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E-book Centaurs, Rioting in Thessaly: Memory and the Classical World
Much of the thought and the practice of human life is irredeem-ably related to Ionia, to Achaea, to classical Greek civilisation. Certainly one, if not the only one, of the central imaginings of ourselves and our world is Ionian. Our mapping of ourselves in our world also owes a huge debt to the classical. The emergence, materialisation, and extra-territorialisation of Ionian spaces of philosophy and democracy indelibly mark our world. The very concept of the human is Ionian even if comparable ideas of the human emerge in the world of Genesis and Gilgamesh. But here darkness emerges just as the human Achaeans emerged from darkness into history. Ionian spaces are also spaces where there are indecisions about whether our being is human or ani-mal, where there are fractures between civilisations resting upon categories of barbarism,2 and where exist the horrors of the Ionian spaces as slave states.3 The Persian expedition of Xenophon was a journey across territory and into battle, but it was also a journey into human separation and a reflection on human darkness. We are but footnotes of Ionian history and philosophy — we replicate time and time again the darkness and the light. The question of the barbarian is central to clas-sical thought in terms of self-definition. Often the confusions about the human have their origins in a process of demarcation between peoples — specifically around the seams and borders between them. But peoples in movement are syncretic even if their hybridities are confusing and often irrational.The porous, permeable boundaries (even if we could detect those borders) of the human are time and time again challenged by the way we imagine ourselves and others. That human-ness, through our capacity to plan and design and imagine, is extended into our buildings and machines and our art. Ionians dissolved and re-imagined their being constantly through play-ing with the ideas of barbarian and animal — and specifically the imagining of Centaurs and other hybrid species. Ionians imagined and designed labyrinths to both lose and find them-selves and others. They fought and eventually conquered the city of Troy — perhaps the origin of some of world history’s most potent, if mundane, labyrinth myths.
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