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Some Preliminary Observations on Classical Greek
Literature
Some Opening
Cautions
However, before plunging into the details, I
should clarify a few things for those readers who may be quite unfamiliar with
ancient Greek culture or at least uncertain about what I mean by the term. I’m talking about the achievements of the
various city states on mainland Greece, the islands, and the coast of Asia
Minor who thought of themselves as having a shared Hellenic (or Greek)
tradition, in contrast to other people around them, in a period lasting roughly
four and half centuries, that is, from the time of Homer (c. 750 BC) to the
deaths of Alexander the Great (323 BC) and Aristotle (322 BC). During this period the cultural developments
in literature, art, philosophy, history, politics, architecture, and science
were without parallel, and they later exerted a decisive and lasting influence
upon the development of Western civilization.
The extraordinarily
impressive cultural achievement of the Greeks invites speculation about its
cause. And there has been no lack of
suggestions as to why these ancient Greeks, rather than, say, the much
wealthier and more powerful Persians to the east or Egyptians to the south,
should have achieved so much in such a relatively short time. Like many others who have spent years reading
and thinking about the Greeks, I have pondered this matter, and the occasion of
this lecture prompts me to explore a tentative and inevitably somewhat
reductive answer to the issue of what underlying characteristic was so special
about the Greeks that it launched and sustained this marvelous moment of cultural
history. For the single most important
and influential feature of ancient Greek culture, if we can identify such a
thing, must surely lie somewhere among the developments that brought it about
in the first place, some unifying cultural fact which fostered an explosion of
creative effort, a common factor uniting Homer and Plato, Aeschylus and
Aristotle, Thucydides and Aristophanes.
Such speculation invites one inevitably to
ruminate about how the Greeks saw the world, about how their understanding of things
was shaped by some distinctive factors which, for all the obvious differences
between those writers listed above, gave them a certain commonality and set
them apart from other cultures. And that
road leads directly to some general reflections on how the Greeks interpreted
the relationship between themselves and the forces which rule the world,
between, that is, their human communities and the divine. So in offering a rapid general introduction,
I propose to say a few things about that subject, skimming rather lightly over
many complex and thoroughly investigated issues, in order to offer at least a
few topics for discussion and debate.
For the single most distinctive thing about the ancient Greeks, as with
so many other cultures, is how they understood the
nature of things and how their actions and achievements arose out of that
vision of how the world works.
The Greek Vision
of the Divine
Like virtually every other culture,
the ancient Greeks developed a religious understanding of the world based on
divine presences and traditional stories.
This aspect of their achievement is probably the most widely known
element in their culture, for almost everyone in the West still remembers
something about the Greek gods and goddesses and about a few of the more
important legends associated with them (e.g., the Trojan War). What may be less obvious is how the
particular forms of these divinities and their interrelationships with each
other and with human beings made the ancient Greek vision of experience
decisively different from many other apparently similar belief systems.
The first important (and most
frequently noted) characteristic of the Greek gods is their human form. Unlike other religions, the Greeks did not
give a prominent place in their religious hierarchy to monsters, animals, or
bizarre imaginary creatures (there are such things in Greek mythology, of
course, but they are distinctly minor characters). Their gods have human shapes and exist within
the context of an extended family recognizably similar to human families. Hence, in the Greek religious imagination,
the highest and most perfect manifestations of existence have forms and
attributes exactly like those of their human worshippers. Indeed, except for their power, beauty, and
immortality, the Greek gods are exactly like human beings in the way they look,
feel, talk, and behave. And much of the
time, their actions within the context of the huge divine family are
recognizably human—they fight with each other, make up, have illicit affairs,
deceive each other, try to subvert the authority of the powerful father, argue,
laugh at each other’s distress, and so on, activities all perfectly
comprehensible to anyone with some experience of family life among human
beings. Divine motivation is thus linked
directly to the constantly shifting and frequently irrational feelings within
the human family, and the forces which rule the world are made instantly
recognizable and emotionally intelligible
because they have such a familiar form.
Such family affairs (in heaven as on
earth) have a dynamic and dramatic quality, since the more important events
almost invariably involve conflict of some kind, everything from a mild spat to
a bitter and long-lasting feud, from an amusing tale of infidelity to stories
of extraordinary suffering and cruelty.
So it’s not surprising perhaps that this religious vision became such a
rich source of intriguing and entertaining stories. More that that, this view
of the cosmos enshrines conflict as the heart of divine and natural processes. And such conflicts are not, as in other
religions, allegorized pictures of the forces of good fighting the forces of
evil, but much more unpredictable and morally ambiguous stories, often without
any clear “lesson” for human beings, other than the repeated emphasis that the
gods are powerful and inconsistent. Just
as ambiguity is a central fact of human family life on earth (with blurred
lines of authority, shifting allegiances, volatile emotions, and uncertain
motives), so ambiguity is a central fact of life in heaven and thus of
explanations for natural events.
