The purpose of this paper is to show how the American society has been greatly influenced by ancient Greece. The influences that have affected our society are from Greek people, architecture, literature, clothing, philosophy, mathematics, science, games, food, schooling, women's life, and religion.
The Greeks had a general tendency to divide the world into pairs of things, one opposed to the other. They saw everything as divided into two parts, which fought with each other all the time. So they tended to divide people into two groups too. There are a lot of different ways to divide people. One important way is to divide people from animals, the Greeks said that people were different from animals because animals ate their food raw, and people at theirs cooked. Also, people have rational thought, but animals do not. People are also divided from gods. People eat food, and gods do not.
Detail of The School of Athens by Raffaello Sanzio...
Parthenon from west
As Greek as it getsPeople die, but gods do not. Another way of looking at these divisions is to divide Greek people from barbarians, people who are not Greek. The Greeks called all foreigners barbarians, even if they were civilized like the Egyptians or the Persians. Or you can divide men from women. The Greeks did feel that men and women were very different, and naturally opposed to each other. Men, in the Greek view, were rational, thinking, stable, normal creatures, while women were irrational, hysterical, and dangerous. If you had to take sides, and the Greeks always took sides, men were more like gods, while women were more like animals. The Greeks also divided people into different age groups. These were teenaged boys and young men. Finally, you can divide slaves and free people. The Greeks made this distinction less than the others because a slave can become free, and a free person...