"What is Europe?" is an interesting
question.
Old it certainly is, and we conservatives tend to think of Europe as the center of everything as a consequence of a long historical development, especially in the wake of the rise of America as the western outpost of "The West" to become the leader of the free world. But from the beginning, obviously, it was not so, but how?
The Greek mythology put the navel of the world, the center, at Delphi, to which east and west came to consult the famous oracle. From this mythology Europe specifically was first associated with the west conceptually from the simple geographic situation of the oracle's position beneath Parnassus to its west, as first expressed in the "Homeric" Hymn to Pythian Apollo, perhaps dating to as early as the 6th century BC:
"Further yet you went, far-shooting Apollo, until you came to the town of the presumptuous Phlegyae who dwell on this earth in a lovely glade near the Cephisian lake, caring not for Zeus. And thence you went speeding swiftly to the mountain ridge, and came to Crisa beneath snowy Parnassus, a foothill turned towards the west: a cliff hangs over it from above, and a hollow, rugged glade runs under. There the lord Phoebus Apollo resolved to make his lovely temple, and thus he said:
'In this place I am minded to build a glorious temple to be an oracle for men, and here they will always bring perfect hecatombs, both they who dwell in rich Peloponnesus and the men of Europe and from all the wave-washed isles, coming to question me. And I will deliver to them all counsel that cannot fail, answering them in my rich temple.'”
And so we "of the west", of Europe, are so because the Greeks originally said so.
The Romans were the first westerners to acknowledge their debt to Greece, and they demonstrated it in so many ways, but chiefly through imitation of Greece's literature and art, the surest form of flattery. Through conquest of Europe they spread that sense of debt to Greece to all the peoples of the continent, and beyond.
That is why we still feel the pull of Europe, despite all the forces arrayed against us seeking to break its spell over us. But the center is really Greece. If we want to be stronger as the people of The West, we ought to take a cue from those old Romans and commit ourselves anew to imitating the best ourselves, just as the great men of the Renaissance did. And one can do it in English, too, simply by immersing oneself in the authors which formed the basis of Johnson's Dictionary, for example. It's what I do everyday, just to anchor myself to the best of the past in order to make the best a part of my too often sorry, vulgar present.
