In Alexander the Great with Sir Richard Burton, Alexander’s tutor Aristotle proclaims that the Persians (Iranians) worship gods with animal heads. The Greeks, on the other hand, worship anthropomorphic gods; gods whom humans can understand and to whom humans can relate. The underlying theme is, or at least should be, that the Persians (and most of what is now the Islamic world) worshipped gods who were beyond human understanding or power. They might be propritiated with prayers and offerings but humans were generally at their mercy. In contrast, the Greek pantheon and the legends that went with it taught that humans were responsible for their own destinies.

The concept of self-reliance and human power were so important to the Greeks, in fact, that their gods could be and sometimes were wounded by mortals. During the Trojan War, for example, the war god Ares fought on the Trojan side and slaughtered Greeks right and left. The goddess Athena encouraged the hero Diomedes to attack Ares, which he did quite successfully. Although Ares could not be killed, he could not bear the pain of the wounds that he was willing enough to inflict on mortals so he fled to Olympus, where Zeus derided him as a coward.

The Greek gods encompassed human virtues and even had human vices. The war god Ares was a cowardly bully and a negative role model, i.e. someone who should not be imitated. Zeus was unfaithful to his wife but he generally favored justice; he was therefore the image of a good if not perfect king. Hephaestos (Vulcan), the artisan and architect of the gods, was lame so he created robots to help him get around his workshop. In other words, the idea that machinery could lift the burden of labor from the backs of humans comes from the Greeks. The water wheel, steam engine, and now the industrial robot all come from the Greeks’ ability to imagine such possibilities even if they could not reduce them to practice. We owe to the Greeks the idea that we can, through our own efforts, improve the world in which we live as opposed to waiting for Big-Daddy-that-Sits-In-Sky to hand us good harvests, wealth, and so on.

This premise is reinforced by the legend of Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus. Epimetheus, whose name means “hindsight,” squandered all the gods’s gifts such as speed, strength, thick hides, and sharp teeth on the lower animals so that, when it came time to give a gift to Man, none were left. Prometheus (”Foresight”) gave Man the power of thought, thus making him superior to all the other animals. Humans might lack the lion’s teeth, claws, and overwhelming strength but they could make spears and bows. Then they could kill lions without coming within reach of their teeth and claws. The obvious lesson is that God (or the gods) gave us the gift of intelligence so we could improve the world in which we live, as opposed to waiting for Big-Daddy-That-Sits-In-Sky to do everything for us.

In contrast, consider the Arabian Nights. Aladdin, a lazy boy from Central Asia, has the good fortune to find a magical lantern and then makes it work almost by accident. In other words, fortune falls into his lap much as the discovery of vast oil reserves has enriched the modern Arab world. Unlike the typical Euro-American hero, Aladdan does little to earn his fortune although he must fight an evil sorcerer to keep it. His wife kills the sorcerer by poisoning his meal: a dishonorable and hardly-innovative or creative tactic. Perhaps the most “Greek” hero of the Arabian Nights is the fisherman who finds a genie bottle whose occupant has vowed to kill whomever releases him. The fisherman proclaims that he cannot believe that the huge genie could have ever fit in the little bottle, wherepon the gullable genie goes back inside to prove that he did. At this point, the fisherman rams the stopper into place to keep him there. (Hercules similarly duped the simple-minded Atlas into picking up the world again by asking him to hold it a moment while he made his lion skin into a pad for his shoulders.)

Although the theme of Homer’s Iliad is the rage of Achilles, the Greeks probably found the character of Odysseus far more appealing. Odysseus does not want to go to war but he does so to honor an agreement he had with the other kings. Although he is a capable warrior, it is of course his intellect and not his strength that finally gets the Trojans to open their gates. During the Odyssey, his ten-year voyage home, he must again rely on his intelligence to save his men and himself. As an example, when a Cyclops captures the Greeks and declares that he is going to eat them, Odysseus first gets the Cyclops drunk and then he and his men ram a sharp wooden rod into his eye. Upon returning home to find his house and wife in the power of numerous Suitors, he puts together yet another plan to trap and slaughter the whole lot of them. The story of Odysseus (Ulysses) again underscores the working of the Greek mind, to which our Euro-American culture has the privilege of being heir.

Hercules further exemplifies the Greek thought process. The hero had to rely on his wits as often as he had to rely on his strength to solve seemingly-impossible problems. When his arrows bounced off the Nemean Lion’s impenetrable hide, he strangled the monster; he realized that the hide, while impenetrable, had to be flexible and he could therefore crush its neck. Instead of shoveling out the Augean Stables, he diverted a river through them and made the water do the hard (and dirty) work for him. The idea of making a river do work, of course, is why we have hydroelectric power.

Hercules was among Alexander the Great’s favorite role models and Alexander’s career is almost an extension of the Labors of Hercules. Like Hercules, he altered geography itself by building an artificial isthmus to attack the supposedly-invulnerable fortress of Tyre. He cut the Gordian Knot while proclaiming that the challenge was to undo it as opposed to untying it. His battle tactics were incomprehensible to the Persians, whom he routed routinely. As an example, his men dealt with a chariot attack by opening their ranks and letting the chariots spend their force on empty space. In another battle, he charged King Darius’ own bodyguard for the purpose of killing the Persian monarch or, even better, getting him to turn tail and run– which he did. Alexander calculated correctly that he did not have to beat a million Persians to win, he needed to beat only one– as long as the one was Darius.

It is of further note that the ideals embodied in Hercules and Alexander are so important to our culture that numerous movies have been made about them. Hercules movies have been around since the 1940s or so, including a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger and a television series with Kevin Sorbo. There have been at least two movies about Alexander the Great. The first (and better, despite the older cinematic technology) starred not only Richard Burton but other major-name actors like Frederic March and Peter Cushing.

It is quite likely that the mindset that Europeans inherited from the Greeks and Romans equipped them to break free of the medieval Church’s dogma and superstition. Although the Church threatened Galileo for using a telescope to explore the heavens, science began to overwhelm religious dogma during the seventeenth century. This never happened in the Islamic world, where independent thinkers are threatened with execution even in the twenty-first century. The bottom line is that the Islamic world has contributed nothing whatsoever to human advancement since the turn of the nineteenth century– no significant works of science, medicine, architecture, or even literature. Inventions ranging from the steam engine to the polio vaccine and the Space Shuttle have all come from the intellectual heirs of the Greeks.

In summary, the Islamic world should remember this lesson in no uncertain terms: our culture’s ancestral gods could beat up your culture’s ancestral gods and, since people make their gods in their own images, that is why we will beat you culturally, economically, and, if necessary, on the battlefield.