Deep History, Secular Theory

10. The Anti-Individualistic Ideology of Hellenistic Culture

[N]o individual is capable of creating a fully originally gesture, belonging to nobody else…- nor can it even be regarded as that person’s instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.

Milan Kundera (1991, 7)

Historical generalizations are invariably shaped by modern cultural values. One of the dominant values of modern Western culture is individualism, the origins of which tend to be claimed by historians for their own domains of research, with examples extending from sixth-century B. C. Greece through modern Europe. The generalization about a Hellenistic period of history, first made in the nineteenth-century, clearly ...