More recently Alan Cumming has been playing a Greek god in the production The Bacchae, and as we know most Scotsmen resemble Greek gods. But the comparisons between Scotland and Greece go deeper than that. Both are seafaring nations with a long history, both conjure up romantic imagery and associations, and both share a patron saint in St Andrew. More importantly, however, it was Greece that gave the ancient world the foundations of its intellectual life: something that Scotland has done for the modern world.

In the ancient world, there arose one civilization to which all Western eyes would turn for enlightenment: the Greeks. The natural fertility of the land, and the bounty of the sea, fed the people well, and for the first time allowed an educated class to devote themselves entirely to the great questions: why are we here? what is real? how does one live a good life? Drawing on the wisdom of civilizations that had gone before – of Ur, of Babylon, of Egypt – the philosophers of classical Greece enhanced all that had come down to them by examining the world not just through folklore and intuition, but through the lens of reason. The systematized thought of the Greeks would go on to dominate the intellectual life of Western civilization for more than two thousand years.

One of the earliest Greek thinkers familiar to us today is Socrates. Socrates lived from around 470 to 400BCE in Athens, and was a soldier and a stonemason before he gave up work to spend a modest retirement single-handedly inventing Western philosophy. He left no written works himself, so what we know of him comes through contemporary writers such as Xenophon, Aristophanes, and his most famous student, Plato. Socrates would wander the markets and public squares of ancient Athens, debating truth and ethics with anyone who would engage him. It was his refusal to believe anything he did not know that, tragically, led to his downfall. His unconventional views on morality and religion brought him into conflict with the authorities: he was put on trial for "corrupting the youth of Athens" and "disbelief in the gods", found guilty, and sentenced to death. He performed his own execution by drinking the poison hemlock.

Although the powerful had killed who Plato called "the wisest and most just of all men", his intellectual martyrdom was not wholly in vain. Plato, a driven man following his beloved master's unjust death, continued in Socrates' tradition and achieved greatness in his own right. He applied Socrates' technique of ceaseless questioning to build a new philosophy of civics and virtue, laid the foundations of much of modern mathematics and geometry, and established the Academy – the ancient world's first great seat of learning, so influential that its very name became synonymous with scholarship. Plato, in turn, taught Aristotle, who broadened the field of philosophy to include the natural world, and became one of the founders of what today we know as science.

Among Aristotle's students was the son of King Philip II of Macedon, a precocious youth named Alexander. Alexander – remembered by history as Alexander The Great – had conquered much of the known world, from Egypt to distant India, at the time of his death just shy of his thirty-third birthday. His conquests ushered in a new era of Greek civilization, known as the Hellenistic period, that saw the Greek language and Greek thought come to prominence throughout the classical world. The centres of Greek culture moved outside Greece itself, particularly to Alexandria in Egypt, the home of the Great Library, the largest repository of knowledge in the world at the time. Even after the Greek states were conquered by newly-ascendant Rome, Greek remained the language of scholarship in the Roman Empire, and the Greek philosophers remained highly thought of, providing the basis for everything that was to come after them from the Roman stoic philosophers to the reinterpreted Platonism and Aristotelianism of the early Christian Church.

"We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilization"
Voltaire

Many centuries later, the Greeks inspired a flowering of intellectual inquiry to rival ancient Athens closer to home. The spirit of questioning assumptions and reluctance to accede to authority that was born on the shores of the Aegean was behind the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment that swept Europe in the 18th century, and its home was here in Scotland.

The Scottish Enlightenment transformed a world of received teachings and social orders set in stone by Kings and Churches into a recognizably modern world of individual liberty, free thought and free trade: a world where humanity has value and virtue of its own, not just that bestowed by authority; a world that encouraged philosophical and scientific innovation rather than suppressing it.

The first major thinker of what is now recognized as the Scottish Enlightenment was Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), an Ulster Scot educated in Glasgow. Hutcheson argued that humanity's senses of beauty, honour and morality are not imparted to us by the teachings handed down to us, but are within ourselves, as much a part of our nature as our senses of sight and hearing. This was in stark contrast to the then accepted political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who believed that humanity is by nature cruel and brutish and must be firmly ruled to protect us from ourselves.

