(2001 James O. Richards All Rights Reserved.)
Ancient
Outline of Lecture
1. Introduction: the Greek Belief in Order
made the Difference
2. Frame of Reference
3. The World as an Intelligible Whole: the Greek Outlook
4. The Polis as the
Context for Greek Life
5. Man and the Good Life in Greek Culture
6. Summary
Introduction
Greek achievements stemmed from the basic conviction that there is a
perfect, eternal order underlying the whole natural world--in other words, that
all nature is a unified and harmonious cosmos, not a chaos--and that this order
is intelligible to man's intellect. Greeks thus looked to a naturalistic
standard or norm, not a transcendent one as the Hebrews did. Their view of
nature as the source of the ideal and normative, however, was different from
that of the older myth-making cultures. Greeks believed that the order
underlying nature consisted of laws which the mind could best understand; the mythopoeic outlook saw nature as a "thou",
personal and alive, to be understood by the emotions and imagination.
?
1. Three different cultures, three different views of the world and how
it is organized. Why? What explains the difference?
2. Both the Greeks and the Hebrews were on the fringe of the dominant
societies in
Frame of Reference
The origins of the Greeks and the early development of their basic beliefs, values, and ideas are still obscure and hotly debated by the specialists. Apparently the first Greek-speaking peoples or Hellenes infiltrated into what is now the modern Greek
In
the Iliad
the same radical break with the past is apparent. Scholars generally agree that
both the mythology and the folk-tales on which the poem was based developed
during the centuries of the Dark Ages out of older Mycenaean sources. Early in
the eighth century Homer drew these together in the Iliad, although his own
contributions are not always clear. Nonetheless, the poem reflects the new
Greek confidence in man's position in the world and his relationship to the
gods. He lived in an orderly world which was understandable and free of much of
the awesomeness and fearsomeness it held in Near Eastern mythopoeic thinking.
The gods were rationalized and humanized in their family structure under Zeus
and in their separate responsibilities. This basic outlook remained significant
until the end of the classic era in the fourth century. After
750 Greeks seemed to enter upon an age of revolution and expansion. The period
down to 500 saw major accomplishments based on the culture which had formed and
slowly consolidated across the Dark Ages. An alphabet was modified from the
Phoenician one. Greeks expanded cultural contacts with other peoples in the
eastern Mediterranean and the west as they carried on a greater volume of
trade; colonies were planted in the western Mediterranean and Black Sea area.
The beginnings of science and philosophy occurred. Greek artists proved their
independent creativity in sculpture, architecture and pottery. In the latter,
they went beyond the designs and the shapes of geometric pottery, so sure had
they become of its underlying principles, to the naturalistic black and red-figure
styles made famous by Athenian artists. One
of the most important results of this age of revolution and expansion, an age
which laid the foundations for the brilliant classical period from 500 to 323,
was the polis
or city-state. It was the context for and the stimulus to the accomplishments
rising out of Greek culture. It was also a perfect illustration of Greek values
and beliefs. The sense of the wholeness of human life, the feeling for balance
and proportion and the faith that man can make intelligible sense of his
environment were made visible in a community which harnessed the individual to
the group without breaking his spirit and which stimulated the broad range of
man's interests from politics to aesthetics. Physically,
the polis was a small, self-sufficient, and autonomous urban center with
surrounding farm-lands and villages. Mountain ridges and hills tended to
separate Greeks and to promote variety and political disunity. During the Dark
Ages Greeks were organized in tribes under kings, but in the late eighth
century many such groupings changed into city-states controlled by aristocrats.
