On Cultural Chauvinism

For who would readily agree that the earth has always existed when historians assure us that the development and improvement and even the discovery of many things are of recent date, and when in the memories and tales of the ancients we find crude men, unkempt rustics, not far removed from wild beasts in their savagery, who did not use the food that we enjoy, but subsisting at first on nuts and berries, only recently began to look for nourishment from the plower furrow; and when we have such faith in the beginning of the world and of the human race itself that we believe that the Golden Age was the first and that subsequent ages degenerated through the baser metals to the last Age of Iron?

And, lest we seem to rely entirely upon the authority of legends, who would not conclude that the earth began at a definite time not so very far in the past when even Greek history does not record salient events more than two thousand years ago? [...] If the world was in the beginning or, as philosophers would have it, before the beginning, why, in the passage of countless ages, was the culture that we now enjoy not discovered? And the knowledge of writing, the sole means of preserving the past? Why, finally, did so many types of experience come so late to some nations, witness the Gauls learning about the vine and the raising of olives at the time when our nation was already fully developed, and other peoples still ignorant of many things that have proved boons to us?

(Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio X)

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Solon said that when he travelled [to Egypt] he was held in great esteem amongst them; moreover, when he was questioning such of their priests as were most versed in ancient lore about their early history, he discovered that neither he himself nor any other Greek knew anything at all, one might say, about such matters. And on one occasion, when he wished to draw them on to discourse on ancient history, he attempted to tell them the most ancient of our traditions, [...] whereupon one of the priests, a prodigiously old man, said, "O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children: there is no such thing as an old Greek."

And on hearing this he asked, "What do you mean?"

And the priest replied, "You are young in soul, every one of you. For therein you possess not a single belief that is ancient and derived from old tradition, nor yet one science that is hoary with age. And this is the cause thereof: there have been and there will be many and divers destructions of mankind, of which the greatest are by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means. [... Because of these,] your people and the others are but newly equipped, every time, with letters and all such arts as civilized States require and when, after the usual interval of years, like a plague, the flood from heaven comes sweeping down afresh upon your people, it leaves none of you but the unlettered and uncultured, so that you become young as ever, with no knowledge of all that happened in old times in this land or in your own."

(Critias, as quoted by Plato, Timæus 21e ff.)

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We, of course, for all our technological sophistication are no better off than the Greeks were.