Ancient Greece and the Formation of the Western Mind

Who were the Greeks?

What language did they speak?

Ancient Greece

• What is the origin of the peoples who called themselves Hellenes?

• The language they spoke belongs to the Indo-European family (which includes Germanic, Celtic, Italic, and Sanskrit language groups)

• The Greeks of historic times were a blend of the native tribes and the Indo-European invaders, en route from the European landmass.

Ancient Greece

•What is the history of the Greeks?

History of the Greeks

• 2200-1450 B.C. Minoan civilization flourishes on Crete (after the mythical king Minos)

• The citadel of Mycenae and the palace of Pylos show that mainland Greece, in that same period, had centers of wealth and power

• The language of these Mycenaeans was an early form of Greek• It must have been the memory of these rich kingdoms that inspired

Homer’s vision of ‘Mycenae rich in gold’• It was a blurred memory: some time in the last century of the

millennium the great palaces were destroyed by fire. With them disappeared their system of writing.

• Dark Age of Greece: for the next few hundred years the Greeks were illiterate; no written evidence survives

Crete

citadel of Mycenae

Palace of Pylos

•What is the legacy of the Greeks?

The legacy of the Greeks• The Dark Ages produced a body of oral epic poetry

that was the raw material Homer shaped into the two great poems, the Iliad and Odyssey

• The Homeric poems date from the 8th century B.C. in which the Greeks learned how to write again

• What role did these poems play in the development of Greek civilization?

• The same role as the Torah had played in Palestine: basis of an education and a whole culture

• The great characters of the epic served as models of conduct for later generations of Greeks

• The figures of the Olympian gods retained in the poems and sculpture of succeeding centuries the shapes and attributes set down by Homer

Odyssey

Olympian Gods

•What are the differences between the Greek and Hebrew conceptions of the universe?

Greek vs Hebrew

• The difference between the Greek and the Hebrew hero (Achilles and Joseph) is remarkable

• The difference between ‘the God of Abraham and of Isaac’ and the Olympians who interfere in the lives of the mortals is an unbridgeable chasm

• The two conceptions of the powers that govern the universe are irreconcilable;

• The Greek conception of the nature of gods is so alien to us that it is difficult for the modern reader to take it seriously

• The Hebrew basis of European religious thought has made it almost impossible for us to imagine a god who can be feared and laughed at, and still sincerely worshipped

Achilles and Joseph

The Hebrew versus the Greek conception of God

• The Hebrew conception of God emphasizes those aspects of the universe that imply a harmonious order

• The elements of disorder in the story of Creation are blamed on humankind

• Hebrew literature tries to reconcile the evidences of disorder with an a priori assumption of an all powerful, just God

• The Greeks conceived their gods as an expression of the disorder of the world in which they lived

Greek conception of gods

• The Olympian gods, like the natural forces of sea and sky, follow their own will even to the extreme of conflict with each other, and always with a sublime disregard for human beings.

• Greek gods are all subjects of a single more powerful god, Zeus

• Zeus’s authority over lesser gods is based only on superior strength

• Zeus cannot be openly resisted, but he can be temporarily deceived by his fellow Olympians

• Zeus has limits to his power too; he cannot save the life of his own son

• Behind Zeus stands the mysterious power of Fate, to which even he must bow

Zeus

Zeus and Europa

Greek gods and morality

• Greek gods represent the blind forces of the universe that humans cannot control

• Gods are not necessarily connected with morality• Morality is a human creation, and though the gods may approve of

it, they are not bound by it• Gods cannot feel the ultimate consequence of violence: death is a

human fear, and the courage to face it is a human quality• There is a double standard; one for gods, and one for mortals, but our

sympathy is directed toward the mortals• Homer imposed on Greek literature the anthropocentric emphasis

that is its great contribution to the Western mind.• Homer’s true concern is for men and women, not gods

Greek Gods

The City-States of Greece

• The stories told in the Homeric poems are set in the age of the Trojan War -12th c. B.C.

