Contents

The intention was to trace ancient Greek thought from the past to the present by looking at the making of the community of man - from villages in hidden valleys to the Polis, foremostly Athens with the Agora and Acropolis besides places of learning (Academies) to the Hellenistic cities like Alexandria based on cosmopolitanism and roads beyond the dream of man.

The exhibition was in one freight wagon and had two large photos covering the entire walls to the left and to the right. The one on the left showed a Greek landscape with one lonely tree on a slope; the other crowded Athens with cars passing by a Kiosk full with newspapers, cigarettes and chocolates to buy.

There were altogether four panels with distinct thematic content:

Panel 1 Archaic Songs - Homer, Sappho, Hesiod - Elytis: translations of Sappho - Now, as then by Melina Mercouri and Homeric Songs Today by Hatto Fischer

Panel 2 Pre-Socratic Thinking, Spirit of Writing, Gate of Fate and the Coming of the Stranger, or Listening to what voices, if not footsteps

Panel 3 History and Law: Measure of Time - Politics and Philosophy - Lessons to be learned from the times of Platon, Socrates and Aristophanes

Panel 4 Breakages and Mediations: Byzantine Scholars after the fall of Agia Sophia - The Square of the Circle: the Illogical, the Metaphysical, Violence and Belief in Miracles - Voices of Modern Poetry

The chapters:

A. Nature: physis and nomos

B. Voices accompanying man on his journey: songs about love and non-Homeric dreams

C. Pre-Socratic thoughts during the Ionian Times freeing thoughts from mythology

D. The looks of the stranger and new rules to live by: from the village to the city, or the measure of things to come

E. The Gate of Fate

F. Measures of life

G. Listening to voices rather than to footsteps

H. The illogical, the metaphysical, violence and beliefs in miracles

I. Learning to listen to the voice of reason

J. Citizenship in the Polis

K. Temples as time frames for perceiving man's inner world as something different from the outer world

L. The rule under the law

M. The economy of thought expressed in so many words

N. Types of self-government, or the unity of man

O. Lessons to be learned out of Ancient Greece: going beyond dreams

Κείμενο: Δρ. Hatto Fischer

A key source for the texts of this exhibition has been the book by Robert Payne. (1964) Ancient Greece. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.

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