. use of reason as one’s main authority

6. splendor; awesomeness

7. mixture or combination

8. from stories of gods and heroes

9. have their quality described

10. baby’s bed