• Though the poems preserve some faded memories of the Mycenaean Age, they are the creation of the Dark Age 10th -8th c. B.C.

• Dark Age – final settlement of the Greek peoples –foundation of small independent cities

• The Greek cities never lost sight of their common Hellenic heritage, but it was not enough to unite them except in the face of overwhelming danger-they were rivals and fierce competitors

The city-states of Greece

• The cities were dominated from the 8th c B.C. by aristocratic oligarchies

• An important safety valve was colonization:• In the 8th and 7th .c B.C. landless Greeks founded new

cities (always near the sea) all over the Mediterranean coast-in Spain, in southern France (Marseilles, Nice), Italy, Sicily (Syracuse), north Africa, Asia Minor, Black Sea.

• It was in the cities founded on the Asian coast that the Greeks adapted to their own language the Phoenician system of writing, adding signs for the vowels to create their alphabet, the forerunner of the Roman alphabet

•What do Athens and Sparta represent?

Athens and Sparta

• 5th c B.C. these two cities led the combined Greek resistance to the Persian invasion of Europe

• The defeat of the solid Persian power by the divided Greek cities surprised the world

• Athens was the first democracy in Western history –a direct, not a representative democracy

• Athens’s power lay in its fleet with which she had played her decisive part in the struggle against Persia

• Sparta, on the other hand, was rigidly conservative in government and policy

• The individual citizen was trained by the state• The Spartans controlled the city-states of the Peloponnese• These two cities, allies for the war of liberation against Persia, became

enemies when the danger was eliminated• 431 -404 B.C. Peloponnesian War –ended with the total defeat of Athens

•What is Athens’s contribution to western civilization?

Athens’ signifcance

• Athenian democracy provided its citizens with a cultural and political environment that was without precedent in the ancient world- maximum development of the individual’s capacities and at the same time maximum devotion to the interests of the community

• However, there were limits on who could participate in the democracy:

• The “individual Athenian” was the adult male citizen• Women could not own property, hold office, or vote• ‘metics’ or resident aliens – settled from other cities for

business reasons

•What was Athens’s intellectual revolution in the 5th c.?

Man is the measure of all things

• It stemmed from innovations in education• Democratic institutions had created a demand for an education that would prepare men for public

life, by training them in the art of public speaking• The Sophist, the professional teacher –taught not only the techniques of public speaking but

also the subjects that gave a man something to talk about – government, ethics, literary criticism, astronomy.

• The curriculum of the Sophists marks the first appearance in European civilization of liberal education

• The Sophists had no control over their teaching:• Their methods placed an emphasis on the effective presentation of a point of view• They produced a generation that had been trained to see both sides of any question and to argue the

weaker side as effectively as the stronger, the false as effectively as the true• They taught how to appeal to the audience’s sense of its own advantage rather than accepted

moral standards• Emphasis on the technique of effective presentation of both sides of any case encouraged a

relativistic point of view• ‘Man is the measure of all things’ –these shifts in world view and moral beliefs led to new

forms of creativity in art, literature, and thought, although they also caused conflicts between traditionalists and proponents of new ideas.

The decline of the city-state

• The war brought to Athens the rule of new politicians who were schooled in the doctrine of power politics

• Athens surrendered to the Spartans in 404 B.C. (pro-Spartan anti-democratic regime installed)

• Athens became a democracy again, but its confidence was gone forever.

• 4th c. B.C. –Plato and Aristotle revolutionized philosophy and laid the foundations for European philosophical thought

• Their predecessor, Socrates discussed such great issues as the nature of justice, of truth, of piety

Why did Athenians feel more and more exasperation with Socrates’s

voice?• Socrates, unlike the Sophists, did not lecture nor did he

charge a fee; his method was dialectic, a search for truth through questions and answers

• His dedication to his mission kept him poor• He did believe in absolute standards• The resentment against him is partly explained by the

questioning of old standards in order to establish new• prophet of the new age• The Athenians sentenced him to death on charge of

impiety in 399 B.C.

Socrates

Sophocles’ Oedipus

Euripides’s MedeaMedea’s cheriot