It Is All Greek - gnothi seauton - "know thyself " - Charlotte Higgins

Zeus once let fly two eagles from the ends of the world: one from the east and one from the west. They soared high over oceans, mountains, forests and plains, until they met at the very centre of the earth, its omphalos, or navel. On this spot, a temple to Apollo was dedicated, the home of the Delphic oracle, where those who wished for insight into their past, present or future might come to consult the god. The questioner would be led into the temple's dark heart. In the gloom, the visitor would more sense than see the Pythia - the laurel-crowned woman who acted as the sacred conduit for the god's communications. In a trance, amid the heady fumes of burning laurel and barley, she would begin her utterances: divinely inspired fragments that the priests would interpret and fashion. But as the inquirer passed under the temple colonnade, before he stepped into the inner sanctum itself, he would have seen some letters carved into the portico: gnothi seauton - "know thyself ".

The intellectual achievements of the ancient Greeks were quite simply extraordinary. They shaped the basic disciplines and genres in which we still organise thought: from poetry to drama, from philosophy to history, from natural history, medicine and ethnography to political science. We have been inexorably moulded by ancient Greece: the way we think about right and wrong, about the nature of beauty, goodness and knowledge; the way we conceive of what it is to be a mortal being amid the immensity of the universe; the way we talk about the past, and our ambiguous relationship with war; the way we discuss politics and citizenship. The tracks that lead back from our world to the Greeks' are narrow, meandering, sometimes virtually rubbed out or invisible - but they are there. What the Greeks did and said still casts light on what we say and do; by looking at the Greeks we can understand more about ourselves. The Greeks, in short, can help us answer their own challenge of "know thyself ".