The vision of the divine presences is
for the ancient Greeks extremely visual and sharply focused and accompanied by
countless familiar stories about the adventures of the gods and goddesses, both
in their dealings with each other and in their interactions with human beings. The Greeks never tired of depicting these
deities or telling stories about them, and their freedom to do so is
astonishing to those raised in cultures with a much sterner attitude towards
artistic interpretations of the divine.
Greek religion was a serious matter, and penalties for flouting
religious practices could be very severe (Socrates, after all, was executed for
impiety). Nonetheless, there was a
freedom to express oneself about the gods, and the range of those responses is
remarkable, all the way from pious hymns and devout prayers, to scandalous
tales of infidelity and rape, to the most rude satirical portrayals (the god
Dionysus, a character in Aristophanes Frogs, for example, shits himself
on stage, describes his turds as a religious offering,
and does so at a religious festival in his own honour, in the presence of the
city’s most important religious officials, evidently to the delight of
everyone, including those officials).
Obviously many people find this fusion
of a religious vision and artistic fecundity delightful, for the vast treasure
house of art and story has been a constant source of inspiration and pleasure
for later centuries, to say nothing of our sense of how such a religious view
transforms our understanding of nature.
But we should avoid the error (common to many later lovers of the Greeks)
of sentimentalizing this belief system, of seeing it as no more than an
astonishingly charming, amusing, and artistically fertile fabrication (such a
response has not been uncommon, for example, among those who wish to see
Homer’s gods as merely entertaining poetical inventions, a reaction which, of
course, tends to close off any attempt to understand these gods as central to a
serious and long-lasting religious vision and thus spares us any potentially
embarrassing comparisons between pagan beliefs and Judeo-Christian religion). Consequently, we need to attend to some of
the more problematic or troubling or less immediately pleasant aspects of this
panoply of anthropomorphic deities.
We might begin by observing that the
gap between the divine and the human was absolute. While the gods frequently interacted with
human beings, sometimes in very cruel ways, at other times more benignly, no
human being could aspire to divine status.
Whatever the afterlife might hold (and throughout much of Greek
literature Hades is not a particularly welcoming place, certainly a far less
desirable residence than the surface of the earth), it does not involve
commingling with the gods, no matter how piously one might have lived or how
famous one became. The one important exception
to this separation is Hercules, a son of Zeus, who was given a place in heaven
after death because of his extraordinary exploits. But there is no sense that another hero might
ever follow his example (2). Hence, this religious
belief holds out no great future hopes in an idyllic life hereafter and insists
on an unbridgeable gulf between human beings and gods (3).
More important than this point,
perhaps, is the fact that, although the physical features of and stories about the
gods are well known and celebrated, the gods’ wishes are far from clear,
especially their intentions regarding human beings. The gods frequently interfere physically and
psychically in human affairs (bringing on, for example, madness, illnesses,
unusual acts of courage or folly, natural disasters, untimely death, and so
on), but there is nothing consistent about these interactions, and they may or
may not take place, no matter how many times the human beings offer sacrifices
or prayers. Throughout Greek literature
the relationship of the gods to human beings is ambiguous. They demand worship, and it is wise to be
pious, so that good fortune is more likely to come (maybe) and one runs less
chance of being punished. And often
people express reverent hopes that the gods will punish evil doers. But there is no guarantee. The gods are just as likely to ignore the
worshipper or punish him anyway. Given
this, it’s not surprising that a very common Greek saying affirmed that no man
should be called happy until he was dead.
Only at that point could one make any conclusion about how the gods had
treated him.
Another way of making the same point
is to mention how the gods provide no clear instructions about how human beings
were to behave towards them or towards each other. Yes, there are some important divinely
sanctioned basic principles, like observing the appropriate attitudes towards
guests in one’s home or towards those offering hospitality (a view emphatically
brought out in the Odyssey, for example), and it is important to pay
one’s respects by appropriate sacrifices and prayers. The gods do communicate to human beings at
certain shrines through the mouths of their prophets. Sometimes a soothsayer may learn something of
the gods’ intentions from omens or entrails.
But such communications or readings are notoriously ambiguous and, as
often as not, rebound on the person seeking advice. What is missing is a clear and consistent
sense of what the relationship between the gods and human beings ought to be. Why have the gods created human beings, and
why do they behave towards them the way they do? The answers to such questions are by no means
given, and there is no single orthodox answer.
In the Iliad, Helen suggests that the gods have arranged for human
beings to fight endless wars in order to produce interesting stories which will
entertain people in later generations.
