The former President of the Republic and Honorary Professor of the School of Law of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Mr. Prokopios Pavlopoulos spoke on the topic "The "Message" of Salamis for the defense of Greek and European Culture" at the event of the Municipality of Salamis and the Union of Cypriot Greece, with the theme "Salamina 480 BC – Greece 1821 – The Cyprus of Struggle”. In his speech, Mr. Prokopios Pavlopoulos pointed out, among other things, the following:
"Participating in this emblematic event of the Municipality of Salamina and the Union of Cypriots of Greece, I have to start from the starting point of the historical moment, which, in this way, leads us 2,500 years ago. Then came the "epic" conflict between Ancient Greece - and specifically some of the City-States that made it up - and the Persian Empire, "epic" in terms of the size of the data that caused it. To remember the epitaph of Aeschylus the Marathoner, the conflict in which the Free Greek and the despotic "deep-seated Medes" faced each other in the "Marathonion Grove".
A. The Median Wars - with the "scale" of historical evaluation "tilting" towards the Naval Battle of Salamis, since it definitively decided the end of these Wars - are, undoubtedly, to this day a kind of "Matrix" of History. "Womb", because it "gave birth" to real History, in the sense that the results of the Median Wars exerted a decisive influence on the subsequent historical course. It would be futile to document the truth of the above statement, which is self-evident based on the Science of History. I content myself with one, and only, testimony, which, because of its representativeness, predisposes adequately. The great British Philosopher John Stuart Mill had pointed out, aphoristically, that:"The Battle of Marathon, even as a military event concerning the History of England, is more important than the Battle of Hastings". That is, the battle of 14.10.1066, in which the Normans, led by William, defeated the Anglo-Saxons of King Harold II of England, consolidating Norman sovereignty. Apparently, John Stuart Mill, with this remark, wanted to show that the eventual victory of the Persians in the Median Wars would have such an influence on the rest of Europe that it would be extremely doubtful whether the Battle of Hastings would have occurred.
B. The persuasions of History in general, and of the History of Civilization in particular, therefore demonstrate that, through their victory in the Median Wars, the Greeks also defended the Civilization, which they created - and which stands, even today, as its first pillar of our common European Culture – setting, for the first time in World History, the since fixed boundary between East and West. At the same time, through their victory in the Median Wars, the Greeks demonstrated the overwhelming superiority and, by logical sequence, the categorical opposition of the unruly and creative Ancient Greek Spirit against the spirit of every illiberal form of state organization, with basic elements of despotism, individual or collective. So, also his categorical opposition to any force that could threaten the "open society", in which only free intellectual creation can exist.
C. This influence of the free, unruly and creative Ancient Greek Spirit is sufficiently documented by the fact that its multi-prismatic and almost liberal constitution could not, under any historical and political version, be reconciled with completely illiberal forms of state organization, namely state organization with basic elements of totalitarian despotism, individual or collective. After all, the Ancient Greek Spirit favored the "rise" of Direct Democracy and "peaked" its creation especially when the state organization of Ancient Athens reached the culmination of Direct Democracy. The above statement is strengthened, from a historical and political point of view, if one looks at the way of organization and development of the great Kingdoms of the East at the time, with the Persian Kingdom being the most representative example:The human spirit, as stated above, is not able to evolve and to create freely under a regime of despotism which, unfortunately, sets him limits inherent in the needs of despotic survival.
D. What was clarified before, regarding the contrast between the "open society" - of course by the measures of the time and the opposite facts of the East, and not under the conditions of the modern version of the "open society" - that prevailed in Ancient Greece, especially after the victory of the Greeks in Marathon and Salamis, and in the "closed circle" of the social structures of the Kingdoms of the East, which developed as institutionally and politically "subservient" to the respective monarchical "holders", highlight and justify, among others, and the following difference between the West and the East:The despotism of the East, with the aforementioned characteristics and especially due to a lack of Freedom, led not to the creation of a "society" but to the organization of a "community", essentially structured on closed "castes", intended not so much to facilitate the organization of social coexistence, as to allow any form of authority to be imposed as "principle" against "principles".
The "roads of freedom" which, as mentioned above, were opened and led by the Ancient Greek Spirit on the way to the culmination of its creation - which formed its priceless legacy for the future of European Civilization - also led to the final synthesis of the quintessence of Freedom, roughly as we perceive it today. That is, of a Freedom, which is in our time the basic, institutional and political support of the Representative Democracy, as a means of state organization that provides it with the most reliable guarantees for the unfettered exercise of the Fundamental Rights of Man.
Follow News247.gr on Google News and be the first to know all the news