The idea that blood ties united the citizens of a polis survived in this
transition; one was born into a polis as into a family. By the fifth
century there were about 200 of these city-states. The major ones, however,
were Athens and Sparta. Each was the focus of the whole life of its citizens,
but they were so different from each other that they were the extremes of what
a polis could be. Located
in one of the southeastern parts of the Greek mainland, Sparta turned itself into
an armed camp on a permanent war footing sometime in the seventh century. Only
Spartiates enjoyed full rights of citizenship. As an aristocracy they
controlled the rest of the population who were either non-voting citizens (peroikoi)
or semi-free (helots). The whole purpose of social institutions and the
laws was to maintain the Spartiates as a disciplined effective army which could
dominate the Peloponnese Personal feelings and ambitions were channeled to that
end. Spartan thus became the byword for a rigid social order, for personal
self-denial and military discipline, all to strengthen the polis. By
such means Sparta became dominant not only in the Peloponnese but in all the
mainland. Not until the fifth century was her primacy challenged--by
Athens--and even so she remained the leading power until the fourth century. Athens developed far
differently while Sparta organized itself on a permanent war footing under the aristocratic
Spartiates. Already the largest polis, Athens moved towards broadly
based rule and commercial and industrial supremacy in Greece. The stages by
which democracy was established were influenced by the economic development of
the city and by two significant reformers, Solon (638?-?559)
and Cleisthenes (fl. 508). Each man had a great deal to do with settling social
and political tensions created by the expansion of trade and industry. Their
solution was to expand the body of citizens and broaden its powers at the
expense of aristocrats. By 500 much of this had been done. Down
to the fifth century Greek culture based on the polis had nurtured a
broad range of creative activities. All this was but a prelude to the classic
era of Greek culture (c.500-323). However, the background to this brilliant age
was almost incessant warfare. First came the Persian
menace, then the debilitating Peloponnesian war between The
Persian kings of the late sixth and early fifth centuries considered the Greek
city-states around the Athens'
empire-building led directly to the long and ruinous Peloponnesian War
(431-401) with Against
this violent background occurred the brilliant classical age centering on The World as an
Intelligible Whole: the Greek Outlook Underlying
most of what the Greeks thought and did were several beliefs, values, and
tendencies. One of these was fundamental; the others were derivatives and
implications of it. Fundamental for Greeks was faith in the coherence of things
and in man's ability to know this basic order. Out of this basic conviction
came the Greek tendency to take a whole view of things. Almost as if obeying an
instinct, Greeks intuitively looked beyond the parts to the whole and beyond
the individual thing to the universal framework into which it might be put. In
so doing they demonstrated feeling for balance, harmony, proportion, and
symmetry, qualities which remained uniquely theirs. They also valued
rationalism--the kind of thinking men do when they keep asking questions about
the nature of things on the assumption that they can discover logical
principles as basic explanations. Finally, Greeks did believe that there was a
natural explanation to questions about this world and human life. They gloried
in life even with its uncertainties, pains, and mortality,
and they believed in man's capabilities and the full development of them. The
Greek faith in the coherence of things and in man's capacity to know was one of
the great leaps forward in terms of the many intellectual possibilities it
opened up. Probably it began with an intuition, a religious feeling for the
divinity and unity of nature, as expressed in the work of potters in the Dark
Ages who acted on the new faith when creating the geometric styles of pottery.
Homer more clearly articulated the belief while recognizing a consistent theme
underlying all the actions of gods and men. He stated it as a moral
order--Moira--that which was right and proper and unchangeable for the gods as
well as men. Later, Greek dramatists would reiterate the same conviction in
moral terms. Two centuries after Homer, however, philosophers in another flash
of insight began to go beyond the Homeric view and to make the belief in order
a matter of intellectual speculation. They started trying to identify laws
which would explain all things, not just what happened if one committed
offenses against basic morality. They believed such laws existed within the
whole natural order; one just had to think about them until the mind could
apprehend them. In this belief they were laying groundwork for modern science
which owes its own faith in an orderly world at least partly to the Greeks. And
they were shedding more of the mythopoeic outlook
which the Greeks of the Dark Ages had begun to abandon. Thales
in the early sixth century seems to have been the first to try to state a
natural and logical explanation of the world. He declared that water was the
single substance which made up everything. His successors in the sixth and
fifth centuries (before Socrates who emphasized other concerns) thought that he
was wrong about water but right about the existence of a single, knowable
substance. As they criticized Thales and each other, becoming more
self-conscious about their use of logical analysis, they tended to offer
increasingly generalized and abstract theories which claimed to account for the
whole of reality. For instance, Heraclitus (active
500-490) insisted that the basic law was constant change according to
proportion. Change was caused by the clash of balancing opposites in such a way
that all the natural world perpetually renewed and
regulated itself. Since the law applied to all reality (the Greeks tending to
take the whole view), Heraclitus was offering an early statement of natural
law. Later this concept would influence Roman law and impel European thinkers
of the Enlightenment. In
discussing the Greek belief in the coherence of things we have also touched on
other characteristics of their outlook. The tendency to keep the whole in
focus, for example, pervaded the Iliad. Homer had a single universal theme, although
he told a fascinating story. The theme was that the committing of hubris,
acting without due regard for one's limits as a man, would be punished. He
chose the Trojan War and some of its stories as the backdrop to his epic, but
he selected one story as the central one: a quarrel between Agamemnon and
Achilles in which both had been guilty of hubris, Agamemnon by being
arrogant and Achilles by getting violently angry. The epic included a wealth of
other materials, but Homer subordinated them all to the teaching of the moral
lesson. Hubris brought punishment on oneself and on countless others as
well. Greek
philosophers and artists were also guided by a holistic outlook. The attempt by
thinkers to drive to the single sustaining principle underlying all things was
based on the assumption that the universe was indeed a unified whole. It did
not occur to philosophers before the fifth century that a single set of laws
might not apply equally to physical, ethical, and political problems. They
assumed reality to be one and so, as we just saw, tried to devise natural law
to cover everything. From the seventh century down to about 400 Greek sculptors
characteristically aimed at portraying not individual figures but idealized
ones. To have presented the human figure realistically would have been to
focus on the individual or the particular. Greek sculptors chose rather to try
to convey the universal in the individual human figure. They even went so far
as to try to formulate laws governing the form and the movement of the human
figure. Similarly, in the most prevalent architectural form, the temple,
architects worked toward achieving a unified, whole structure. The Parthenon on
A
third element of Greek culture, the value placed on rationalism, has also been
implied in the discussion of the Iliad and early Greek philosophy. The Homeric
outlook was a basic confidence that man could best accommodate himself to an
intelligible world by taking thought about his moral behavior. He could do
little about his ultimate fate except meet it heroically. But he could be
assured that the divine forces which sometimes impelled him were human-like and
behaved in ways man could understand. Thales and the other pre-Socratics placed
even greater reliance on rationalism when they assumed that what governed the
universe was essentially the same as human thought. Hence the mind could fathom
the universe if it thought in a logical fashion. No
one, however, surpassed the confidence in reason shown by Socrates, his pupil
Plato, and his pupil's pupil Aristotle. They did not have the same interests in
natural philosophy which the pre-Socratics had, but they used and improved the
tools of reason and logical analysis which their predecessors had developed.
