Vissavald: Yes, Greece is not just the Ancient Greece. But there's
no way to overrate the Ancient Greece. Ancient Greece is the mother and father of Europe, european culture, european way of life, of thought, of science, of everything. And it's like that not only for european countries themselves but for almost all the world (USA, Latin America, Russia, Australia), maybe just excluding Asia and Africa.
And it's not Roman empire who should be called the Source, you haven't misread. Rome is a bland and distorted copy of Greece, even Latin language has about 50% of borrowed Greek words and roots.
So one can only
underestimate the Ancient Greece.
Well, I'm Greek myself so that may be why I think Ancient Greece is overrated. My viewpoint comes from the fact that until the 20th century, eveyone sang the praises of Ancient Greece and forgot the other important Greek entity that was around for quite a while -the Byzantine Empire. "Byzantium" (I'm putting this in quotes because that wasn't the name people used at the time) not only maintained the ancient Greek civilization, but also enriched it with the christian values, which made the western civilization that much better, since the ancient Greek religion wasn't really all that moral. And then there are the Greeks of the early modern times, which strongly held these combined values even though they were conquered by the Turkish. I prefer then to see Greek history as a continuous development, and I think that it wasn't only Ancient Greece that mattered, but Byzantium too. In that vein, I think Byzantium is hugely
underrated, and thus ancient Greece overrated by comparison. Both are important, but the importance of one is way more known than that of the other...