Jonathan writes:
"We can't say we are getting to what the Greeks were really about: we can only
substitute another representation of Greekness for one we see as outmoded or
stereotypical."

But see Peter Murphy's essay cited below. Ionian polis/poiesis architecture, stemming from Hippodamus and others:
1) designed new city spaces (colonies) which allowed mingling of heterogeneous populations of strangers, because they were based on the universal "justice", or mathematical proportions, of the cosmos - creating the artifice of civilized life;
2) followed nature (phusis) not by simple imitation but by creative estrangement - the "truthful lie" - the lie that reveals both its genealogy & its dependence on something more fundamental than genealogy (these same cosmic proportions). The example here is civic architecture, in which marble pillars & other architectural forms are meant to resemble, without copying exactly, the elements of the simple wooden hut or original dwelling.

Basically Murphy argues that all the nationalistic & historicist neo-Classical revivals of the 19th century missed the point, both by asserting the tribe or nation as opposed to the civic & cosmopolitan, and by thinking that appropriating Greek style was a "historical" process, when the Greeks themselves showed that the Classical is an imitation of nature itself on a more basic level, the image of universal proportion evoked from opposing forces. The essay explores how the loss of "polis"-design has consequences for political formations (when politics devolves from free participation & creative collaboration into various forms of patronage & anomie ).

Anyway, the implications of the essay are that it MIGHT be possible, in a way, to get at what the Greeks were really about - because they were getting at aspects of civilization & civic life which are truly universal (in a sort of "physical", scientific, "urban planning" sense).

Jonathan's comment is, on the one hand, true in the Greek sense (of producing a "truthful lie" for a different historical era); on the other hand, if we produce a "truthful lie" based on universal creative design in nature, we ARE getting at what the Greeks were really about. Both and.

audblog audio post Island Road # 11 and 12. My wife says it doesn't sound like me. That's all right. Hippodamus designed cities for playful strangers, according to the phusis(nature) of the cosmos; principles of universal proportion & mediation that so fascinated Simone Weil. (See the fine essay by Peter Murphy, "Architectonics", in Agon , Logos, Polis : the Greek achievement and its aftermath, ed. by Murphy & Arnason, Steiner Verlag, 2001.)