Ancient Greece:

the groundwork for today’s occidental culture.

curated collection from several books printed in the mid XIX century.

“Unique” is a loaded word but when it comes to defining the ancient Greek civilization it comes in handy: imagine a number of small peoples scattered on a not very large land surrounded by the sea, connected to each other by ‘almost’ common languages, myths, traditions, commerce, and more often than not also bloody wars.

What spurred them to develop such a high level of culture, logic, critical thinking, philosophy, abstraction, mathematics, aesthetic, literature, art, that it survived for millennia and influenced so deeply even today’s way of seeing the world? Was it competition? Was it curiosity? Ingenuity? Need? Leisure time to philosophise while their slaves took care of the trivial work? Your guess is as good as mine, however that’s what they actually did.

A sort of miracle, if you will: in that small corner of the world saw the light Socrates, Plato, Homer (whoever he or they were…), Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Hippocrates, Democritus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (just to name a few), immortal names who laid the foundations for something that still lives and might still survive for millennia.

About the visual treatment

Captions are presented in a clear modern format to assist interpretation while maintaining visual separation from the original engravings

The engravings of ‘800 that purportedly depict the ancient Greek culture look inspired by a romantic ideal of harmony and aesthetic that may or may not belong to the originals, but nevertheless they provide quite a plausible representation of them.

I rummaged through my books looking for the rarest ones and eventually dwelt on those fascinating pottery jars depicting in ocher and black the ancient myths as well as everyday scenes; processing them properly was no easy job, mostly due to the poor conditions of the originals, but I think it was worth the while.

Two of them struck me particularly – let’s have a look at them:

An allegory of democracy: the people is represented as an ox, being watered by a winged Goddess on one side while on the other side another woman (another Goddess? The owner?) flogs him viciously.

Apparently the ancient Greeks had a fine sense of humor as well 

That’s funny: in Italian there’s still a figure of speech, “il popolo bue” (the ox-people) to allude to a huge amorphous human mass lacking any intelligence or will of its own (ahem, plus ça change…).

Another image – from an amphora, I guess upon its contours – brings our fantasy back in time: a school, and a boy types on a laptop (???)… or does he just write with a stylus on a wax-covered board?

Be it as it may, if it’s a laptop it’s obviously fully charged, for there’s no visible power cord connected 

But don’t let this bizarre Hamlet doubt deflect your attention from a quite remarkable fact: almost 5000 years back, when our ancestors were probably still fighting over a dead rat, even Greek boys could write!

Who this set is for

Ideal for:

– Editorial and publishing professionals

– Graphic and type designers

– Printing historians and researchers

– Museums and educational institutions

– Book design and publishing projects

– Decorative wall art for studios, libraries, and print workshops

45 high resolution images, zip file of 246 MB to download

Simplified license explained