Making generalisations with history is always a bit dangerous...
I visited Newgrange (in Ireland) some ten years ago. It had taken the people there something like two hundred years to build it - more than four thousand years ago. They probably were not thinking that as our fleeting culture is just about to die, so let's do this in a hurry. They must have been optimists in our sense of the word used here.
The counter example.
Adolf Hitler and his visions of the eternal Germany, to be realised with the help of Mr. Speer. The eternal monumets being imagined and in some cases begun by the
third Reich... Were they optimists or pessimists? Or where they more vaguely the culture that did not believe to make for any lasting mark, and thence craved for any marks to out-count the days of their makers?
Quote:
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The urge to be personally remembered is in fact more a product of modern secular society, or indeed a vain and self-centred society, witness the current Cult of Personality.
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Exactly. We must bear in mind that even the idea of "myself" as a self-centered notion is a new invention... The
feeling of "me" today as the center of individuality was for the ancient Greeks and Romans the animality in us. Emotions and feelings happen to us and are not governed by us. They thought that a human was a human only when he (yes,
he!) shut down the thrives and desires and was thinking things with the reason (
differentia specifica of the humans).
In that world one couldn't think of being the center of all, but needed just to find his place in the order of the universe...
So there was no possibility of being optimistic or pessimistic on a grander scale then. Individual personality is a modern idea...