can u send me essay on the past is a guide to mordern life
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Hey! I couldn't find what you exactly looking for but got this from a book which was similar from your question. Hope it helps. You can change words as it is from a novel.
This is tricky territory. The ancient world looks as if it is populated by people "just like us", not least because it is the great minds of the classical world – Virgil, Homer, Plato, Cicero and the rest – who have informed so much of our intellectual inheritance, from the humanists onwards. Read certain love poems by the Roman writer Catullus, and you can almost hear him breathing, so close and immediate do the emotions that flood out of those words appear to be. But the worlds of classical Greece and ancient Rome are also irretrievably alien, separated from us by thousands of years, utterly foreign by way of everything from religion and ritual to their universal acceptance of a slave-based economy (even Spartacus believed in slavery, he just didn't want to be one).
Ancient Athenian democracy, for example, had very little to do with our modern political system in Britain: the problem is that we have inherited the Greek word (the original meaning is "grip of the people", so it's an idea with an inbuilt critique). Athenian democracy, which – even if it was retrospectively glorified in texts such as Pericles's Funeral Oration – began as a pragmatic solution to a very real set of political problems that just happened to work out rather well for the family of its founding father. (The statesman Pericles and the gorgeous Alcibiades were both of the same family as Cleisthenes, the aristocrat credited with Athens's democratic reforms.
Sometimes the conclusions for modern life that Haynes draws from the ancient world can seem rather banal. Does the fact that Greek officials were paid a workman's wage mean that modern politicians could usefully take a pay-cut? Will thinking about Plato's theory of forms really make us hesitate when considering the purchase of a new electronic gadget? Does the fact that the emperor Caligula died at the hand of the head of the Praetorian Guard really teach us not to tease policemen? (Surely Haynes has her tongue in her cheek with that last one.)