The Son Supplants the Father

When as a college undergraduate I was first instructed about Socrates, I was taught to believe that he lived in an age when the “traditional Greek religion” was in full retreat. The mythopoetic worldview of the Greeks had collapsed, or was in the process of collapsing. And philosophy was actually born out of this collapse, contributing to and arguably hastening the end of Greek religion. Philosophy, that is to say, was a kind of epitaphic swan song, offered in memoriam of the poets’ dying Olympians. What I was not taught at the time was how very modern this notion of philosophyas- one-thing-and-religion-as-another actually is; it would have made little sense to the Greeks themselves. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Art · Epistemology · Greeks · Literature · SOCRATES · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · History · Philosophy

• The footnote

  Anthony Grafton•The footnote•1997

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