I feel like this is an entirely quixotic mission, but it’s something that ought to be put out there nonetheless: The ancient Greeks and Romans are not part of Western culture. Homer is no more a part of the Western canon than the Bhagvad Gita or the Tao Te Ching. When I see something like Identity Evropa and their posters covered with Greek sculpture, it makes me cringe internally.

The Greek culture was the culture of the body, and their society was the society of the present, the tangible, the material, and the sensuous. The Western culture is the culture of the intangible, the distant, the esoteric, of moral law and expansionary force. As an example, when Plato introduced idealism to the Greek, he did so using a telling metaphor; the ideal was not an essence, or an abstract, but a perfect body that existed in a parallel world. His idea of liberation was liberation to a more vivid sensuousness, a more ‘real’ materialism- from the Cave to the world of light. The Greeks imagined the world after death to be universally a drear misery, for saint and sinner alike- it was life, the carpe diem, that was of real significance. Look at the way they depicted the soul- as a butterfly. An insect which flew from the mouth after the death of the body, the only important part of man!

Greek art is popular because it is shallow. The statuary of Lysippos has no hidden depth, it suggests no higher meaning than the perfection of material form and proportion. In perfect mimesis of life, in undying stone, was where Greek spirituality exhausted itself. Working in stone does not represent care for the future; rather, to the Greek it symbolized the eternal present.

The Renaissance was merely an adoption of outward form rather than the revival of real “Greek” art. Consider La Pieta, and realize that this one sculpture contains more emotion, signifies a deeper world of meaning, than the entire history of Greek and Roman sculpture combined. The Greek sculpture had no individuality, no suggestion of internal depth and personality. It wore a mask, even when it was meant to designate a specific god or personage, a mask that was drawn from a mere handful of stock character types. Even the portraiture-in-stone that developed through Hellenistic into Roman times, even when it strove for mimesis of the actual person, contained no hint of the internality of the man depicted.

And realize that the high arts of Europe bore almost no relation to those of Classical times; of orchestral music compared to the near-nonexistent and to our ear absurdly primitive Greek music, of oil-painting to the wall-fresco, of the opera to the masked, robotically-intoned Greek theater. And the mere single generation of “Renaissance” sculpture actually produced is a historical footnote compared to the likes of a Bach or Beethoven. The architecture that the Renaissance thought it was borrowing from classical times was actually the architecture of the Muslim kingdoms, which they in turn had borrowed and modified from the Romans. Oops!

In other cases, the European attachment to the Classical was detrimental to the expression of the Western world-feeling. Aside from a scattered few geniuses like Shakespeare who chose or were chosen to work in the form, it was a long time before theater liberated itself from Greek pretensions and became the opera. It should be considered a blessing that the Greek arts of painting and music were lost to the medieval European, unlike their work in stone and writing, because the full actualization of Western art comes indeed in these media and not those which were trammeled in by classical conventions. The great epic poetry of the West as well was written in verse, whether lyric or alliterative, that was entirely alien to that which the Romans and Greeks utilized. In any case, the utility of Classical influence on Western art was in the best case an incidental choice of form or subject matter that had no effect on the inner spirit of the work, and in the worst a restrictive form which stifled Western tendencies. Never do we see a case in which Classical influence improves a Western art form.

The pediment of the Ionic temple sat with a heavy finality upon its columns. The Parthenon is a beautiful building. But it is worldly and self-contained in its perfect proportions. Its interior is merely an afterthought; the main element of the classical temple is the entablature and its pediment, a single mass exalted, a body raised above the earth by columns. Compare to the Gothic cathedral, with its spires and vaulted arches: it aspires toward heaven, appears to strain against the limitations of gravity, to break free from the earth. Its stained-glass windows dissolve the boundary between interior and exterior; they suggest, to the worshiper inside, an infinite expanse of light. It becomes self-evident that the creators of these two architectures had entirely different spiritual physiognomies.

Nowhere is this difference more apparent than in our attitudes toward the Divine. The Greek felt the presence of his gods most keenly in the heart of his city, among the bustle of people and in sight of that god’s altar. Western man feels his God as infinity: infinite force and infinite energy, and as such feels his presence in places that suggest this infinity: on barren mountaintops, windswept moors and under the expanse of a heaven-reaching canopy of trees. And it was this feeling that he sought to inspire when he built his churches. Our monks and holy men would withdraw from the social world, so as to be alone and thus together with God. The Greek was never alone. Even in his theater, even in a moment of solemn reflection by the protagonist, he was attended to by the anonymous public body of the chorus. Achilles’ solitude was aberrant, and I suspect a great deal of the material that became Homer was left over from Mycenae, spun and edited to make it palatable to the Greek ear.