Socrates apparently believed that man needed most to know the Good if he was to
live well. He meant by the Good not a consensus of what men accepted as
goodness or what had been traditionally thought to be good. He used Good in the
absolute sense, always the same for all men everywhere. It existed within man
and as an objective reality underlying the visible world. Once man knew it, he
would be virtuous. Indeed, it would be impossible for him not to be
"good". If a man did evil, it was only because he did not know the
Good. Plato went on to
develop Socrates' ideas even more. He taught that not only the Good but all
other ideals existed in a world beyond the world of the senses. This world
alone was real, all else being illusory. One could know the Good, the True and
the Beautiful, the world of perfect forms, by rigorous rational inquiry and
contemplation which culminated in spiritual illumination. Few would manage to
do it, however, and those few had the job of trying to lead others to discover
as much as they could of the ideal world. This elite, Plato declared, was the
only fit ruling class for the truly good polis. Aristotle's
interests outreached his masters' in that he wrote on practically everything.
In fact, he created categories of knowledge which scholars followed for
centuries and which they have still not entirely given up. He systematized all
that he studied: political systems, principles of logic, literary criticism,
most of the sciences, and others. In this he, as the others, demonstrated the
force of the conviction that man could know and understand if he used reason. ? Sometimes
Greeks tended to follow reason when experimentation and observation would have
been better. There was a lot of nonsense in Greek theories about the natural
world as well as astonishing insights. The physician Hippocrates of Cos (469-399)
exemplified the best of both rationalism and the desire for facts. Pure
theorizing was hardly worthwhile, he said, unless it was based on actual
observation. One needed to examine patients, record their conditions, and then
draw theories about their ills. Hippocrates, however, did not start a trend
toward this kind of experimentalism. This emphasis in science would not come
until modern times in Another
aspect of the Greeks' naturalism was their zestful attitude towards life. In
spite of life's misery and frustration, most Greeks until the Hellenistic
period did not think the next world had anything to offer. The Odyssey
said as much in the scene (Book 11, lines 460-540) in which Odysseus visited
Hades and was told by the dead Achilles that it was better to be the lowest
slave alive than the greatest king in the underworld. Life being really all
there was, one should live to the fullest. For the
Homeric heroes this had meant seeking glory even at the price of an early
death, and Greeks continued to admire that ideal. But within the context of the
life of the polis they also thought that life should mean cultivating
all man's capabilities and trying to do varied things well. The thing to strive
for was control, so as not to be carried away, or restraint, not license, in
doing what was done. ? The Polis as the
Context for Greek Life What did the polis mean to the Greek? First of
all, it is clear that it meant the right way for man to live because it was a
microcosm in its laws and constitution of the fundamental order of the world.
The world was a cosmos, organized and structured, instead of a chaos because of
divine, eternal laws. Similarly, human society was a polis in which men
could control themselves and live a full and excellent life because of the rule
of law. Without the polis only a despot could manage things. Greeks were
well aware of the pattern of theocratic absolutism which predominated in the
Near East and they rejected it. As the Hebrews, they took the view that all men
were responsible for the welfare of society. Aristotle summed up their
sentiments in a single sentence: Man is an
animal whose characteristic it is to live in a city-state.1 Aeschylus
said essentially this in the Oresteia when he held up the polis
as the only means of solving the knottiest human problems. The main action of
the trilogy of plays (Agamemnon,
Libation Bearers, and Eumenides) was the bloody myth of Agamemnon, king of
Mycenae, Clytemnestra, his wife, and Orestes, their son. Because Agamemnon had
sacrificed one of their daughters to appease the gods before setting out for
Troy, Clytemnestra killed him when he returned from the war. Zeus thereupon
commanded, through Apollo, that Orestes kill his mother as an act of justice.
