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, and a few others like them, 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 3, partly because of the mystical value placed on those numbers.
[Back to Text]