The origin myth of the modern West

The reason for this continued obsession with ancient Greece is that we believe that our modern Western civilization and culture stems directly from the Greek world. We believe that Western civilization began, had its origins, its birth, in classical Greece, that this kernel of civilization was transmitted through time, through Rome, through medieval Europe, through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and ultimately to the world of the modern West. This imagined genealogy of Western civilization begins in ancient Greece and ends with us, the modern West, today. I think this is why we are ultimately still so interested in the classical world.

The ancient Greek world was spread across three different continents. It was partly located in Europe, but it was also partly located in Africa. For the most part, much of the ancient Greek world was located in the modern continent of Asia. When we think of the modern West, we often think of it as a European and North American geographical construct. Yet, the ancient Greek world was much more Asian than it was European, and it was certainly as African as it was European. This is quite different from the expectations that we might have.

When we look at what happened in antiquity, the heirs of antiquity are not exclusively or even predominantly in Europe. What we find is that the inheritance of classical antiquity is much more distributed than we might initially assume. Greek culture and civilization have left their imprint on many different societies around the world, not just Western culture and society.

The heritage of ancient Greek culture can be clearly seen in the Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox tradition. It is also very evident in the traditions of medieval Islam and especially the scientific traditions that emerged out of that.

Elements of ancient Greek culture and civilization also persisted and survived in Central Asia, as far east as modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. If we map the heirs of ancient Greek culture and civilization, we find that they are not exclusively located in Europe or the modern West at all. In fact, we have Asian, African, European and North American heirs of classical civilization.

In the early medieval period, much of Central and Western Europe is actually seeking to distance itself from Greek antiquity. This is because of the close association of the classical Greek past with the Byzantine present and the traditions of Eastern Christianity that were associated with them. In the early medieval period, right up until the time of the Crusades, the opposition is very much between the Latin West and the Greek East. Therefore Greek antiquity is almost tainted by association.

It is not until later, during the Renaissance, that elements of Greek antiquity become more integrated with that Central and Western European tradition. This happens after the fall of the Byzantine Empire and after the rise of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, and this is certainly partly a response to that. The civilizational lines are no longer between the Latin West and the Greek East, but between the Greco-Latin West and the Islamic East.

However, even these civilizational lines are quite complex and messy for several centuries. It is not really until the turn of the 17th century that we start to find them really crystallizing. It is at this point that we have a rhetoric of a unified Christendom, which brings together the various traditions of Western Latin Christianity combining Catholicism and various forms of Protestantism in opposition to the Ottoman Muslim Turkish world. This really emerges out of the rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and the various Habsburg realms.

In the context of this rhetoric, we begin to hear of a unified line of Europe on the one side, which starts with the Habsburgs and stretches back through Rome and Greece, because these are European ancient powers. That becomes more and more distinct from the Ottoman line, which stretches back through an Asian antiquity, through the Trojans and back to the Persians and the Medes. So we have this growing sense of distinction between Europe and Asia, Christendom and Islam, not just in the present of the late 16th century, but also in the past as well. The classical worlds of antiquity become separated into European and Asian antiquity, just as the contemporary worlds of Europe and Asia were also becoming further and further apart.

This distinction was made not just in the imperial present, but also in the imagined past. We have an increasing sense of a European antiquity, an exclusively European antiquity, which becomes an exclusively white European antiquity, which is linked to Rome and then Greece. This is set in greater and greater opposition to an exclusively non-European, Asian and African non-white antiquity, which becomes linked then to the ancient worlds of the Carthaginians, the Phoenicians, the Trojans, the Persians and the Egyptians, which begin to occupy a very different conceptual space in antiquity as well as in modernity. This is really the birth of the idea of the classical world as something which is distinct and separate from the rest of antiquity.

There's also been a real attempt to decolonize classical antiquity as well, to try and understand the Asian and African elements of the Greco-Roman world and to write them back into history as well

There is a completely different civilizational model there, whereby ancient civilizations can persist and continue into the modern world, with ancient China not being the ancestor of modern China but simply continuing through time and being one and the same entity: a transhistorical, unchanging civilizational entity which persists through human history. Under this conception, the ancient Greek world has never gone. It has never left us. It has merely transformed, changed shape and is still present with us today in the modern nation state of Greece.

In this civilizational model, then, we see several parallel civilizations persisting through time from antiquity to the present day: Greece being one, China being another, other cultures — such as Mesopotamia through to modern Iraq or ancient Persia through to modern Iran — being other parallel, ancient and enduring civilizations. There are different ways of constructing these civilizational narratives and different ways of imagining the relationship between the modern world and the ancient one.

We know now that we are not descended in any straightforward or linear way from the ancient Greeks, neither biologically nor culturally nor civilizationally — but actually, that does not matter, and it should not matter. I think in the modern West we need a new origin myth which allows for rupture, which allows for choice, which allows for diversity. I think the modern West can still look to ancient Greece for inspiration and for its roots, but we need to look back to an ancient Greek world that was diverse, that was geographically dispersed, that was comprised of many interacting individual groups that came together in a form of cultural convergence.

If we see the ancient Greek world as it really was, a world that was forged through cultural interconnections, through cultural convergence, through diverse people coming together, this actually is a foundation myth which I think we can all draw inspiration from today. This would be an origin myth which is much more suited to the modern West as it is now.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025