Orestes obeyed at the cost of violating the blood-tie himself and facing the
wrath of the Furies, deities whose job it was to avenge such crimes as
parricide. Where would it end? How could things be righted when one act of
justice led to further injustice? Aeschylus' answer was that justice could come
only through the polis. Orestes fled from the Furies to Athens, where
Athena, acting for Zeus, persuaded the Furies to submit the question to the
Athenian citizens and to accept their decision. When Orestes was released,
Athena convinced the Furies that they ought to become guardians of the polis,
punishing those who disturbed or violated the civic order. By divine sanction,
then, the polis had brought justice so that all claims were satisfied.
The law of the city had become the same as the fundamental moral order of the
universe, each deserving the same reverence. A
fundamental part of a young man's education, besides the study of Homer and of
the polis' day-to-day business, was learning the basic laws of the
city-state, or nomoi. By this practice the polis not only
proclaimed what justice, and moral virtues and social ideals were, but proposed
to teach them to its citizens. As a young man learned these laws and imbibed
their spirit, therefore, he was being transformed into a higher type of human
being. (The idea of law as a molder of human character eventually influenced
Roman law and thence European culture.) The
audience which viewed Aeschylus' plays (and which served on the juries trying
to maintain justice) was not an idle elite but the whole body of citizens of
the polis. Thus the second meaning of the polis to Greeks was
that it was the whole community and its way of life. Not just in democratic
Athens but in the monarchical or aristocratically ruled city-states as well,
the general feeling was that the affairs of the polis concerned all
citizens. Citizens might not participate fully in all matters in some
city-states, but that did not mean that it was up to one man either to decide
everything as in Persia. Athenians
carried the principle that the polis belonged to all farther than anyone
else. They believed that a man's first duty was to public business: attending
the Assembly to which all adult Athenian males belonged; serving on the juries
which administered the laws of the polis: fighting for the city-state in
time of war; holding public office if chosen by his fellow citizens; and taking
an active part in the dramas, festivals, and games sponsored by the city. This
was an admirable ideal, but how did Greeks find the time? By
living simply. Before the fourth century, it took only part of the day
to do the amount of work required to have the necessities of life. The rest was
left for public business. How did Greeks know enough to be so fully involved?
The small scale of
the polis made it possible. A citizen lived daily with the problems
of the city-state and he knew as well as anyone else what was going on. If he
did not care enough to know and take part in public affairs he was useless
(idiotes) to the city and himself. Any
matter concerning the polis could come before the Assembly which met on
the Pnyx about
once a month. Many different matters regularly did: the Assembly was the sole
legislative body; it decided basic foreign policy and controlled finances; it
checked all the public officials to see that they were performing properly; it
might become a court on very important judicial cases (as in the example of
Orestes). Day to day business between the Assembly was
handled by a council of five hundred chosen by ballot to serve for a year. Any
citizen, therefore, might find himself on this body and could wind up giving a
great deal of time to city-state business. As the citizen joined in resolving
problems and making fundamental decisions for Athens, he was free to propose
anything which did not contradict old laws and was free to criticize any other
proposals or any existing policies. If he criticized policy, however, he was
expected to show how his alternative would work better. In fact, he might be
given the job of executing his own scheme, with ostracism as the penalty
for failure. The polis, therefore, encouraged responsibility as it
brought its members into the business of the community. When
danger threatened, the citizen fought
for the polis with whatever equipment he owned. This meant that the
wealthiest bore a share of the fighting which was proportionate to their wealth
and stake in the polis' welfare. The richest provided
and often commanded warships. The moderately wealthy served with their own weapons and armor as members of the phalanx, the
city's fighting unit composed of ranks of closely ordered infantry. The poor
were support troops or rowers on board the ships of the fleet. Mobilization. in short, was very
much like every other facet of life in the polis--all participated as
fully as they could. The polis
not only attempted to draw man into public political business, but also
provided religious festivals, games, dramas, public readings of Homer, and
common aesthetic experiences through its architecture and art. It was the focus
of all man's interests and was an active, formative way of life. Dramatic
productions were not for the few. They were civic functions to which all were
invited and expected to come. Those citizens unable to pay their way got in
free. The brunt of the expense of the productions was borne by wealthy citizens
as "liturgies," or "folk-works" for the community. The
plays themselves, as in the example of the Oresteia by Aeschylus, were not
simply diverting and entertaining in a light sense (not even the comedies by
Aristophanes were mindless time-fillers for people who had nothing better to
do). They were reminders of civic responsibility and civic greatness. They
dealt with fundamental problems of human relations and of human destiny. They