Herodotus offers the view that the driving force of history is
punishment meted out by the gods for those who become too obsessed with their
own greatness. At times there is a sense
that the gods bring on human suffering for their own amusement; at other times,
the gods turn their backs on human affairs.
Sometimes the gods complain about human wrongdoing. Choruses in Greek tragedies often offer the
fervent hope that those who are good will avoid the wrath of the gods and that
only those who do bad things will suffer (a moral faith which the story will
often contradict). In Oedipus the
King, even the finest of all men, who strives to do the right thing,
suffers horribly for some divine reason which is never provided. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the chorus
believes there is a divine purpose guiding events but is filled with an anxious
uncertainty about what that might be and can cope with their distress only with
a repetitive formulaic “All may be well.”
Again and again, Greek literature draws attention to a radical
uncertainty about divine purposes.
Here a brief comparison with the
Jewish religion may be helpful. Unlike
the Greeks, the Jews have a single God (with a capital G) whose presence is
completely mysterious (His name is unpronounceable and there is a commandment
forbidding any images depicting His form).
Hence, there is a total lack of stories about or images of His life in heaven,
His genealogy, or any other specific aspect of His physical being. However, His relationship with the Jews is
emphasized and clarified over and over.
He has provided, through Moses, a comprehensive list of hundreds of
instructions about how the faithful are to behave in all aspects of their
lives, and He has established a contract with His people: if they will believe
and follow His laws, he will deliver them or their descendants into the
Promised Land, where they will be rich and prosperous. One of the central features of the Old
Testament is a succession of prophets who keep reminding the people of this
covenant. Thus, for the Jews there is no
ambiguity about their relationship to the Lord or about what God is planning
for His people. There may well be some
uncertainties about how certain laws should be interpreted in particular cases,
but there is no doubting the authority of the laws themselves (and they were
written down and codified in a way that effectively preserved them intact). Even in the most difficult times, the Jewish
believer knew what he had to do and could remember God’s promise and the
historical evidence of God’s actions in living up to it (as in the Exodus from
Egypt, the survival in the desert, and the arrival in Canaan).
For all the clarity of the vision of
the divine personalities, the Greeks lack this sort of assurance (there is only
one famous Greek quasi-religious commandment, characteristically ambiguous, the
inscription at the oracle at Delphi: “Know thyself”). There is no way of knowing whether the gods
or a particular god will or will not favour them from one day to the next. In the Iliad, for example, the
warriors are constantly offering prayers and sacrifices to Zeus in order to
gain his support, which will give them success on the battlefield. As often as not, Zeus denies their
request. This denial, however, does not
lead the warriors to question their faith.
They tried, but on this day Zeus wasn’t in the mood to assist them. Perhaps things will be different tomorrow. There is no way they can read Zeus’ mind or
predict what he will do; nor do they have any right to expect that he will
favour them just because they have offered a rich sacrifice. Nevertheless, they continue to believe. In many cases, they can explain such
disappointment as the result of the interference of some other god. Zeus may be sympathetic, but his wife, Hera,
may have persuaded him to suspend his sympathy for a while, so she can get her
way, or she or some other god may have tricked him (so the believers can accept
the setback without blaming Zeus or slackening their faith in him or even
doubting his special affection for their cause). Since there is no demand that the divine
family act any more logically or consistently than any large human family,
there are any number of reasons why human hopes in a particular deity may be
misplaced on any particular occasion. In
much of Greek literature, the notion that these gods have to be consistently
fair or answer to some rational code of conduct or live up to an agreement is
never raised (other than as a thin hope).
[Parenthetically, one might note that
this aspect of their religious belief drove some Greeks (a distinct minority
wanting to put morality onto a more rational footing) away from the traditional
mythology, on the ground that the gods were immoral in their own conduct and in
their treatment of human beings (all that sexual activity, duplicity, and
cruelty were not appropriate to divine beings).
And the confusion and ambiguity of many of the accounts of the gods’
actions appear to have led others to seek explanations for natural events
without reference to the old stories.
This latter response gave birth to what we recognize as the beginning of
science and philosophy (more about this later on)].
Such a faith, it strikes me, for all
its beauty, energy, and artistic fertility, is, as Nietzsche realized, a very
tough religious vision sustained in the harshest conditions without any
reliable hope that things will work out all right eventually. In a number of the Greek tragedies, one of
main functions of the chorus seems to be to provide a sense (albeit often a
less resolute sense than in the Iliad) of this uncertainty. The gods are in control, but what are their
plans? What do they intend for us? Where are we going next? Will they assist us, or are their wishes on
this occasion more malicious or uncaring?
Such questions often generate an ominously ironic mood. We might note
here, too, that, unlike Jewish religion, the Greek vision contains no
historical promise. However the gods
behave and whatever their intentions (if they have any consistent plans at
all), there is no sense that things are going to change fundamentally for the
better (in fact, if anything, the situation for human beings has gotten
considerably worse since the age of the heroes). In that sense, their religious belief gives
them a profoundly static picture of the world: history is not taking them
anywhere except, perhaps, around in circles, and so history will not deliver
them a clear answer to those urgent questions or alter the situation they find
themselves in now.
