# Quote — Martin Bernal, Black Athena

> [Winckelmann] loved every aspect of his image of Greece, seeing its two dominant essences as liberty and youth. According to him Greece epitomized freedom, while Egyptian culture had been stunted by its monarchism and conservatism and was the symbol of rigid authority and stagnation — which also happened to be non-European. In his mind, the Greek city-states contained the liberty without which it was impossible to create great art. Winckelmann, and his followers, loved this liberty and youth for their freshness and vitality. Yet he insisted upon the soft gentleness of Greek art, and the ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘serene greatness’ of Greek culture as a whole, which he saw as the result of the equable Greek climate. Moreover, central to his love of Greece was his appreciation of Greek homosexuality. Winckelmann himself was homosexual, and the major homosexual strand which has persisted in modern Hellenism has continued to be associated with him.

- Author: [Martin Bernal](https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-bernal.md)
- Book: [Black Athena](https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-bernal/black-athena.md)
- Page: 213
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Bernal#Volume_1_(1987)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-bernal/black-athena/winckelmann-loved-every

## More from this book

> The same social and intellectual forces that had brought down the Ancient Model in the 1820s were even more intense in the 1840s and 50s, and they clearly played a role in the increasingly ‘northern’ picture of Ancient Greece that developed in the late 19th century. At the same time, the sense that only 19th-century men knew how to think ‘scientifically’ gave the – mainly German – scholars the confidence both to dismiss ancient descriptions of early Greek history and to invent new ones of their own without any regard to the Ancients.

p. 441 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-bernal/black-athena/the-same-social.md)

> The Greek War of Independence...united all Europeans against the traditional Islamic enemies from Asia and Africa.This War – and the philhellenic movement, which supported the struggle for independence – completed the already powerful image of Greece as the epitome of Europe. The Ancient Greeks were now seen as perfect, and as having transcended the laws of history and language. Thus it was now thought profane to study any aspect of their culture as one would the culture of other peoples. Moreover, with the rise of a passionate and systematic racism in the early 19th century, the ancient notion that Greece was a mixed culture that had been civilized by Africans and Semites became not only abominable but unscientific. Just as one had to discount the ‘credulous’ Greeks’ stories about sirens and centaurs, so one had to reject legends of their having been colonized by inferior races. Paradoxically, the more the 19th century admired the Greeks, the less it respected their writing of their own history.

p. 441 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-bernal/black-athena/the-greek-war.md)

> This view of Egyptian religion played a central role in the two major ‘novels’ of the 2nd century AD, Heliodoros’ Aithiopika and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass. In his morally elevating and romantic story with a beautiful and virtuous Ethiopian – but not black – heroine, Heliodoros expressed great admiration for the Ethiopians and their gymnosophists (naked philosophers or gurus), but Aithiopika is focused on Egypt and the moral superiority of its religion. It also stresses the passionate interest taken in it by Greek priests, who saw it as the key to their own cults. When talking about the priests of Delphi bombarding a visiting Egyptian with questions, the author wrote: "In short, they forgot none of the interesting features of Egypt, for there is no country in the world which Greeks prefer to hear about."

p. 119 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/martin-bernal/black-athena/this-view-of-egyptian.md)