were part of a whole effort by the polis to train its citizens
intellectually and morally. The measure of the worth of a polis for the
Greek was not how efficiently it operated, not how powerful militarily or
economically it was, but whether it produced human excellence and a satisfying
life. Pericles
in his Funeral
Speech in Thucydides' Peloponnesian War gave the classic summary of this
conception when he proclaimed Athens as the school of the Greeks with a
cultural life open to all and proclaimed the Athenian an unparalleled example
of the adaptable and versatile man. Man and the Good
Life in Greek Culture Man
was as complex for the Greeks as he was for the Hebrews. And,
characteristically, the Greek outlook took in the whole human condition. Man
was divine-like in some respects because of his similarity to the gods and yet
he was still weak and ephemeral. He was not individually worthwhile in the same
sense as Judaism or Christianity affirmed him to be, but he was a human being,
and his mortal life was worthwhile. Free to make choices, he could only do so
within the framework of fate or necessity. And yet he was unique in being able
to ponder and grasp the essential thrust of life. He could live honorably and
well by learning the rhythms which governed his life. Most
Greeks did not think in terms of whether man was basically good or evil. An
Orphic myth of the sixth century did present man as a dual being with a divine
soul and an evil body. Plato later subscribed to a dualism of this sort and
through him the notion influenced Christianity and later European culture. But
while it was Greek in tenor, this dualism was not widely adopted before the
fourth century. Man was a whole being. If he was good or virtuous it was
because he had been shaped toward the ideal of arete--all-rounded moral,
physical, intellectual, and practical excellence. And if he did evil, it was
because he lacked arete. In either case, however, what we call his
character had been acquired and not inherited. He was not an abject sinner by
nature, or a pure spirit, or even a combination of these two split natures. 2. Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics asserted that "excellence of character results from
habit." Can this be true? And can this be taught and obtained by practice? Man
stood in a close relationship to the gods which was at once the source of his
glory and his pain. Mythology
told of the many women who bore children by the gods and also moralized about
the men who tried to violate goddesses. Homer presented the gods as human-like
in character and behavior. They ate, quarreled, became jealous, made love,
fought each other as well as humans, and sometimes were wounded--all very much
like man. And yet they were immortal and man was a frail creature who lived,
suffered and died all too quickly. The poet Pindar
(c. 522-446) summed up man's relationship to the gods even better than Homer: "One is
the race of Gods and of men; from one mother we both draw our breath. Yet are
our powers poles apart."2 Yet
the Greeks accepted man's mortality and affirmed his worth anyway. Again,
Pindar: Thing of a day! such
is man; a shadow in a dream. For
centuries man's dilemma as a free and yet determined being influenced Greek
writers. Homer posed it in the Iliad through the characters of the heroic
figures Achilles and Hector. Both knew they had to die if they pursued the ideal
of arete: Hector if he dared to meet Achilles in combat,
and Achilles if he went on to kill Hector. Their fate had already been decreed,
and yet they chose death consciously and willingly rather than give up arete
and glory. Sophocles
probed even deeper into the issue of man's freedom and fate in Oedipus the King, a
tragedy about a rational and great man who was fated to kill his father and
marry his mother unknowingly. In the ancient myth on which the play was based,
Oedipus' parents knew his fate and tried to keep it from happening by ordering
that he be abandoned as a child. He was spared, however, and grew up in
Corinth. When he learned his fate, he left Corinth to spare those he thought
were his parents, and fled towards Thebes, his true native city. On the road he
met an old man, argued with him and killed him. Arriving at Thebes, he ended
the Sphinx's reign of terror, married the widow of the former king and became
king himself. He unwittingly fulfilled all the prophecies: the old man he
killed was his real father Laius, king of Thebes, and the king's widow was his
real mother, Jocasta. Sophocles began the play at that point with Oedipus, as a
confident and successful ruler, vowing to punish the murderer of Laius and end
the plague ravaging the city as divine punishment for the murder. As his
efforts to find the killer led him closer and closer to the truth he refused to
stop. He had to know, rationalist that he was. The truth, when it finally came
out, was too much for Jocasta who hanged herself and almost too much for
Oedipus who stabbed his own eyes in punishment. So Sophocles seemed to be
saying that even the great and the wise must suffer. The reason: men are not
gods; they lack divine knowledge, and they are gripped by fate. And yet man was
not a puppet; he could accept and live with his fate. Oedipus left the stage a
man who had suffered the worst that could happen, but still resolving to live
through his suffering. Greeks
found joy in the few simple good things there were in a brief life of poverty.
But the means for simple living were not hard to come by, and many of them
preferred to live that way so that they could concentrate on what they liked
best anyway, the public life of the city. Normally they wore during the day
what they slept in at night, ate simple foods (chiefly bread), and lived in
modest houses. They prized healthy children, especially brave sons and
grandsons, although men spent little time at home in a male-centered polis.
