
Originally Posted by
athanaric
Well TWC has a relatively large body of people who jerk off to ancient Greek culture and can't imagine any other European culture existing without it. Feels like 19th century sometimes.
That said, ancient Greek culture is grand and has contributed many important components to the human civilization of today. I'm not so sure about "better" or "worse" civilizations, I don't think it's very productive to judge them in such a way (unless there is an obvious imbalance - for example: Lebanese culture, whatever its flaws may be, is infinitely superior to Salafism). They all have their advantages and disadvantages, and they've all copied from another culture at some point of their development. Greek and Persian culture for example both owe very much to ancient Mesopotamian and Near Eastern cultures, and Arab culture owes very much to all of these.
As for the "no slaves" thing, it's a bit more complicated than that. In cultures where you have few or no slaves sensu stricto, like in ancient Persia or in most Christian cultures, you typically have serfs to fill that niche, whose lot isn't really much better. There are some religions or ideologies which are more in favour of slavery than others, for example the slave warrior caste of Islamic cultures (ghulams or janissaries) would be a strange concept to the feudal Ancient Iranian or Medieval European societies, who depended on free nobles to form the warrior elite.
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