| | I sanctioned the sentiment despite the ambiguity of authorship and the historical errors.
I am not aware of any barbarain slaves who became philosophers, though the Greek philosopher Diogenes was sold into slavery. That fact underscores the flimsy structure of what we regard as a government founded on political theory of natural rights. That is a very modern idea with few tendril roots in the ancient Greek world. Voting by the citizens was about the extent of it. And those citizens voted to punish Anaxagoras and Aspasia. The Athenians did not welcome foreign Greek ("metic") philosophers. And they condemned Socrates, a citizen. That was why Aristotle fled Athens after the death of Alexander.
Still, we moderns like to dust off the words of Isocrates that the name of Hellene belongs no longer to a race, but to a state of mind. "So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas distinctive no longer of race but of intellect, and the title of Hellene a badge of education rather than of common descent." -- Pangyricus, para. 50 J.A. Freese translation.
True, also, that many famous philosophers of antiquity traveled to Athens specifically to meet other like-minded people.
Also, when Ptolemy II convinced his father to fund the Library at Alexandria, they created a wonder that drew intellectuals from all over. It was then and there - not at Athens - that the word "cosmopolitan" was coined and that the common language was Koine ("union") Greek, not some specific dialect (Ionic, Doric, Aeolic). However, the best event was the collapse of Ptolemaic kingdom. Correct me if I am wrong, but having lost wars against the other successors and their successors, Ptolemy V was forced to reduce the Library staff and sent hundreds of scholars packing. They took their learning to other cities all across the Greek world and sparked a renaissance that we see in the works of Hipparchus and Aristarchus. So, it was not Athens, really, but Alexandria to which we owe thanks.
We in the USA do not perceive Japanese imperialism in Latin America, but the presence of Japanese in Brazil is easy to document; and the fallen president of Peru was Alberto Fujimori. I point also to the "corporate solidarity" expressed by characters in Bruce Sterling's millennialist novel Islands in the Net. I mention that because when I worked for Kawasaki Robotics USA, the treasurer there once said that he thought that "all international people share a common culture."
The nuances in Tibor Machan's family ethnography match my own, but would clearly be lost on anyone in America today. That Slovaks, Slovenes, and Slavonians think they are different peoples is cute ... ignorant, but cute... For 500 years, Croats and Serbs were different people. Then, in the modern era, "Serbo-Croatian" was offered as a single language. However, following the downfall of communism, Serbs and Croats went to war, and the languages (and home cultures) diverged. ("Hard c, soft dick" they say about the orthography.) Like true capitalism, true communism is ideologically opposed to nationalism and ethnicism. One of Ayn Rand's last essays warned against "balkanization" i.e., breaking up global capitalism into islands of ethnicity.
Of course ethnicity is another collectivism, a crude racialist insistence on the accident of birth over the consequences of choice.
As an aside, I occasionally wonder what would have happened if the USA and USSR had agreed to glasnost on Earth as on Mir, and joined in an invasion of Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and then Iran to kick out the mullahs back in 1980-1984. We could have brought science and technology and materialism and rationalism to the entire world and argued economics among ourselves.
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