The most optimistic vision of Greek religion,
at least before Plato, is our first surviving complete tragedy: Aeschylus' Oresteia
(458 BC), which offers us the vision of an enormously attractive
possibility: a harmoniously working fusion of divine and human justice.
The trilogy opens with a community in crisis. Its traditional
understanding of justice is failing, since it seems to lead to an unending sequence
of revenge killings which threaten the survival of the state. By the end
of the trilogy, the gods have, in effect, transferred some responsibilities for
justice onto the human community and have reconciled the divine forces of blood
revenge with the human powers of rational persuasion. Hence, there exists
here (in this aesthetic vision) a happy fusion of divine and human power, under
which the state will thrive. The most pessimistic of all Greek plays is the
last surviving tragedy, Euripides' Bacchae (404
BC), which exposes the divine forces as mindlessly irrational, absurdly cruel,
and fatally destructive to the human community and which explodes any notion
that a harmonious reconciliation between the human powers of reason and the
divine force is possible.
Dike and the
Tragic Experience
These common observations about the
Greeks bring me to what is probably the central point of these remarks For in Greek
literature the most distinctive characteristic arising out of this vision of
experience is a passionate and ceaseless concern for Justice, a constant
exploration seeking clarification about these questions of divine purpose and
the appropriate response to an often cruel and always ambiguous relationship
between the human and the divine. The
term Justice here (in Greek Dike, pronounced to rhyme with dee-kay), one needs to add, is a
very wide-ranging concept having to do with a great deal more than fair
judicial processes. In Greek mythology
Dike was a goddess, a daughter of Zeus, responsible for maintaining moral order
on earth, but the term refers also to something much wider than a single
personality, a concept we might call “the arrangement,” something analogous to
a structural principle by which things work or ought to work and which might
guide human beings to a better understanding of the world and their role in it.
Given that cosmic order is mysterious
and that there is no authoritative description of or shared agreement about it,
the choice is either to accept the mystery and celebrate it in various ways
(through religious rituals, for example), in the hope that Justice, however it
worked, might guide one’s behaviour (i.e., base one’s life on the human hope
that the gods might really be concerned about proper human conduct), or else to
challenge it, that is, to see what human beings might be able to learn about
divine justice by pushing human striving to the limit, by directly confronting
the unknown given conditions of the world (rather than just passively enduring
them). This latter response seems to
have been one which the Greeks, for some reason, especially favoured. In fact, this restless search for dike
may well be the decisive characteristic of their culture (particularly among
the group known as the Ionians, centred in Athens and
living on many islands and cities in Asia Minor). And so many of their
greatest human heroes are those who embark upon a battle against those fatal
conditions (fatal in the sense that they lie outside human control) in an
attempt to impose their own will upon the world.
Of course, many cultures have
important heroes who confront the unknown, who, like Gilgamesh, leave the human
community to fight against monsters in the dangerous forests of the wilderness,
and who embark on various quest narratives full of mysterious dangers. But these heroes tend to survive the
encounters, learn from them, and return to the human community, bringing back
an enriched understanding of why the community matters. The Greeks, however, developed a particular
interest in the hero who is killed or who self-destructs in his quest, the
person who does not learn the importance of the community and return to it but
rather one who, having launched himself against Fate, continues his fight
against the unknown well beyond the limits of human prudence or communal
restraint until the ironic mystery and power of what he is up against destroys
him. In short, the Greek preoccupation
with dike leads them to a celebration of the tragic vision of experience.
I don’t propose to offer here a lengthy
description of the terms tragedy or the tragic vision of experience,
other than to observe that this uniquely Greek vision arises from the desire of
some extraordinarily self-assertive personalities to live life entirely on
their own terms, no matter what the cost (4). Their
sense of their own rightness is so strong that they push their fierce demands
on life well beyond all conventional communal standards to the point where the
consequences of their actions lead to their own destruction. In other words, they take human experience
(and especially human freedom to act) to the utter limit, and, in so doing,
temporarily expose social conventions (including conventional religious belief)
as consoling illusions and reveal something about the way the cosmos really
works. While such a vision is profoundly
fatalistic and almost always deeply pessimistic, it affirms the ability of
individual human beings to assert their heroic willingness to confront the
mysteries of dike and to accept in full the horrific consequences of
that stance. For the Greeks such a hero
was worthy of their finest artistic efforts and greatest admiration.
