Thought of the Week - 10th July

This week I abandoned the notion that the ancient Greek civilization was a continuous civilization all the way from the late Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period, at least in the minds of the ancient Greeks. It seems like an absurd thing to have thought but I had never really considered the Greeks of the classical period as 'other' than the Greeks of the archaic period. They were the same people in my mind even though I knew that the culture, politics, technology and everything else had changed around them. I had this epiphany while reading the opening chapter of the first book of Thucydides' A History of the Peloponnesian War' where he gives a summary of the history of Greece from the pre-Mycenaean period to the classical period when he was writing. Since the actual history of the Peloponnesian war really starts from chapter two, I had always skipped this chapter before. But this afternoon, bored and finding nothing else to do, I gave it a read and was surprised to find Thucydides obviously treating the ancient-er Greeks as 'other' to himself. That chapter clearly has an 'us vs. them' feel to it similar to something one could find in a history book today which talks about the Romans. After giving it some thought, I realized that the Mycenaeans Thucydides was talking about lived a thousand years before him. Other than geography, there was no reason for him to think of them as continuous people. Upon reflection, I found that I myself didn't really think of the generation that lived through the first world war as a continuous people of which I was a part. The second world war, yes, but not the first. I think that has something to do with the fact that I have never really known anybody who lived through the first world war. My grandparents were alive during the second and I could talk to them about it but I couldn't have ever talked to anyone about how it felt to have lived through the first. So basically, do we innately disown the people who are out of living memory for us and relegate them to cold history instead of warm human-ness? Do we, as humans, thus always only have a fixed period of time which we consider as 'us' and so everyone predating 'us' becomes 'them'? Will I, sixty years down the line, become a 'them'?