Think of the ancient Greeks and we form a picture in our heads either of old bearded men talking philosophy or ripped warriors tearing their enemies to shreds. Ancient Greece seems full of such contradictions. A place that invented democracy but also ran on slave labour, that idolised youth but left children to die through exposure. The key questions for Dr Michael Scott in Who Were The Greeks? – the two-part series he wrote and presented for BBC Two – was how to make sense of those contradictions, how to understand what made ancient Greece tick.
What was really exciting about this challenge was bringing together traditional historical investigations with hard-core archaeology and science. The use of infra-red imaging in the British Museum, for example, to see ancient coloured paint (Egyptian blue) never seen before on the Parthenon marbles. For Dr Scott, the most thought-provoking piece of evidence was the well in Athens containing the bodies of infants and dogs, which is examined in the first part. It symbolised how different this world was. Why throw dogs into a well with dead babies?
But, in seeing the bones of these children, and in recognising the markings of killer childhood diseases like meningitis, or defects like cleft palate, it was impossible not to be overwhelmed by sadness, grief and pity. The same human emotions I suspect that affected the mothers and fathers of these children 2,000 years or so before.
You can read the transcript for the first ten minutes of the documentary here.
