A lot of people don't know that my background is completely classical. For a while there, I was all about Moliere and the Greeks and Brecht and Tennessee Williams.
Many people have been pontificating, and patronizing, and moralizing, and scapegoating, saying you Greeks, you are the problem. I would say we Greeks have a problem. We are not the problem.
So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there - fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many.
We, to some degree, are like what we are because we inherited certain things from the Greeks and the Romans. One of them that's so striking is the whole area of politics.
The ancient Greeks were the first ones to say an unexamined life is not worth living. They don't tell you of course what we found out, an examined life not that fascinating either.
I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