The
Good Life, more than enjoying family, possessions, and pleasures, was living
with a sense of proportion among man's several sides and a respect for man's
proper limits. That meant on the one hand whole-mindedness and striving for arete
in one's own life--all-rounded excellence in those things man can be excellent
in, such as speaking, physical prowess, the cultivation of the mind, and wise
actions. One should try to balance in his person the cardinal virtues of
Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, and Justice as the Homeric writings and the laws
of the polis taught them. Failure in this was hamartia,
or perhaps even more serious, hubris. Hamartia was potentially a deadly
error. Hubris was definitely fatal as a violation of the basic laws of
universe--arrogance before the gods or blind anger, setting oneself up too
highly--and brought certain retribution at the hands of the gods. As
always for the Greek, there was the political side of the Good Life, for as we
have already seen the view that man became more nearly what he could become
ideally as he dedicated himself to the common welfare of the polis and
its whole life. The person who tried to be a private citizen did not do anyone
any good, even himself (the root-word for "private person" being the
same as for "idiot"). The Good man also exhibited the cardinal
virtues in the polis by facing danger for it (Courage), curbing his
ambitions and pride for it (Temperance), obeying its laws (Justice), and trying
to do the right thing at the right time in its public business (Wisdom). The Transformation of Greek Ideals in Hellenistic Culture Greek culture
down to the fourth century might be summed up in the statement that order and
not chaos ruled the world and human affairs. It flourished within the stimulating
framework of the polis which was a visible sign of the conviction that
order prevailed. There, law ruled and not the passions of men. There was a
microcosm of universal order, a miniature of the world which contained or
embodied that fixed, fundamental order underlying all things. Because they
believed that order ruled and not chaos, Greeks tried to see the whole, they
were confident of reason's ability to discern order in the world and they
strived for harmony, balance, and symmetry in what they thought and said and
did. Not only the polis, but Greek philosophy and science, poetry and drama,
art and architecture, and the Olympian religion displayed the effects of these
cultural beliefs, values, and ideas. Even by the
end of the fifth century, and well before the Hellenistic Age (c.323-30 B.C.),
changes in this basic outlook began to appear. There were signs that some men
were beginning to doubt that order ruled rather than chaos or at least to think
that knowledge about that order, if it could be obtained, was difficult to come
by. Their mood was represented by the philosopher-teachers called Sophists who
were contemporaries of Socrates and Plato and who raised doubts about
traditional beliefs and values. They insisted that virtue meant whatever the
individual using the word meant. One of them, Protagoras, went on to declare
that all was relative to the individual: "Man is the measure of all
things". Even in the plays of Euripides there is an implied questioning of
the nature of the fundamental moral order. The
changing character of the polis as a whole way of life and a basic unit
of international relations was already apparent by the late fifth century. The
Peloponnesian War contributed to the deterioration of the internal life of the polis,
as Thucydides revealed in his accounts (History of the Peloponnesian Wars) of
Athens' bitter factional strife, the self-seeking of its leaders after
Pericles, and the Assembly's growing irresponsibility during the course of the
war. The conflict also brought out the inadequacies of the polis as a
basic political form for all who cared to see. Finally, Alexander the Great sealed
the fate of the city-state. After his career
the polis had no further significance except as a remembered ideal and
an administrative and cultural center to hold together Alexander's kingdom and
the later successor kingdoms. City-states ceased being communities of mutually
responsible citizens living a common life. These
tendencies towards changes became so pronounced after Alexander that the term
Hellenistic (or "Greek-like") is used to describe the new era, 323-30
B.C. Alexander
may have had dreams of creating a great universal state and a new cultural
union to bind together Greeks and his other subject peoples. Although scholars
have speculated about his vision of such a cosmopolis, Alexander
died before his plans could be clearly defined or accomplished. His
generals struggled over and divided much of his empire, other parts becoming
independent. The three major kingdoms which finally emerged were Egypt and the
Palestinian coast ruled by the Ptolemy family, the bulk of the old Persian empire ruled by descendants of Seleucus, and Macedonia ruled by Antigonas'
heirs. An assortment of minor powers also existed alongside these three
including the old Greek city-states which Macedonia controlled. The rulers of
these major states may have wanted to unify Alexander's conquests again, but
none of them was an Alexander. So such unity as existed among these areas was a
common possession of a changing Greek culture and a similar use of some of
Alexander's techniques for ruling. Hellenistic
monarchs discarded the Greek principle of self-government and usually claimed
to be gods or divinely protected. They ruled for the most part as absolute
monarchs in the fashion of Alexander and the old Near East kings. Their
strength rested on their Greek and Macedonian mercenary soldiers and
bureaucrats who lived in strategic cities, many of which were newly built.
