Transcript Ancient Greece and the Formation of the Western Mind
Ancient Greece and the Formation of the Western Mind
Who were the Greeks?
What language did they speak?
Ancient Greece
• What is the origin of the peoples who called themselves
Hellenes
?
• The language they spoke belongs to the
Indo European family
(which includes Germanic, Celtic, Italic, and Sanskrit language groups) • The Greeks of historic times were a blend of the
native tribes
and the
Indo-European invaders
, en route from the European landmass.
Ancient Greece
•What is the history of the Greeks?
History of the Greeks
• • 2200-1450 B.C.
Minoan
civilization flourishes on Crete (after the mythical king Minos) • The citadel of
Mycenae
and the palace of disappeared their system of writing.
Pylos
Greece, in that same period, had centers of wealth and power • The language of these Mycenaeans was an early form of Greek • It must have been the memory of these rich kingdoms that inspired
Homer’s vision of ‘Mycenae rich in gold’
show that mainland • It was a blurred memory: some time in the last century of the millennium the great palaces were destroyed by fire. With them
Dark Age of Greece
: for the next few hundred years the Greeks were illiterate; no written evidence survives
Crete
citadel of
Mycenae
Palace of Pylos
•What is the legacy of the Greeks?
The legacy of the Greeks
• The Dark Ages produced a body of oral epic poetry that was the raw material
Homer
shaped into the two great poems, the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
• The Homeric poems date from the 8 th century B.C. in which the Greeks learned how to write again • •
What role did these poems play in the development of Greek civilization?
• The same role as the
Torah
had played in Palestine: basis of an education and a whole culture • The great characters of the epic served as
models of conduct
for later generations of Greeks
The figures of the Olympian gods
retained in the poems and sculpture of succeeding centuries the shapes and attributes set down by Homer
Odyssey
Olympian Gods
•What are the differences between the Greek and Hebrew conceptions of the universe?
Greek vs Hebrew
• The difference between the
Greek
and the
Hebrew
chasm hero (Achilles and Joseph) is remarkable • The difference between ‘
the God of Abraham and of Isaac’
and
Olympians the
who interfere in the lives of the mortals is an unbridgeable •
The two conceptions of the powers that govern the universe are irreconcilable;
• The • The
Greek
conception of the nature of gods is so alien to us that it is difficult for the modern reader to take it seriously
Hebrew basis of European religious
and still sincerely worshipped thought has made it almost impossible for us to imagine a god who can be feared and laughed at,
Achilles and Joseph
The Hebrew versus the Greek conception of God
• The • The
Hebrew conception of God
those aspects of the universe that imply a
harmonious order elements of disorder
emphasizes in the story of Creation are blamed on
humankind
• Hebrew literature tries to reconcile the evidences of disorder with an a priori assumption of an
all powerful, just God
• The
Greeks they lived
conceived their
gods as an expression of the disorder of the world in which
Greek conception of gods
• • • • • • The
Olympian gods
, like the
natural forces of sea and sky
, follow their own will even to the extreme of conflict with each other, and always with a
sublime disregard for human beings.
Greek gods are all subjects of a single more powerful god,
Zeus
Zeus’s authority over lesser gods is based only on
superior strength
Zeus cannot be openly resisted, but he can be temporarily deceived by his fellow Olympians Zeus has limits to his power too; he cannot save the life of his own son Behind Zeus stands the mysterious
power of Fate
, to which even he must bow
Zeus
Zeus and Europa
Greek gods and morality
• Greek gods represent
the blind forces of the universe
cannot control that humans •
Gods are not necessarily connected with morality
•
Morality is a human creation
, and though the gods may approve of it, they are not bound by it • Gods cannot feel the ultimate consequence of violence: death is a human fear, and the courage to face it is a human quality • There is a double standard; one for gods, and one for mortals, but our sympathy is directed toward the mortals •
Homer imposed on Greek literature the anthropocentric emphasis that is its great contribution to the Western mind
.
