Wrong Lessons Of Ancient Greeks

The ancient Greeks had a strong misogynistic tendency that they have imparted to many others, and this misogyny has been influential even to this day. There appear to be two reasons for this: A wrong lesson learned from the Iliad, and impossible standards for women.

The Iliad had vast effect on the thinking of ancient Greeks. The epic sees Helen and Paris as the villains and blames them for the destruction of Troy. The real villain was Helen's husband, Menelaus. This man decided that it was right to lead a whole nation into war and destroy a whole city because his wife left him to be with another man. Of whatever hubris Helen and Paris may have been guilty, his hubris was far greater.

A wrong lesson learned is worse than no lesson learned at all. We see this for example with Russia. Russia has a strong authoritarian tradition. That is because they've learned from history that authoritarianism pays. They had quite nice cities that were destroyed by authoritarian Genghis Khan. They had at one point two competing governments – a democracy in Novgorod and a monarchy in Moscow – and Moscow conquered Novgorod. Soviet Union rose to great power under authoritarian Stalin and Brezhnev and was laid low under humanitarian Gorbachev and democratic Yeltsin. Russian men are brutal and authoritarian because that is what history teaches them to be. They have learned a wrong lesson from history, and the result has been a political abomination.

We see the exact same thing with the Iliad. Even if Paris and Helen did something wrong, it did not begin to justify destroying a whole city. What wrong did Hecuba do? What wrong did Hector do? Yet both of them died violent deaths. The real villains were not Paris and Helen. It was Menelaus.

Besides the wrong lessons learned from the Iliad, there is another source of the Greek misogyny. The Greeks applied to women impossible standards – standards that no human woman could meet. If you have ridiculous standards, you will hate most of what comes your way. Similarly we see many women with feminist influences hating men, because they expect from men ridiculous things that no human man can deliver. If you expect the impossible you will be disappointed. In many cases you will become hateful; and this is what we see with both the feminists and the Greeks.

In both cases we see very grave errors. These errors have had a vast negative effect on history and on the Western civilization as such. In one case we see a wrong lesson learned, and in the other case we see a result of applying ridiculous expectations. Neither one of these things deserve to have the power that they have had on the world. It is time that wrong historical lessons be unlearned; and it is time that the power of disappointed impossible expectations be seen for what it is. Remove from society the influence of these errors, and see the world greatly improve both for men and for women.