The Greek fascination with the tragic
hero undoubtedly stems from their pre-occupation with competitive displays of
excellence. Homer established for the
Greeks a standard of virtuous conduct based on competition. The most important goal of the best warriors
is always to strive to be the best, not simply in battle, but in athletic
games, public speaking, possessions, personal appearance, and so on. If the universe does not give me a coherent
and consistent moral standard or rules (something like the Ten Commandments),
then I derive a sense of my excellence and purpose, my value as a human being,
from where I stand in relation to my peers, from the way in which my community
(as well as other communities) recognizes and celebrates my individual
pre-eminence. Even in a life away from
the battlefield, as Odysseus demonstrates in the Odyssey, the highest
purpose of human life is to demonstrate one’s heroic qualities in competitive
actions and (equally important) to make sure such achievements are known and
recognized by others. Such a belief
fosters a continuing fascination with individual self-assertion quite unlike,
say, the Jewish emphasis on communal striving or the Roman emphasis on public
service or the Christian faith in meekness, charity, and humility (5).
Parenthetically, it’s worth observing
that this Greek admiration for self-assertiveness extended also to those who
were very successful liars or tricksters, people who used their wits to secure
an advantage for themselves by frequently duplicitous means. This quality of the Greeks was not especially
admired by later cultures. It helped to
produce the most famous line ever written about the Greeks by a Roman (Vergil’s
“I fear the Greeks, especially when they bring gifts”) and accounts for the
fact that in medieval and Renaissance literature the great Greek hero Odysseus
is often treated as a disreputable character or a villain (e.g., in Dante’s Inferno,
where he and Diomedes are deep in hell, and in Shakespeare’s Troilus and
Cressida).
While on this brief digression, I should
perhaps mention the significance of this heroic striving and its relationship
to dike by considering for a moment the Greed word Eros, the
designation of the god of love (along with Aphrodite) and love itself.
Love instigated by Eros characteristically leads to a striving forward
and upward. The term refers to an irrational zest for life and a desire
to experience and embrace the world. Applied to the human being's
attitude to the gods, it communicates a sense of upward striving, a challenging
attempt to reach out and apprehend the divine, often a
passion that expresses itself in explicit sexual terms. By contrast, the
Christian concept of love, agape, designates a love which flows down
from above, a divine gift which human beings accept and share in the spirit of
a community which knows and celebrates its relationship with God (Jesus is the
supreme example and source of agape). Where Eros lies at
the very heart of individualistic heroic striving, Agape promotes a
diametrically opposed vision of love, in which such heroic striving has no
place. A Greek would find the instruction to love his neighbour just as
he loves himself incomprehensible.
Of course, not all Greek heroes push their
self-assertiveness to the limit. In the Iliad,
for example, there are clearly understood unwritten rules about just how far one
has to exert oneself in a battle (in certain circumstances, withdrawal or even
a refusal to fight is acceptable), and in dramatic tragedies it is common for
someone to urge the hero to relent. But
the tragic hero is clearly one who acknowledges no such unwritten rules and who
thus defies the social conventions which urge him to exhibit some restraint, as
we see from following the careers of the greatest of them: Achilles (in the Iliad)
and Oedipus (in Oedipus the King), among others.
In the ancient world, this tragic
response to life is unique to the Greek literature. The closest example we have of it in the Old
Testament is the story of Job, who, like Achilles, demands an accounting from
the divine and is (for a while) unwilling to relent, even in response to some
urgent pleas from his friends. But Job
does finally give way; he does not push his confrontation with God to the
limit. And, as if to neutralize any
discomfort we may experience from this encounter (and tragedies can be very
disconcerting, since they force us to examine our conventional beliefs), Job is
handsomely rewarded, so that he ends up even better off than before (an ending
which has prompted all sorts of objections and accusations of tampering with
the texts). Of course, in any culture
where the survival of the community at all costs is the central imperative, the
tragic figure’s obsession with his own individual integrity can be an unwelcome
and excessive manifestation of individualism, a preoccupation with one's own
will rather than with the community ethic (one of the reasons why modern social
reformers often have little room for a tragic view of life).
It seems highly probable (although
there is no direct evidence for this) that tragic drama began as a celebration
of such a hero (who may well have been a historical character). Legends have it that the first actor was a
man called Thespis and that originally a tragic drama consisted of a huge
chorus and a single actor (perhaps the leader of the chorus) who took on the
role of the hero in the choral celebrations of his memory and acted out his
greatest exploit. The development of
tragic drama saw an increase in the number of actors on stage at any one time
(Aeschylus normally uses two and Sophocles three) and a diminishing importance
for the chorus (in the Oresteia the choruses have a major role in the
play and at times are large; in some of Euripides’ plays they seem almost
irrelevant). Moreover, it's significant that
such dramatic presentations of tragic heroes took place in a competition which
was a central feature of an important annual religious festival, so that the
celebration of heroic self-assertiveness was also an integral part of religious
worship, fascinating communal celebrations of heroic individualism (6).
