Tangent

Published: October 27, 2024

Today, I encountered one of the biggest tangents in my life, and I wanted to take note of it.

I was reading A.J. Ayer’s article, The Claims of Philosophy, where I stumbled upon the sentence, “Few men, indeed, can ever have reasoned worse than Hegel, the arch-pontiff of the nineteenth century, but at least he claimed the support of reason for his fantasies.” This made me curious about Hegel (a big mistake).

I had heard a bit about him before but knew nothing in detail, so I searched around and found a two-hour video about him. After an hour, I stopped because it made very little sense to me and switched to another, shorter video by a professor. This one, at 45 minutes, was much more understandable—I highly recommend it.

In the video, the professor said something like, “The classical phase starts with the myths of the gods and then shrinks down to human scale […] if you know the movement from Aeschylus, with his moral rigor and seriousness, to the complete moral abandonment in Euripides […], there is clearly a movement from gods to heroes to men.”

This piqued my curiosity about when these people lived because I recently read Plato’s The Republic, where he already complains about the moral decline (in Book 3, section 1.(b)) in mythological stories, referring to Homer, the most famous poet from whom many great Greek myths, like the Odyssey, come from.

I looked it up and found that Homer was born around 800 BCE, while Euripides was born around 480 BCE, nearly a four hundred years later. It really does seem like throughout history, people have always complained about moral degradation.

From Euripides’ Wikipedia page, I learned that he was prophesied at birth to become a great athlete. This got me curious about the Olympics and whether they continued uninterrupted or were resumed later. It turns out that ancient Greece held around 195 Olympiads (possibly more, if some were unrecorded), and the games were officially resumed in 1896.

This led me to wonder why the games had been paused. They were outlawed by Theodosius I, the last Roman emperor, before the Roman Empire was split into a eastern and a western sections. The split, I think, began with Diocletian, who appointed a co-emperor to help manage the vast empire.

And that was the tangent.