THE COOKS’ TOUR SYNDROME

Abstract

The western world, from ancient times, say from Herodotus onward, was and is interested in how others live. Herodotus’s Histories was unabashedly curious about the lives of the Egyptians, Persians, and other races that inhabited the immediate or remote environs of ancient Greece. The then-Gmk world, while conscious of the intellectual and social power of the Greeks vis-a-vis other races, did not descend to the peddling of romantic made-up stories of other peoples; this culminated in later European tales, the keystone of which was Mandeville’s Travels. The Greeks and the later Romans, while maintaining the essential superiority of Greeks and Romans, nonetheless were inclined to the view that there were social and economic gradations among the Greeks and the Romans themselves. The fruits of Graeco-Roman civilization were reserved for those who were “gently” born. The decision makers, as well as most philosophers (the ultimate thinkers of those times), came from socially privileged groups. There were a few exceptions: The philosopher Solon was held to be an oil-seller, a fact that Plutarch never fails to belabor in his Parallel Lives. In fact, Plutarch’s work reads like an ancient Almanach de Gotha or Burke‘s Peerage. The Romans, who, unlike the ancient Greeks, conquered a large part of Euro-Asia, were careful to limit citizenship to specific foreigners. Among native-born Romans, aristocratic birth was the key to social and ...