It is tempting to link this self-assertive
spirit and tragic vision of life to both the high and low points of Greek
history. The most triumphant moments were undoubtedly the two defeats of
the Persian invaders, one at Marathon in 490 and the other at Salamis and
Plataea in 480. Faced with what looked like impossible odds (especially
in the second invasion by Xerxes) the Greeks set aside their frequently
quarrelsome differences and marched out to confront a foreign enemy.
Thanks to the heroic conduct of particular individuals (most famously the
Spartans at Thermopylae) and the bravery of the citizens, the Persians were
defeated, and Greece was saved. The lowest point of Greek history was the
Peloponnesian War (which started in 431 BC and ended in 404 BC), in effect, a
savage conflict between groups of Greek states who could or would not reconcile
their differences more peacefully because their shared traditions were insufficient
to check their fear of each other and their leaders' quests for power.
The war ruined Athens (although its cultural achievements by no means ended
then), and the victorious power, Sparta, soon went into a permanent
decline. Many of the great works we read now were written in the light of
these events. Aeschylus fought at the Battle of Marathon, and the great
optimism of his Oresteia may well be a product of his sense of the
astonishing achievements of the united Greeks. Sophocles, Euripides, and
Aristophanes wrote during various stages of the war, and their treatments of
the old stories and traditional customs are decisively shaped by that
event. The last and most pessimistic works of classical Greek culture
(Thucydides' Pelponnesian War and
Euripides' Bacchae) were written when the
disastrous results of the civil war (especially for the Athenians) were clear
for all to see. Within about seventy years (by 338 BC), the Greek states
had been defeated by the Macdeonians and about one
hundred years later by the Romans.
By a curious and (perhaps) significant irony,
the conquest of the Greeks by Philip of Macedon was consolidated by his son,
Alexander the Great, the most self-assertive warrior of all time, who saw
himself as the reincarnation of Achilles and who carried with him on his
campaigns (in a special casket which used to hold the crown of Persia) a copy
of the most influential shaping work of traditional Greek culture, Homer's Iliad.
A Note on the
Philosophers
To answer such a complex question very
briefly, I can refer to my previous remark about how the very richness and
complexity of Greek religion prompted a reaction against it. We have no
accurate knowledge of how this reaction began, although traditionally the first
important philosophers are associated with Miletus, a city in Asia Minor.
The location may well be significant because Miletus would be a place where
traditional Greek religion encountered other beliefs and stories from the East
and where there was therefore some confusion or at least debate about which
stories were more important than others. Whether this is the case or not,
philosophy seems to have started with a few citizens of Miletus (someone named
Thales is supposed to have been involved) asked a question which to us may
seems very obvious but which for most cultures is very strange: Can we explain
how things work, without calling in divine forces or personalities as causes in
natural events? Can we, in other words, find a natural explanation for
natural events? Alternatively put, can we banish our traditional gods and
goddesses from our understanding of dike?
The significance of this question cannot be
overestimated, and it remains a mystery why the Greeks should be the ones to
ask it originally and pursue it for so long. It's important because it
asks the thinker to abandon traditional stories and find some reasonable way to
account for the ways things are on earth, a human account which relies on
natural events. There is no space here to trace the achievements of these
early philosophers (called materialists because they first sought an
explanation in terms of some essential material, like water, or air, or
ether). But I would like briefly to mention the most decisive moment of
their enquiries. The search for some essential and universal material
stuff quickly ran into difficulties, and so some of these thinkers turned their
attention to another approach: what mattered in explanations was not the stuff
itself, but the arrangement of material, the formal structure of matter.
One could explain the variety of things in the natural world by speculating about
the fundamental properties of matter, especially (as it turned out) the
mathematical properties of its constituents (7).
Now, this wedding of mathematics to
explanations of nature is of enormous importance. It is, in effect, the
start of science and a major advance for philosophical speculation. For
example, using geometry to plot the movements of the heavens makes modern
astronomy possible (it enables one to move beyond observation into precise
modeling of the cosmos on mathematical principles). It's curious, in
retrospect, that the Babylonians, who were mathematically much more
sophisticated than the Greeks and whose observations of the stars went back
thousands of years, never thought of putting the two together, any more than
did the Egyptians, from whom the Greeks derived much of their knowledge of
geometry.