Other Greeks also resided in these cities which became commercial and cultural
centers of influence drawing each of the realms together internally. Kings
welcomed into their service any native inhabitants who were willing to adopt
Greek ways. But generally this small ruling class was almost entirely Greco-Macedonian
and governed the masses of native peoples. At
least before 200 these kingdoms made possible an expansion in trade and
industry and a rise in prosperity among the upper ruling elements. The period
was also remarkable for developments which occurred in the sciences. Euclid
developed a systematic approach to geometry about 300. About the same time the
first human dissections in medicine took place. In astronomy, Aristarchus of
Samos (c.310-230) proposed a heliocentric theory, although other scholars
rejected his theory for a geocentric one which fit observed facts better. The
geocentric theory of Ptolemy (c.140 A.D.) achieved such acceptance and
authority that it lasted almost fifteen centuries. Two
qualities characterized the Greek culture of these Hellenistic kingdoms:
universalism and individualism. On the one hand, the Greek outlook tended to
become universal or cosmopolitan in keeping with the wider world in which
Greeks now moved as an aristocratic ruling class. This involved a reinterpretation
and a broadening of basic beliefs and values. Classical Greek culture had been
centered on the city-state and restricted to fewer people than in the
Hellenistic world. It had also been shared by the whole spectrum of classes
within the polis (excluding women). On the other hand, the tendency
toward universalism was also accompanied by a spirit of individualism, a fact
which at first surprises. Yet the forces producing the one tendency also
produced the other. Since Greeks no longer lived within tightly-knit
communities which defined a whole way of life, they were driven to think as
cosmopolitan individuals and to modify traditional assumptions and ideas which
had made sense in the group-oriented polis. If group ties were weakened,
the individual was left more to himself to think about and understand the new
world which opened up after Alexander's conquests. Until
late in the Hellenistic era the notion of a basic order underlying the world
still held sway, but not with the simpler and more intensely held convictions
of the classical era. The order of things seemed to be much more complex than
had been thought before, and if it were to be known it could not be stated in a
way which all would find acceptable. The sense of the interrelatedness of
things, the feeling for symmetry, harmony, and proportion virtually disappeared
as values which carried conviction, along with the polis as a whole way
of life. Rationalism continued to characterize the philosophic and scientific
attempts to explain the world and human affairs, but not with the same intensity
of conviction which had characterized thinking down to the fifth century.
Alongside rationalism other alternatives grew in popularity across the period.
The belief in a naturalistic interpretation of life--that man's mortal life was
meaningful in its own right and worth living well--was also challenged by other
beliefs that man's hopes were better placed in individual immortality achieved
through a mystical and escapist union with some deity. Some
of the signs of the universalizing and individualizing of Greek culture were
the transformation of the Greek language, changing styles in sculpture, the
spread of philosophies of conduct, and the rise of the mystery religions. As
the language of the ruling class Greek became dominant in the Middle East,
losing its variety in the process. Dialects which had been peculiar to certain
Greek cities gave way to uniform and common Greek, the koine, or
language of all those who wished to be understood anywhere in the Hellenistic
world. This language became and remained for centuries a unifying force until superceded by Arabic, the language of the conquering
Moslems, in the eight century C. E. Changing styles in sculpture also
illustrate the changing direction of Hellenistic culture. Sculptors became
realistic and individualistic in the choice of subject matter, common people
being depicted almost as often as gods and heroes. Classical Greek sculpture of
the fifth century had been a restrained
blend of the ideal type and the individual figure. Its aim was to inspire
and unify the group. Emotionalism was present, but harnessed. Hellenistic
sculpture, however, was often portrait-like in its detail and calculated
through its own agitation to rouse the individual's emotions. (see the old
market woman which will be shown in lecture.) At the same time, its
emotional appeal tended to be superficial. This general style spread throughout
the Hellenistic world, becoming manneristic, or bound
by rules and formulas as it did so. Finally,
the philosophies of conduct, Stoicism and Epicureanism, illustrated both the
individualistic and universal tendencies by appealing to the citizen of
cosmopolis who had to work out his own problems. The polis had enfolded
the individual. The absolutist Hellenistic kingdom merely administered him from
afar and was too vast to enable him to find emotional loyalty and psychological
security in its service. The two philosophies were somewhat different in their
appeals but similar in that they both urged that a man control himself through
reason and keep his distance from the world. The
message of Epicurus of Athens
(342-271) was that men ought to free themselves from the fear of death and live
for pleasure. Death, he declared, was simply the scattering of the atoms which
made up the body. Thus one had nothing to fear: no punishment from the gods; no
shadowy afterlife. Life was purely a materialistic moment between non-existence
and non-existence. One's goal in that moment was to live so as to enjoy a
maximum of pleasure and a minimum of pain. Since gross sensuality produced more
pain than pleasure, the good life was not sensual and endless pleasure. Rather,
the simple life was best and the avoiding of commitments such as marriage and
political life. Thus man finally could attain ataraxia
or inner calmness to put up with whatever the world did to him. Zeno