Don’t get me started on Homer. Achilles may well have been the first Western hero, but the Iliad is a repudiation of Achilles. Greeks didn’t name their kids after him back then, and they don’t do it now. Odysseus meets Achilles’ ghost in the Odyssey, and Achilles laments that he chose death and glory over a comfortable life of little renown. This is a passage that has given scholars an endless amount of headache, when Achilles claims that he would rather be the meanest slave alive than king over all the dead. It seems to contradict the entire Iliad, but it only does so when we read Achilles as a hero and not as an unworthy man who is not meant to be emulated. And we only read Achilles as a hero because of the makeup of our souls and our particular world-feeling, which are in fact inherently opposed to the Greek way of seeing the world.

The Greeks did not believe in the free will and had no conception of the man as playing an active role in destiny. Odysseus is buffeted about from island to island. He is not an intrepid explorer, not a hero projecting his indomitable will across space, but a toy of fate, an insect clinging to a leaf that the gods have seen fit to blow hither and thither at their pleasure. Another fact which perplexes scholars is that Odysseus took many years to cross the tiny Mediterranean sea in order to reach his homeland. But again, they impose a Western perspective which illustrates the vast spiritual distance between us. To the Greeks, the Mediterranean was a terrifyingly huge expanse of ocean, an intolerably hostile environment which dissolved the microcosm of the polis and its environs. And Odysseus, though a clever problem-solver, was not clever enough to set a course for Ithaca and stay it. He in fact possessed very little will in the matter; a far cry from a Columbus or a Magellan- or even the Mycenaeans, who colonized even the Atlantic coast of Spain, far earlier and far more distant than the Greeks ever dared sail.

The Greek colony was not a projection of the mother city’s political power, but a form of cellular mitosis in which an entirely new autonomous city was founded. In their colonization, the Greeks followed literally in the footsteps of the Phoenicians, and oftentimes founded their colonies within visible distance of an already extant Phoenician colony. In each and every case, the tendency of the Greek soul seems to shrink from the distant and the unknown. The Greek city-state’s territory comprised only the land from which the city’s acropolis could be seen, and anything distant from that was a hostile wilderness, the domain of Chaos. Whereas in the West, a state is the projection of a King’s rule, all the land under which his laws and his sovereign force can be applied. But to the Greek, Delphi was a definite, temporally defined body, a single thing. And the society of men that lived therein was simply a “body made up of bodies”.

The Greeks had no special concern for history or the future. No Greek ever thought to excavate Troy, which was exactly where Homer said it was, nor did they pay any attention to the ruins of Mycenae and its imposing fortress, which loomed over Delphi but bore no historic significance to its population. Rather, they simply dismissed it as impossible for man to have constructed, lending its architecture the moniker ‘cyclopean’, despite the man who became known as Agamemnon resting there! Thucydides was an exception; he himself was exiled and likely murdered, and we don’t see his like again until the West rose. And even his fairly meticulous history was only of the very recent past. After the sack and ruin of Athens by the Persians, the Athenians took their destroyed art and heaped it, along with the rubble of houses and other stones, pell-mell into a wall around the city. The Romans literally invented their pre-republic history out of thin air. All that needed to be known was the myth of the legendary founder, which itself occurred in an indeterminate past. Virgil’s Aenead was, rather than a definitive canon, simply an interpretation of a myth that every Roman had heard in a slightly different way. And we can contrast the Greco-Roman attitude towards history with that of the Egyptians and Chinese, both of whom were keeping exhaustively detailed annals before the Greeks had even learned to write.

Now, this is not to say that there are no lessons we can learn from the Greeks, but they are lessons that must be treated as if coming from an alien people and culture, the same way a reactionary can gain insight by reading Confucius. Their materialism led to a meticulous observation of rites and rituals, and they were not shy in considering certain behaviors as pathological to the body social. But on the other hand, they were just as meticulous in observing the rites of foreign gods, who they truly believed to be real entities in the lands of their worship. And only public behavior fell under the scrutiny of Greek moral law. The idea that one could be inwardly sinful, or even have ‘evil intent’ would be considered absurd. The Greek culture and the products of its political thinking and philosophy should not be swallowed hook, line, and sinker as part of the Western tradition.