To put mathematics at the heart of one's
understanding of dike is to demand a fundamentally different form of
reasoning, and some of the philosophers were clearly seeking to do this as a
way of countering the frequently irrational (and, in their eyes, immoral)
behaviour associated with traditional rituals, cults, sacrifices, and so
on. However, it is not necessarily demanding the abandonment of a
religious sensibility. For mathematics came to be seen in many quarters
as a spiritual training, a way to discipline the mind, so that knowledge of the
higher order of things might be attained through geometry, rather than through
the various methods used in traditional religion (e.g., fasting, drink, group
chanting, sex, sacrifices, prayers, and so on). Plato (in the Republic)
gives the greatest importance to an understanding of geometry as a spiritual
training and is deliberately subverting the tradition in order to insist that
we can only arrive at an understanding of dike by thinking in a new
way. His goal, however, is still an inspired insight into how the cosmos
works, what the highest divine powers have to reveal (what he calls the Form
of the Good) (8).
It's probably fair to say that rational
philosophy (or rational enquiry generally) tends to flourish, if at all, at
critical periods when the traditional religion is failing in some important
ways (as in Europe after the Thirty Years' War). So it's no accident that
the greatest surviving works of Greek philosophy come, like Thucydides' great
work which marks the emergence of a historical enquiry based on thoroughly
rational principles, after the Peloponnesian War, by which time many of the
most important social organizations responsible for traditional religious faith
and communal customs had been badly discredited and traditional Greek society
was in shambles.
While these philosophical speculations were
obviously different in significant ways from the old religious traditions, in
one important respect they were alike: both were spatial explanations
which emphasized the visual order of the cosmos, without reference to any
notion of historical development. What matters in the search for dike
are the formal properties which make the world
the way it is. Such a way of looking at the world is crucially different
from the Jewish (and later Christian) way of seeing the world as primarily
based on an unfolding, linear story, a unique and
divinely guided history.
These differences have led some thinkers to
speculate about our divided inheritance. In our explanations for natural
things (including ourselves) we can think like Greeks, or we can think like
Jews. We can, that is, explain things with reference to their formal
properties, the way they are arranged, the mathematical structures which make
them what they are, or we can explain them with reference to their history, a
story of how they have developed into what they have become. The first is
the basis of the scientific imagination; the second is the basis for the
historical imagination. Much of the modern history of Western
civilization arises from the combination of these two visions, when, starting
in the seventeenth century, we turned our scientific imaginations loose in the
service of a vision of our historical destiny. But that's another story.
Epilogue
I have repeatedly mentioned that the
achievements of the classical Greeks played a decisive role in the development
of Western culture, and that fact should be obvious to anyone who has the
slightest general knowledge about those achievements. Tracing this
influence, however, is a complex business, since Western attitudes towards
Greek culture have often been very sceptical, if not
directly hostile.
The Romans admired the Greeks excessively,
borrowed extensively from them, and were very conscious of their inferiority to
the Greeks in all sorts of things. But at the same time they were deeply
suspicious of many aspects of Greek culture, particularly in light of what had
happened to it when the Greeks turned against each other. So they
deliberately set their cultural goals in a different direction and encouraged
artists to promote a vision of life very different from that of the Greeks. By
an irony of history, a famous Roman, Julius Caesar, may have been responsible
for the most catastrophic event in the literary history of Greece, the burning
of the library in Alexandria (in the first century BC), an event which
destroyed thousands of irreplaceable documents (this is not to suggest that
Caesar, if he did start a fire, deliberately meant the library to be engulfed).
Early Christianity developed among the pagan
Greeks, and Greek thought played an important role in shaping the new religion
as it emancipated itself from its Jewish roots (much of the Christian vision of
the afterlife comes directly from Greek religious cults and Plato, so much so
that Nietzsche labeled Christianity "Platonism for the
people"). However, Christian thinking was always hostile to Greek
religion. The term pagan (meaning civilian, in contrast to
the Christian soldier of god) came to refer to those who worshipped
nature, especially the Greeks, and then more generally to all non-Christians
(other than the Jews). The early Christians, faced with the amazingly
rich tradition of Greek stories, tended to allegorize them extensively to fit
Christian doctrine (a practice continued with Roman stories). But once
the Christians gained control of the Roman Empire (in the fourth century AD),
they closed down Greek schools, attacked the shrines, stopped many traditional
rituals (e.g., the Olympic Games), and suppressed the literature and art.
For a long time, the Greek heritage was lost
to the West, known only (if at all) by Latin reinterpretations of Greek
stories. Hence, the influence of classical Greek culture on the West and
even a knowledge of the Greek language were virtually
non-existent. During this period, although the outlines of many of the
most famous stories were known (e.g., the Trojan War), the details came from
very non-Greek sources and hence do not accurately reflect the visions of life
in the original Greek texts. But in the early Renaissance (14th
century), Greek scholars fleeing the forces of Islam started to move with their
libraries into Italy from Byzantium and initiated a revival. From that
point on, the authentic voice of classical Greek culture began to be heard
again in Western Europe (a process enormously helped by the invention of
printing in 1455), and for hundreds of years after that the work of scholars
and artists provided a steady stream of printed texts, translations, and
examples of Greek art, so that one can talk about a growing and direct
influence of classical Greek thought on European culture for the past four
hundred years (at least). This influence shows no sign of slowing
down. Indeed, to judge from the number of translations of ancient Greek
works in circulation in modern culture, their achievements are more popular
than ever.