of Citium (335-263), the founder of Stoicism, also
advocated a search for inner serenity, but believed in doing one's duty in the
world all the while. The individual, he said, contained within himself a
particle of the Divine Reason which governed the world. He thus could know the
ultimate rationality of all things. Knowing it, he should submit to it and
discipline himself to disregard all the folly and evil which were contrary to
the divine order. If thereby he achieved the state of apatheia
(emotionlessness), however, his duty still was to
carry out his public obligations and to show the virtues of bravery, justice,
wisdom, and temperance (which Christianity later borrowed). His duty was also
to regard all men as brothers because all possessed the divine within them, but
he could not lose his tranquility by loving them. Of the two philosophies, Stoicism had a greater
appeal in the Hellenistic world and later in the Roman Empire than did
Epicureanism. Both appealed mainly to the intellect in man, rather than to the
emotions which tended to get one into trouble. The
mystery religions, however, appealed to the emotions of those who were not
tough-minded enough to follow reason. Called mystery cults because they had
secret rituals and teachings only for the initiates, these religions did give
some individuals a sense of belonging. One of the more popular seems to have
been the cult of Isis and Sarapis. It was a blend of
newer Greek mythology and older Egyptian elements. Like other religions, it
gave the worshiper hope of a mystical union with deities and a way out of the
world and thereby offered some emotional comfort to those seeking answers which
they used to find within the traditional polis as a way of life. All
these signs of universalism and individualism point to the future of the
eastern Mediterranean world. Had Alexander or any of his successors been able
to create a lasting empire to be a political and social framework for Greek
culture there might have been an outpouring of creative energy comparable to or
greater than that of the city-state era. As it was the Hellenistic monarchs
could not even maintain stability in their own realms, much less imitate
Alexander. In the absence of political unity, the Hellenistic world was
weakened by continuing warfare. After 200 economic decline
set in and social tensions increased between the dwindling class of the
well-off and the swelling class of the poor. The Hellenistic world became
so unstable that it drew other powers on the periphery into the area. The most
important of these was Rome. The Hellenistic world had in a sense overreached
itself, but it had preserved even as it disseminated and transformed Greek
culture. Rome went on to take up Greek culture, blend with it her own culture
and make the resulting synthesis a major binding ingredient in her imperial
rule of the Mediterranean world. 1.
Translated by H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957), p.11.
?
1. How do you respond to the idea that the Greeks took a holistic view of
things?
2. What about the implications for art and architecture, not to mention
poetry?
Where did the Greeks get their confidence in reason? Is the belief in
rational thinking just another kind of faith? What gave them the
assurance they were right?
1. How can one live life fully and zestfully if there is no confidence
about an afterlife?
2. The Greek ideal of living heroically and dying
gloriously is not a dead ideal is it? Can you think of ways that
ideal has survived?
3. Think back to the Hebrews and their ideal of the Good Life. Compare it to the Greek ideal. What are the differences? (Think of Micah 6:8: what is it that God
requires but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God?) Keep these different ideals in mind; we will
come back to them when we get to Christianity and the medieval era.
?
The Greeks believed that what man needed to perfect himself in an all-rounded
way was to live in the polis. In other words, he didn't need
salvation; he needed civic life. What do you think? How does
one become a better human being? Truly, fully human in the fullest
expression of humanity of which man is capable? Inner
transformation by some religious or moral conversion? Outer transformation by living in the right kind of society?
?
If one believes that his society is grounded in the nature of things, mirrors
the basic order of things, he will accept its laws as just. Right? What if he doesn't believe that his society is
based on universal principles of justice? Will he obey the laws?
?
These last two sentences relate to my previous questions above about what man
needs to perfect himself. Again, can one be made into a better person by
living in and being subject to the laws and government and experience of social
life?
?
If the U.S. Congress followed the principle that before you criticize some
policy or action, you had better have a better alternative, what would
happen?
?
1. Would you have felt restricted by the communal life of the polis?
Why? Would the restrictions have been worth it?
2. Pericles in his Oration, after extolling the heroes who died for the city,
said "These take as your model and, judging happiness to be the fruit of
freedom and freedom of valour, never decline the dangers of war." Good
advice?
?
1. Greeks did not believe in the sinfulness of man. Was their view
of human nature inadequate, incomplete? Why? Why not?
3. Is the idea of dualism (pure spirit, evil flesh) correct? Why? Why
not?
Yet when god-given splendour visits him
A bright radiance plays over him, and how sweet is life!3
?
Again, if all you have to look forward to is this life and the best that you
can enjoy, is it still worth living well?
?
Why does change occur? Why, especially, when things are going well?
When the best that can be thought or done or said is being thought, done, and
said, why does there have to be change?
?
Why did yearnings for immortality or survival of the individual personality
grow? This has not always been a major force? Why then? Is it
today? For you?
?
Which of the two (Stoicism or Epicureanism) do you find most appealing?
Is either ultimately satisfactory?
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., pp. 174-175.