• Homer’s true concern is for men and women, not gods
Greek Gods
The City-States of Greece
• The stories told in the
Homeric poems
the age of the • Though the poems preserve some faded memories of the the
Dark Age Trojan War -12 Mycenaean Age
10 th -8 th c. B.C.
th c. B.C.
are set in , they are the creation of •
Dark Age
– final settlement of the Greek peoples –
foundation of small independent cities
• The Greek cities never lost sight of their
common Hellenic heritage,
but it was not enough to unite them except in the face of overwhelming danger they were rivals and fierce competitors
The city-states of Greece
• The cities were dominated from the 8 th c B.C. by aristocratic oligarchies • An important safety valve was
colonization
: • In the 8 th and 7 th .c B.C. landless Greeks founded new cities (always near the sea) all over the
Mediterranean coast
-in Spain, in southern France (Marseilles, Nice), Italy, Sicily (Syracuse), north Africa, Asia Minor, Black Sea.
• It was in the cities founded on the
Asian coast
that the Greeks adapted to their own language
the Phoenician system of writing, adding signs for the vowels to create their alphabet, the forerunner of the Roman alphabet
•What do Athens and Sparta represent?
Athens and Sparta
• • • • • • • • • 5 th c B.C. these two cities led the combined
Greek resistance to the Persian invasion of Europe
The defeat of the solid Persian power by the divided Greek cities surprised the world
Athens was the first democracy in Western history
representative democracy –a direct, not a Athens’s power lay in its
fleet
the struggle against Persia with which she had played her decisive part in
Sparta, policy
on the other hand, was
rigidly conservative in government and The individual citizen was trained by the state
The Spartans controlled the city-states of the Peloponnese These two cities, allies for the war of liberation against Persia, became enemies when the danger was eliminated 431 -404 B.C.
Peloponnesian War
–ended with the total defeat of Athens
•What is Athens’s contribution to western civilization?
Athens’ signifcance
•
Athenian democracy
provided its citizens with a cultural and political environment that was without precedent in the ancient world-
maximum development of the individual’s capacities
and at the same time maximum
devotion to the interests of the community
• However, there were
limits
on who could participate in the democracy: • The “individual Athenian” was the
adult male
citizen •
Women
could not own property, hold office, or vote • ‘metics’ or
resident aliens
– settled from other cities for business reasons
•What was Athens’s intellectual revolution in the 5 th c.?
Man is the measure of all things
• • • • • • • • • • It stemmed from innovations in education Democratic institutions had created a demand for an education that would prepare men for public life, by training them in the art of public speaking
The Sophist, the professional teacher –taught not only the techniques of public speaking but also the subjects that gave a man something to talk about – government, ethics, literary criticism, astronomy
.
The curriculum of the Sophists marks the first appearance in European civilization of
liberal education
The Sophists had no control over their teaching: Their methods placed an
emphasis on the effective presentation of a point of view
They produced a generation that had been trained to see both sides of any question and to argue the weaker side as effectively as the stronger,
the false as effectively as the true
They taught how to appeal to the audience’s sense of its own advantage
rather than accepted moral standards
Emphasis on the technique of effective presentation of both sides of any case encouraged a
relativistic point of view ‘Man is the measure of all things’ –these shifts in world view and moral beliefs led to new forms of creativity in art, literature, and thought, although they also caused conflicts between traditionalists and proponents of new ideas.
The decline of the city-state
• • The war brought to Athens the rule of new politicians who were schooled in the doctrine of
power politics Athens surrendered to the Spartans
in 404 B.C. (pro Spartan anti-democratic regime installed) • Athens became a democracy again, but its confidence was gone forever.
• 4 th c. B.C. –
Plato and Aristotle
revolutionized philosophy and laid the foundations for European philosophical thought • Their predecessor,
Socrates
discussed such great issues as the nature of justice, of truth, of piety
Why did Athenians feel more and more exasperation with Socrates’s
•
voice?
Socrates
, unlike the Sophists, did not lecture nor did he charge a fee;
his method was dialectic
, a search for truth through questions and answers • His dedication to his mission kept him poor • He did believe in
absolute standards
• The resentment against him is partly explained by the questioning of old standards in order to establish new • prophet of the new age • The Athenians
sentenced him to death on charge of impiety in 399 B.C.