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Piece I wrote on the even now under-estimated impact of Grecco-Roman Culture, and how Modern Culture IS just classical culture with some odd conceits thrown in.
I Contrast Harold Bloom's "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" and his thesis that most of what westerners consider "Human Nature" are actually just cultural artifacts of how our culture has adapted Shakespearean psychological ideas and self conceptions... Which would not hold across cultures unexposed to Shakespeare or Shakespeare inspired fiction and narratives...
And I contrast Ancient Greek Texts with biblical texts, with shocking results.
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Notes -
I think the cultural impact of single people, especially Shakespeare, is usually overstated. He didn't invent the yo momma joke. Our first record of it is in 3500 BC. He didn't invent 1700 words either; really he didn't invent any but rather took old words, slightly modified them, and used them in new contexts. If you think about it for a moment this makes sense--why in the world would he make up a random nonsense word and assume audiences would just follow along based on context clues? He wasn't that influential in his time.
He and specific Greek authors both came up with a few new ideas, but mostly parroted existing ideas and memes in a format which has long outlived their true "origins" (inasmuch as such ideas can actually have origins, rather than simply having existed since the beginning of human culture with slight modifications over the years).
EDIT: said "understated", meant "overstated"
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