Hutcheson influenced the thoughts of one of the best remembered philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. A great polymath, Hume was as successful a historian and economist as he was a philosopher. His History of England was the standard text on the subject for many years, but it is for his sceptical approach to philosophy that he is best known worldwide. Hume was among the first modern thinkers to advance a theory of morality that was independent of both divine mandate, and abstract moral absolutes. He concluded that morality could not give us an infallible guide on how to act, rather a basis to make judgements for ourselves on our own actions, and that concern for the wellbeing of others, not adherence to any particular set of rules, was the foundation of a moral life.

Our modern understanding of economics also traces its roots to the Scottish Enlightenment, in the form of Adam Smith. Born in Kirkcaldy, and educated in Glasgow and Oxford, Smith is best remembered for his treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith realized that in the increasingly modern economy, as it moved away from agriculture towards industry, wealth originated not from land (as was previously believed) but from labour. His arguments are at the heart of modern capitalism: he famously used the example of a pin factory to demonstrate the effectiveness of the division of labour; he was a passionate defender of free trade as a force for the benefit of all, not just the few; and introduced the idea of a self-regulating market economy. He is quoted as saying, "Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men."

The Scottish Enlightenment ideas of personal liberty and responsibility swept the world. They were at work in the French and American revolutions, they came down to the campaigners who fought to abolish the slave trade, they shaped the economic future of the entire world. The intellectual climate brought about in Scotland paved the way for great Scottish scientists and engineers like James Watt, whose improvements to the steam engine heralded the Industrial Revolution, James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin, the grandfathers of modern physics, and James Hutton, whose ideas on geology gave rise to the modern science.

The legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment is still alive today wherever people struggle to free themselves from tyranny and bondage.

Cultural links between Scotland and Greece are not limited to history by any means: strong ties are in place in the present day. The literary, intellectual and architectural gifts of the ancient Greeks to the world are a seemingly inexhaustible source of scholarly investigation and, as is so often the case, Scottish academics and universities are among the world leaders in its pursuit.

Professor John Underhill of the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh believes that working together with literary experts he has discovered the location of Homer's Ithaca, kingdom of the legendary adventurer Odysseus. It had been believed that Homer's Ithaca was either a complete fiction, or was intended to be the island known today as Ithaka, distorted by the author's lack of knowledge of the local geography, but Underhill's team have suggested that it was on Paliki, a peninsula of the island of Kefalonia. The epic poet Homer, known to us only through his great works The Iliad and The Odyssey that tell of the Trojan war and Odysseus' long and eventful journey home, wrote in detail about the landscape of Ithaca, and the features described do not match up with those of the island known by that name today. The team matched up the literary clues about Ithaca from The Odyssey with the geography of Paliki, and used modern geological techniques to establish that in Homer's time (around the 7th century BCE) it could well have been an island, not attached to Kefalonia as it is now. If the findings are confirmed, it will represent an achievement comparable to Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy itself, a city once believed to be mythical.

Given the spread of Greek and Scottish ideas around the world, it is perhaps appropriate that the only university in the world that is home to both a Centre for Scottish Studies and a School of Hellenic Studies should be in the North American Pacific Rim. Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada is named after the explorer Simon Fraser, the son of Scottish highlanders, who was the first European to explore the area where Vancouver now stands, giving his name to the Fraser River, at whose delta Vancouver was built.

Winston Churchill once said, "Off all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind." It should perhaps therefore be no surprise that so many Scots have been chosen to portray ancient Greeks in modern cinema and theatre. Our new first minister is also fond of looking back to the inspiration of Greece and has noted that, 'Philip of Macedonia – is reputed to have said "Athens is not a city or a state but an idea." Thus it is with Scotland. Scottishness is not a single concept. There is no one definition. It is something that exists in the heart and in the head.'

Like the ancient Greeks, our contribution to human kind has been far from small.

Further Information:

Courtesy of Scottish Government - Scotland.org . 

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