Notes
(1) The city-states
(meaning the city and the adjacent land) were generally quite small in area and
population (made up of citizens, slaves, resident aliens, women and children).
The most populous city state, Athens, with an area of about 1000 square miles,
had in 431 BC a population of about 310,000 (about 45,000 of whom were
citizens). Sparta, by contrast, although occupying a larger and more fertile
area of about 3000 square miles, had a population of about 12,000, the majority
of whom were not citizens. Most of the city states were considerably smaller in
area and population than Athens or Sparta. . [Back to Text]
(2) Other possible
exceptions are the twin brothers Castor and Pollux
(or Polydeuces), brothers of Helen and Clytaemnestra, who after death were
allowed by Zeus to divide their time between heaven and Hades. Also,
Ganymede, a royal prince of Troy, was so beautiful he was taken up to Olympus
to serve as Zeus' cup bearer and sexual playmate, and in the Odyssey we meet Ino,
a daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, who became a sea goddess after her
death. In the Odyssey, Menelaus is promised an after life in the
Elysian Fields, where life is delightful, because he is married to Helen, a
daughter of Zeus. These stories, however, are exceptions which, in
effect, prove the rule. [Back
to Text]
(3) These comments on the
after life require a brief clarification.
Over the centuries, there was, especially in the popular religious
cults, a growing interest in the afterlife (something which may well be a
symptom of troubled times, when the orthodox faith does not answer to the
demands of ordinary people). But in the
major works of literature, from Homer to the tragedians, there is no sense that
life after death is anything to look forward to or that a significant part of
the human personality survives (something equivalent to what we might call the
soul). Characters do appeal to the
spirits of the dead (as Orestes and Electra do in the Libation Bearers),
and the ghosts of the dead do appear from time to time (e.g., the ghost of
Patroclus in the Iliad, the shades of the dead Odysseus meets in the Odyssey,
and the ghost of Clytaemnestra in the Eumenides), but such apparitions
do not introduce any sense of vital life after death. The first fully developed sense of a
significant afterlife where human beings are judged, rewarded, and punished
comes in Plato’s Republic, which appears very late in the classical
period, and it is significant that this detailed picture emerges in a book
which is challenging traditional belief (especially Homer) at a time when that
traditional belief has clearly failed to stop the Greeks spending years killing
each other.
It is true that the idea
of a judgment of some kind in the afterlife occurs as early as the Odyssey,
where the name Rhadamanthus, one of a trio of judges, is mentioned and where
there are some famous wrongdoers being punished (e.g., Tantalus and Sisyphus,
among others). But there is no sense that the other shades are experiencing
a specific afterlife based on the way they lived, and there is very little
sense anywhere in the major works of literature that people believe in a
moralized afterlife so much that it affects the way they live. In most
cases, the punishments people fear occur in this life, not in the next. [Back to Text]
(4) Those who would like a
more detailed exploration of these terms should consult the following link: Tragedy and Comedy (part of a lecture
on King Lear). [Back to
Text]
(5) Recently I saw a
bumper sticker on a truck from Alaska which neatly summed up this Greek
attitude: “If you’re not the lead dog, the view never
changes.” Everyone may have to help pull
the communal sled, but if you’re not the alpha male dog, you spend your life
staring at the arse hole of the dog in front of
you. [Back to Text]
(6) The origins of
dramatic comedy are easier to speculate about, since that form seems clearly to
have originated in Greece, as in Europe, from spring festivals which featured
all sorts of rambunctious dramas celebrating the passing of winter and the
arrival of a new season of good weather. [Back to Text]
(7) To illustrate
the shift, you can attempt this easy experiment. Try breathing on your
wrist with your mouth wide open. Then do the same with your lips pursed
(as if you were trying to whistle). In every case, the breath coming from
your wide open mouth will be warmer than the breath coming through your pursed
lips. How can this be? The measuring device is the same (your
wrist) and the source of the air is the same (your lungs). How can one be
hot and one be cold? The only reasonable answer is that surely the form
of the air is different in each case, and the different natural phenomena (hot
and cold) are a product of the different formal arrangements of the air.
I'm not claiming that the Greeks actually performed this experiment, by the
way, although it's tempting to think that they did, because that would make it
one of the most remarkable simple experiments in the history of human thought. [Back to Text]
(8) Plato seems to have
believed that the fundamental formal unit of matter was a right-angled triangle
with dimensions of 1, 2, and the square root of three, partly because of the
mystical value placed on those numbers. [Back to Text]
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