During the rare lull in conversation at Burke's Bar in Yonkers, NY, a good friend of mine, John Patrick Woods, occasionally posits the question as to whether there are any great men or women left in the world. (None of that sports and boobs stuff in my circle.) With no consensus definition of "great"available (The Guinness people are too busy recording the longest kiss or the tallest pile of leaves to help with loftier intellectual pursuits.), we are left with the old description of pornography to whit, I'll know it when I see it. If the majority accepts your greatness without much discussion, you're great.
We can agree on at least one living person: Nelson Mandela. Beyond that, who can say? If you expand the search to the twentieth century living or dead , you might vote for Martin Luther King, Jr., Pope John Paul II, Winston Churchill, Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi and maybe Franklin or Eleanor Roosevelt. If you expand the search into the eighteenth century you might include George Washington or Ben Franklin. The problem is if you need to make a case for someone's greatness, acclamation abates. One need not be perfect to be great but when do character flaws (King's romantic issues, Churchill's bigotry, the Pope's protection of pedophile priests) overshadow the achievements? If you have to think about it too much you have already made the point that there aren't many "greats".
This invariably leads my over-educated comrades to a discussion of those throughout history that have had the suffix "the Great" affixed to their name. Mr. Woods has identified some twenty-five such persons whereas Wikipedia lists 112. Most such as, Shapur the Great (Persia), Photius the Great (Constantinople) and Gwanggaeto the Great (Korea) were either local "greats" or pronounced "great" in their own lifetimes usually by their own pronouncement. Several are names you know: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Herrod the Great, Pope Leo the Great, Charles the Great (aka Charlemagne), Fredrick the Great, and on and on. Many of us know the names but only historians (and educated patrons of Burke's) know why the moniker.
The title was apparently first used by the Persians. Cyrus II tried it on about 350 BC but Alexander III was the first to have it stick. Since then the name has been attached to butchers, thinkers, statesmen, theologians, popes and one apostle. (Apparently James the Great was so designated to distinguish him from James the Slightly Below Average.) Interestingly, there is only one woman in the group. How or why Catherine II made it to the enduring ranks of the Greats is open to question. She rose to power in a conspiracy against her husband Peter and spent the next 24 years trying to "reform" Russia. No friend of the Conservatives, she vastly increased the size of local governments and attempted to reduce the power of the nobility. Think Nancy Pelosi in a really big bouffant.
Catherine also appears to have the honor of being the last in the line of "Greats"...if you don't count Jackie Gleason, Wayne Gretzky, and Mohammed Ali. After 2,500 years and 112 so-called "greats" we seem to have lost interest. Modern communication technology insures that anyone's greatness last only as long as it takes for the penis pictures to surface. No one looks "great" in those.
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