Ancient Greece and the Formation of the Western Mind

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Ancient Greece and the Formation of the Western
Mind

• Greece is considered by most historians to be the
  foundational culture of Western Civilization,
  although this view has come under more critical
  scrutiny in recent decades. Greek culture was a
  powerful influence in the Roman Empire, which
  carried a version of it to many parts of Europe.

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the Glory that was Greece,And the grandure that
was Rome.
To HelenHelen, thy beauty is to meLike those
Nicean barks of yore, / That gently, oer a
perfumed sea, /The weary way-worn wanderer
boreTo his own native shore.On desperate seas
long wont to roam,Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic
face, / Thy Naiad airs have brought me home/ To
the Glory that was Greece,/ And the grandure that
was Rome.
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. . .Lo! In yon window-nicheHow statue-like I
see thee stand,The agate lamp within thy
hand!Ah, Psyche, from the regions whichAre
holy-land!By Edgar Alan Poe 1831
Detail from Grecian Urn.
Artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 -
1882) Helen of Troy Art Style Pre-Raphaelite Year
1863
http//www.livingmyths.com/Greek.htm
http//www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Mythology/Helen.html
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Why Study the Greeks?

• Western intellectual history always begins with
  the ancient Greeks. 
• This is not to say that no one had any deep
  thoughts prior to the ancient Greeks, or that the
  philosophies of ancient India and China (and
  elsewhere) were in any way inferior.  In fact,
  philosophies from all over the world eventually
  came to influence western thought, but only much
  later. 
• But it was the Greeks that educated the Romans
  and, after a long dark age, it was the records of
  these same Greeks, kept and studied by the Moslem
  and Jewish scholars as well as Christian monks,
  that educated Europe once again (Boeree).

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Though the origin of the Hellenes, or ancient
Greeks, is unknown, their language clearly
belongs to the Indo-European family.

• Named after the mythical king Minos, the Minoan
  civilization flourished on the island of Crete in
  the second millennium B.C.
• In the same period, the Myceneans developed a
  wealthy and powerful civilization on mainland
  Greece.

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• At some point in the last century of the
  millennium, the great palaces were destroyed by
  fire.
• With them, the arts, skills, and language of the
  Myceneans vanished for the next few centuries, a
  period called the "Dark Age" of Greece.
• Much of what we know about them is based on the
  body of oral poetry that became the raw material
  for Homer's epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey.

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Where Do I Come From? Why do I Do the Things
that I Do?

• By serving as a basis for education, the Iliad
  and Odyssey played a role in the development of
  Greek civilization that is equivalent to the role
  that the Torah had played in Palestine.
• The irreconcilable difference between the Greeks
  gods of Olympus and the Hebrew god led to a
  struggle from which only one survived.
• For those of us raised under monotheistic
  religions or cultures, the Greek gods and their
  relation to humanity may seem alien.

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Mythic Greek gods were admired for qualities
that would make the modern world flinch.
Hebrews and Greeks
http//www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/print.cfm?id59
98

• Whereas the Hebrews blamed humanity for bringing
  disorder to God's harmoniously ordered universe,
  the Greeks conceived their gods as an expression
  of the disorder of the world and its
  uncontrollable forces.
• To the Greeks, morality is a human invention and
  though Zeus is the most powerful of their gods,
  even he can be resisted by his fellow Olympians
  and must bow to the mysterious power of fate.

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Greek Piety vs. Greek Myths
Religious beliefs and practices of the ancient
Hellenes.

• Greek religion is not the same as Greek
  mythology, which is concerned with traditional
  tales, though the two are closely interlinked.
• Curiously, for a people so religiously minded,
  the Greeks had no word for religion itselfthe
  nearest term being eusebeia (piety).

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• The student of Greek religion is naturally
  concerned to know what the Greeks believed about
  their gods.
• They had numerous beliefs, but the sole
  requirement was to believe that the gods existed
  and to perform ritual and sacrifice, through
  which the gods received their due.
• To deny the existence of a deity was to risk
  reprisals, from the deity or from other mortals.
• The list of avowed atheists is brief. But if a
  Greek went through the motions of piety, he
  risked little, since no attempt was made to
  enforce orthodoxy, a religious concept almost
  incomprehensible to the Greeks.

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• The Greeks had no word for religion itself, the
  closest approximations being eusebeia (piety)
  and threskeia (cult).
• The large corpus of myths concerned with gods,
  heroes, and rituals embodied the worldview of
  Greek religion and remains its legacy.
• It should be noted that the myths varied over
  time and that, within limits, a writere.g., a
  Greek tragediancould vary a myth in order to
  change not only the role played by the gods in it
  but also the evaluation of the gods' actions.

