By: Gilbert Pilayre
Footsteps through Antiquity: Wandering among the Greek Ruins
What I like about Greece is its touch of antiquity. The stone ruins, the huge once functional buildings, as well as the stories and poems written by poets and philosophers. Nothing of sorts can command such nearness in time. Time portals that bring back how lives were before. As I recall how I lectured my bored teenagers that in time we too will not be around anymore but remember through what we left behind. But somehow, I caught myself that this sounds simply hollow. If the meaning in all of this is to leave some form of legacy, it’s too short-sighted. If the priority is how to be remembered when one dies is too vanity-driven, it only serves the hubris but not the practical needs of a people in slave-like conditions. When the future becomes a priority. We will all die; one cannot curate immortality. It stems from the people whose lives became better. That’s where good memories form, like when one fights for freedom from a colonizing power for instance or a class enemy that keeps people to suffer. Ego-driven individuals end up frustrated since everyone knows someone’s dirty secrets, as the saying goes, one cannot grab smoke and put it in their pockets.
Above is my photo of the ruins of Knossos, once famous for its labyrinth and flesh-eating minotaur of the ancient Minoan civilization
Perhaps, the profound wisdom of the ancient Greeks is found in their acceptance of human imperfection. Through their drama and mythology, the ancient Greeks recognized that hubris and vulnerability are woven into the same fabric of existence. In wrestling their own limitations, they gave voice to the universal human condition as once described by the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt – leaving us a timeless reminder that wisdom begins not with absolute certainty but with the courage to confront our own fallibility.