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• From the later 6th century BC onward, myths and
  gods were subject to rational criticism on
  ethical or other grounds.
• In these circumstances it is easy to overlook the
  fact that most Greeks believed in their gods in
  roughly the modern sense of the term and that
  they prayed in a time of crisis not merely to the
  relevant deity but to any deity on whose aid
  they had established a claim by sacrifice.
• To this end, each Greek polis (city) had a series
  of public festivals throughout the year that were
  intended to ensure the aid of all the gods who
  were thus honored.
• They reminded the gods of services rendered and
  asked for a quid pro quo. In crises in particular
  the Greeks, like the Romans, were often willing
  to add deities borrowed from other cultures.

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What a Neo-Pagan Says
Nobody would suppose they would make themselves a
better person by emulating Zeus, or even Athena
or Apollo (let alone Hermes or Pan). (Indeed,
aspiring to be like the gods is the most obvious
form of hubris, and invites Their wrath, as we
see from many myths.) But this does not mean the
gods are immoral. The gods have Their own
morality, and it makes no more sense to apply
Their moral norms to us, than it would to apply
our moral norms to wolves. . . We worship the
gods - we respect Them, acknowledge Them -
because They are the ineluctable powers of the
universe, neither good nor evil (because our
moral categories are not appropriate for Them).
Sophistes
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Grecian City States

• Though united by their common Hellenic heritage,
  Greek city-states differed in customs, political
  constitutions, and dialects.
• They were often rivals and fierce competitors,
  establishing colonies in the eighth and seventh
  centuries along the Mediterranean coast.

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• The Greeks who established colonies in Asia
  adapted their language to the Phoenician writing
  system, adding signs for vowels to change it from
  a consonantal to an alphabetic system.
• First used for commercial documents, writing was
  later applied to treaties, political decrees,
  and, later, literature.

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Battle of Thermopylae

• An Allied Greek force of approximately 7,000 men
  marched north to block the pass in the summer of
  480 BC.
• The Persian army, alleged by the ancient sources
  to have numbered in the millions, arrived at the
  pass in late August or early September.
• Vastly outnumbered, the Greeks held up the
  Persians for seven days in total (including three
  of battle), before the rear-guard was annihilated
  in one of history's most famous last stands.

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Aware that they were being outflanked, Leonidas
dismissed the bulk of the Greek army, and
remained to guard the rear with 300 Spartans, 700
Thespians, 400 Thebans and perhaps a few hundred
others, the vast majority of whom were killed.

• The Persian Immortals

• The site of the battle today. The road to the
  right is built on reclaimed land and approximates
  the 480BC shoreline.

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Go tell the Spartans, passerbyThat here, by
Spartan law, we lie
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Athens and Sparta

• Inspired by their defeat of the Persian invaders,
  Athens and Sparta emerged as the two most
  prominent city-states of the fifth century B.C.
• With the elimination of their common enemy,
  however, the two cities became enemies,
  culminating in the Peloponnesian war, which left
  Athens defeated.

http//www.sikyon.com/index.html
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Sites Cited

• Berggren, Paula. Dale Hudson, and Anita Mannur
  Ancient Greece and the Formation of the Western
  Mind. Anthology of World Literature. 2003-2006
  W.W. Norton http//www.wwnorton.com/nawol/s2_overv
  iew.htm 5 Oct. 2006.
• Boeree,George C. The Ancient Greeks, Part One
  The Pre-Socratics George Boerees Homepage
  http//www.ship.edu/cgboeree/greeks.html 2000 5.
  Oct. 2006.

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• Bouchard, Gilbert A. Olympics Viewed Differently
  by Ancient Greeks Express News. 13 Aug. 2004
  http//www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/print.cfm?id59
  98 5. Oct. 2006
• Eddy, Steve. Greek Myths Living Myths.
  2001-2006 http//www.livingmyths.com/Greek.htm 5.
  Oct. 2006.
• "Greek Religion." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2006.
  Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
  http//search.eb.com/eb/article-9110627 5 Oct.
  2006.

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• Papakyriakou/Anagnostou, Ellen. Ancient Greek
  Cities. 1997-2004 http//www.sikyon.com/index.html
  5 Oct. 2006.
• Parada, Carlos. Greek Mythology Link 1997
  http//homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/index.html
  5 Oct 2006.
• Sophistes, Apollonius. "Hellenic Neo-Paganism"
  The Biblioteca Arcana. 1995-1997
  http//www.cs.utk.edu/mclennan/BA/HNP.htmlimmora
  l 5 Oct. 2006.